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  1. A framework for philosophical biology.Sepehr Ehsani - manuscript
    Advances in biology, at least over the past two centuries, have mostly relied on theories that were subsequently revised, expanded or eventually refuted using experimental and other means. The field of theoretical biology used to primarily provide a basis, similar to theoretical physics in the physical sciences, to rationally examine the frameworks within which biological experiments were carried out and to shed light on overlooked gaps in understanding. Today, however, theoretical biology has generally become synonymous with computational and mathematical biology. (...)
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  2. Types of Experiments and Causal Process Tracing: What Happened on the Kaibab Plateau in the 1920s?Roberta L. Millstein - manuscript
    I argue that Binkley et al. use causal process tracing in conjunction with a natural trajectory experiment and two natural snapshot experiments in their re-examination of the Kaibab. This shows that Aldo Leopold may have been right about trophic cascade in the Kaibab in the 1920s, i.e., that there are good reasons to think that a loss of predators led to a deer irruption which decreased aspen recruitment. Using the different cause-finding practices in combination can strengthen causal inferences and mitigate (...)
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  3. Is Genetic Drift a Force?Charles H. Pence - manuscript
    One hotly debated philosophical question in the analysis of evolutionary theory concerns whether or not evolution and the various factors which constitute it may profitably be considered as analogous to “forces” in the traditional, Newtonian sense. Several compelling arguments assert that the force picture is incoherent, due to the peculiar nature of genetic drift. I consider two of those arguments here – that drift lacks a predictable direction, and that drift is constitutive of evolutionary systems – and show that they (...)
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  4. The Conflation of "Chance" in Evolution.Charles H. Pence - manuscript
    Discussions of “chance” and related concepts are found throughout philosophical work on evolutionary theory. By drawing attention to three very commonly-recognized distinctions, I separate four independent concepts falling under the broad heading of “chance”: randomness, epistemic unpredictability, causal indeterminism, and probabilistic causal processes. Far from a merely semantic distinction, however, it is demonstrated that conflation of these obviously distinct notions has an important bearing on debates at the core of evolutionary theory, particularly the debate over the interpretation of fitness, natural (...)
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  5. When is a biological cause a source of information?Karola Stotz & Paul E. Griffiths - manuscript
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  6. Causal Specificity, Biological Possibility and Non-parity about Genetic Causes.Marcel Weber - manuscript
    Several authors have used the notion of causal specificity in order to defend non-parity about genetic causes (Waters 2007, Woodward 2010, Weber 2017, forthcoming). Non-parity in this context is the idea that DNA and some other biomolecules that are often described as information-bearers by biologists play a unique role in life processes, an idea that has been challenged by Developmental Systems Theory (e.g., Oyama 2000). Indeed, it has proven to be quite difficult to state clearly what the alleged special role (...)
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  7. Causal Control: A Rationale for Causal Selection.Lauren N. Ross - 2015
    Causal selection has to do with the distinction we make between background conditions and “the” true cause or causes of some outcome of interest. A longstanding consensus in philosophy views causal selection as lacking any objective rationale and as guided, instead, by arbitrary, pragmatic, and non-scientific considerations. I argue against this position in the context of causal selection for disease traits. In this domain, causes are selected on the basis of the type of causal control they exhibit over a disease (...)
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  8. Reasoning in biological discoveries.Lindley Darden - manuscript
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  9. The Epistemology of Causal Selection: Insights from Systems Biology.Beckett Sterner - forthcoming - In C. Kenneth Waters (ed.), Causal Reasoning in Biology. University of Minnesota Press.
    Among the many causes of an event, how do we distinguish the important ones? Are there ways to distinguish among causes on principled grounds that integrate both practical aims and objective knowledge? Psychologist Tania Lombrozo has suggested that causal explanations “identify factors that are ‘exportable’ in the sense that they are likely to subserve future prediction and intervention” (Lombrozo 2010, 327). Hence portable causes are more important precisely because they provide objective information to prediction and intervention as practical aims. However, (...)
