Knowledge of Life Today presents the thoughts of Jean Gayon, a major philosopher of science in France who is recognized across the Atlantic, especially for his work in philosophy and the history of life sciences. The book is structured around Gayon's personal answers to questions put forward by Victor Petit. This approach combines scientific rigor and risk-taking in answers that go back to the fundamentals of the subject. As well as the relationship between philosophy and the history (...) of science, Gayon discusses the main questions of the history and philosophy of biology that marked his intellectual journey: Darwin, evolutionary biology, genetics and molecular biology, human evolution, and various aspects of the relationship between biology and society in contemporary times (racism, eugenics, biotechnology, biomedicine, etc.). (shrink)

This book, originally published in French, examines the philosophical debates on functions over the last forty years and proposes new ways of analysis. Pervasive throughout the life sciences, the concept of function has the air of an epistemological scandal: ascribing a function to a biological structure or process amounts to suggesting that it is explained by its effects. This book confronts the debates on function with the use of the notion in a wide range of disciplines, such as biology, psychology, (...) and medicine. It also raises the question of whether this notion, which is as old in the history of technology as it is in the life sciences, has the same meaning in these two domains. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introductory Remarks: Not a “Philosopher of Science” “Positive Metaphysics” “Confrontation” Bergson's Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.

In Darwinism's Struggle for Survival Jean Gayon offers a philosophical interpretation of the history of theoretical Darwinism. He begins by examining the different forms taken by the hypothesis of natural selection in the nineteenth century and the major difficulties which it encountered, particularly with regard to its compatibility with the theory of heredity. He then shows how these difficulties were overcome during the seventy years which followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and he concludes by analysing (...) the major features of the genetic theory of natural selection, as it developed from 1920 to 1960. This rich and wide-ranging study will appeal to philosophers and historians of science and to evolutionary biologists. (shrink)

In Darwinism's Struggle for Survival Jean Gayon offers a philosophical interpretation of the history of theoretical Darwinism. He begins by examining the different forms taken by the hypothesis of natural selection in the nineteenth century and the major difficulties which it encountered, particularly with regard to its compatibility with the theory of heredity. He then shows how these difficulties were overcome during the seventy years which followed the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and he concludes by analysing (...) the major features of the genetic theory of natural selection, as it developed from 1920 to 1960. This rich and wide-ranging study will appeal to philosophers and historians of science and to evolutionary biologists. (shrink)

This Special Issue of Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres contains papers based on the contributions presented at the Conference "Defining Life" held in Paris (France) on 4-5 February, 2008. The main objective of this Conference was to confront speakers from several disciplines--chemists, biochemists, biologists, exo/astrobiologists, computer scientists, philosophers and historians of science--on the topic of the definition of life. Different viewpoints of the problem approached from different perspectives have been expounded and, as a result, common grounds as well (...) as remaining diverging arguments have been identified. In addition to individual talks, two large roundtables gave ample room for speakers to discuss their diverging viewpoints. This volume collects almost all the contributions presented during the Conference and provides a rich spectrum of renewed answers to the ever-standing question "What is Life?". Besides the arguments directly regarding this question, more philosophical or historical reflections are also proposed in this issue that were not presented during the Conference. This volume also offers a synthesis written by J. Gayon taking each contribution into account. To conclude this foreword, we would like to thank all the participants and speakers who made this Conference a most stimulating event. Each provided novel ideas to "Defining Life" while highlighting the extreme difficulty to reach a consensus on this topic. We are also very grateful to the French CNRS Interdisciplinary Program Origines des Planètes et de la Vie (Origins of Planets and Life) for its generous support, as well as to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris for hosting the Conference. We also thank Alan W. Schwartz for generously offering this space for publishing the Proceedings of the Conference. (shrink)

This paper does not intend to provide an exhaustive account of Canguilhem's thinking. It will focus on his philosophical approach to the biological sciences.

