Results for 'Biological measurement'

957 found
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  1. Measurement in biology is methodized by theory.Maël Montévil - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (3):35.
    We characterize access to empirical objects in biology from a theoretical perspective. Unlike objects in current physical theories, biological objects are the result of a history and their variations continue to generate a history. This property is the starting point of our concept of measurement. We argue that biological measurement is relative to a natural history which is shared by the different objects subjected to the measurement and is more or less constrained by biologists. We (...)
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  2.  66
    Measuring and Explaining Disagreement in Bird Taxonomy.Stijn Conix, Vincent Cuypers & Charles H. Pence - 2024 - European Journal of Taxonomy 943 (1):288-307.
    -/- Species lists play an important role in biology and practical domains like conservation, legislation, biosecurity and trade regulation. However, their effective use by non-specialist scientific and societal users is sometimes hindered by disagreements between competing lists. While it is well-known that such disagreements exist, it remains unclear how prevalent they are, what their nature is, and what causes them. In this study, we argue that these questions should be investigated using methods based on taxon concept rather than methods based (...)
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  3. Measuring effectiveness.Jacob Stegenga - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 54:62-71.
    Measuring the effectiveness of medical interventions faces three epistemological challenges: the choice of good measuring instruments, the use of appropriate analytic measures, and the use of a reliable method of extrapolating measures from an experimental context to a more general context. In practice each of these challenges contributes to overestimating the effectiveness of medical interventions. These challenges suggest the need for corrective normative principles. The instruments employed in clinical research should measure patient-relevant and disease-specific parameters, and should not be sensitive (...)
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  4. Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of 'Race'.Jonathan Michael Kaplan & Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2013 - Biological Theory 7 (1):401-412.
    It is illegitimate to read any ontology about "race" off of biological theory or data. Indeed, the technical meaning of "genetic variation" is fluid, and there is no single theoretical agreed-upon criterion for defining and distinguishing populations (or groups or clusters) given a particular set of genetic variation data. Thus, by analyzing three formal senses of "genetic variation"—diversity, differentiation, and heterozygosity—we argue that the use of biological theory for making epistemic claims about "race" can only seem plausible when (...)
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  5. Biological Autonomy.Attila Grandpierre & Menas Kafatos - 2012 - Philosophy Study 2 (9):631-649.
    We argue that genuine biological autonomy, or described at human level as free will, requires taking into account quantum vacuum processes in the context of biological teleology. One faces at least three basic problems of genuine biological autonomy: (1) if biological autonomy is not physical, where does it come from? (2) Is there a room for biological causes? And (3) how to obtain a workable model of biological teleology? It is shown here that the (...)
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  6. Sensory Measurements: Coordination and Standardization.Ann-Sophie Barwich & Hasok Chang - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (3):200-211.
    Do sensory measurements deserve the label of “measurement”? We argue that they do. They fit with an epistemological view of measurement held in current philosophy of science, and they face the same kinds of epistemological challenges as physical measurements do: the problem of coordination and the problem of standardization. These problems are addressed through the process of “epistemic iteration,” for all measurements. We also argue for distinguishing the problem of standardization from the problem of coordination. To exemplify our (...)
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  7. Biological Control Variously Materialized: Modeling, Experimentation and Exploration in Multiple Media.Tarja Knuuttila & Andrea Loettgers - 2021 - Perspectives on Science 29 (4):468-492.
    This paper examines two parallel discussions of scientific modeling which have invoked experimentation in addressing the role of models in scientific inquiry. One side discusses the experimental character of models, whereas the other focuses on their exploratory uses. Although both relate modeling to experimentation, they do so differently. The former has considered the similarities and differences between models and experiments, addressing, in particular, the epistemic value of materiality. By contrast, the focus on exploratory modeling has highlighted the various kinds of (...)
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  8. A Sense So Rare: Measuring Olfactory Experiences and Making a Case for a Process Perspective on Sensory Perception.Ann-Sophie Barwich - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (3):258-268.
    Philosophical discussion about the reality of sensory perceptions has been hijacked by two tendencies. First, talk about perception has been largely centered on vision. Second, the realism question is traditionally approached by attaching objects or material structures to matching contents of sensory perceptions. These tendencies have resulted in an argumentative impasse between realists and anti-realists, discussing the reliability of means by which the supposed causal information transfer from object to perceiver takes place. Concerning the nature of sensory experiences and their (...)