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  10. Philosophical Perspectives on Causal Reasoning in Biology.C. Kenneth Waters & James Woodward (eds.) - forthcoming - University of Minnesota Press.
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  11. Causal Selection versus Causal Parity in Biology: Relevant Counterfactuals and Biologically Normal Interventions.Marcel Weber - forthcoming - In Brian J. Hanley & C. Kenneth Waters (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Causal Reasoning in Biology. Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science. Vol. XXI. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    Causal selection is the task of picking out, from a field of known causally relevant factors, some factors as elements of an explanation. The Causal Parity Thesis in the philosophy of biology challenges the usual ways of making such selections among different causes operating in a developing organism. The main target of this thesis is usually gene centrism, the doctrine that genes play some special role in ontogeny, which is often described in terms of information-bearing or programming. This paper is (...)
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  12. Life and Mind: The Common Tetradic Structure of Organism and Consciousness – a Phenomenological Approach.Christoph Hueck - 2024 - Dialectical Systems: A Forum in Biology, Ecology, and Cognitive Science.
    The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years. Organisms have recently been described as complex systems that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis, autonomy, agency and teleological structure. This perspective marks a significant advancement from the 20th-century viewpoint, which predominantly saw organisms as genetically programmed, randomly generated and blindly selected (...)
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  13. Alternative Philosophical Approaches to Causation: Beyond Difference-making and Mechanism.Yafeng Shan (ed.) - 2024 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Causation is one of the most controversial topics in philosophy. There is a wide range of philosophical accounts of causation, for example, the regularity account, the probabilistic account, the counterfactual account, the interventionist account, which can be all classified as ‘difference-making’ accounts; and the mechanistic account. Many argue that only one of these accounts is correct as there is only one type of causal relation (causal monism), while others maintain that there are multiple types of causation (causal pluralism). In addition, (...)
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  14. Shallow versus deep genetic causes.Adam C. Smith & Stephen M. Downes - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e201.
    We argue that Madole & Harden's distinction between shallow versus deep genetic causes can bring some clarity to causal claims arising from genome-wide association studies (GWASs). However, the authors argue that GWAS only finds shallow genetic causes, making GWAS commensurate with the environmental studies they hope to supplant. We also assess whether their distinction applies best to explanations or causes.
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  15. On the naturalisation of teleology: self-organisation, autopoiesis and teleodynamics.Miguel Garcia-Valdecasas - 2022 - Adaptive Behavior 30 (2):103-117.
    In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy to account for organism teleology. This article argues that the treatment of teleology in autopoiesis and other organisation theories is inconclusive for three reasons: First, (...)
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  16. Life Processes as Proto-Narratives: Integrating Theoretical Biology and Biosemiotics through Biohermeneutics.Arran Gare - 2022 - Cosmos and History : The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 18 (1):210-251.
    The theoretical biology movement originating in Britain in the early 1930’s and the biosemiotics movement which took off in Europe in the 1980’s have much in common. They are both committed to replacing the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and they have both invoked theories of signs to this end. Yet, while there has been some mutual appreciation and influence, particularly in the cases of Howard Pattee, René Thom, Kalevi Kull, Anton Markoš and Stuart Kauffman, for the most part, these movements have developed (...)
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  17. Mechanisms in Science: Method or Metaphysics?Stavros Ioannidis & Stathis Psillos - 2022 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Stathis Psillos.
    In recent years what has come to be called the 'New Mechanism' has emerged as a framework for thinking about the philosophical assumptions underlying many areas of science, especially in sciences such as biology, neuroscience, and psychology. This book offers a fresh look at the role of mechanisms, by situating novel analyses of central philosophical issues related to mechanisms within a rich historical perspective of the concept of mechanism as well as detailed case studies of biological mechanisms. It develops a (...)
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  18. Evidence of effectiveness.Jacob Stegenga - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 91 (C):288-295.
    There are two competing views regarding the role of mechanistic knowledge in inferences about the effectiveness of interventions. One view holds that inferences about the effectiveness of interventions should be based only on data from population-level studies (often statistical evidence from randomised trials). The other view holds that such inferences must be based in part on mechanistic evidence. The competing views are local principles of inference, the plausibility of which can be assessed by a more general normative principle of inference. (...)
