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Toolmaking and the evolution of normative cognition Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2021-01-12 Jonathan Birch
We are all guided by thousands of norms, but how did our capacity for normative cognition evolve? I propose there is a deep but neglected link between normative cognition and practical skill. In modern humans, complex motor skills and craft skills, such as toolmaking, are guided by internally represented norms of correct performance. Moreover, it is plausible that core components of human normative
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Is cancer a matter of luck? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2021-01-11 Anya Plutynski
In 2015, Tomasetti and Vogelstein published a paper in Science containing the following provocative statement: “… only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to “bad luck,” that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells.” The paper—and perhaps especially
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What are the major transitions? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2021-01-11 Matthew D. Herron
The ‘Major Transitions in Evolution’ (MTE) framework has emerged as the dominant paradigm for understanding the origins of life's hierarchical organization, but it has been criticized on the grounds that it lacks theoretical unity, that is, that the events included in the framework do not constitute a coherent category. I agree with this criticism, and I argue that the best response is to modify the
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What is an animal personality? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2021-01-10 Marie I. Kaiser, Caroline Müller
Individuals of many animal species are said to have a personality. It has been shown that some individuals are bolder than other individuals of the same species, or more sociable or more aggressive. In this paper, we analyse what it means to say that an animal has a personality. We clarify what an animal personality is, that is, its ontology, and how different personality concepts relate to each other
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When imprecision is a good thing, or how imprecise concepts facilitate integration in biology Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-12-11 Celso Neto
Contrary to the common-sense view and positivist aspirations, scientific concepts are often imprecise. Many of these concepts are ambiguous, vague, or have an under-specified meaning (Gillon 1990). In this paper, I discuss how imprecise concepts promote integration in biology and thus benefit science. Previous discussions of this issue focus on the concepts of molecular gene and evolutionary novelty
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The evolutionary community concept is fully armed and operational: a reply to Sagoff Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-12-07 Kyle Barrett, Craig Guyer, David A. Steen
In 2017 we published a paper in this journal proposing a philosophical framework for recognizing ecological communities as natural entities, the Evolutionary Community Concept (ECC). That paper attracted a lengthy reply; herein we take the opportunity to clarify critical aspects of the ECC and use a case study (the longleaf pine forest) to demonstrate how the ECC can be made operational. We maintain
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Unlimited Associative Learning and the origins of consciousness: a primer and some predictions Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-12-03 Jonathan Birch, Simona Ginsburg, Eva Jablonka
Over the past two decades, Ginsburg and Jablonka have developed a novel approach to studying the evolutionary origins of consciousness: the Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework. The central idea is that there is a distinctive type of learning that can serve as a transition marker for the evolutionary transition from non-conscious to conscious life. The goal of this paper is to stimulate discussion
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The zone of latent solutions and its relevance to understanding ape cultures Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-10-11 Claudio Tennie, Elisa Bandini, Carel P. van Schaik, Lydia M. Hopper
The zone of latent solutions (ZLS) hypothesis provides an alternative approach to explaining cultural patterns in primates and many other animals. According to the ZLS hypothesis, non-human great ape (henceforth: ape) cultures consist largely or solely of latent solutions. The current competing (and predominant) hypothesis for ape culture argues instead that at least some of their behavioural or artefact
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Understanding scientific types: holotypes, stratotypes, and measurement prototypes Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-10-03 Alisa Bokulich
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
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Narrative niche construction: memory ecologies and distributed narrative identities Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-09-28 Richard Heersmink
Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct
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What makes neurophysiology meaningful? Semantic content ascriptions in insect navigation research Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-09-18 Kelle Dhein
In the course of investigating the living world, biologists regularly attribute semantic content to the phenomena they study. In this paper, I examine the case of a contemporary research program studying the navigation behaviors of ants and develop an account of the norms governing researchers’ ascriptions of semantic content in their research practices. The account holds that researchers assign semantic
