Results for 'evolution of individuality'

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  1. Evolution of Individuality: A Case Study in the Volvocine Green Algae.Erik R. Hanschen, Dinah R. Davison, Zachariah I. Grochau-Wright & Richard E. Michod - 2017 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 9 (3).
    All disciplines must define their basic units and core processes. In evolutionary biology, the core process is natural selection and the basic unit of selection and adaptation is the individual. To operationalize the theory of natural selection we must count individuals, as they are the bearers of fitness. While canonical individuals have often been taken to be multicellular organisms, the hierarchy of life shows that new kinds of individuals have evolved. A variety of criteria have been used to define biological (...)
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  2. Evolution of multicellularity: cheating done right.Walter Veit - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (3):34.
    For decades Darwinian processes were framed in the form of the Lewontin conditions: reproduction, variation and differential reproductive success were taken to be sufficient and necessary. Since Buss and the work of Maynard Smith and Szathmary biologists were eager to explain the major transitions from individuals to groups forming new individuals subject to Darwinian mechanisms themselves. Explanations that seek to explain the emergence of a new level of selection, however, cannot employ properties that would already have to exist on that (...)
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  3.  80
    The evolution of reproductive characters: an organismal-relational approach.David Cortés-García, Arantza Etxeberria & Laura Nuño de la Rosa - 2024 - Biology and Philosophy 39 (26):1-23.
    This paper delves into the character concept as applied to reproduction. Our argument is that the prevailing functional-adaptationist perspective falls short in explaining the evolution of reproductive traits, and we propose an alternative organismal-relational approach that incorporates the developmental and interactive aspects of reproduction. To begin, we define the functional individuation of reproductive traits as evolutionary strategies aimed at enhancing fitness, and we demonstrate how this perspective influences the classification of reproductive characters and modes, the comprehension of shared traits (...)
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  4. From Pan to Homo sapiens: evolution from individual based to group based forms of social cognition.Dwight Read - 2020 - Mind and Society 19 (1):121-161.
    The evolution from pre-human primates to modern Homo sapiens is a complex one involving many domains, ranging from the material to the social to the cognitive, both at the individual and the community levels. This article focuses on a critical qualitative transition that took place during this evolution involving both the social and the cognitive domains. For the social domain, the transition is from the face-to-face forms of social interaction and organization that characterize the non-human primates that reached, (...)
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  5. The Evolution of Social Contracts.Michael Vlerick - 2019 - Journal of Social Ontology 5 (2):181-203.
    Influential thinkers such as Young, Sugden, Binmore, and Skyrms have developed game-theoretic accounts of the emergence, persistence and evolution of social contracts. Social contracts are sets of commonly understood rules that govern cooperative social interaction within societies. These naturalistic accounts provide us with valuable and important insights into the foundations of human societies. However, current naturalistic theories focus mainly on how social contracts solve coordination problems in which the interests of the individual participants are aligned, not competition problems in (...)
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  6. Evolution of Quine’s Thinking on the Thesis of Underdetermination and Scott Soames’s Accusation of Paradoxicality.M. Ashraf Adeel - 2015 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (1):56-69.
    Scott Soames argues that interpreted in the light of Quine's holistic verificationism, Quine's thesis of underdetermination leads to a contradiction. It is contended here that if we pay proper attention to the evolution of Quine's thinking on the subject, particularly his criterion of theory individuation, Quine's thesis of underdetermination escapes Soames' charge of paradoxicality.
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  7. The evolution of the symbolic sciences.Nathalie Gontier - 2024 - In Nathalie Gontier, Andy Lock & Chris Sinha (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution. OUP. pp. 27-70.
    Aspects of human symbolic evolution are studied by scholars active in a variety of fields and disciplines in the life and the behavioral sciences as well as the scientific-philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and linguistic sciences. These fields and disciplines all take on an evolutionary approach to the study of human symbolism, but scholars disagree in their theoretical and methodological attitudes. Theoretically, symbolism is defined differentially as knowledge, behavior, cognition, culture, language, or social group living. Methodologically, the diverse symbolic evolution (...)
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  8. Advancements in the Evolution of Human Capacities to Know.Mark Pharoah - 2020 - Linguistic Frontiers 3 (2):66-69.
    The premise of this paper is that there are three distinct and hierarchical ‘categories of knowledge’ (Pharoah 2018). The first of these is physiological knowledge which is acquired over generations through the interaction between replicating lineages and the environment. This interaction facilitates the evolution of me-aningful physiological structures, forms, functions, and qualitative ascriptions. Second, there is phenomenal knowledge which is qualified by the utilisation of real-time experience to effect an individuated spatiotemporal subjective perspective. This capability requires sophisticated cognitive capabilities. (...)
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  9. 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 (...)
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  10. Evolution of socio-philosophical approaches to mercy in the context of social development.Yuriy Khodanych - 2018 - EUREKA: Social and Humanities 3:33-38.
    The article is devoted to the study of the evolution of socio-philosophical approaches to charity in the context of social development. The author analyzes the phenomenon of mercy through the prism of various philosophical traditions and views: Confucianism and the period of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, German classical philosophy, Russian religious philosophy, Western philosophical thought of the twentieth century, neo-Marxism and post-Marxism. The author comes to the conclusion that at different periods of the socio-philosophical thought development, the understanding of (...)
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  11. Pointing and the Evolution of Language: An Applied Evolutionary Epistemological Approach.Nathalie Gontier - 2013 - Humana Mente 6 (24).
    Numerous evolutionary linguists have indicated that human pointing behaviour might be associated with the evolution of language. At an ontogenetic level, and in normal individuals, pointing develops spontaneously and the onset of human pointing precedes as well as facilitates phases in speech and language development. Phylogenetically, pointing behaviour might have preceded and facilitated the evolutionary origin of both gestural and vocal language. Contrary to wild non-human primates, captive and human-reared nonhuman primates also demonstrate pointing behaviour. In this article, we (...)
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  12. Patterns and evolution of moral behaviour: moral dynamics in everyday life.Albert Barque-Duran, Emmanuel M. Pothos, James M. Yearsley & James A. Hampton - 2016 - Thinking and Reasoning 22 (1):31-56.
    Recent research on moral dynamics shows that an individual's ethical mind-set moderates the impact of an initial ethical or unethical act on the likelihood of behaving ethically on a subsequent occasion. More specifically, an outcome-based mind-set facilitates Moral Balancing, whereas a rule-based mind-set facilitates Moral Consistency. The objective was to look at the evolution of moral choice across a series of scenarios, that is, to explore if these moral patterns are maintained over time. The results of three studies showed (...)
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  13. Networks of Gene Regulation, Neural Development and the Evolution of General Capabilities, Such as Human Empathy.Alfred Gierer - 1998 - Zeitschrift Für Naturforschung C - A Journal of Bioscience 53:716-722.
    A network of gene regulation organized in a hierarchical and combinatorial manner is crucially involved in the development of the neural network, and has to be considered one of the main substrates of genetic change in its evolution. Though qualitative features may emerge by way of the accumulation of rather unspecific quantitative changes, it is reasonable to assume that at least in some cases specific combinations of regulatory parts of the genome initiated new directions of evolution, leading to (...)
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  14. A Sustainable Community of Shared Future for Mankind: Origin, Evolution and Philosophical Foundation.Uzma Khan, Huili Wang & Ishraq Ali - 2021 - Sustainability 13 (16):1-12.
    The Community of Shared Future for Mankind (CSFM) concept is a comprehensive Chinese proposal for a better future of mankind. In this article, we provide a comprehensive analysis of this concept by focusing on its origin, evolution and philosophical foundation. This article deals with the origin and evolution of the CSFM concept. We show that the concept originated during the presidency of Hu Jintao, who initially used it for the domestic affairs of China. However, the usage of the (...)
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  15. Consciousness, the High Probability of Afterlife, and the Evolution of Intelligence in the Universe/s (16th edition).K. L. Senarath Dayathilake - 2023 - Cambridge.Org.
    This article investigates the profound mysteries of consciousness and the afterlife, topics that have captivated humanity for centuries. Despite extensive scientific inquiry, the existence of an afterlife remains unverified, and the nature of consciousness poses significant challenges. This research presents innovative hypotheses through thought experiments grounded in empirical evidence and robust theoretical frameworks. It examines the complexities of consciousness, its intricate relationship with the brain, and advocates for interdisciplinary approaches that integrate physics, psychology, and philosophy. The study boldly posits the (...)