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  9. If I Could Talk to the Animals: Measuring Subjective Animal Welfare.Heather Browning - 2019 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    Animal welfare is a concept that plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. This thesis focusses on taking a philosophical perspective to (...)
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  10. Marriages of Mathematics and Physics: A Challenge for Biology.Arezoo Islami & Giuseppe Longo - 2017 - Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 131:179-192.
    The human attempts to access, measure and organize physical phenomena have led to a manifold construction of mathematical and physical spaces. We will survey the evolution of geometries from Euclid to the Algebraic Geometry of the 20th century. The role of Persian/Arabic Algebra in this transition and its Western symbolic development is emphasized. In this relation, we will also discuss changes in the ontological attitudes toward mathematics and its applications. Historically, the encounter of geometric and algebraic perspectives enriched the mathematical (...)
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  11. Measuring the World: Olfaction as a Process Model of Perception.Ann-Sophie Barwich - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 337-356.
    How much does stimulus input shape perception? The common-sense view is that our perceptions are representations of objects and their features and that the stimulus structures the perceptual object. The problem for this view concerns perceptual biases as responsible for distortions and the subjectivity of perceptual experience. These biases are increasingly studied as constitutive factors of brain processes in recent neuroscience. In neural network models the brain is said to cope with the plethora of sensory information by predicting stimulus regularities (...)
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  12. The promise of Roberts' “measurability account of laws”.James Norris - 2004 - Southwest Philosophy Review 20 (2):117-128.
    There is a common argument form in the metaphysics of natural laws literature: a theory of natural law is attacked by offering a claim L as a law of scientific field F (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.), and from this law metaphysical implications contrary to the theory are drawn. Quite often however, L would not be regarded as a law by a scientist of F. Roberts' "measurability account of laws" offers a new and interesting way to more reliably identify the laws (...)
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  13. Which Kind of Causal Specificity Matters Biologically?Marcel Weber - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (3):574-585.
    Griffiths et al. (2015) have proposed a quantitative measure of causal specificity and used it to assess various attempts to single out genetic causes as being causally more specific than other cellular mechanisms, for example, alternative splicing. Focusing in particular on developmental processes, they have identified a number of important challenges for this project. In this discussion note, I would like to show how these challenges can be met.
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  14. Objects and processes: two notions for understanding biological information.Agustín Mercado-Reyes, Pablo Padilla Longoria & Alfonso Arroyo-Santos - forthcoming - Journal of Theoretical Biology.
    In spite of being ubiquitous in life sciences, the concept of information is harshly criticized. Uses of the concept other than those derived from Shannon's theory are denounced as pernicious metaphors. We perform a computational experiment to explore whether Shannon's information is adequate to describe the uses of said concept in commonplace scientific practice. Our results show that semantic sequences do not have unique complexity values different from the value of meaningless sequences. This result suggests that quantitative theoretical frameworks do (...)
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  15. (9 other versions)Stepping Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology. Towards an Integrable Model of Life: Accelerating Discovery in the Biological Foundations of Science.Plamen L. Simeonov, Edwin Brezina, Ron Cottam, Andreé C. Ehresmann, Arran Gare, Ted Goranson, Jaime Gomez-­‐Ramirez, Brian D. Josephson, Bruno Marchal, Koichiro Matsuno, Robert S. Root-­Bernstein, Otto E. Rössler, Stanley N. Salthe, Marcin Schroeder, Bill Seaman & Pridi Siregar - 2012 - In Plamen L. Simeonov, Leslie S. Smith & Andrée C. Ehresmann (eds.), Integral Biomathics: Tracing the Road to Reality. Springer. pp. 328-427.
    The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented (...)
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  16. Can ANOVA measure causal strength?Robert Northcott - 2008 - Quarterly Review of Biology 83 (1):47-55.
    The statistical technique of analysis of variance is often used by biologists as a measure of causal factors’ relative strength or importance. I argue that it is a tool ill suited to this purpose, on several grounds. I suggest a superior alternative, and outline some implications. I finish with a diagnosis of the source of error – an unwitting inheritance of bad philosophy that now requires the remedy of better philosophy.