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Has classical gene position been practically reduced? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-09-16 Oriol Vidal, David Teira
One of the defining features of the classical gene was its position (a band in the chromosome). In molecular genetics, positions are defined instead as nucleotide numbers and there is no clear correspondence with its classical counterpart. However, the classical gene position did not simply disappear with the development of the molecular approach, but survived in the lab associated to different genetic
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Cyclic and multilevel causation in evolutionary processes Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-09-15 Jonathan Warrell, Mark Gerstein
Many models of evolution are implicitly causal processes. Features such as causal feedback between evolutionary variables and evolutionary processes acting at multiple levels, though, mean that conventional causal models miss important phenomena. We develop here a general theoretical framework for analyzing evolutionary processes drawing on recent approaches to causal modeling developed in the machine-learning
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Zoocentrism in the weeds? Cultivating plant models for cognitive yield Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-09-05 Adam Linson, Paco Calvo
It remains at best controversial to claim, non-figuratively, that plants are cognitive agents. At the same time, it is taken as trivially true that many (if not all) animals are cognitive agents, arguably through an implicit or explicit appeal to natural science. Yet, any given definition of cognition implicates at least some further processes, such as perception, action, memory, and learning, which
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Are moral norms rooted in instincts? The sibling incest taboo as a case study Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-08-25 Nathan Cofnas
According to Westermarck’s widely accepted explanation of the incest taboo, cultural prohibitions on sibling sex are rooted in an evolved biological disposition to feel sexual aversion toward our childhood coresidents. Bernard Williams posed the “representation problem” for Westermarck’s theory: the content of the hypothesized instinct (avoid sex with childhood coresidents) is different from the content
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Dynamical causes Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-08-25 Russell Meyer
Mechanistic explanations are often said to explain because they reveal the causal structure of the world. Conversely, dynamical models supposedly lack explanatory power because they do not describe causal structure. The only way for dynamical models to produce causal explanations is via the 3M criterion: the model must be mapped onto a mechanism. This framing of the situation has become the received
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Defining aging Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-08-25 Maël Lemoine
Aging is an elusive property of life, and many important questions about aging depend on its definition. This article proposes to draw a definition from the scientific literature on aging. First, a broad review reveals five features commonly used to define aging: structural damage, functional decline, depletion, typical phenotypic changes or their cause, and increasing probability of death. Anything
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Chimpanzee normativity: evidence and objections Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-08-05 Simon Fitzpatrick
This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity: i.e., some ability to internalize and enforce social norms—rules governing appropriate and inappropriate behaviour—within their social groups, and to make evaluations of others’ behaviour in light of such norms. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that such a sense of normativity
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Character identity mechanisms: a conceptual model for comparative-mechanistic biology Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-07-30 James DiFrisco, Alan C. Love, Günter P. Wagner
There have been repeated attempts in the history of comparative biology to provide a mechanistic account of morphological homology. However, it is well-established that homologues can develop from diverse sets of developmental causes, appearing not to share any core causal architecture that underwrites character identity. We address this challenge with a new conceptual model of Character Identity Mechanisms
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Causal inference in biomedical research Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-07-28 Tudor M. Baetu
Current debates surrounding the virtues and shortcomings of randomization are symptomatic of a lack of appreciation of the fact that causation can be inferred by two distinct inference methods, each requiring its own, specific experimental design. There is a non-statistical type of inference associated with controlled experiments in basic biomedical research; and a statistical variety associated with
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Eco-evo-devo and iterated learning: towards an integrated approach in the light of niche construction Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-07-26 José Segovia-Martín, Sergio Balari
In this paper we argue that ecological evolutionary developmental biology (eco-evo-devo) accounts of cognitive modernity are compatible with cultural evolution theories of language built upon iterated learning models. Cultural evolution models show that the emergence of near universal properties of language do not require the preexistence of strong specific constraints. Instead, the development of
