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  1. Metaphors as surrogate variables. The case of adaptive radiation.Alfonso Arroyo-Santos & Mark E. Olson - manuscript
    We develop a new metaphor account where metaphors become surrogate variables for different but related phenomena. As we will argue, subrogation is the result of the interplay between the things inspired by the metaphor and the empirical dynamics that result from such inspiration. In particular, we focus on adaptive radiation, a major concept of evolutionary biology. Our study suggests that there is no distinct phenomenon, process, or pattern in nature than can be identified as adaptive radiation. What we have instead (...)
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  2. Interpretations of the concepts of resilience and evolution in the philosophy of Leibniz.Vincenzo De Florio - manuscript
    In this article I interpret resilience and evolution in view of the philosophy of Leibniz. First, I discuss resilience as a substance’s or a monad’s “quantity of essence” — its “degree of perfection” — which I express as the quality of the Whole with respect to the sum of the qualities of the Parts. Then I discuss evolution, which I interpret here as the autopoietic Principle that sets Itself in motion and creates all reality, including Itself. This Principle may be (...)
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  3. Mechanistic Explanation without Mechanisms.John Matthewson & Brett Calcott - manuscript
    We provide an account of mechanistic representation and explanation that has several advantages over previous proposals. In our view, explaining mechanistically is not simply giving an explanation of a mechanism. Rather, an explanation is mechanistic because of particular relations that hold between a mechanical representation, or model, and the target of explanation. Under this interpretation, mechanistic explanation is possible even when the explanatory target is not a mechanism. We argue that taking this view is not only coherent and plausible, it (...)
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  4. Evolution of Self-Consciousness. Pan-Homo Split and Anxiety Management. (June 2023 ASSC 26 Poster. Not presented).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Primatology tells that about seven million years ago a split began in primate evolution, a split that led to chimpanzee and human lineages (the pan-homo split). During these millions of years our human lineage has developed performances that our chimpanzee cousins do not possess, like reflective self-consciousness and language. We present here an evolutionary scenario that proposes a rationale for the pan-homo split. It is based on a pre-human anxiety that may have barred access to self-consciousness for the chimpanzee lineage. (...)
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  5. Life, Local Constraints and Meaning Generation. An Evolutionary Approach to Cognition (2015).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    The relations between life and cogntion have been addressed through different perspectives [Stewart 1996, Boden 2001, Bourgine and Stewart 2004, van Duijn & all 2006, Di Paolo 2009]. We would like here to address that subject by relating life to cognition through a process of meaning generation. Life emerged on earth as a far from thermodynamic equilibrium performance that had to maintain herself. Life is charactertized by a ‘stay alive’ constraint that has to be satisfied (such constraint can be included (...)
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  6. How Gene–Culture Coevolution Can—but Probably Did Not—Track Mind-Independent Moral Truth.Nathan Cofnas - 2023 - Philosophical Quarterly 73 (2):414-434.
    I argue that our general disposition to make moral judgments and our core moral intuitions are likely the product of social selection—a kind of gene–culture coevolution driven by the enforcement of collectively agreed-upon rules. Social selection could potentially track mind-independent moral truth by a process that I term realist social selection: our ancestors could have acquired moral knowledge via reason and enforced rules based on that knowledge, thereby creating selection pressures that drove the evolution of our moral psychology. Given anthropological (...)
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  7. Faire évoluer les virus vers des formes plus pathogènes, est-ce vraiment raisonnable ?Antoine Danchin - 2023 - Raison Présente 228 (4):35-43.
    Anticiper les épidémies est le souhait le plus vif de toutes les institutions qui veillent sur la santé publique. Un raisonnement naïf permet de penser qu’il suffit de faire évoluer en laboratoire un organisme potentiellement pathogène pour savoir comment sa descendance pourra devenir plus virulente pour l’homme. Il est alors facile de faire croître cet organisme sur des cellules humaines, qu’il infecte mal pour commencer, puis de retenir ses descendants au fur et à mesure qu’ils deviennent plus infectieux. La vision (...)
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  8. Individual-level mechanisms in ecology and evolution.Marie I. Kaiser & Rose Trappes - 2023 - In William C. Bausman, Janella K. Baxter & Oliver M. Lean (eds.), From biological practice to scientific metaphysics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    Philosophers have studied mechanisms in many fields in biology. The focus has often been on molecular mechanisms in disciplines such as neuroscience, genetics, and molecular biology with some work on population-level mechanisms in ecology and evolution. We present a novel philosophical case study of individual-level mechanisms, mechanisms in ecology and evolution that concern the interactions between an individual and its environment. The mechanisms we analyze are called niche choice, niche conformance, and niche construction (NC3) mechanisms. Based on a detailed analysis (...)
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  9. Many Paths to Anticipatory Behavior: Anticipatory Model Acquisition Across Phylogenetic and Ontogenetic Timescales.Matthew Sims - 2023 - Biological Theory 1 (2):114-133.
    Under the assumption that anticipatory models are required for anticipatory behavior, an important question arises about the different manners in which organisms acquire anticipatory models. This article aims to articulate four different non-exhaustive ways that anticipatory models might possibly be acquired over both phylogenetic and ontogenetic timescales and explore the relationships among them. To articulate these different model-acquisition mechanisms, four schematics will be introduced, each of which represents a particular acquisition structure that can be used for the purposes of comparison, (...)
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  10. Evolution within the body: The rise and fall of somatic Darwinism in the late nineteenth century.Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2023 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 45 (8):1-27.
    Originating in the work of Ernst Haeckel and Wilhelm Preyer, and advanced by a Prussian embryologist, Wilhelm Roux, the idea of struggle for existence between body parts helped to establish a framework, in which population cell dynamics rather than a predefined harmony guides adaptive changes in an organism. Intended to provide a causal-mechanical view of functional adjustments in body parts, this framework was also embraced later by early pioneers of immunology to address the question of vaccine effectiveness and pathogen resistance. (...)
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  11. Forma, función y arquitectura biológica.Giorgio Airoldi & Cristian Saborido - 2022 - Cuadernos Filosóficos / Segunda Época 19.
    Los conceptos de evolución y cambio evolutivo son a la vez laxos y polisémicos: se aplican a fenómenos muy diferentes y no siempre se definen con precisión. La aplicación extendida del paradigma neo-darwinista clásico, además, suele imponer un esquema adaptacionista al análisis de los hechos evolutivos, en el cual las funciones juegan un papel lógicamente anterior a los rasgos y sus formas. En este artículo proponemos, como etapa previa a la formulación de hipótesis sobre las causas del cambio, un modelo (...)
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  12. Reduction and Mechanism. [REVIEW]Caitlin Mace & Cory Wright - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3):637-641.
    Reductionism is an old doctrine desperate for new direction. With nomologically constructed theories commanding less attention in the life sciences, concern for the twentieth-century tradition of a...
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  13. What Makes the Identity of a Scientific Method? A History of the “Structural and Analytical Typology” in the Growth of Evolutionary and Digital Archaeology in Southwestern Europe (1950s–2000s).Sébastien Plutniak - 2022 - Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 5 (1).
    Usual narratives among prehistoric archaeologists consider typological approaches as part of a past and outdated episode in the history of research, subsequently replaced by technological, functional, chemical, and cognitive approaches. From a historical and conceptual perspective, this paper addresses several limits of these narratives, which (1) assume a linear, exclusive, and additive conception of scientific change, neglecting the persistence of typological problems; (2) reduce collective developments to personal work (e.g. the “Bordes’” and “Laplace’s” methods in France); and (3) presuppose the (...)
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  14. Extending the Explanatory Scope of Evolutionary Theory: The Origination of Historical Kinds in Biology and Culture.Günter P. Wagner & Gary Tomlinson - 2022 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 14 (1).
    Two welcome extensions of evolutionary thinking have come to prominence over the last thirty years: the so-called ’extended evolutionary synthesis’ (EES) and debate about biological kinds and individuals. These two agendas have, however, remained orthogonal to one another. The EES has mostly restricted itself to widening the explanations of adaptation offered by the preceding ’modern evolutionary synthesis’ by including additional mechanisms of inheritance and variation; while discussion of biological kinds has turned toward philosophical questions of essential vs. contingent properties of (...)
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  15. Empirical adaptationism revisited: is it testable and is it worth testing?Mingjun Zhang - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (6):1-23.
    Empirical adaptationism is often said to be an empirical claim about nature, which concerns the overall relative causal importance of natural selection in evolution compared with other evolutionary factors. Philosophers and biologists who have tried to clarify the meaning of empirical adaptationism usually share, explicitly or implicitly, two assumptions: (1) Empirical adaptationism is an empirical claim that is scientifically testable; (2) testing empirical adaptationism is scientifically valuable. In this article, I challenge these two assumptions and argue that both are unwarranted (...)
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  16. The Origins of Darwin's 'unknown laws of variation'.Derek Hough - 2021 - Researchgate.
    The goal of this project is to encourage biologists to exclude any mention of 'copying errors' from the latest definition of the theory of evolution. Instead, it should be accepted that evolutionary change is facilitated by an evolved system of variety-maintenance and variety-generation which in turn leads to novel structures and complexity.
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  17. The role of redundancy and many-to-one mapping in evolution.Derek Philip Hough - 2021 - Researchggate.
    How does the genetic code navigate through the mind-boggling list of alternatives? This brief article gives a clue.
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  18. N. R. Hanson and von Uexküll: A Biosemiotic and Evolutionary Account of Theories.C. David Suárez Pascal - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (2):247-261.
    This paper proposes a biosemiotic conception of theories, as non-intentional organic theories, which is based on an analysis and comparison of philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson’s account of theories and zoologist Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of organisms. It is argued that Hanson’s proposals about scientific theories and their relation to observation are semiotic in nature and that there exists a correspondence between Hanson’s depiction of the relationship between theories, observation, and reality and von Uexküll’s views on the relationship between organisms and (...)
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  19. 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 fitness. (...)
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  20. La guerra de la Naturaleza, la carestía y la muerte como fuente del diseño de los seres vivos.Giorgio Airoldi & Cristian Saborido - 2020 - Endoxa 46:123.
    El proyecto del ‘Darwinismo Formal’ de Alan Grafen propone una formulación matemática de la teoría de Darwin que pretende demostrar que la selección natural moldea los rasgos fenotípicos a través de la maximización de la eficacia. El proyecto de Grafen reposa sobre tres premisas: la selección natural es la única fuerza que moldea los fenotipos; la eficacia es la única medida de le evolución; y el diseño biológico surge como resultado de un proceso de optimización selectiva. En este trabajo argumentamos (...)
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  21. 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, and (...)
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  22. Ecological scaffolding and the evolution of individuality.Andrew Black, Pierrick Bourrat & Paul Rainey - 2020 - Nature Ecology and Evolution 4:426–436.
  23. परोपकार, यीशु और दुनिया के अंत-कैसे टेम्पलटन फाउंडेशन एक हार्वर्ड प्रोफेसरशिप खरीदा है और विकास, तर्कसंगतता और सभ्यता पर हमला किया। ई.ओ. विल्सन 'पृथ्वी की सामाजिक विजय' (2012) और Nowak और Highfield 'SuperCooperators'(2012)की समीक्षा Altruism, Jesus and the End of the World—how the Templeton Foundation bought a Harvard Professorship and attacked Evolution, Rationality and Civilization. A review of E.O. Wilson 'The Social Conquest of Earth' (2012) and Nowak and Highfield ‘SuperCooperators’ (समीक्षा संशोधित 2019).Michael Richard Starks - 2020 - In पृथ्वी पर नर्क में आपका स्वागत है: शिशुओं, जलवायु परिवर्तन, बिटकॉइन, कार्टेल, चीन, लोकतंत्र, विविधता, समानता, हैकर्स, मानव अधिकार, इस्लाम, उदारवाद, समृद्धि, वेब, अराजकता, भुखमरी, बीमारी, हिंसा, कृत्रिम बुद्धिमत्ता, युद्ध. Las Vegas, NV, USA: Reality Press. pp. 307-322.
    प्रसिद्ध चींटी आदमी ई.ओ. विल्सन हमेशा मेरे नायकों में से एक रहा है - न केवल एक उत्कृष्ट जीवविज्ञानी, लेकिन बुद्धिजीवियों के छोटे और गायब अल्पसंख्यक जो कम से कम हमारी प्रकृति के बारे में सच्चाई पर संकेत करने की हिम्मत है कि दूसरों को समझने में विफल, या insofar के रूप में वेओ समझ , जोर से राजनीतिक expience के लिए बचने के लिए. अफसोस की बात है, वह एक पार्टी के रूप में सबसे कठोर फैशन में अपने लंबे (...)
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  24. की समीक्षा "हम Hardwired हैं? क्लार्क और ग्रुंस्टीन ऑक्सफोर्ड (2000) द्वारा--Review of “Are We Hardwired? by Clark & Grunstein (संशोधित 2019).Michael Richard Starks - 2020 - In पृथ्वी पर नर्क में आपका स्वागत है: शिशुओं, जलवायु परिवर्तन, बिटकॉइन, कार्टेल, चीन, लोकतंत्र, विविधता, समानता, हैकर्स, मानव अधिकार, इस्लाम, उदारवाद, समृद्धि, वेब, अराजकता, भुखमरी, बीमारी, हिंसा, कृत्रिम बुद्धिमत्ता, युद्ध. Las Vegas, NV, USA: Reality Press. pp. 100-102.
    यह व्यवहार पर जीन/पर्यावरण बातचीत की एक उत्कृष्ट समीक्षा है और, थोड़ा दिनांकित होने के बावजूद, एक आसान और सार्थक पढ़ा है. वे जुड़वां अध्ययन जो व्यवहार पर आनुवंशिकी के भारी प्रभाव दिखाने के साथ शुरू करते हैं. वे जूडिथ हैरिस के तेजी से अच्छी तरह से ज्ञात अध्ययन जो विस्तार और तथ्यों है कि साझा घर के माहौल व्यवहार पर लगभग कोई प्रभाव नहीं है संक्षेप में ध्यान दें और कहा कि गोद लिया बच्चों को अपने सौतेले भाई और (...)
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  25. Reciprocal Causation and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.Andrew Buskell - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (4):267-279.
    Kevin Laland and colleagues have put forward a number of arguments motivating an extended evolutionary synthesis. Here I examine Laland et al.'s central concept of reciprocal causation. Reciprocal causation features in many arguments supporting an expanded evolutionary framework, yet few of these arguments are clearly delineated. Here I clarify the concept and make explicit three arguments in which it features. I identify where skeptics can—and are—pushing back against these arguments, and highlight what I see as the empirical, explanatory, and methodological (...)
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  26. Possibility spaces and the notion of novelty: from music to biology.Maël Montévil - 2019 - Synthese 196 (11):4555-4581.
    We provide a new perspective on the relation between the space of description of an object and the appearance of novelties. One of the aims of this perspective is to facilitate the interaction between mathematics and historical sciences. The definition of novelties is paradoxical: if one can define in advance the possibles, then they are not genuinely new. By analyzing the situation in set theory, we show that defining generic (i.e., shared) and specific (i.e., individual) properties of elements of a (...)
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  27. How microbes "jeopardize" the modern synthesis.Aaron Novick & W. Ford Doolittle - 2019 - PLOS Genetics 5 (15):e1008166.
    This editorial introduces a series of review articles concerning the ways in which recent work on microbial evolution has both deepened and challenged the modern synthesis. The authors develop a framework for thinking about theory change in biology.
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  28. The Ideological Matrix of Science: Natural Selection and Immunity as Case Studies.Agustin Ostachuk - 2019 - Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 15 (1):182-213.
    The modern concept of ideology was established by the liberal politician and philosopher Destutt de Tracy, with the objective of creating an all-embracing and general science of ideas, which followed the sensualist and empiricist trend initiated by Locke that culminated in the positivism of Comte. Natural selection and immunity are two key concepts in the history of biology that were strongly based on the Malthusian concept of struggle for existence. This concept wrongly assumed that population grew faster than the means (...)
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  29. 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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  30. More than Fitness. A Robustness-based Proposal of a Logical Space to Classify Processes Behind Evolutionary Phenomena.Giorgio Airoldi - 2018 - Kairos 20 (1):89-112.
    The assumption that natural selection alone is sufficient to explain not only which traits get fixed in a population/species, but also how they develop, has been questioned since Darwin’s times, and increasingly in the last decades. Alternative theories, linked to genetic and phenotypic processes, or to the theory of complex systems, have been proposed to explain the rise of the phenotypic variety upon which natural selection acts. In this article, we illustrate the current state of the issue and we propose (...)
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  31. Anthropocene: The philosophy of Biotechnology.Valentin Cheshko, Glazko Valery & Ivanitskaya Lida - 2018 - Moscow, Russia: Kurs INFRA-M.
    The theory of evolution of complex, including the humans system and algorithm for its constructing are a synthesis of evolutionary epistemology, philosophical anthropology and concrete scientific empirical basis in modern science,. In other words, natural philosophy is regaining the status bar element theoretical science in the era of technology-driven evolution. The co-evolutionary concept of 3-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path (...)
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  32. Hierarchy Theory of Evolution and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: Some Epistemic Bridges, Some Conceptual Rifts.Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2018 - Evolutionary Biology 45 (2):127-139.
    Contemporary evolutionary biology comprises a plural landscape of multiple co-existent conceptual frameworks and strenuous voices that disagree on the nature and scope of evolutionary theory. Since the mid-eighties, some of these conceptual frameworks have denounced the ontologies of the Modern Synthesis and of the updated Standard Theory of Evolution as unfinished or even flawed. In this paper, we analyze and compare two of those conceptual frameworks, namely Niles Eldredge’s Hierarchy Theory of Evolution (with its extended ontology of evolutionary entities) and (...)
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  33. The emerging structure of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis: where does Evo-Devo fit in?Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2018 - Theory in Biosciences 137.
    The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) debate is gaining ground in contemporary evolutionary biology. In parallel, a number of philosophical standpoints have emerged in an attempt to clarify what exactly is represented by the EES. For Massimo Pigliucci, we are in the wake of the newest instantiation of a persisting Kuhnian paradigm; in contrast, Telmo Pievani has contended that the transition to an EES could be best represented as a progressive reformation of a prior Lakatosian scientific research program, with the extension (...)
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  34. Developmental mechanisms.Alan Love - 2018 - In S. Glennan & P. Illari (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Mechanisms. New York: Routledge.
    The Routledge Handbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into four Parts: Historical perspectives on mechanisms The nature of mechanisms Mechanisms and the philosophy of science Disciplinary perspectives on mechanisms. Within these Parts central topics and problems are examined, including the rise of mechanical (...)
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  35. Sombrillas y operaciones en la construcción científica del mundo.Alfonso Arroyo-Santos - 2017 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 8:107--116.
    This paper argues that many of the conceptual controversies in evolutionary biology are due to the use of different operational definitions. Since the set of operations is not consistent, then there are many ways to understand, in practice, how concepts should be investigated. In this paper we introduce a formal analysis to study the scope of operationalism and we conclude that the controversial concepts are in fact umbrella variables, that is, a single term can be referring to different processes, phenomena (...)
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  36. “Practice-Oriented Controversies and Borrowed Epistemic Credibility in Current Evolutionary Biology: Phylogeography as a Case Study.Alfonso Arroyo-Santos, Mark E. Olson & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2017 - Perspectives on Science 25 (3):310-334.
    Philosophical treatments of scientific controversies usually focus on theory, excluding important practice related aspects. However, scientists in conflict often appeal to extra-theoretical and extra-empirical elements. To understand better the role that non-empirical elements play in scientific controversies, we introduce the notion of borrowed epistemic credibility, illustrating our proposal with a recent controversy in a field of evolutionary biology known as phylogeography. Our analysis shows how scientific controversies that spring from disagreements about methodological issues potentially involve deeper debates regarding what constitutes (...)
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  37. Concept Progress.Leo Indman - 2017 - New York, USA: Leo Indman.
    Concept Progress is a fusion of science fiction and philosophy. It is a thesis on metaphysics that stretches beyond the scope of modern science and scratches many of our curious itches. The thesis is complemented by short and loosely tied sci-fi stories that make its conceptualizations come to life. ​ The central theme throughout is that progress is a driving force in human evolution. This recurring viewpoint has previously stirred much debate. However, as we escalate through the twenty-first century, the (...)
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  38. Perspectives on integrating genetic and physical explanations of evolution and development.Alan Love, Thomas Stewart, Gunter Wagner & Stuart Newman - 2017 - Integrative and Comparative Biology:icx121.
    In the 20th century, genetic explanatory approaches became dominant in both developmental and evolutionary biological research. By contrast, physical approaches, which appeal to properties such as mechanical forces, were largely relegated to the margins, despite important advances in modeling. Recently, there have been renewed attempts to find balanced viewpoints that integrate both biological physics and molecular genetics into explanations of developmental and evolutionary phenomena. Here we introduce the 2017 SICB symposium “Physical and Genetic Mechanisms for Evolutionary Novelty” that was dedicated (...)
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  39. Application of the Eco-field and General Theory of Resources to Bark Beetles: Beyond the Niche Construction Theory.F. J. Sánchez-García, V. Machado, J. Galián & D. Gallego - 2017 - Biosemiotics 10 (1):57-73.
    A new approach to landscape ecology involves the application of the eco-field hypothesis and the General Theory of Resources. In this study, we describe the putative eco-field of bark beetles as a spatial configuration with a specific meaning-carrier for every organism-resource interaction. Bark beetles are insects with key roles in matter and energy cycles in coniferous forests, which cause significant changes to forestry landscapes when outbreaks occur. Bark beetles are guided towards host trees by the recognition of semiotic signals using (...)
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  40. Review of Are We Hardwired by Clark and Grunstein (2000).Michael Starks - 2017 - Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks 3rd Ed. (2017).
    This is an excellent review of gene/environment interactions on behavior and, in spite of being a bit dated, is an easy and worthwhile read. They start with twin studies which show the overwhelming impact of genetics on behavior. They note the increasingly well known studies of Judith Harris which extend and summarize the facts that shared home environment has almost no effect on behavior and that adopted children grow up to be as different from their stepbrothers and sisters as people (...)
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  41. A Unifying Theory of Biological Function.J. H. van Hateren - 2017 - Biological Theory 12 (2):112-126.
    A new theory that naturalizes biological function is explained and compared with earlier etiological and causal role theories. Etiological theories explain functions from how they are caused over their evolutionary history. Causal role theories analyze how functional mechanisms serve the current capacities of their containing system. The new proposal unifies the key notions of both kinds of theories, but goes beyond them by explaining how functions in an organism can exist as factors with autonomous causal efficacy. The goal-directedness and normativity (...)
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  42. Drift and evolutionary forces: scrutinizing the Newtonian analogy.Víctor J. Luque - 2016 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 31 (3):397-410.
    This article analyzes the view of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces. The analogy with Newtonian mechanics has been challenged due to the alleged mismatch between drift and the other evolutionary forces. Since genetic drift has no direction several authors tried to protect its status as a force: denying its lack of directionality, extending the notion of force and looking for a force in physics which also lacks of direction. I analyse these approaches, and although this strategy finally succeeds, (...)
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  43. On closing the gap between philosophical concepts and their usage in scientific practice: a lesson from the debate about natural selection as a mechanism.Lucas J. Matthews - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 55:21-28.
    In addition to theorizing about the role and value of mechanisms in scientific explanation or the causal structure of the world, there is a fundamental task of getting straight what a ‘mechanism’ is in the first place. Broadly, this paper is about the challenge of application: the challenge of aligning one's philosophical account of a scientific concept with the manner in which that concept is actually used in scientific practice. This paper considers a case study of the challenge of application (...)
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  44. "La métaphysique de Raymond Ruyer dans son rapport à la théologie naturelle" [The Metaphysics of Raymond Ruyer in Relation to Natural Theology].Gagnon Philippe - 2016 - In Bertrand Souchard & Fabien Revol (eds.), Controverses sur la création : Science, philosophie, théologie. Paris/Lyon: Vrin/Institut interdisciplinaire d'études épistémologiques. pp. 11-53.
  45. The evolution of cooperation.Ellen Clarke - 2015 - The Philosophers' Magazine.
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  46. The Integral Jan Smuts.Guy Pierre Du Plessis & Robert Weathers - 2015 - Paper Presented at The Fourth International Integral Theory Conference, CA: San Francisco, 19 July 2015.
    Integral Theory as developed by Ken Wilber and other contemporary Integral scholars acknowledge many antecedent foundational influences, and proto-Integral thinkers. Curiously, the philosopher-statesman Jan Smuts’ theory of Holism is seldom acknowledged, although it has significantly contributed, albeit often implicitly, to the development of Integral Theory. This paper and presentation has two central aims: To point out that Smuts can be counted amongst one of the great Integral thinkers of the 20th Century; that Smuts’ notion of Holism had a significant influence (...)
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  47. Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden. In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences. [REVIEW]Justin Garson - 2015 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (1):180-83.
    Carl F. Craver and Lindley Darden’s new book, In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences, is a fantastic and lucid introduction to the “new mechanism” tradition in the philosophy of science. Over the last 2 decades, but particularly since the turn of the century, this has become an influential framework for thinking about core problems in the history and philosophy of science, with a strong emphasis on biology. There are at least four major aims. First, the new mechanism (...)
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  48. Adaptationism and the Logic of Research Questions: How to Think Clearly About Evolutionary Causes.Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (4):DOI: 10.1007/s13752-015-0214-2.
    This article discusses various dangers that accompany the supposedly benign methods in behavioral evoltutionary biology and evolutionary psychology that fall under the framework of "methodological adaptationism." A "Logic of Research Questions" is proposed that aids in clarifying the reasoning problems that arise due to the framework under critique. The live, and widely practiced, " evolutionary factors" framework is offered as the key comparison and alternative. The article goes beyond the traditional critique of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin, to (...)
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  49. Embedded Mechanisms and Phylogenetics.Lucas J. Matthews - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):1116-1126.
    A strong case has been made for the role and value of mechanistic explanation in neuroscience and molecular biology. A similar demonstration in other domains of scientific investigation, however, remains an important challenge of scope for the new mechanists. This article helps answer that challenge by demonstrating one valuable role mechanisms play in phylogenetics. Using the transition/transversion rate parameter as a case example, this article argues that models embedded with mechanisms produce stronger phylogenetic tree hypotheses, as measured by maximum likelihood (...)
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  50. The evolution of phenotypic plasticity: Genealogy of a debate in genetics.Antonine Nicoglou - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 50:67-76.
    The paper describes the context and the origin of a particular debate that concerns the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. In 1965, British biologist A. D. Bradshaw proposed a widely cited model intended to explain the evolution of norms of reaction, based on his studies of plant populations. Bradshaw’s model went beyond the notion of the “adaptive norm of reaction” discussed before him by Dobzhansky and Schmalhausen by suggesting that “plasticity” the ability of a phenotype to be modified by the environment (...)
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