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  17. The Evolution of Consciousness & Subjectivity in a Biological Framework for The Universe.Ronald Williams - manuscript
    This paper explores the evolution of consciousness and subjectivity through a biological framework for understanding the universe. It posits that functional patterns in biological systems mirror cosmic mathematical principles, defining our objective reality. Similar to wave and Fibonacci patterns in different physical phenomena, biological patterns are intrinsic to all things and can be quantified using Dedre Gentner’s approach to analogy. For example, Earth’s ocean currents and the melting and freezing of Antarctica resemble the circulatory system and heart, (...)
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  18. Concern Across Scales: a biologically inspired embodied artificial intelligence.Matthew Sims - 2022 - Frontiers in Neurorobotics 1 (Bio A.I. - From Embodied Cogniti).
    Intelligence in current AI research is measured according to designer-assigned tasks that lack any relevance for an agent itself. As such, tasks and their evaluation reveal a lot more about our intelligence than the possible intelligence of agents that we design and evaluate. As a possible first step in remedying this, this article introduces the notion of “self-concern,” a property of a complex system that describes its tendency to bring about states that are compatible with its continued self-maintenance. Self-concern, as (...)
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  19. Causal Specificity, Biological Possibility and Non-parity about Genetic Causes.Marcel Weber - manuscript
    Several authors have used the notion of causal specificity in order to defend non-parity about genetic causes (Waters 2007, Woodward 2010, Weber 2017, forthcoming). Non-parity in this context is the idea that DNA and some other biomolecules that are often described as information-bearers by biologists play a unique role in life processes, an idea that has been challenged by Developmental Systems Theory (e.g., Oyama 2000). Indeed, it has proven to be quite difficult to state clearly what the alleged special role (...)
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  20. The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: a metascientific view of evolutionary biology, and some directions to transcend its limits.Emanuele Serrelli - manuscript
    To approach the issue of the recent proposal of an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) put forth by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd Müller, I suggest to consider the EES as a metascientific view: a description of what’s new in how evolutionary biology is carried out, not only a description of recently learned aspects of evolution. Knowing ‘what is it to do research’ in evolutionary biology, today versus yesterday, can aid training, research and career choices, establishment of relationships and collaborations, decision of (...)
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  21. Promoting coherent minimum reporting guidelines for biological and biomedical investigations: the MIBBI project.Chris F. Taylor, Dawn Field, Susanna-Assunta Sansone, Jan Aerts, Rolf Apweiler, Michael Ashburner, Catherine A. Ball, Pierre-Alain Binz, Molly Bogue, Tim Booth, Alvis Brazma, Ryan R. Brinkman, Adam Michael Clark, Eric W. Deutsch, Oliver Fiehn, Jennifer Fostel, Peter Ghazal, Frank Gibson, Tanya Gray, Graeme Grimes, John M. Hancock, Nigel W. Hardy, Henning Hermjakob, Randall K. Julian, Matthew Kane, Carsten Kettner, Christopher Kinsinger, Eugene Kolker, Martin Kuiper, Nicolas Le Novere, Jim Leebens-Mack, Suzanna E. Lewis, Phillip Lord, Ann-Marie Mallon, Nishanth Marthandan, Hiroshi Masuya, Ruth McNally, Alexander Mehrle, Norman Morrison, Sandra Orchard, John Quackenbush, James M. Reecy, Donald G. Robertson, Philippe Rocca-Serra, Henry Rodriguez, Heiko Rosenfelder, Javier Santoyo-Lopez, Richard H. Scheuermann, Daniel Schober, Barry Smith & Jason Snape - 2008 - Nature Biotechnology 26 (8):889-896.
    Throughout the biological and biomedical sciences there is a growing need for, prescriptive ‘minimum information’ (MI) checklists specifying the key information to include when reporting experimental results are beginning to find favor with experimentalists, analysts, publishers and funders alike. Such checklists aim to ensure that methods, data, analyses and results are described to a level sufficient to support the unambiguous interpretation, sophisticated search, reanalysis and experimental corroboration and reuse of data sets, facilitating the extraction of maximum value from data (...)
