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  1. Are biological traits explained by their 'selected effect' functions?Joshua R. Christie, Carl Brusse, Pierrick Bourrat, Peter Takacs & Paul Edmund Griffiths - forthcoming - Australasian Philosophical Review.
    The selected effects or ‘etiological’ theory of Proper function is a naturalistic and realist account of biological teleology. It is used to analyse normativity in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and elsewhere. The theory has been developed with a simple and intuitive view of natural selection. Traits are selected because of their positive effects on the fitness of the organisms that have them. These ‘selected effects’ are the Proper functions of the traits. Proponents argue that this (...)
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  2. The idea of mismatch in evolutionary medicine.Pierrick Bourrat & Paul Edmund Griffiths - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Mismatch is a prominent concept in evolutionary medicine and a number of philosophers have published analyses of this concept. The word ‘mismatch’ has been used in a diversity of ways across a range of sciences, leading these authors to regard it as a vague concept in need of philosophical clarification. Here, in contrast, we concentrate on the use of mismatch in modelling and experimentation in evolutionary medicine. This reveals a rigorous theory of mismatch within which the term ‘mismatch’ is indeed (...)
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  3. Origins and evolution of religion from a Darwinian point of view: synthesis of different theories.Pierrick Bourrat - 2014 - In Thomas Heams, Philippe Huneman, Guillaume Lecointre & Marc Silberstein (eds.), Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences. Springer. pp. 761-779.
    The religious phenomenon is a complex one in many respects. In recent years an increasing number of theories on the origin and evolution of religion have been put forward. Each one of these theories rests on a Darwinian framework but there is a lot of disagreement about which bits of the framework account best for the evolution of religion. Is religion primarily a by-product of some adaptation? Is it itself an adaptation, and if it is, does it benefi ciate individuals (...)
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  4. Being Precise about Precision and One-to-One Specificity.Pierrick Bourrat - manuscript
    Following from my criticisms of Calcott’s analysis on the permissive/instructive distinction, I rebut his claims that 1) he clarifies my measure one-to-one specificity; 2) for all intents and purposes of his analysis his notion of precision is different from my measure of one- to-one specificity; 3) Waddington box is a better and different model than the extension of Woodward’s radio I propose.
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