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  16. Human evolution and transitions in individuality.Paulo C. Abrantes - 2013 - Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 18 (S1):203-220.
    This paper investigates whether it is fruitful to describe the role culture began to play at some point in the Hominin lineage as pointing to a transition in individuality, by reference to the works of Buss, Maynard-Smith and Szathmáry, Michod and Godfrey-Smith. The chief question addressed is whether a population of groups having different cultural phenotypes is either paradigmatically Darwinian or marginal, by using Godfrey-Smith's representation of such transitions in a multi-dimensional space. Richerson and Boyd's «dual inheritance» theory, and (...)
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  17. What could cognition be, if not human cognition?: Individuating cognitive abilities in the light of evolution.Carrie Figdor - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (6):1-21.
    I argue that an explicit distinction between cognitive characters and cognitive phenotypes is needed for empirical progress in the cognitive sciences and their integration with evolution-guided sciences. I elaborate what ontological commitment to characters involves and how such a commitment would clarify ongoing debates about the relations between human and nonhuman cognition and the extent of cognitive abilities across biological species. I use theoretical proposals in episodic memory, language, and sociocultural bases of cognition to illustrate how cognitive characters are (...)
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  18. From Experiential-based to Relational-based Forms of Social Organization: A Major Transition in the Evolution of Homo sapiens.Dwight Read - 2010 - In Read Dwight (ed.), Social Brain, Distributed Mind. pp. 199-229.
    The evolutionary trajectory from non-human to human forms of social organization involves change from experiential- to relational-based systems of social interaction. Social organization derived from biologically and experientially grounded social interaction reached a hiatus with the great apes due to an expansion of individualization of behaviour. The hiatus ended with the introduction of relational-based social interaction, culminating in social organization based on cultural kinship. This evolutionary trajectory links biological origins to cultural outcomes and makes evident the centrality of distributed forms (...)
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  19. Power in Cultural Evolution and the Spread of Prosocial Norms.Nathan Cofnas - 2018 - Quarterly Review of Biology 93 (4):297–318.
    According to cultural evolutionary theory in the tradition of Boyd and Richerson, cultural evolution is driven by individuals' learning biases, natural selection, and random forces. Learning biases lead people to preferentially acquire cultural variants with certain contents or in certain contexts. Natural selection favors individuals or groups with fitness-promoting variants. Durham (1991) argued that Boyd and Richerson's approach is based on a "radical individualism" that fails to recognize that cultural variants are often "imposed" on people regardless of their individual (...)
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  20. The ethical significance of evolution.Andrzej Elzanowski - 2010 - In Soniewicka Stelmach (ed.), Stelmach, J., Soniewicka M., Załuski W. (red.) Legal Philosophy and the Challenges of Biosciences (Studies in the Philosophy of Law 4). Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego. pp. 65-76.
    DARWIN’s (1859, 1871) discoveries have profound ethical implications that continue to be misrepresented and/or ignored. In contrast to socialdarwinistic misuses of his theory, Darwin was a great humanitarian who paved the way for an integrated scientific and ethical world view. As an ethical doctrine, socialdarwinism is long dead ever since its defeat by E. G. Moore although the socialdarwinistic thought is a hard-die in the biological community. The accusations of sociobiology for being socialdarwinistic are unfounded and stem from the moralistic (...)
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  21. The stability of traits conception of the hologenome: An evolutionary account of holobiont individuality.Javier Suárez - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (1):1-27.
    Bourrat and Griffiths :33, 2018) have recently argued that most of the evidence presented by holobiont defenders to support the thesis that holobionts are evolutionary individuals is not to the point and is not even adequate to discriminate multispecies evolutionary individuals from other multispecies assemblages that would not be considered evolutionary individuals by most holobiont defenders. They further argue that an adequate criterion to distinguish the two categories is fitness alignment, presenting the notion of fitness boundedness as a criterion that (...)
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  22. Individuality and adaptation across levels of selection: How shall we name and generalize the unit of Darwinism?Stephen Jay Gould & Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 1999 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96 (21):11904-09.