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Race and medicine in light of the new mechanistic philosophy of science Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-07-09 Kalewold Hailu Kalewold
Racial disparities in health outcomes have recently become a flashpoint in the debate about the value of race as a biological concept. What role, if any, race has in the etiology of disease is a philosophically and scientifically contested topic. In this article, I expand on the insights of the new mechanistic philosophy of science to defend a mechanism discovery approach to investigating epidemiological
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Technology led to more abstract causal reasoning Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-07-06 Peter Gärdenfors, Marlize Lombard
Many animal species use tools, but human technical engagement is more complex. We argue that there is coevolution between technical engagement (the manufacturing and use of tools) and advanced forms of causal cognition in the human (Homo) lineage. As an analytic tool, we present a classification of different forms of causal thinking. Human causal thinking has become detached from space and time, so
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Does proper function come in degrees? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-07-03 John Matthewson
Natural selection comes in degrees. Some biological traits are subjected to stronger selective force than others, selection on particular traits waxes and wanes over time, and some groups can only undergo an attenuated kind of selective process. This has downstream consequences for any notions that are standardly treated as binary but depend on natural selection. For instance, the proper function of
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Anthropogenic climate change as a monumental niche construction process: background and philosophical aspects Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-06-29 Andra Meneganzin, Telmo Pievani, Stefano Caserini
Climate change has historically been an evolutionary determinant for our species, affecting both hominin evolutionary innovations and extinction rates, and the early waves of migration and expansion outside Africa. Today Homo sapiens has turned itself into a major geological force, able to cause a biodiversity crisis comparable to previous mass extinction events, shaping the Earth surface and impacting
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A role for representations in inflexible behavior Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-06-28 Todd Ganson
Representationalists have routinely expressed skepticism about the idea that inflexible responses to stimuli (e.g. reflexive responses like the pupillary light reflex) are to be explained in representational terms. Representations are supposed to be more than just causal mediators in the chain of events stretching from stimulus to response, and it is difficult to see how the sensory states driving
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Sources of evolutionary contingency: chance variation and genetic drift Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-06-05 T. Y. William Wong
Contingency-theorists have gestured to a series of phenomena such as random mutations or rare Armageddon-like events as that which accounts for evolutionary contingency. These phenomena constitute a class, which may be aptly called the ‘sources of contingency’. In this paper, I offer a probabilistic conception of what it is to be a source of contingency and then examine two major candidates: chance
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The explanatory breadth of pushmi-pullyu representations Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-05-15 Mark Bauer
The pushmi-pullyu representation (“PPR”) is a non-conjunctive representation with both descriptive and directive contents. Introduced by Millikan, the PPR is supposed to aid in explaining how organisms adapt behavior to environmental variance in the absence of intermediate inference. Until recently, it has led an uncontroversial theoretical life. However, Artiga has suggested that the PPR postulate
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Beyond quantitative and qualitative traits: three telling cases in the life sciences Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-05-11 Davide Serpico
This paper challenges the common assumption that some phenotypic traits are quantitative while others are qualitative. The distinction between these two kinds of traits is widely influential in biological and biomedical research as well as in scientific education and communication. This is probably due to both historical and epistemological reasons. However, the quantitative/qualitative distinction
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Internal perspectivalism: the solution to generality problems about proper function and natural norms Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-05-09 Jason Winning
In this paper, I argue that what counts as the proper function of a trait is a matter of the de facto perspective that the biological system, itself, possesses on what counts as proper functioning for that trait. Unlike non-perspectival accounts, internal perspectivalism does not succumb to generality problems. But unlike external perspectivalism, internal perspectivalism can provide a fully naturalistic
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From allostatic agents to counterfactual cognisers: active inference, biological regulation, and the origins of cognition Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-04-29 Andrew W. Corcoran, Giovanni Pezzulo, Jakob Hohwy
