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14Developing a rhetorical account of explanation (review)Choice 52 (8): 4168. 2015.Book review of "The Nature of Scientific Thinking: on Interpretation, Explanation and Understanding" by J. Faye. The nature of scientific explanation is a central topic of interest to philosophers but the literature has metamorphosed from a coherent body of key papers and examples into narrow and specialized discussions in different scientific disciplines.
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13Marine invertebrate larvae: model life histories for development, ecology, and evolution.In T. J. Carrier, A. M. Reitzel & A. Heyland (eds.), Evolutionary Ecology of Marine Invertebrate Larvae. 2018.The questions raised for the study of marine invertebrate larvae have implications for the evolution of development, the life histories of animals, and life in the sea more generally. These questions began to coalesce in the 19th century around two main factors. The first was the discovery of marine larvae. Through careful observation, investigators detected and confirmed that the development of animals exhibited stages surprisingly different from the previously known adults and adult-like juven…Read more
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13From Arabidopsis and Antirrhinum to Arabia and Antioch (review)Evolution & Development 15 158-159. 2013.From Arabidopsis and Antirrhinum to Arabia and Antioch: a review of cells to civilizations: the principles of change that shape life Cells to Civilizations: The Principles of Change That Shape Life, Coen, E. 2012. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-14967-7
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13Developmental biologyThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.Developmental biology is the science of explaining how a variety of interacting processes generate an organism’s heterogeneous shapes, size, and structural features that arise on the trajectory from embryo to adult, or more generally throughout a life cycle. It represents an exemplary area of contemporary experimental biology that focuses on phenomena that have puzzled natural philosophers and scientists for more than two millennia.
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13Methodological pluralism about causation in the sciences (review)Social Choice and Welfare 53 (11): 1247. 2015.Book review of "Causality: Philosophical Theory Meets Scientific Practice" by P. Illari and F. Russo,
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13Positional Information and the Measurement of SpecificityPhilosophy of Science 87 (5): 1061-1072. 2020.Philosophical discussions of information and specificity in biology are now commonplace, but no consensus exists about whether the privileging of genetic causation in investigation and explanation...
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13From philosophy to science (to natural philosophy): evolutionary developmental perspectivesThe Quarterly Review of Biology 83. 2008.This paper focuses on abstraction as a mode of reasoning that facilitates a productive relationship between philosophy and science. Using examples from evolutionary developmental biology, I argue that there are two areas where abstraction can be relevant to science: reasoning explication and problem clarification. The value of abstraction is characterized in terms of methodology (modeling or data gathering) and epistemology (explanatory evaluation or data interpretation).
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13Philosophy and paleontology: getting to know each other (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2011.
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13Organizing interdisciplinary research on purposeBioScience 72 (4). 2022.The star-nosed mole is aptly named. Its distinctive snout consists of 22 tendrils ringing a pair of nostrils and, from some angles, the entire setup resembles a misshapen star. The tendrils are fleshy and look a bit like fingers, and, like fingers, they have a certain dexterity. But why? Why does the mole have such a singular appendage as opposed to something more ordinary? What is the function or purpose of this bizarre structure? From the dedicated work of Ken Catania, of Vanderbilt Universit…Read more
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12. Ignorance and science: from strange juxtaposition to essential connection (review)Science in Focus. 2012.
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11Darwin’s ‘imaginary illustrations’: creatively teaching evolutionary concepts and the nature of scienceThe American Biology Teacher 72. 2010.An overlooked feature of Darwin’s work is his use of “imaginary illustrations” to show that natural selection is competent to produce adaptive, evolutionary change. When set in the context of Darwin’s methodology, these thought
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11Correction to: Teleonomy: Revisiting a Proposed Conceptual Replacement for TeleologyBiological Theory 1-1. forthcoming.