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  19. Coherent Causal Control: A New Distinction within Causation.Marcel Weber - 2022 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 12 (4):69.
    The recent literature on causality has seen the introduction of several distinctions within causality, which are thought to be important for understanding the widespread scientific practice of focusing causal explanations on a subset of the factors that are causally relevant for a phenomenon. Concepts used to draw such distinctions include, among others, stability, specificity, proportionality, or actual-difference making. In this contribution, I propose a new distinction that picks out an explanatorily salient class of causes in biological systems. Some select causes (...)
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  20. 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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  21. Islamic Thought in Africa: The Collected Works of Afa Ajura (1910-2004) and the Impact of Ajuraism on Northern Ghana.Alhaj Yusuf Salih Ajura & Zakyi Ibrahim - 2021 - Yale University Press.
    _The first book length-work on Afa Ajura and translation of his complete poems_ This is the first English translation of and commentary on the collected poems of Alhaj Yūsuf Ṣāliḥ Ajura (1910–2004), a northern Ghanaian orthodox Islamic scholar, poet, and polemicist known as Afa Ajura, or “scholar from Ejura.” The poems, all handwritten in Arabic script, mainly in the Ghanaian language of Dagbani and also Arabic, explore the author’s socio‑religious beliefs. In the accompanying introduction, the translator examines the diverse themes (...)
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  22. Bacterial communication.Marc Artiga - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (4):1-19.
    Recent research on bacteria and other microorganisms has provided interesting insights into the nature of life, cooperation, evolution, individuality or species. In this paper, I focus on the capacity of bacteria to produce molecules that are usually classified as ’signals’ and I defend two claims. First, I argue that certain interactions between bacteria should actually qualify as genuine forms of communication. Second, I use this case study to revise our general theories of signaling. Among other things, I argue that a (...)
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  23. Signals are minimal causes.Marc Artiga - 2021 - Synthese 198 (9):8581-8599.
    Although the definition of ‘signal’ has been controversial for some time within the life sciences, current approaches seem to be converging toward a common analysis. This powerful framework can satisfactorily accommodate many cases of signaling and captures some of its main features. This paper argues, however, that there is a central feature of signals that so far has been largely overlooked: its special causal role. More precisely, I argue that a distinctive feature of signals is that they are minimal causes. (...)
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  24. How interventionist accounts of causation work in experimental practice and why there is no need to worry about supervenience.Tudor M. Baetu - 2021 - Synthese 199 (1-2):4601-4620.
    It has been argued that supervenience generates unavoidable confounding problems for interventionist accounts of causation, to the point that we must choose between interventionism and supervenience. According to one solution, the dilemma can be defused by excluding non-causal determinants of an outcome as potential confounders. I argue that this solution undermines the methodological validity of causal tests. Moreover, we don’t have to choose between interventionism and supervenience in the first place. Some confounding problems are effectively circumvented by experimental designs routinely (...)
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  25. Measuring Causal Invariance Formally.Pierrick Bourrat - 2021 - Entropy 23 (6):690.
    Invariance is one of several dimensions of causal relationships within the interventionist account. The more invariant a relationship between two variables, the more the relationship should be considered paradigmatically causal. In this paper, I propose two formal measures to estimate invariance, illustrated by a simple example. I then discuss the notion of invariance for causal relationships between non-nominal (i.e., ordinal and quantitative) variables, for which Information theory, and hence the formalism proposed here, is not well suited. Finally, I propose how (...)
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  26. What Caused the Bhopal Gas Tragedy? The Philosophical Importance of Causal and Pragmatic Details.Brian J. Hanley - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (4):616-637.
    In cases in which many causes together bring about an effect, it is common to select some as particularly important. Philosophers since Mill have been pessimistic about analyzing this reasoning because of its variability and the multifarious causal and pragmatic details of how it works. I argue Mill was right to think these details matter but wrong that they preclude philosophical analysis of causal selection. I show that analyzing the pragmatic details of scientific debates about the important causes of the (...)
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  27. Francis Galton’s regression towards mediocrity and the stability of types.Adam Krashniak & Ehud Lamm - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 81 (C):6-19.
    A prevalent narrative locates the discovery of the statistical phenomenon of regression to the mean in the work of Francis Galton. It is claimed that after 1885, Galton came to explain the fact that offspring deviated less from the mean value of the population than their parents did as a population-level statistical phenomenon and not as the result of the processes of inheritance. Arguing against this claim, we show that Galton did not explain regression towards mediocrity statistically, and did not (...)
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  28. Causation and Causal Selection in the Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease.Hane Htut Maung - 2021 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 17 (2):5-27.
    In The Biopsychosocial Model of Health and Disease, Derek Bolton and Grant Gillett argue that a defensible updated version of the biopsychosocial model requires a metaphysically adequate account of disease causation that can accommodate biological, psychological, and social factors. This present paper offers a philosophical critique of their account of biopsychosocial causation. I argue that their account relies on claims about the normativity and the semantic content of biological information that are metaphysically contentious. Moreover, I suggest that these claims are (...)
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  29. W.F.R. Weldon changes his mind.Charles H. Pence - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-20.
    A recent debate over the causal foundations of evolutionary theory pits those who believe that natural selection causally explains long-term, adaptive population change against those who do not. In this paper, I argue that this debate – far from being an invention of several articles in 2002 – dates from our very first engagements with evolution as a quantified, statistical science. Further, when we analyze that history, we see that a pivotal figure in the early use of statistical methodology in (...)
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  30. Causal Concepts in Biology: How Pathways Differ from Mechanisms and Why It Matters.Lauren N. Ross - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):131-158.
    In the last two decades few topics in philosophy of science have received as much attention as mechanistic explanation. A significant motivation for these accounts is that scientists frequently use the term “mechanism” in their explanations of biological phenomena. While scientists appeal to a variety of causal concepts in their explanations, many philosophers argue or assume that all of these concepts are well understood with the single notion of mechanism. This reveals a significant problem with mainstream mechanistic accounts– although philosophers (...)
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  31. Causes with material continuity.Lauren N. Ross - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (6):1-17.
    Recent philosophical work on causation has focused on distinctions across types of causal relationships. This paper argues for another distinction that has yet to receive attention in this work. This distinction has to do with whether causal relationships have “material continuity,” which refers to the reliable movement of material from cause to effect. This paper provides an analysis of material continuity and argues that causal relationships with this feature are associated with a unique explanatory perspective, are studied with distinct causal (...)
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  32. What’s all the fuss about? The inheritance of acquired traits is compatible with the Central Dogma.M. Polo Camacho - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-15.
    The Central Dogma of molecular biology, which holds that DNA makes protein and not the other way around, is as influential as it is controversial. Some believe the Dogma has outlived its usefulness, either because it fails to fully capture the ins-and-outs of protein synthesis (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013; Stotz, 2006), because it turns on a confused notion of information (Sarkar, 2004), or because it problematically assumes the unidirectional flow of information from DNA to protein (Gottlieb, 2001). This paper evaluates (...)
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  33. Semiosis and Information: Meeting the Challenge of Information Science to Post-Reductionist Biosemiotics.Arran Gare - 2020 - Biosemiotics 13 (3):327-346.
    The concept of information and its relation to biosemiotics is a major area of contention among biosemioticians. Biosemioticians influenced by von Uexküll, Sebeok, Bateson and Peirce are critical of the way the concept as developed in information science has been applied to biology, while others believe that for biosemiotics to gain acceptance it will have to embrace information science and distance biosemiotics from Peirce’s philosophical work. Here I will defend the influence of Peirce on biosemiotics, arguing that information science and (...)
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  34. Binding Specificity and Causal Selection in Drug Design.Oliver M. Lean - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (1):70-90.
    Binding specificity is a centrally important concept in molecular biology, yet it has received little philosophical attention. Here I aim to remedy this by analyzing binding specificity as a causal property. I focus on the concept’s role in drug design, where it is highly prized and hence directly studied. From a causal perspective, understanding why binding specificity is a valuable property of drugs contributes to an understanding of causal selection—of how and why scientists distinguish between causes, not just causes from (...)
