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9Mechanisms can be complex: Talia Morag: Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason. Abingdon, Oxon & New York: Routledge, 2016, 288 pp, £88.00 HB (review)Metascience 26 (3): 387-391. 2017.
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2070Developmental Systems TheoryeLS 1-7. 2015.Developmental systems theory (DST) is a wholeheartedly epigenetic approach to development, inheritance and evolution. The developmental system of an organism is the entire matrix of resources that are needed to reproduce the life cycle. The range of developmental resources that are properly described as being inherited, and which are subject to natural selection, is far wider than has traditionally been allowed. Evolution acts on this extended set of developmental resources. From a developmental…Read more
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42Titles and abstracts for the Pitt-London Workshop in the Philosophy of Biology and Neuroscience: September 2001.
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19Jesse Prinz Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (3): 559-567. 2008.
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29Exploring the Folkbiological Conception of Human NaturePhilosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences 366 (1563): 444. 2011.Integrating the study of human diversity into the human evolutionary sciences requires substantial revision of traditional conceptions of a shared human nature. This process may be made more difficult by entrenched, 'folkbiological' modes of thought. Earlier work by the authors suggests that biologically naive subjects hold an implicit theory according to which some traits are expressions of an animal's inner nature while others are imposed by its environment. In this paper, we report further st…Read more
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263Function, homology and character individuationPhilosophy of Science 73 (1): 1-25. 2006.I defend the view that many biological categories are defined by homology against a series of arguments designed to show that all biological categories are defined, at least in part, by selected function. I show that categories of homology are `abnormality inclusive'—something often alleged to be unique to selected function categories. I show that classifications by selected function are logically dependent on classifications by homology, but not vice-versa. Finally, I reject the view that biolo…Read more
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684Genetic, epigenetic and exogenetic informationIn Richard Joyce (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Evolution and Philosophy, Routledge. 2016.We describe an approach to measuring biological information where ‘information’ is understood in the sense found in Francis Crick’s foundational contributions to molecular biology. Genes contain information in this sense, but so do epigenetic factors, as many biologists have recognized. The term ‘epigenetic’ is ambiguous, and we introduce a distinction between epigenetic and exogenetic inheritance to clarify one aspect of this ambiguity. These three heredity systems play complementary roles in s…Read more
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441Genetic, epigenetic and exogenetic information in development and evolutionInterface Focus 7 (5). 2017.The idea that development is the expression of information accumulated during evolution and that heredity is the transmission of this information is surprisingly hard to cash out in strict, scientific terms. This paper seeks to do so using the sense of information introduced by Francis Crick in his sequence hypothesis and central dogma of molecular biology. It focuses on Crick's idea of precise determination. This is analysed using an information-theoretic measure of causal specificity. This all…Read more
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721A Developmental Systems Account of Human NatureIn Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (eds.), Why We Disagree About Human Nature, Oxford University Press. pp. 00-00. 2018.It is now widely accepted that a scientifically credible conception of human nature must reject the folkbiological idea of a fixed, inner essence that makes us human. We argue here that to understand human nature is to understand the plastic process of human development and the diversity it produces. Drawing on the framework of developmental systems theory and the idea of developmental niche construction we argue that human nature is not embodied in only one input to development, such as the gen…Read more
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1095Developmental Systems Theory as a Process TheoryIn Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245. 2018.Griffiths and Russell D. Gray (1994, 1997, 2001) have argued that the fundamental unit of analysis in developmental systems theory should be a process – the life cycle – and not a set of developmental resources and interactions between those resources. The key concepts of developmental systems theory, epigenesis and developmental dynamics, both also suggest a process view of the units of development. This chapter explores in more depth the features of developmental systems theory that favour tre…Read more
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135Dancing in the dark: Evolutionary psychology and the argument from designIn Steven Scher & Frederick Rauscher (eds.), Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 135--160. 2001.The Narrow Evolutionary Psychology Movement represents itself as a major reorientation of the social/behavioral sciences, a group of sciences previously dominated by something called the ‘Standard Social Science Model’. Narrow Evolutionary Psychology alleges that the SSSM treated the mind, and particularly those aspects of the mind that exhibit cultural variation, as devoid of any marks of its evolutionary history. Adherents of Narrow Evolutionary Psychology often suggest that the SSSM owed more…Read more
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Lehrman's dictum: Information and explanation in developmental biologyDevelopmental Psychobiology 55 (1): 22--32. 2013.
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15Book Reviews : Alexander Rosenberg, Philosophy of Social Science. Westview, Boulder, CO, 1988. Pp. xiv, 218, $35.00 (cloth), $18.95 (paper (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2): 290-293. 1991.