    Two major clarifications have greatly abetted the understanding and fruitful expansion of the theory of natural selection in recent years: the acknowledgment that interactors, not replicators, constitute the causal unit of selection; and the recognition that interactors are Darwinian individuals, and that such individuals exist with potency at several levels of organization (genes, organisms, demes, and species in particular), thus engendering a rich hierarchical theory of selection in contrast with Darwin’s own emphasis on the organismic level. But a piece of (...)
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  23. Ageing and the goal of evolution.Justin Garson - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-16.
    There is a certain metaphor that has enjoyed tremendous longevity in the evolution of ageing literature. According to this metaphor, nature has a certain goal or purpose, the perpetuation of the species, or, alternatively, the reproductive success of the individual. In relation to this goal, the individual organism has a function, job, or task, namely, to breed and, in some species, to raise its brood to maturity. On this picture, those who cannot, or can no longer, reproduce are somehow (...)
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  24. The evolution and development of consciousness: the subject-object emergence hypothesis.John E. Stewart - 2022 - Biosystems 217.
    A strategy for investigating consciousness that has proven very productive has focused on comparing brain processes that are accompanied by consciousness with processes that are not. But comparatively little attention has been given to a related strategy that promises to be even more fertile. This strategy exploits the fact that as individuals develop, new classes of brain processes can transition from operating ‘in the dark’ to becoming conscious. It has been suggested that these transitions occur when a new class of (...)
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  25. Individuals, Existence, and Existential Commitment in Visual Reasoning.Jens Lemanski - 2024 - Open Philosophy 7 (1):1-25.
    This article examines the evolution of the concept of existence in modern visual representation and reasoning, highlighting important milestones. In the late eighteenth century, during the so-called golden age of visual reasoning, nominalism reigned supreme and there was limited scope for existential import or individuals in logic diagrams. By the late nineteenth century, a form of realism had taken hold, whose existential commitments continue to dominate many areas in logic and visual reasoning to this day. Physical, metaphysical, epistemological, and (...)
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  26. Making Artists of Us All: The Evolution of an Educational Aesthetic.George E. Abaunza - 2005 - Dissertation, Florida State University
    The history of philosophy is replete with attempts at invoking rationality as a means of directing and even subduing human desire and emotion. Understood as that which moves human beings to action, desire and emotion come to be associated with human freedom and rationality as a means of curbing that freedom. Plato, for instance, takes for granted a separation between thought and action that drives a wedge between our rational ability to exercise self-discipline and the free expression of desire and (...)
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  27. The Trajectory of Evolution and its Implications for Humanity.John E. Stewart - 2019 - Journal of Big History (3):141-155.
    Does the Big History of life on Earth disclose a trajectory that has been driven by selection? If so, will the trajectory continue to apply into the future? This paper argues that such a trajectory exists, and examines some of its key implications. The most important consequence is that humanity can use the trajectory to guide how it evolves and adapts into the future. This is because the trajectory identifies a sequence of adaptations that will be favoured by selection. If (...)
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  28.  60
    Individuality and the control of life cycles.Beckett Sterner - 2017 - In Scott Lidgard & Lynn K. Nyhart (eds.), Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 84-108.
    I will argue that MLS theory does not provide a complete, self- sufficient approach to theorizing about evolutionary transitions. As a formal, mathematical theory about evolution within a population, it presupposes but does not address the material structure of the population that realizes the model. An MLS model might tell us whether a cooperative trait could be- come fixed in a population, for example, but it won’t be able to explain how the cooperation actually works to produce an adaptive (...)
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  29. Biological Individuals.Robert A. Wilson & Matthew J. Barker - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...)
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  30. The Challenge of Evolution to Religion.Johan De Smedt & Helen De Cruz - 2020 - Cambridge University Press.
    This Element focuses on three challenges of evolution to religion: teleology, human origins, and the evolution of religion itself. First, religious worldviews tend to presuppose a teleological understanding of the origins of living things, but scientists mostly understand evolution as non-teleological. Second, religious and scientific accounts of human origins do not align in a straightforward sense. Third, evolutionary explanations of religion, including religious beliefs and practices, may cast doubt on their justification. We show how these tensions arise (...)
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  31. Evolution's Arrow: the direction of evolution and the future of humanity.John E. Stewart - 2000 - Canberra: The Chapman Press.