What is the function of cognition? On one influential account, cognition evolved to co-ordinate behaviour with environmental change or complexity (Godfrey-Smith in Complexity and the function of mind in nature, Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996). Liberal interpretations of this view ascribe cognition to an extraordinarily broad set of biological
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The use and limitations of null-model-based hypothesis testing Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-04-23 Mingjun Zhang
In this article I give a critical evaluation of the use and limitations of null-model-based hypothesis testing as a research strategy in the biological sciences. According to this strategy, the null model based on a randomization procedure provides an appropriate null hypothesis stating that the existence of a pattern is the result of random processes or can be expected by chance alone, and proponents
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The evolutionary role of affordances: ecological psychology, niche construction, and natural selection Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-04-22 Manuel Heras-Escribano
This paper aims to examine the evolutionary role of affordances, that is, the possibilities for action available in our environments. There are two allegedly competing views for explaining the evolutionary role of affordances: the first is based on natural selection; the second is based on niche construction. According to the first, affordances are resources that exert selection pressure. The second
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What is a target system? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-03-12 Alkistis Elliott-Graves
Many phenomena in the natural world are complex, so scientists study them through simplified and idealised models. Philosophers of science have sought to explain how these models relate to the world. On most accounts, models do not represent the world directly, but through target systems. However, our knowledge of target systems is incomplete. First, what is the process by which target systems come
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Ernst Haeckel’s ‘Kant Problem’: metaphysics, science, and art Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-03-05 Stefan Forrester
Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) has become famous, and perhaps infamous, for many reasons. Presently, he is probably most widely-known for his paintings of plants and animals in his very popular book, Art Forms in Nature, originally collected and published in 1904. However, in addition to Haeckel’s art, he is also well-known for his advocacy of Darwinism and Social Darwinism, for first coining the term ‘ecology
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Problems with using stability, specificity, and proportionality as criteria for evaluating strength of scientific causal explanations: commentary on Lynch et al. (2019) Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-02-12 Gry Oftedal
Lynch et al. (Biol Philos 34:62, 2019) employ stability, specificity, and proportionality as criteria for evaluating microbiome causal explanations. Although these causal characteristics signify relevant differences between causal roles, I suggest that they should not be used as general criteria for strong or good causal explanations.
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Representation-supporting model elements Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-02-11 Sim-Hui Tee
It is assumed that scientific models contain no superfluous model elements in scientific representation. A representational model is constructed with all the model elements serving the representational purpose. The received view has it that there are no redundant model elements which are non-representational. Contrary to this received view, I argue that there exist some non-representational model elements
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Elusive vehicles of genetic representation Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-02-06 Riin Kõiv
The teleosemantic theory of representational content is held by some philosophers to imply that genes carry semantic information about whole-organism phenotypes. In this paper, I argue that this position is not supported by empirical findings. I focus on one of the most elaborate defenses of this position: Shea’s (Biol Philos 22:313–331, 2007a, Br J Philos Sci 64:1–31, 2013a) view that genes represent
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Microbial activities are dependent on background conditions Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-02-05 Tamar Schneider
Taking the case of H. pylori and ulcer, Lynch et al., demonstrate how framing Koch’s postulate by an interventionist account clarifies the latter’s explanatory strength in proportionality with the weaknesses in specificity and stability due to the influence of background conditions. They suggest this approach as an efficient way to bypass the enigma of background conditions and microbial activity in
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Dynamic homology and circularity in cladistic analysis Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-02-04 Ariel Jonathan Roffé
In this article, I examine the issue of the alleged circularity in the determination of homologies within cladistic analysis. More specifically, I focus on the claims made by the proponents of the dynamic homology approach, regarding the distinction (sometimes made in the literature) between primary and secondary homology. This distinction is sometimes invoked to dissolve the circularity issue, by