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11Co-option of stress mechanisms in the origin of evolutionary noveltiesEvolution 76 394-413. 2022.It is widely accepted that stressful conditions can facilitate evolutionary change. The mechanisms elucidated thus far accomplish this with a generic increase in heritable variation that facilitates more rapid adaptive evolution, often via plastic modifications of existing characters. Through scrutiny of different meanings of stress in biological research, and an explicit recognition that stressors must be characterized relative to their effect on capacities for maintaining functional integrity,…Read more
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10John Tyler Bonner: Remembering a scientific pioneerJournal of Experimental Evolution (Mol Dev Evol) 332 365-370. 2019.Throughout his life, John Tyler Bonner contributed to major transformations in the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology. He pondered the evolution of complexity and the significance of randomness in evolution, and was instrumental in the formation of evolutionary developmental biology. His contributions were vast, ranging from highly technical scientific articles to numerous books written for a broad audience. This historical vignette gathers reflections by several prominent research…Read more
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10Revolutionary evo-devo? (review)Journal of the History of Biology 40. 2007.Essay review of David Arnold, "The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800-1856" (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), xiv + 298 pp., illus.
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8Fostering inquiry in nonlaboratory settingsJournal of College Science Teaching 34 39-43. 2004.Inquiry is an important learning strategy, even for students who cannot or do not perform actual experiments. The authors describe two activities, other than experimentation, that they used in introductory biology learning groups to emphasize inquiry abilities. They also provide recommendations for creating additional inquiry activities.
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7Gene expression patterns in a novel animal appendage: The sea urchin pluteus armEvolution & Development 9. 2007.The larval arms of echinoid plutei are used for locomotion and feeding. They are composed of internal calcite skeletal rods covered by an ectoderm layer bearing a ciliary band. Skeletogenesis includes an autonomous molecular differentiation program in primary mesenchyme cells (PMCs), initiated when PMCs leave the vegetal plate for the blastocoel, and a patterning of the differentiated skeletal units that requires molecular cues from the overlaying ectoderm. The arms represent a larval feature th…Read more
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7How cancer spreads: reconceptualizing a diseaseIn Giovanni Boniolo & Marco J. Nathan (eds.), Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Research and Practice, Routledge. pp. 100-121. 2016.Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Theory and Practice aims at a systematic investigation of a number of foundational issues in the field of molecular medicine. The volume is organized around four broad modules focusing, respectively, on the following key aspects: What are the nature, scope, and limits of molecular medicine? How does it provide explanations? How does it represent and model phenomena of interest? How does it infer new knowledge from data and experiments? The…Read more
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6Beyond the MemeUniversity of Minnesota Press. 2019.Contributors: Sabina Leonelli Nancy J. Nersessian Michel Janssen Jacob G. Foster James A. Evans Mark A. Bedau Marshall Abrams Gilbert B. Tostevin Salikoko S. Mufwene Massimo Maiocchi Joseph D. Martin Paul E. Smaldino Claes Andersson Anton Törnberg Petter Törnberg Beyond the Meme assembles interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic structures interact on different scales of size and time. The volume demonstrates how …Read more
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5Co-option and dissociation in larval origins and evolution: the sea urchin larval gutEvolution & Development 10. 2008.The origin of marine invertebrate larvae has been an area of controversy in developmental evolution for over a century. Here, we address the question of whether a pelagic “larval” or benthic “adult” morphology originated first in metazoan lineages by testing the hypothesis that particular gene co-option patterns will be associated with the origin of feeding, indirect developing larval forms. Empirical evidence bearing on this hypothesis is derivable from gene expression studies of the sea urchin…Read more
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5Explaining cultural evolution: an interdisciplinary endeavorIn A. C. Love and W. C. Wimsatt (ed.), Beyond the Meme: Development and Structure in Cultural Evolution. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science.. 2019.
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Situating evolutionary developmental biology in evolutionary theoryIn S. M. Scheiner and D. P. Mindell (ed.), The Theory of Evolution: Principles, Concepts, and Assumptions. pp. 144-169. 2020.
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Evolution and Development: Conceptual IssuesCambridge University Press. 2024.The intersection of development and evolution has always harbored conceptual issues, but many of these are on display in contemporary evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo). These issues include: (1) the precise constitution of evo-devo, with its focus on both the evolution of development and the developmental basis of evolution, and how it fits within evolutionary theory; (2) the nature of evo-devo model systems that comprise the material of comparative and experimental research; (3) the…Read more
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |