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3Introduction: What is developmental systems theory?In Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths & Russell D. Gray (eds.), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, Mit Press. pp. 1-11. 2001.
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248How the mind grows: A developmental perspective on the biology of cognitionSynthese 122 (1-2): 29-51. 2000.The 'developmental systems' perspective in biology is intended to replace the idea of a genetic program. This new perspective is strongly convergent with recent work in psychology on situated/embodied cognition and on the role of external 'scaffolding' in cognitive development. Cognitive processes, including those which can be explained in evolutionary terms, are not 'inherited' or produced in accordance with an inherited program. Instead, they are constructed in each generation through the inte…Read more
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270The vernacular concept of innatenessMind and Language 24 (5): 605-630. 2009.The proposal that the concept of innateness expresses a 'folk biological' theory of the 'inner natures' of organisms was tested by examining the response of biologically naive participants to a series of realistic scenarios concerning the development of birdsong. Our results explain the intuitive appeal of existing philosophical analyses of the innateness concept. They simultaneously explain why these analyses are subject to compelling counterexamples. We argue that this explanation undermines t…Read more
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209Basic Emotions, Complex Emotions, Machiavellian EmotionsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 52 39-67. 2003.The current state of knowledge in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral ecology allows a fairly robust characterization of at least some, so-called ?basic emotions? - short-lived emotional responses with homologues in other vertebrates. Philosophers, however are understandably more focused on the complex emotion episodes that figure in folk-psychological narratives about mental life, episodes such as the evolving jealousy and anger of a person in an unraveling sexual relationship. On…Read more
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From adaptive heuristic to phylogenetic perspective: Some lessons from the evolutionary psychology of emotionIn Harmon H. I. I. I. Holcolmb (ed.), The Evolution of Minds: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 309-325. 2001.
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100The Cronin controversy (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1): 122-138. 1995.
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702Biological Information, Causality and Specificity - an Intimate RelationshipIn Sara Imari Walker, Paul C. W. Davies & George F. R. Ellis (eds.), From Matter to Life: Information and Causality, Cambridge University Press. pp. 366-390. 2017.In this chapter we examine the relationship between biological information, the key biological concept of specificity, and recent philosophical work on causation. We begin by showing how talk of information in the molecular biosciences grew out of efforts to understand the sources of biological specificity. We then introduce the idea of ‘causal specificity’ from recent work on causation in philosophy, and our own, information theoretic measure of causal specificity. Biological specificity, we ar…Read more
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155Evo-devo meets the mind: Toward a developmental evolutionary psychologyIn Roger Sansom & Robert N. Brandon (eds.), Integrating Evolution and Development: From Theory to Practice, Mit Press. pp. 195-225. 2007.The emerging discipline of evolutionary developmental biology has opened up many new lines of investigation into morphological evolution. Here I explore how two of the core theoretical concepts in ‘evo-devo’ – modularity and homology – apply to evolutionary psychology. I distinguish three sorts of module – developmental, functional and mental modules and argue that mental modules need only be ‘virtual’ functional modules. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that separate mental modules are so…Read more
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133Replicator II – judgement dayBiology and Philosophy 12 (4): 471-492. 1997.The Developmental Systems approach to evolution is defended against the alternative extended replicator approach of Sterelny, Smith and Dickison (1996). A precise definition is provided of the spatial and temporal boundaries of the life-cycle that DST claims is the unit of evolution. Pacé Sterelny et al., the extended replicator theory is not a bulwark against excessive holism. Everything which DST claims is replicated in evolution can be shown to be an extended replicator on Sterelny et al.s de…Read more
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354Darwinism, process structuralism, and natural kindsPhilosophy of Science 63 (3). 1996.Darwinists classify biological traits either by their ancestry (homology) or by their adaptive role. Only the latter can provide traditional natural kinds, but only the former is practicable. Process structuralists exploit this embarrassment to argue for non-Darwinian classifications in terms of underlying developmental mechanisms. This new taxonomy will also explain phylogenetic inertia and developmental constraint. I argue that Darwinian homologies are natural kinds despite having historical e…Read more