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Does the extended evolutionary synthesis entail extended explanatory power? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-01-23 Jan Baedke, Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Francisco Vergara-Silva
Biologists and philosophers of science have recently called for an extension of evolutionary theory. This so-called ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’ (EES) seeks to integrate developmental processes, extra-genetic forms of inheritance, and niche construction into evolutionary theory in a central way. While there is often agreement in evolutionary biology over the existence of these phenomena, their
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Investigating populations in generalized Darwinism Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-01-22 Karim Baraghith
Darwinian evolution is a population-level phenomenon. This paper deals with a structural population concept within the framework of generalized Darwinism (GD), resp. within a generalized theory of evolution. According to some skeptical authors, GD is in need of a valid population concept in order to become a practicable research program. Populations are crucial and basic elements of any evolutionary
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The end of science? On human cognitive limitations and how to overcome them Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-01-20 Maarten Boudry, Michael Vlerick, Taner Edis
What, if any, are the limits of human understanding? Epistemic pessimists, sobered by our humble evolutionary origins, have argued that some parts of the universe will forever remain beyond our ken. But what exactly does it mean to say that humans are ‘cognitively closed’ to some parts of the world, or that some problems will forever remain ‘mysteries’? In this paper we develop a richer conceptual
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Precis of defending biodiversity Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-01-09 Stefan Linquist, Gary Varner, Jonathan E. Newman
Why should governments or individuals invest time and resources in conserving biodiversity? A popular answer is that biodiversity has both instrumental value for humans and intrinsic value in its own right. Defending Biodiversity critically evaluates familiar arguments for these claims and finds that, at best, they provide good reasons for conserving particular species or regions. However, they fail
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Defending a Leopoldian basis for biodiversity: a response to Newman, Varner, and Linquist Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-01-09 Roberta L. Millstein
In their book, Defending Biodiversity, Newman, Varner, and Linquist (NVL) cast doubt on whether Leopoldian defenses of biodiversity, in their current form, have been successful. I argue that there is a more accurate interpretation of Leopold that is not subject to the criticisms made by NVL, and that Leopold’s body of work as a whole, including but not limited to the essay “The Land Ethic” in A Sand
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Biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and the environmentalist agenda Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-01-09 Jay Odenbaugh
Jonathan Newman, Gary Varner, and Stefan Linquist’s Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics is a critical examination of a panoply of arguments for conserving biodiversity. Their discussion is extremely impressive though I think one can push back on some of their criticisms. In this essay, I consider their criticisms of the argument for conserving biodiversity based on ecosystem services;
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Biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and the environmentalist agenda: a reply to Odenbaugh Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2020-01-09 Jonathan A. Newman
Among the instrumental value defenses for biodiversity conservation is the argument that biodiversity is necessary to support ecosystem functioning. Lower levels of biodiversity yield lower levels of ecosystem functioning and hence the inference that we should conserve biodiversity. In our book Defending Biodiversity: Environmental Science and Ethics, we point out three problems with this inference
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Are emotional states based in the brain? A critique of affective brainocentrism from a physiological perspective. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2019-09-06 Giovanna Colombetti,Eder Zavala
We call affective brainocentrism the tendency to privilege the brain over other parts of the organism when defining or explaining emotions. We distinguish two versions of this tendency. According to brain-sufficient, emotional states are entirely realized by brain processes. According to brain-master, emotional states are realized by both brain and bodily processes, but the latter are entirely driven
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CRISPR: a new principle of genome engineering linked to conceptual shifts in evolutionary biology. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2019-04-02 Eugene V Koonin
The CRISPR-Cas systems of bacterial and archaeal adaptive immunity have become a household name among biologists and even the general public thanks to the unprecedented success of the new generation of genome editing tools utilizing Cas proteins. However, the fundamental biological features of CRISPR-Cas are of no lesser interest and have major impacts on our understanding of the evolution of antivirus
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How to use fitness landscape models for the analysis of collective decision-making: a case of theory-transfer and its limitations. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2019-04-02 Peter Marks,Lasse Gerrits,Johannes Marx