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  22. Semantics in Support of Biodiversity: An Introduction to the Biological Collections Ontology and Related Ontologies.Ramona L. Walls, John Deck, Robert Guralnik, Steve Baskauf, Reed Beaman, Stanley Blum, Shawn Bowers, Pier Luigi Buttigieg, Neil Davies, Dag Endresen, Maria Alejandra Gandolfo, Robert Hanner, Alyssa Janning, Barry Smith & Others - 2014 - PLoS ONE 9 (3):1-13.
    The study of biodiversity spans many disciplines and includes data pertaining to species distributions and abundances, genetic sequences, trait measurements, and ecological niches, complemented by information on collection and measurement protocols. A review of the current landscape of metadata standards and ontologies in biodiversity science suggests that existing standards such as the Darwin Core terminology are inadequate for describing biodiversity data in a semantically meaningful and computationally useful way. Existing ontologies, such as the Gene Ontology and others in the (...)
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  23. Understanding scientific types: holotypes, stratotypes, and measurement prototypes.Alisa Bokulich - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (5):1-28.
    At the intersection of taxonomy and nomenclature lies the scientific practice of typification. This practice occurs in biology with the use of holotypes (type specimens), in geology with the use of stratotypes, and in metrology with the use of measurement prototypes. In this paper I develop the first general definition of a scientific type and outline a new philosophical theory of types inspired by Pierre Duhem. I use this general framework to resolve the necessity-contingency debate about type specimens in (...)
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  24. Biological Organisation as the True Foundation of Reality.Brian Josephson - forthcoming - In Amoroso Richard (ed.), Proceedings of the Xth International Symposium Honoring J-P Vigier. WORLD SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING CO..
    The presumptions underlying quantum mechanics make it relevant to a limited range of situations only; furthermore, its statistical character means that it provides no answers to the question ‘what is really going on?’. Following Barad, I hypothesise that the underlying mechanics has parallels with human activities, as used by Barad to account for the way quantum measurements introduce definiteness into previously indefinite situations. We are led to consider a subtle type of order, different from those commonly encountered in the discipline (...)
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  25. The scope and limits of biological explanations in archaeology.Ben Jeffares - 2003 - Dissertation, Victoria University of Wellington
    I show how archaeologists have two problems. The construction of scenarios accounting for the raw data of Archaeology, the material remains of the past, and the explanation of pre-history. Within Archaeology, there has been an ongoing debate about how to constrain speculation within both of these archaeological projects, and archaeologists have consistently looked to biological mechanisms for constraints. I demonstrate the problems of using biology, either as an analogy for cultural processes or through direct application of biological principles (...)
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  26. Grounding cognition: heterarchical control mechanisms in biology.William Bechtel & Leonardo Bich - 2021 - Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376 (1820).
    We advance an account that grounds cognition, specifically decision-making, in an activity all organisms as autonomous systems must perform to keep themselves viable—controlling their production mechanisms. Production mechanisms, as we characterize them, perform activities such as procuring resources from their environment, putting these resources to use to construct and repair the organism's body and moving through the environment. Given the variable nature of the environment and the continual degradation of the organism, these production mechanisms must be regulated by control mechanisms (...)
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  27. Is the Brain Analogous to a Quantum Measuring Apparatus?Paavo Pylkkänen - 2022 - In A. C. Grayling S. Wuppuluri (ed.), Metaphors and Analogies in Sciences and Humanities: Words and Worlds. pp. 215-235.
    Researchers have suggested since the early days of quantum theory that there are strong analogies between quantum phenomena and mental phenomena and these have developed into a vibrant new field of quantum cognition during recent decades. After revisiting some early analogies by Niels Bohr and David Bohm, this paper focuses upon Bohm and Hiley’s ontological interpretation of quantum theory which suggests further analogies between quantum phenomena and biological and psychological phenomena, including the proposal that the human brain operates in (...)
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  28.  49
    (1 other version)Robust Biomarkers: Methodologically Tracking Causal Processes in Alzheimer’s Measurement.Vadim Keyser & Louis Sarry - 2020 - In Barbara Osimani & Adam La Caze (eds.), Uncertainty in Pharmacology.