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125Modularity, and the psychoevolutionary theory of emotionBiology and Philosophy 5 (2): 175-196. 1990.It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may c…Read more
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16Conceptual Barriers to Interdisciplinary CommunicationIn Crowley OâRourke, Eigenbrode Stephen, Wulfhorst Sanford D. & Michael J. D. (eds.), Enhancing Communication & Collaboration in Interdisciplinary Research, Sage Publications. pp. 195-215. 2014.21 page
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67Genes: Philosophical Analyses Put to the TestHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 26 (1): 5-28. 2004.This paper describes one complete and one ongoing empirical study in which philosophical analyses of the concept of the gene were operationalized and tested against questionnaire data obtained from working biologists to determine whether and when biologists conceive genes in the ways suggested. These studies throw light on how different gene concepts contribute to biological research. Their aim is not to arrive at one or more correct 'definitions' of the gene, but rather to map out the variation…Read more
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326Genes in the postgenomic eraTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 27 (6): 499-521. 2006.We outline three very different concepts of the gene—instrumental, nominal, and postgenomic. The instrumental gene has a critical role in the construction and interpretation of experiments in which the relationship between genotype and phenotype is explored via hybridization between organisms or directly between nucleic acid molecules. It also plays an important theoretical role in the foundations of disciplines such as quantitative genetics and population genetics. The nominal gene is a critica…Read more
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105The historical turn in the study of adaptationBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 (4): 511-532. 1996.A number of philosophers and ‘evolutionary psychologists’ have argued that attacks on adaptationism in contemporary biology are misguided. These thinkers identify anti-adaptationism with advocacy of non-adaptive modes of explanation. They overlook the influence of anti-adaptationism in the development of more rigorous forms of adaptive explanation. Many biologists who reject adaptationism do not reject Darwinism. Instead, they have pioneered the contemporary historical turn in the study of adapt…Read more
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1Adaptive Explanation and the Concept of a VestigeIn David L. Hull (ed.), A review of Paul Griffiths (ed.), Trees of Life: Essays in Philosophy of Biology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1992, 276 pp. $96.00, Kluwer. pp. 111-131. 1994.
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2836Evolutionary debunking arguments in three domains: Fact, value, and religionIn James Maclaurin Greg Dawes (ed.), A New Science of Religion, Routledge. 2013.Ever since Darwin people have worried about the sceptical implications of evolution. If our minds are products of evolution like those of other animals, why suppose that the beliefs they produce are true, rather than merely useful? We consider this problem for beliefs in three different domains: religion, morality, and commonsense and scientific claims about matters of empirical fact. We identify replies to evolutionary scepticism that work in some domains but not in others. One reply is that ev…Read more
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1Evolutionary Perspectives on EmotionIn Alfred W. Kazniak (ed.), Emotions, Qualia and Consciousness, World Scientific. pp. 106--123. 2001.Evolutionary Psychology links the methodology for cognitive science associated with the late David Marr to evolutionary theory. The mind is conceived as a bundle of modules which can be described at three theoretical levels. Each module represents an adaptation to some specific ecological problem. Evolutionary psychologists try to derive the highest level of description using a heuristic method called 'adaptive thinking'. This paper questions the value of the official EP methodology and reassert…Read more
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532Signals that make a DifferenceBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 2017.Recent work by Brian Skyrms offers a very general way to think about how information flows and evolves in biological networks — from the way monkeys in a troop communicate, to the way cells in a body coordinate their actions. A central feature of his account is a way to formally measure the quantity of information contained in the signals in these networks. In this paper, we argue there is a tension between how Skyrms talks of signalling networks and his formal measure of information. Although S…Read more
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117Dancing in the dark: Evolutionary psychology and the argument from designIn Steven J. Scher & Frederick Rauscher (eds.), Evolutionary Psychology: Alternative Approaches, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 135--160. 2002.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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58Behavioral 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
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 |