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  35. The Unfolding of a New Vision of Life, Cosmos and Evolution.Agustin Ostachuk - 2020 - Ludus Vitalis 28 (53):81-83.
    Has science already answered the fundamental questions about the concepts of Life, Cosmos and Evolution? Has science not relegated these fundamental questions by following up on more immediate, “useful” and practical endeavors that ultimately ensure that the wheel of capitalism keeps spinning in its frantic search for material and economic progress? There is something terribly wrong with the current theory of evolution, understood as the Darwinian theory with its successive versions and extensions. The concept of natural selection, the cornerstone of (...)
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  36. A Theory of Evolution as a Process of Unfolding.Agustin Ostachuk - 2020 - Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 16 (1):347-379.
    In this work I propose a theory of evolution as a process of unfolding. This theory is based on four logically concatenated principles. The principle of evolutionary order establishes that the more complex cannot be generated from the simpler. The principle of origin establishes that there must be a maximum complexity that originates the others by logical deduction. Finally, the principle of unfolding and the principle of actualization guarantee the development of the evolutionary process from the simplest to the most (...)
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  37. La differenza tra ereditarietà ed ereditabilità nello studio dei tratti psicologici.Davide Serpico - 2020 - Medicalive Magazine 6 (1):7-21.
    ITA: In questo articolo analizzerò la differenza tra il concetto di ereditarietà e quello di ereditabilità. In primo luogo, evidenzierò come i due concetti derivino storicamente da differenti tradizioni nello studio della variabilità fenotipica e del rapporto genotipo-fenotipo. Secondariamente, illustrerò gli aspetti teorici e metodologici alla base dei due concetti, che sono peraltro collegati a differenti aree delle scienze biologiche. Infine, spiegherò brevemente come si sia recentemente tentato, con molte difficoltà, di connettere lo studio dei meccanismi dell’ereditarietà allo studio dell’ereditabilità. (...)
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  38. Beyond quantitative and qualitative traits: three telling cases in the life sciences.Davide Serpico - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (3):1-26.
    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 involves a variety of simplifications on the genetic causes of phenotypic variability and on the development of complex traits. Here, I examine three cases from the life (...)
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  39. Pathogen versus microbiome causation in the holobiont.Aja Watkins & Federica Bocchi - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (1):1-6.
    In their paper “How Causal are Microbiomes? A Comparison with the Helicobacter pylori Explanation of Ulcers,” Lynch, Parke, and O’Malley successfully argue that certain causal attributions made to the microbiome have not satisfied Koch’s postulates nor the interventionist framework. However, their argument involves an implicit assumption that cases such as H. pylori are sufficiently similar to cases involving the microbiome, such that causal attributions to both should be evaluated according to the same causal framework. Our commentary targets this assumption. First, (...)
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  40. Causal Complexity, Conditional Independence, and Downward Causation.James Woodward - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):857-867.
    This article defends the notion of downward causation, relating it to a notion of conditional independence.
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  41. Evidence amalgamation, plausibility, and cancer research.Marta Bertolaso & Fabio Sterpetti - 2019 - Synthese 196 (8):3279-3317.
    Cancer research is experiencing ‘paradigm instability’, since there are two rival theories of carcinogenesis which confront themselves, namely the somatic mutation theory and the tissue organization field theory. Despite this theoretical uncertainty, a huge quantity of data is available thanks to the improvement of genome sequencing techniques. Some authors think that the development of new statistical tools will be able to overcome the lack of a shared theoretical perspective on cancer by amalgamating as many data as possible. We think instead (...)
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  42. Understanding Multicellularity: The Functional Organization of the Intercellular Space.Leonardo Bich, Thomas Pradeu & Jean-Francois Moreau - 2019 - Frontiers in Physiology 10.
    The aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework to understand how multicellular systems realize functionally integrated physiological entities by organizing their intercellular space. From a perspective centered on physiology and integration, biological systems are often characterized as organized in such a way that they realize metabolic self-production and self-maintenance. The existence and activity of their components rely on the network they realize and on the continuous management of the exchange of matter and energy with their environment. One (...)