    In biomedical measurement, biomarkers are used to achieve reliable prediction of, and useful causal information about patient outcomes while minimizing complexity of measurement, resources, and invasiveness. A biomarker is an assayable metric that discloses the status of a biological process of interest, be it normative, pathophysiological, or in response to intervention. The greatest utility from biomarkers comes from their ability to help clinicians (and researchers) make and evaluate clinical decisions. In this paper we discuss a specific methodological (...)
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  29. Object spaces: An organizing strategy for biological theorizing.Beckett Sterner - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (3):280-286.
    A classic analytic approach to biological phenomena seeks to refine definitions until classes are sufficiently homogenous to support prediction and explanation, but this approach founders on cases where a single process produces objects with similar forms but heterogeneous behaviors. I introduce object spaces as a tool to tackle this challenging diversity of biological objects in terms of causal processes with well-defined formal properties. Object spaces have three primary components: (1) a combinatorial biological process such as protein synthesis (...)
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  30. Whispers and Shouts. The measurement of the human act.Fernando Flores Morador & Luis de Marcos Ortega (eds.) - 2021 - Alcalá de Henares, Madrid: Departement of Computational Sciences. University of Alcalá; Madrid.
    The 20th Century is the starting point for the most ambitious attempts to extrapolate human life into artificial systems. Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics, Claude Shannon’s Information Theory, John von Neumann’s Cellular Automata, Universal Constructor to the Turing Test, Artificial Intelligence to Maturana and Varela’s Autopoietic Organization, all shared the goal of understanding in what sense humans resemble a machine. This scientific and technological movement has embraced all disciplines without exceptions, not only mathematics and physics but also biology, sociology, psychology, economics etc. (...)
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  31. The Use of Video-based Instructional Material to Improve Learning Competency of the Students in Selected Topics in Biology at Satriwithaya School Bangkok Thailand (20th edition).Albert Jayfferson Roy - 2024 - Psychology and Education: A Multidisciplinary Journal 20 (8):1066-1077.
    This research explored the utilization of video-based instructional material in enhancing learning competency among a group of sixty (60) students enrolled in grade 8 at Satriwithaya School in Bangkok, Thailand. The study was carried out. out during the 2nd semester of S.Y. 2023–2024. The respondents were chosen using the approach of purposive sampling. The research study employed an experimental approach and utilized quantitative research. Through the use of of a one-group pre- and post-test, the researcher was able to gather the (...)
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  32. A Biological Account of Design in Nature.Attila Grandpierre - 2012 - In Swan Liz, Gordon Richard & Seckbach Joseph (eds.), Origin of Design in Nature.
    We consider first the most fundamental „design in Nature”, the explanatory structure of the Universe on the basis of the natural sciences, and the related problem of teleology in Nature. We point out that it is necessary to generalize the presently used explanatory scheme of physics. We derive here the first essentially complete scientific world picture, and obtain new insights answering to the problem of cosmic design. Considering some important objections against teleology, we present counter-arguments, give a new classification of (...)
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  33. Control Mechanisms: Explaining the Integration and Versatility of Biological Organisms.Leonardo Bich & William Bechtel - 2022 - Adaptive Behavior.
    Living organisms act as integrated wholes to maintain themselves. Individual actions can each be explained by characterizing the mechanisms that perform the activity. But these alone do not explain how various activities are coordinated and performed versatilely. We argue that this depends on a specific type of mechanism, a control mechanism. We develop an account of control by examining several extensively studied control mechanisms operative in the bacterium E. coli. On our analysis, what distinguishes a control mechanism from other mechanisms (...)
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  34. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial Brains. [REVIEW]Ekin Erkan - 2020 - Chiasma 6 (1):248-260.
    In her seminal text, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (2008), Catherine Malabou gestured towards neuroplasticity to upend Bergson's famous parallel of the brain as a "central telephonic exchange," whereby the function of the brain is simply that of a node where perceptions get in touch with motor mechanisms, the brain as an instrument limited to the transmission and divisions of movements. Drawing from the history of cybernetics one can trace how Bergson's 'telephonic exchange' prefigures the neural 'cybernetic metaphor.' (...)
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  35. Calibration, Coherence, and Consilience in Radiometric Measures of Geologic Time.Alisa Bokulich - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (3):425-456.