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183Innateness, canalization, and 'biologicizing the mind'Philosophical Psychology 21 (3). 2008.This article examines and rejects the claim that 'innateness is canalization'. Waddington's concept of canalization is distinguished from the narrower concept of environmental canalization with which it is often confused. Evidence is presented that the concept of environmental canalization is not an accurate analysis of the existing concept of innateness. The strategy of 'biologicizing the mind' by treating psychological or behavioral traits as if they were environmentally canalized physiologica…Read more
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332What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological CategoriesUniversity of Chicago Press. 1997.Paul E. Griffiths argues that most research on the emotions has been as misguided as Aristotelian efforts to study "superlunary objects" - objects...
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57Behavioral genetics and development: Historical and conceptual causes of controversyNew Ideas in Psychology 26 (3): 332-352. 2008.Traditional, quantitative behavioral geneticists and developmental psychobiologists such as Gilbert Gottlieb have long debated what it would take to create a truly developmental behavioral genetics. These disputes have proven so intractable that disputants have repeatedly suggested that the problem rests on their opponents' conceptual confusion; whilst others have argued that the intractability results from the non-scientific, political motivations of their opponents. The authors provide a diffe…Read more
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128The distinction between innate and acquired characteristicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2010.The idea that some characteristics of an organism are explained by the organism's intrinsic nature, whilst others reflect the influence of the environment is an ancient one. It has even been argued that this distinction is itself part of the evolved psychology of the human species. The distinction played an important role in the history of philosophy as the locus of the dispute between Rationalism and Empiricism discussed in another entry in this encyclopedia. This entry, however, focuses on twe…Read more
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204The misuse of Sober's selection for/selection of distinctionBiology and Philosophy 10 (1): 99-108. 1995.Elliott Sober''s selection for/selection of distinction has been widely used to clarify the idea that some properties of organisms are side-effects of selection processes. It has also been used, however, to choose between different descriptions of an evolutionary product when assigning biological functions to that product. We suggest that there is a characteristic error in these uses of the distinction. Complementary descriptions of function are misrepresented as mutually excluding one another. …Read more
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148GeneIn David L. Hull & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Cambridge University Press. 2005.The historian Raphael Falk has described the gene as a ‘concept in tension’ (Falk 2000) – an idea pulled this way and that by the differing demands of different kinds of biological work. Several authors have suggested that in the light of contemporary molecular biology ‘gene’ is no more than a handy term which acquires a specific meaning only in a specific scientific context in which it occurs. Hence the best way to answer the question ‘what is a gene’, and the only way to provide a truly philos…Read more
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Rand on concepts, definitions, and the advance of science: Comments on Gotthelf and LennoxIn Allan Gotthelf & James G. Lennox (eds.), Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology, University of Pittsburgh Press. pp. 139--147. 2013.
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319How biologists conceptualize genes: an empirical studyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 35 (4): 647-673. 2004.Philosophers and historians of biology have argued that genes are conceptualized differently in different fields of biology and that these differences influence both the conduct of research and the interpretation of research by audiences outside the field in which the research was conducted. In this paper we report the results of a questionnaire study of how genes are conceptualized by biological scientists at the University of Sydney, Australia. The results provide tentative support for some hy…Read more
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64Emotion on Dover Beach: Feeling and Value in the Philosophy of Robert SolomonEmotion Review 2 (1): 22-28. 2010.Robert Solomon’s philosophy of emotion should be understood in the light of his lifelong commitment to existentialism and his advocacy of “the passionate life” as a means of creating value. Although he developed his views in the framework of the “cognitive theory” of emotions, closer examination reveals many themes in common with a socially situated, transactionalist view of emotions.
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57Our Plastic NatureIn Snait Gissis & Eva Jablonka (eds.), Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology, Mit Press. pp. 319--330. 2011.This chapter analyzes the notion of human nature and the concept of inner nature from the perspective of developmental systems theory. It explores the folkbiology of human nature and looks at three features associated with traits that are expressions of the inner nature that organisms inherit from their parents: fixity, typicality, teleology.
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38A niche for the genomeBiology and Philosophy 31 (1): 143-157. 2016.In their considered reviews both Thomas Pradeu and Lindell Bromham introduce important topics not sufficiently covered in our book. Pradeu asks us to enlarge on the epigenetic and ecological context of genes, particularly in the form of symbioses. We use the relationship between eukaryotes and their symbiotic organisms as a welcome opportunity to clarify our concept of the developmental niche, and its relationship to the developmental system. Bromham’s comments reveal that she is primarily inter…Read more
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152In What Sense Does ‘Nothing Make Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’?Acta Biotheoretica 57 (1-2): 11-32. 2009.Dobzhansky argued that biology only makes sense if life on earth has a shared history. But his dictum is often reinterpreted to mean that biology only makes sense in the light of adaptation. Some philosophers of science have argued in this spirit that all work in ‘proximal’ biosciences such as anatomy, physiology and molecular biology must be framed, at least implicitly, by the selection histories of the organisms under study. Others have denied this and have proposed non-evolutionary ways in wh…Read more
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14Who’s afraid of the nanny state? Introduction to a symposiumPublic Health 129 (8): 1017--1020. 2015.
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