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  43. causal reasoning about genetics: synthesis and future directions.Kate E. Lynch, Ilan Dar Nimrod, Paul Edmund Griffiths & James Morandini - 2019 - Behavior Genetics 2 (49):221-234.
    When explaining the causes of human behavior, genes are often given a special status. They are thought to relate to an intrinsic human 'essence', and essentialist biases have been shown to skew the way in which causation is assessed. Causal reasoning in general is subject to other pre-existing biases, including beliefs about normativity and morality. In this synthesis we show how factors which influence causal reasoning can be mapped to a framework of genetic essentialism, which reveals both the shared and (...)
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  44. How causal are microbiomes? A comparison with the Helicobacter pylori explanation of ulcers.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):62.
    Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...)
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  45. Organic Selection and Social Heredity: The Original Baldwin Effect Revisited.Nam Le - 2019 - Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 2019 (31):515-522.
    The so-called “Baldwin Effect” has been studied for years in the fields of Artificial Life, Cognitive Science, and Evolutionary Theory across disciplines. This idea is often conflated with genetic assimilation, and has raised controversy in trans-disciplinary scientific discourse due to the many interpretations it has. This paper revisits the “Baldwin Effect” in Baldwin’s original spirit from a joint historical, theoretical and experimental approach. Social Heredity – the inheritance of cultural knowledge via non-genetic means in Baldwin’s term – is also taken (...)
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  46. How causal are microbiomes? A comparison with the H elicobacter pylori explanation of ulcers.Kate E. Lynch, Emily C. Parke & Maureen A. O’Malley - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (6):62.
    Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...)
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  47. Genetic Relatedness and Its Causal Role in the Evolution of Insect Societies.Tuomas K. Pernu - 2019 - Journal of Biosciences 44:107.
    The role of genetic relatedness in social evolution has recently come under critical attention. These arguments are here critically analyzed, both theoretically and empirically. It is argued that when the conceptual structure of the theory of natural selection is carefully taken into account, genetic relatedness can be seen to play an indispensable role in the evolution of both facultative and advanced eusociality. Although reviewing the empirical evidence concerning the evolution of eusociality reveals that relatedness does not play a role in (...)
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  48. Social Evolution and the Two Elements of Causation.Tuomas K. Pernu & Heikki Helanterä - 2019 - Oikos 128:905-911.
    The kin selection theory has recently been criticised on the basis of claiming that genetic relatedness does not play a causal role in the social evolution among individuals of insect societies. We outline here a line of criticism of this view by demonstrating two things. First, there are strong conceptual, theoretical and empirical reasons to think that close genetic relatedness has been necessary for the rise of the helper castes of social insects. And second, once we understand how causal explanation (...)
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  49. Mechanistic Causation: Difference-Making is Enough.Stathis Psillos & Stavros Ioannidis - 2019 - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 3 (38):53-75.
    In this paper we defend the view that mechanisms are underpinned by networks of difference-making relations. First, we distinguish and criticise two different kinds of arguments in favour of an activity-based understanding of mechanism: Glennan’s metaphysics- first approach and Illari and Williamson’s science-first approach. Second, we present an alternative difference-making view of mechanism and illustrate it by looking at the history of the case of scurvy prevention. We use the case of scurvy to argue that evidence for a mechanism just (...)
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  50. Changing The Definition of The Kilogram: Insights For Psychiatric Disease Classification.Hanna M. Van Loo, Jan-Willem Romeijn & Kenneth S. Kendler - 2019 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 26 (4):97-108.
    In psychiatry, many scientists desire to move from a classification system based on symptoms toward a system based on biological causes. The idea is that psychiatric diseases should be redefined such that each disease would be associated with specific biological causes. This desire is intelligible because causal disease models often facilitate understanding and identification of new ways to intervene in disease processes. In its attempt to move from syndromal to specific etiological definitions, psychiatry follows the trend of general medicine.Current psychiatric...
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