Literally speaking, "Philosophy of biology" is a rather old expression. William Whewell coined it in 1840, at the very time he introduced the expression "philosophy of science". Whewell was fond of creating neologisms, like Auguste Comte, his French counterpart in the field of the philosophical reflection about science. Historians of science know that a few years earlier, in 1834, Whewell had generated a small scandal when he proposed the word "scientist" as a general term by which "the students of the (...) knowledge of the material world" could describe themselves, and distinguish themselves from artists. The term "philosopher", Whewell argued, was too wide. A new generic term, more or less equivalent to the French term "savant", was needed in order to prevent the disintegration of science that seemed to flow from its specialization in modern times.1 When Whewell first introduced the terms "philosophy of science" and "philosophy of biology" in his 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences, the latter term was merely a special branch of "philosophy of science". The expression "philosophy of science" itself had two justifications: firstly, this phrase expressed the idea that "science" remained cognitively coherent enough to justify a critical enquiry into its methodological unity and its foundation; secondly, the phrase "philosophy of science" was required in order to distinguish a properly "philosophical" enquiry from a "historical" approach to science. Although Whewell's 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences 2 had approximately the same chapter structure as his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences 3 (that is, a series of chapters successively devoted to the concept of science in general, and although there was considerable overlap between the contents of the two books, then to particular sciences), its theoretical purpose was different. Clearly, Whewell was not willing to confuse the genres of history and philosophy as Auguste Comte had done in his 1830 Cours de philosophie positive.4 Note also that the word "biology" was still extremely rare in English when Whewell used it in 1840. In fact, Whewell's 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences does not make use of the word "biology": Whewell successively examines "botany", "zoology", "physiology" and "comparative antomy" as special branches of "analytico-classificatory science", then discusses palaeontology as a special case of the "palaeo-etiological sciences". Three years later, in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Whewell does use "biology" as a generic term for all the sciences dealing with life. The various sciences which were separately examined in the previous book are now collectively considered. Furthermore, the main philosophical problem raised by biology is its dual nature: biology is both nomological and a historical science. Modern philosophers of biology are generally unaware of the story of the origins of the expression "philosophy of biology", but Whewell's dual theoretical nature of biology is still a major concern for modern "philosophy of biology". (shrink)

There is no doubt that Nietzsche, the most famous philosopher of the second half of the nineteenth century, was concerned with Darwin. This essay aims to provide a systematic evaluation of Nietzsche's work in those areas in which he felt the necessity to position himself with regard to Darwin, or "Darwinism," as he knew it.

Omniprésente dans l'ensemble des sciences de la vie, la catégorie de fonction a les allures d'un scandale épistémologique : attribuer une fonction à une structure ou à un processus biologique, c'est en effet suggérer qu'on l'explique par ses effets. Cet ouvrage, sans précédent en langue française examine les débats philosophiques contemporains sur les fonctions depuis une trentaine d'années, et propose de nouvelles voies d'analyse. Il confronte ces débats à l'usage de la notion de fonction dans un large spectre de disciplines (...) biologiques, psychologiques et médicales. Il soulève aussi la question de savoir si cette notion, aussi ancienne dans l'histoire des techniques que dans celle des sciences de la vie, y a le même sens. (shrink)

This article shows how Lamarckism was essential in the birth of the French school of molecular biology. We argue that the concept of inheritance of acquired characters positively shaped debates surrounding bacteriophagy and lysogeny in the Pasteurian tradition during the interwar period. During this period the typical Lamarckian account of heredity treated it as the continuation of protoplasmic physiology in daughter cells. Félix d’Hérelle applied this conception to argue that there was only one species of bacteriophage and Jules Bordet applied (...) it to develop an account of bacteriophagy as a transmissible form of autolysis and to analyze the new phenomenon of lysogeny. In a long-standing controversy with Bordet, Eugène Wollman deployed a more morphological understanding of the inheritance of acquired characters, yielding a particulate, but still Lamarckian, account of lysogeny. We then turn to André Lwoff who, with several colleagues, completed Wollman’s research program from 1949 to 1953. We examine how he gradually set aside the Lamarckian background, finally removing inheritance of acquired characters from the resulting account of bacteriophagy and lysogeny. In the conclusion, we emphasize the complex dual role of Lamarckism as it moved from an assumed explanatory framework to a challenge that the nascent molecular biology had to overcome. (shrink)

Réponses à Juliette Grange sur ses remises en cause peu argumentées d'une partie de la philosophie en France.

This paper surveys questions about the nature of the Modern Synthesis as a historical event : was it rather theoretical than institutional? When and where did it actually happen? Who was involved? It argues that all answers to these questions are interrelated, and that systematic sets of answers define specific perspectives on the Modern Synthesis that are all complementary.

The article examines two cases of adoption of evolutionary ways of thinking by modern economists: Nelson and Winter’s (Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, 1982), and evolutionary game theory (1990s and after). In both cases, the authors explicitly refer to natural selection in an economic context. I show that natural selection is taken in two different senses, which correspond to two general conceptions of the principle of natural selection, one of which contains reproduction and heredity as key elements, whereas the other (...) does not. (shrink)

In this study we have examined the reception of Mendelism in France from 1900 to 1940, and the place of some of the extra-Mendelian traditions of research that contributed to the development of genetics in France after World War II.

The first objective of the paper is to propose a classification and characterize the major approaches to the modes of cultural evolution: (1) Research programs on the origins of the cultural capacity of the human species. (2) Description and explanation of cultural change with the help of concepts or models inspired by the schemes of population genetics. (3) Research on parallel evolution of genes and culture. (4) Narrow coupling between biological evolution and cultural evolution, or the “gene-culture coevolution paradigm.” These (...) four modes of cultural evolution make sense at a different time-scale (respectively: more than 100 000 years; less than 100 years; greater than 1000 years; less than 1000 years). The second section of the paper provides an evaluation of the various programs, from various points of view: methodological, ethical, and epistemological. (shrink)

Direction de revue : Comptes rendus Biologies, vol. 333, n°2, 2010.

Chance comes into plays at many levels of the explanation of the evolutionary process; but the unity of sense of this category is problematic. The purpose of this talk is to clarify the meaning of chance at various levels in evolutionary theory: mutations, genetic drift, genetic revolutions, ecosystems, macroevolution. Three main concepts of chance are found at these various levels: luck (popular concept), randomness (probabilistic concept), and contingency relative to a given theoretical system (epistemological concept). After identifying which concept(s) of (...) chance fit(s) with these levels, the question is raised whether these concepts can be reduced to a smaller number, and whether chance in evolutionary theory has a subjective or an objective sense. (shrink)

Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards is Sober’s book that comes closest to history of science. Some reviews have expressed reservations about Sober’s inclination to subordinate historical accuracy to analytical clarity, and to contemporary discussions . My comments will be devoted to the kind of relationship that Sober entertains with history of science. I do not think that the author’s interest in history is superficial and instrumental.In the first section, I try to locate Sober’s book within ‘&HPS’ , a recent (...) initiative that gathers a growing number of people willing to promote a new regime of interaction between philosophy and history of science. I will suggest that Sober offers an interesting way of developing this approach. The more critical second section is devoted to Sober’s first chapter, bearing on the relationship between the two main tenets of Darwin’s argument in the Origin—descent with modif .. (shrink)

Dans la théorie contemporaine de l’évolution, trois sens classiques de la notion de hasard interviennent : la notion ordinaire de chance, la notion probabiliste de l’aléatoire, et la notion épistémologique de contingence relativement à un système théorique. Ces trois notions suffisent à définir le statut du hasard aux principaux niveaux du processus évolutif où l’on invoque communément des effets fortuits : mutations, dérive génétique, révolutions génétiques, changements écologiques, macroévolution. On se demande enfin si les divers sens du hasard rencontrés dans (...) cette étude peuvent être ramenés à l’unité, et s’ils renvoient à un hasard subjectif ou à un hasard objectif. In the contemporary theory of evolution, three classical meanings of the notion of chance come into play : the ordinary meaning of chance, the probabilistic notion of randomness, and the epistemological notion of contingency with reference to a theoretical system. These three notions are sufficient in order to define the status of chance on the principal levels of the evolutive process where fortuitous effects are commonly invoked : mutations, genetic deviations, genetic revolutions, ecological changes, macroevolution. The question is raised, finally, whether the diverse meanings of chance considered in the present study may be brought to one, and whether they refer to a subjective form of chance or to an objective chance. (shrink)