    In 2012, the Geological Time Scale, which sets the temporal framework for studying the timing and tempo of all major geological, biological, and climatic events in Earth’s history, had one-quarter of its boundaries moved in a widespread revision of radiometric dates. The philosophy of metrology helps us understand this episode, and it, in turn, elucidates the notions of calibration, coherence, and consilience. I argue that coherence testing is a distinct activity preceding calibration and consilience, and I highlight the value (...)
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  36. Truth through Nonviolence.Venkata Rayudu Posina - 2016 - GITAM Journal of Gandhian Studies 5 (1):143-150.
    What is reality? How do we know? Answers to these fundamental questions of ontology and epistemology, based on Mahatma Gandhi's "experiments with truth", are: reality is nonviolent (in the sense of not-inconsistent), and nonviolence (in the sense of respecting-meaning) is the only means of knowing (Gandhi, 1940). Be that as it may, science is what we think of when we think of reality and knowing. How does Gandhi's nonviolence, discovered in his spiritual quest for Truth, relate to the scientific pursuit (...)
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  37. The problem of interspecies welfare comparisons (preprint).Heather Browning - manuscript
    One of the biggest problems in applications of animal welfare science is our ability to make comparisons between different individuals, particularly different species. Although welfare science provides methods for measuring the welfare of individual animals, there’s no established method for comparing measures between individuals. This problem occurs because of the underdetermination of the conclusions given the data, arising from two sources of variation that we cannot distinguish – variation in the underlying target variable (welfare experience) and in the relationship of (...)
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  38. History of memory artifacts.Richard Heersmink - 2023 - In Lucas Bietti & Pogacar Martin (eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 1-12.
    Human biological memory systems have adapted to use technological artifacts to overcome some of the limitations of these systems. For example, when performing a difficult calculation, we use pen and paper to create and store external number symbols; when remembering our appointments, we use a calendar; when remembering what to buy, we use a shopping list. This chapter looks at the history of memory artifacts, describing the evolution from cave paintings to virtual reality. It first characterizes memory artifacts, memory (...)
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  39. AGI and the Knight-Darwin Law: why idealized AGI reproduction requires collaboration.Samuel Alexander - 2020 - Agi.
    Can an AGI create a more intelligent AGI? Under idealized assumptions, for a certain theoretical type of intelligence, our answer is: “Not without outside help”. This is a paper on the mathematical structure of AGI populations when parent AGIs create child AGIs. We argue that such populations satisfy a certain biological law. Motivated by observations of sexual reproduction in seemingly-asexual species, the Knight-Darwin Law states that it is impossible for one organism to asexually produce another, which asexually produces another, (...)
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  40. Heads and Tails: Molecular Imagination and the Lipid Bilayer, 1917–1941.Daniel Liu - 2018 - In Karl Matlin, Jane Maienschein & Manfred Laubichler (eds.), Visions of Cell Biology: Reflections Inspired by Cowdry's General Cytology. University of Chicago Press. pp. 209-245.
    Today, the lipid bilayer structure is nearly ubiquitous, taken for granted in even the most rudimentary introductions to cell biology. Yet the image of the lipid bilayer, built out of lipids with heads and tails, went from having obscure origins deep in colloid chemical theory in 1924 to being “obvious to any competent physical chemist” by 1935. This chapter examines how this schematic, strictly heuristic explanation of the idea of molecular orientation was developed within colloid physical chemistry, and how the (...)
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  41. De la selección natural al diseño: una propuesta de extensión del darwinismo formal.Giorgio Airoldi & Cristian Saborido - 2017 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 8 (1):71--80.
    Darwin’s claim that Natural Selection, through optimization of fitness, explains complex biological design has not yet been properly formalized. Alan Grafen’s Formal Darwinism Project aims at providing such a formalization and at demonstrating that fitness maximization is coherent with results from Population Genetics, usually interpreted as denying it. We suggest that Grafen’s proposal suffers from some limitations linked to its concept of design as optimized fitness. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a classification of evolutionary facts based (...)
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  42. Fitness: Philosophical Problems.Grant Ramsey & Charles Pence - 2013 - eLS.
    Fitness plays many roles throughout evolutionary theory, from a measure of populations in the wild to a central element in abstract theoretical presentations of natural selection. It has thus been the subject of an extensive philosophical literature, which has primarily centered on the way to understand the relationship between fitness values and reproductive outcomes. If fitness is a probabilistic or statistical quantity, how is it to be defined in general theoretical contexts? How can it be measured? Can a single conceptual (...)
