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107The Developmental Systems Perspective: Organism-environment systems as units of development and evolutionIn Massimo Pigliucci & Katherine Preston (eds.), Phenotypic Integration: Studying the Ecology and Evolution of Complex Phenotypes, Oxford University Press. pp. 409-431. 2002.Developmental systems theory is an attempt to sum up the ideas of a research tradition in developmental psychobiology that goes back at least to Daniel Lehrman’s work in the 1950s. It yields a representation of evolution that is quite capable of accommodating the traditional themes of natural selection and also the new results that are emerging from evolutionary developmental biology. But it adds something else - a framework for thinking about development and evolution without the distorting dic…Read more
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Adaptation and adaptationismIn Robert A. Wilson & Frank C. Keil (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, Mit Press. pp. 3-4. 1999.Encyclopedia entry on the concepts of adaptation and adaptationism.
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280Evolutionary Psychology: History and Current StatusIn Jessica Pfeifer & Sahotra Sarkar (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Routledge. pp. 263--268. 2006.The development of evolutionary approaches to psychology from Classical Ethology through Sociobiology to Evolutionary Psychology is outlined and the main tenets of today's Evolutionary Psychology briefly examined: the heuristic value of evolutionary thinking for psychology, the massive modularity thesis and the monomorphic mind thesis.
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62Tracking the shift to 'postgenomics'Community Genetics 9 (3). 2006.Current knowledge about the variety and complexity of the processes that allow regulated gene expression in living organisms calls for a new understanding of genes. A ‘postgenomic’ understanding of genes as entities constituted during genome expression is outlined and illustrated with specific examples that formed part of a survey research instrument developed by two of the authors for an ongoing empirical study of conceptual change in contemporary biology.
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119Biohumanities: Rethinking the relationship between biosciences, philosophy and history of science, and societyQuarterly Review of Biology 83 (1): 37--45. 2007.We argue that philosophical and historical research can constitute a ‘Biohumanities’ which deepens our understanding of biology itself; engages in constructive 'science criticism'; helps formulate new 'visions of biology'; and facilitates 'critical science communication'. We illustrate these ideas with two recent 'experimental philosophy' studies of the concept of the gene and of the concept of innateness conducted by ourselves and collaborators.
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200Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of emotion (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (3): 559-567. 2008.
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28Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution (edited book)MIT Press. 2001.The nature/nurture debate is not dead. Dichotomous views of development still underlie many fundamental debates in the biological and social sciences. Developmental systems theory offers a new conceptual framework with which to resolve such debates. DST views ontogeny as contingent cycles of interaction among a varied set of developmental resources, no one of which controls the process. These factors include DNA, cellular and organismic structure, and social and ecological interactions. DST has …Read more
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2Conceptual change and conceptual diversity contribute to progress in scienceIn Gabriele Bammer (ed.), Change! Combining Analytic Approaches with Street Wisdom, Australian National University Press. pp. 163--176. 2015.
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111Molecular and Developmental BiologyIn Peter Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell Publishers. pp. 252-271. 2002.Philosophical discussion of molecular and developmental biology began in the late 1960s with the use of genetics as a test case for models of theory reduction. With this exception, the theory of natural selection remained the main focus of philosophy of biology until the late 1970s. It was controversies in evolutionary theory over punctuated equilibrium and adaptationism that first led philosophers to examine the concept of developmental constraint. Developmental biology also gained in prominenc…Read more
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382Functional analysis and proper functionsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3): 409-422. 1993.The etiological approach to ‘proper functions’ in biology can be strengthened by relating it to Robert Cummins' general treatment of function ascription. The proper functions of a biological trait are the functions it is assigned in a Cummins-style functional explanation of the fitness of ancestors. These functions figure in selective explanations of the trait. It is also argued that some recent etiological theories include inaccurate accounts of selective explanation in biology. Finally, a gene…Read more
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The Baldwin effect and Genetic assimilation: Contrasting explanatory foci and Gene concepts in two approaches to an evolutionary processIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Culture and Cognition, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 91-101. 2006.David Papineau (2003; 2005) has discussed the relationship between social learning and the family of postulated evolutionary processes that includes ‘organic selection’, ‘coincident selection’, ‘autonomisation’, ‘the Baldwin effect’ and ‘genetic assimilation’. In all these processes a trait which initially develops in the members of a population as a result of some interaction with the environment comes to develop without that interaction in their descendants. It is uncontroversial that the deve…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Philosophy of Medicine |
Philosophy of Mind |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |