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24Discussion: Three ways to misunderstand developmental systems theoryBiology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 417-425. 2005.Developmental systems theory is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology. The contributions to this literature by evolut…Read more
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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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2071Developmental 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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722A 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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103The Cronin controversy (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (1): 122-138. 1995.
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From adaptive heuristic to phylogenetic perspective: Some lessons from the evolutionary psychology of emotionIn Paul S. Davies & I. I. I. Harmon R. Holcomb (eds.), The Evolution of Minds: Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 309-325. 2001.
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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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687Biological Information, Causality and Specificity - an Intimate RelationshipIn Sara Imari Walker, Paul Davies & George 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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153Evo-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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353Darwinism, 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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65Genes: 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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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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103The 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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374Genes 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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491Signals 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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2770Evolutionary debunking arguments in three domains: Fact, value, and religionIn James Maclaurin Greg Dawes (ed.), A New Science of Religion, Routledge. 2012.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
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 |