There is considerable correspondence between theories and models used in biology and the social sciences. One type of model that is in use in both biology and the social sciences is the fitness landscape model. The properties of the fitness landscape model have been applied rather freely in the social domain. This is partly due to the versatility of the model, but it is also due to the difficulties
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A use/disuse paradigm for CRISPR-Cas systems. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2019-03-14 Sophie Juliane Veigl
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Relating traditional and academic ecological knowledge: mechanistic and holistic epistemologies across cultures. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 David Ludwig,Luana Poliseli
Current debates about the integration of traditional and academic ecological knowledge (TEK and AEK) struggle with a dilemma of division and assimilation. On the one hand, the emphasis on differences between traditional and academic perspectives has been criticized as creating an artificial divide that brands TEK as "non-scientific" and contributes to its marginalization. On the other hand, there has
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Evolutionary arguments against moral realism: Why the empirical details matter (and which ones do). Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 Jeroen Hopster
The aim of this article is to identify the strongest evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) against moral realism and to assess on which empirical assumptions it relies. In the recent metaethical literature, several authors have de-emphasized the evolutionary component of EDAs against moral realism: presumably, the success or failure of these arguments is largely orthogonal to empirical issues. I argue
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Synthetic versus analytic approaches to protein and DNA structure determination. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2018-10-27 Agnes Bolinska
The structures of protein and DNA were discovered primarily by means of synthesizing component-level information about bond types, lengths, and angles, rather than analyzing X-ray diffraction photographs of these molecules. In this paper, I consider the synthetic and analytic approaches to exemplify alternative heuristics for approaching mid-twentieth-century macromolecular structure determination
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Logical fallacies and invasion biology. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2018-09-18 Radu Cornel Guiaşu,Christopher W Tindale
Leading invasion biologists sometimes dismiss critics and criticisms of their field by invoking "the straw man" fallacy. Critics of invasion biology are also labelled as a small group of "naysayers" or "contrarians", who are sometimes engaging in "science denialism". Such unfortunate labels can be seen as a way to possibly suppress legitimate debates and dismiss or minimize reasonable concerns about
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Gender as a historical kind: a tale of two genders? Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2018-05-18 Marion Godman
Is there anything that members of each binary category of gender have in common? Even many non-essentialists find the lack of unity within a gender worrying as it undermines the basis for a common political agenda for women. One promising proposal for achieving unity is by means of a shared historical lineage of cultural reproduction with past binary models of gender (e.g. Bach in Ethics 122:231-272
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Kuhnian revolutions in neuroscience: the role of tool development. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2018-05-15 David Parker
The terms "paradigm" and "paradigm shift" originated in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas Kuhn. A paradigm can be defined as the generally accepted concepts and practices of a field, and a paradigm shift its replacement in a scientific revolution. A paradigm shift results from a crisis caused by anomalies in a paradigm that reduce its usefulness to a field. Claims of paradigm shifts
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Self domestication and the evolution of language. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2018-04-03 James Thomas,Simon Kirby
We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis
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A Cladist is a systematist who seeks a natural classification: some comments on Quinn (2017). Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2018-04-03 David M Williams,Malte C Ebach
In response to Quinn (Biol Philos, 2017. 10.1007/s10539-017-9577-z) we identify cladistics to be about natural classifications and their discovery and thereby propose to add an eighth cladistic definition to Quinn's list, namely the systematist who seeks to discover natural classifications, regardless of their affiliation, theoretical or methodological justifications.
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An enactive account of placebo effects. Biol. Philos. (IF 1.125) Pub Date : 2017-08-12 Giulio Ongaro,Dave Ward
Placebos are commonly defined as ineffective treatments. They are treatments that lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the properties of the condition on which treatment aims to intervene. Given this, the fact that placebos can have substantial therapeutic effects looks puzzling. The puzzle, we argue, arises from the relationship placebos present between culturally meaningful entities
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