    Evolution's Arrow argues that evolution is directional and progressive, and that this has major consequences for humanity. Without resort to teleology, the book demonstrates that evolution moves in the direction of producing cooperative organisations of greater scale and evolvability - evolution has organised molecular processes into cells, cells into organisms, and organisms into societies. The book founds this position on a new theory of the evolution of cooperation. It shows that self-interest at the level of (...)
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  32. Transbiopolitics: Ontology and Metatheory of Managed Evolution.Valentin Cheshko & Kuz Oleh - 2021 - Epistemological studies in Philosophy, Social and Political Sciences 4 (1):1-11.
    Applied technological developments are represented by (1) genetic engineering as management tools of biological evolution and (2) socio-economic engineering as management tools of civilizational and socio-cultural development. This binary structure logically follows from the postulated three-module organization of the sustainable evolutionary strategy of the sentient human being. Naturphilosophy once again acquires the status of the basis of the theory of evolution in an explicit way. There is a system of metaphysical postulates and ontological categories derived from the anthropic (...)
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  33. The hologenome concept of evolution: a philosophical and biological study.Javier Suárez - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Exeter
    The hologenome concept of evolution is a hypothesis about the evolution of animals and plants. It asserts that the evolution of animals and plants was partially triggered by their interactions with their symbiotic microbiomes. In that vein, the hologenome concept posits that the holobiont (animal host + symbionts of the microbiome) is a unit of selection. -/- The hologenome concept has been severely criticized on the basis that selection on holobionts would only be possible if there were (...)
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  34. (1 other version)The Dead Hands of Group Selection and Phenomenology -- A Review of Individuality and Entanglement by Herbert Gintis 357p (2017).Michael Starks - 2016 - In Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization-- Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 2nd Edition Feb 2018. Las Vegas, USA: Reality Press.
    Since Gintis is a senior economist and I have read some of his previous books with interest, I was expecting some more insights into behavior. Sadly he makes the dead hands of group selection and phenomenology into the centerpieces of his theories of behavior, and this largely invalidates the work. Worse, since he shows such bad judgement here, it calls into question all his previous work. The attempt to resurrect group selection by his friends at Harvard, Nowak and Wilson, a (...)
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  35. Genes and the Agents of Life: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences Biology.Robert A. Wilson - 2004 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    Genes and the Agents of Life undertakes to rethink the place of the individual in the biological sciences, drawing parallels with the cognitive and social sciences. Genes, organisms, and species are all agents of life but how are each of these conceptualized within genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and systematics? The 2005 book includes highly accessible discussions of genetic encoding, species and natural kinds, and pluralism above the levels of selection, drawing on work from across the biological sciences. The book (...)
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  36. The Metaphysics of Evolution.John Dupre - 2017 - Interface Focus 7 (5):1-9.
    This paper briefly describes process metaphysics, and argues that it is better suited for describing life than the more standard thing, or substance, metaphysics. It then explores the implications of process metaphysics for conceptualizing evolution. After explaining what it is for an organism to be a process, the paper takes up the Hull/Ghiselin thesis of species as individuals and explores the conditions under which a species or lineage could constitute an individual process. It is argued that only sexual species (...)
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  37. Transbiopolitical trend of the COVID-19 pandemic: from political globalization to policy of global evolution.Valentin Cheshko & Oleh Kuz - 2021 - Politicus 3:122-130.
    Topicality of the research topic. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increase in the instability of the structure of ecosocial systems. Technological innovations have led to a sharp deterioration in natural social ecodynamics. The aim of the research is the conceptual modeling of the proliferation of biopolitics from the social sphere to the field of international relations with the subsequent transformation into a systemic factor of the global evolutionary process. Research methods and results. The model is (...)
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  38. Prometheus and Proteus: the creative, unpredictable individual in evolution.Wolfgang Sterrer - 1992 - Evolution and Cognition 1:101-129.
    Evolutionary theory usually neglects two variables: the changes induced in the environment by the evolving organism, and individual uniqueness in sexually reproducing species. In order to fuel its maintenance and reproduction, an organism must average a positive net energy balance vis-a-v}s its environment. It achieves this via aptations, which consist of information (i.e., the internalization of all that is predictable about the environment, including the machinery to take advantage of this information) and stored energy (to operate the machinery, including a (...)
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  39. The importance of symbiosis in philosophy of biology: an analysis of the current debate on biological individuality and its historical roots.Javier Suárez - 2018 - Symbiosis 76 (2):77-96.