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  43. The Origin of Consciousness.Ronald Williams - forthcoming - Biologicaluniverse.Org.
    This paper explores the evolution of consciousness and subjectivity through a biological framework for understanding the universe. It posits that functional patterns in biological systems mirror cosmic mathematical principles, defining our objective reality. Similar to wave and Fibonacci patterns in different physical phenomena, biological patterns are intrinsic to all things and can be quantified using Dedre Gentner’s approach to analogy. For example, Earth’s ocean currents and the melting and freezing of Antarctica resemble the circulatory system and heart, (...)
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  44. Scientific Coordination beyond the A Priori: A Three-dimensional Account of Constitutive Elements in Scientific Practice.Michele Luchetti - 2020 - Dissertation, Central European University
    In this dissertation, I present a novel account of the components that have a peculiar epistemic role in our scientific inquiries, since they contribute to establishing a form of coordination. The issue of coordination is a classic epistemic problem concerning how we justify our use of abstract conceptual tools to represent concrete phenomena. For instance, how could we get to represent universal gravitation as a mathematical formula or temperature by means of a numerical scale? This problem is particularly pressing when (...)
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  45. The Ontic Account of Scientific Explanation.Carl F. Craver - 2014 - In Marie I. Kaiser, Oliver R. Scholz, Daniel Plenge & Andreas Hüttemann (eds.), Explanation in the special science: The case of biology and history. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 27-52.
    According to one large family of views, scientific explanations explain a phenomenon (such as an event or a regularity) by subsuming it under a general representation, model, prototype, or schema (see Bechtel, W., & Abrahamsen, A. (2005). Explanation: A mechanist alternative. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36(2), 421–441; Churchland, P. M. (1989). A neurocomputational perspective: The nature of mind and the structure of science. Cambridge: MIT Press; Darden (2006); Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of (...)
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  46. Causal efficacy and the analysis of variance.Robert Northcott - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (2):253-276.
    The causal impacts of genes and environment on any one biological trait are inextricably entangled, and consequently it is widely accepted that it makes no sense in singleton cases to privilege either factor for particular credit. On the other hand, at a population level it may well be the case that one of the factors is responsible for more variation than the other. Standard methodological practice in biology uses the statistical technique of analysis of variance to measure this latter (...)
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  47. Perspectival pluralism for animal welfare.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (1):1-14.
    Animal welfare has a long history of disregard. While in recent decades the study of animal welfare has become a scientific discipline of its own, the difficulty of measuring animal welfare can still be vastly underestimated. There are three primary theories, or perspectives, on animal welfare - biological functioning, natural living and affective state. These come with their own diverse methods of measurement, each providing a limited perspective on an aspect of welfare. This paper describes a perspectival pluralist (...)
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  48.  61
    Interpretable and accurate prediction models for metagenomics data.Edi Prifti, Antoine Danchin, Jean-Daniel Zucker & Eugeni Belda - 2020 - Gigascience 9 (3):giaa010.
    Background: Microbiome biomarker discovery for patient diagnosis, prognosis, and risk evaluation is attracting broad interest. Selected groups of microbial features provide signatures that characterize host disease states such as cancer or cardio-metabolic diseases. Yet, the current predictive models stemming from machine learning still behave as black boxes and seldom generalize well. Their interpretation is challenging for physicians and biologists, which makes them difficult to trust and use routinely in the physician-patient decision-making process. Novel methods that provide interpretability and biological (...)
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  49.  43
    Consciousness.Sam Lerman - manuscript
    There are many bodies, neurons, interacting in a brain. For bodies and interactions to produce consciousness might depend on specific matter and matter interactions, such as specifically those of the neural grey matter and voltages of the brain, or abstract representations and information patterns, such as just the neural firing patterns or those that can be simulated on GPUs. My flipbook thought experiment, elaborated on later in this work, reduces the latter possibility to absurdity. We're able to feel complex emotional (...)
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  50. Organization needs organization: Understanding integrated control in living organisms.Leonardo Bich & William Bechtel - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93:96-106.
    Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare (...)
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