    Symbiosis plays a fundamental role in contemporary biology, as well as in recent thinking in philosophy of biology. The discovery of the importance and universality of symbiotic associations has brought new light to old debates in the field, including issues about the concept of biological individuality. An important aspect of these debates has been the formulation of the hologenome concept of evolution, the notion that holobionts are units of natural selection in evolution. This review examines the philosophical (...)
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  40. Evolution in Space and Time: The Second Synthesis of Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, and the Philosophy of Biology.Mitchell Ryan Distin - 2023 - Self-published because fuck the leeches of Big Publishing.
    Change is the fundamental idea of evolution. Explaining the extraordinary biological change we see written in the history of genomes and fossil beds is the primary occupation of the evolutionary biologist. Yet it is a surprising fact that for the majority of evolutionary research, we have rarely studied how evolution typically unfolds in nature, in changing ecological environments, over space and time. While ecology played a major role in the eventual acceptance of the population genetic viewpoint of (...) in the synthetic era (circa 1918-1956), it held a lesser role in the development of evolutionary theory until the 1980s, when we began to systematically study the evolutionary dynamics of natural populations in space and time. As a result, early evolutionary theory was initially constructed in an abstract vacuum that was unrepresentative of evolution in nature. The subtle synthesis between ecology with evolutionary biology (eco-evo synthesis) over the past 40 years has progressed our knowledge of natural selection dynamics as they are found in nature, thus revealing how natural selection varies in strength, direction, form, and, more surprisingly, level of biological organization. Natural selection can no longer be reduced to lower levels of biological organization (i.e., individuals, selfish genes) over shorter timescales but should be expanded to include adaptation at higher levels and over longer timescales. Long-term and/or emergent evolutionary phenomena, such as multilevel selection or evolvability, have thus become tenable concepts within an evolutionary biology that embraces ecology and spatiotemporal change. Evolutionary biology is currently suspended at an intermediate stage of scientific progress that calls for the organization of all the recent knowledge revealed by the eco-evo synthesis into a coherent and unified theoretical framework. This is where philosophers of biology can be of particular use, acting as a bridge between the subdisciplines of biology and inventing new theoretical strategies to organize and accommodate the recent knowledge. Philosophers have recommended transitioning away from outdated philosophies that were originally derived from physics within the philosophical zeitgeist of logical positivism (i.e., monism, reductionism, and monocausation) and toward a distinct philosophy of biology that can capture the natural complexity of multifaceted biological systems within diverse ecosystems—one that embraces the emerging philosophies of pluralism, emergence, and multicausality. Therefore, I see recent advances in ecology, evolutionary biology, and the philosophy of biology as laying the groundwork for another major biological synthesis, what I refer to as the Second Synthesis because, in many respects, it is analogous to the aims and outcomes of the first major biological synthesis (but is notably distinct from the inorganic and contrived progressive movement known as the extended evolutionary synthesis). With the general development of a distinctive philosophy of science, biology has rightfully emerged as an autonomous science. Thus, while the first synthesis legitimized biology, the Second Synthesis autonomized biology and afforded biology its own philosophy, allowing biology to finally realize its full scientific potential. (shrink)
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  41. The gene as the unit of selection: a case of evolutive delusion.Armando Aranda-Anzaldo - 1997 - Ludus Vitalis 5 (9):91-120.
    The unit of selection is the concept of that ‘something’ to which biologists refer when they speak of an adaptation as being ‘for the good of’ something. Darwin identified the organism as the unit of selection because for him the ‘struggle for existence’ was an issue among individuals. Later on it was suggested that, in order to understand the evolution of social behavior, it is necessary to argue that groups, and not individuals, are the units of selection. The last (...)
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  42. Struggle within: evolution and ecology of somatic cell populations.Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2021 - Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences 78 (21):6797-6806.
    The extent to which normal (nonmalignant) cells of the body can evolve through mutation and selection during the lifetime of the organism has been a major unresolved issue in evolutionary and developmental studies. On the one hand, stable multicellular individuality seems to depend on genetic homogeneity and suppression of evolutionary conflicts at the cellular level. On the other hand, the example of clonal selection of lymphocytes indicates that certain forms of somatic mutation and selection are concordant with the organism-level (...)
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  43. Non-genetic inheritance: Evolution above the organismal level.Anton Sukhoverkhov & Nathalie Gontier - 2021 - Biosystems 1 (200):104325.
    The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...)
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  44. Individuating population lineages: a new genealogical criterion.Beckett Sterner - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (5):683-703.
    Contemporary biology has inherited two key assumptions from the Modern Synthesis about the nature of population lineages: sexual reproduction is the exemplar for how individuals in population lineages inherit traits from their parents, and random mating is the exemplar for reproductive interaction. While these assumptions have been extremely fruitful for a number of fields, such as population genetics and phylogenetics, they are increasingly unviable for studying the full diversity and evolution of life. I introduce the “mixture” account of population (...)
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  45.  79
    On the Epistemic Roles of the Individualized Niche Concept in Ecology, Behavioral and Evolutionary Biology.Marie I. Kaiser & Katie H. Morrow - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    We characterize four fruitful and underappreciated epistemic roles played by the concept of an individualized niche in contemporary biology, utilizing results of a qualitative empirical study conducted within an interdisciplinary biological research center. We argue that the individualized niche concept (1) shapes the research agenda of the center, (2) facilitates explaining core phenomena related to inter-individual differences, (3) helps with managing individual-level causal complexity, and (4) promotes integrating local knowledge from ecology, evolutionary biology, behavioral biology and other biological fields. We (...)
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  46. Plant Individuality and Multilevel Selection Theory.Ellen Clarke - 2011 - In Brett Calcott & Kim Sterelny (eds.), The Major Transitions in Evolution Revisited. MIT Press. pp. 227--250.
    This chapter develops the idea that the germ-soma split and the suppression of individual fitness differences within the corporate entity are not always essential steps in the evolution of corporate individuals. It illustrates some consequences for multilevel selection theory. It presents evidence that genetic heterogeneity may not always be a barrier to successful functioning as a higher-level individual. This chapter shows that levels-of-selection theorists are wrong to assume that the central problem in transitions is always that of minimizing within-group (...)
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  47. Individuating Cognitive Characters: Lessons from Praying Mantises and Plants.Carrie Figdor - 2024 - Philosophy of Science:1-20.
    This paper advances the development of a phylogeny-based psychology in which cognitive ability types are individuated as characters in the evolutionary biological sense. I explain the character concept and its utility in addressing (or dissolving) conceptual problems arising from discoveries of cognitive abilities across a wide range of species. I use the examples of stereopsis in the praying mantis, internal cell-to-cell signaling in plants, and episodic memory in scrub jays to show how anthropocentric cognitive ability types can be reformulated into (...)
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  48. Culture and Transitions in Individuality.Paulo Abrantes - 2011 - In Luiz Dutra & Alexandre Meyer Luz (eds.), Rumos da Epistemologia v. 11. Núcleo de Epistemologia e Lógica. pp. 395-408.
    Some "major" evolutionary transitions have been described as transitions in individuality. In this depiction, natural selection might bring about new kinds of individuals, whose evolutionary dynamics takes place in a novel way. Using a categorization proposed by Godfrey-Smith, this transition is fully accomplished when a new "paradigmatic" Darwinian population emerges. In this paper I investigate whether at some point in the evolution in the hominin lineage a transition of this kind might have happened, by assuming some of the (...)
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  49. (1 other version)Is evolution fundamental when it comes to defining biological ontology? Yes.Ellen Clarke - 2017 - In Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge.
    I argue for the usefulness of the evolutionary kind of biological individual.
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  50. Testing the “(Neo-)Darwinian” Principles against Reticulate Evolution: How Variation, Adaptation, Heredity and Fitness, Constraints and Affordances, Speciation, and Extinction Surpass Organisms and Species.Nathalie Gontier - 2020 - Information 11 (7):352.
    Variation, adaptation, heredity and fitness, constraints and affordances, speciation, and extinction form the building blocks of the (Neo-)Darwinian research program, and several of these have been called “Darwinian principles.” Here, we suggest that caution should be taken in calling these principles Darwinian because of the important role played by reticulate evolutionary mechanisms and processes in also bringing about these phenomena. Reticulate mechanisms and processes include symbiosis, symbiogenesis, lateral gene transfer, infective heredity mediated by genetic and organismal mobility, and hybridization. Because (...)
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