•  12
    Who’s afraid of the nanny state? Introduction to a symposium
    with Roger S. Magnusson
    Public Health 129 (8): 1017--1020. 2015.
  •  29
    Generating Thoughts on Genetics (review)
    Metascience 17 (2): 273-275. 2008.
  •  125
    The phenomena of homology
    Biology and Philosophy 22 (5): 643-658. 2007.
    Philosophical discussions of biological classification have failed to recognise the central role of homology in the classification of biological parts and processes. One reason for this is a misunderstanding of the relationship between judgments of homology and the core explanatory theories of biology. The textbook characterisation of homology as identity by descent is commonly regarded as a definition. I suggest instead that it is one of several attempts to explain the phenomena of homology. Tw…Read more
  •  14
    Author’s response
    Metascience 8 (1): 49-62. 1999.
    The air of consensus in these reviews is, as McNaughton notes, methodological. The future of philosophical emotion theory is in synthesising what a wide range of science has to tell us and using this to reflect on the nature of mind in general. In this respect the philosophy of emotion has been seriously out of step with the rest of a very exciting contemporary scene in the philosophy of mind. Whatever the shortcomings of my own attempt to bring the philosophy of emotion into contact with the re…Read more
  •  211
    Ethology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology
    In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Blackwell. pp. 393-414. 2008.
    In the years leading up to the Second World War the ethologists Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen, created the tradition of rigorous, Darwinian research on animal behavior that developed into modern behavioral ecology. At first glance, research on specifically human behavior seems to exhibit greater discontinuity that research on animal behavior in general. The 'human ethology' of the 1960s appears to have been replaced in the early 1970s by a new approach called ‘sociobiology’. Sociobiology …Read more
  •  857
    Evolution, Dysfunction, and Disease: A Reappraisal
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (2): 301-327. 2018.
    Some ‘naturalist’ accounts of disease employ a biostatistical account of dysfunction, whilst others use a ‘selected effect’ account. Several recent authors have argued that the biostatistical account offers the best hope for a naturalist account of disease. We show that the selected effect account survives the criticisms levelled by these authors relatively unscathed, and has significant advantages over the BST. Moreover, unlike the BST, it has a strong theoretical rationale and can provide subs…Read more
  •  60
    Epigenetics: ambiguities and implications
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 38 (4): 1-20. 2016.
    Everyone has heard of ‘epigenetics’, but the term means different things to different researchers. Four important contemporary meanings are outlined in this paper. Epigenetics in its various senses has implications for development, heredity, and evolution, and also for medicine. Concerning development, it cements the vision of a reactive genome strongly coupled to its environment. Concerning heredity, both narrowly epigenetic and broader ‘exogenetic’ systems of inheritance play important roles i…Read more
  • Emotions
    In Stephen P. Stich & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Blackwell Guide to Philosophy of Mind, Blackwell. pp. 197--203. 2002.
  • Darwinism and Developmental Systems
    with Russell D. Gray
    In Susan Oyama, Paul Griffiths & Russell D. Gray (eds.), Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, Mit Press. pp. 195-218. 2001.
  • Levels of Description
    In P. Slezak, T. Caelli & R. Clark (eds.), Perspectives on Cognitive Science, Ablex. pp. 283--300. 1995.
  •  288
    The importance of homology for biology and philosophy
    Biology and Philosophy 22 (5): 633-641. 2007.
    Editors' introduction to the special issue on homology (Biology and Philosophy Vol. 22, Issue 5, 2007)
  •  11
    Biology, Philosophy of
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  180
    Is emotion a natural kind?
    In Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, Oxford University Press. 2002.
    In _What Emotions Really Are: The problem of psychological categories_ I argued that it is unlikely that all the psychological states and processes that fall under the vernacular category of emotion are sufficiently similar to one another to allow a unified scientific psychology of the emotions. In this paper I restate what I mean by ?natural kind? and my argument for supposing that emotion is not a natural kind in this specific sense. In the following sections I discuss the two most promising p…Read more
  •  574
    What is innateness?
    The Monist 85 (1): 70-85. 2001.
    In behavioral ecology some authors regard the innateness concept as irretrievably confused whilst others take it to refer to adaptations. In cognitive psychology, however, whether traits are 'innate' is regarded as a significant question and is often the subject of heated debate. Several philosophers have tried to define innateness with the intention of making sense of its use in cognitive psychology. In contrast, I argue that the concept is irretrievably confused. The vernacular innateness conc…Read more
  •  182
    Genetics and philosophy : an introduction
    Cambridge University Press. 2013.
    In the past century, nearly all of the biological sciences have been directly affected by discoveries and developments in genetics, a fast-evolving subject with important theoretical dimensions. In this rich and accessible book, Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz show how the concept of the gene has evolved and diversified across the many fields that make up modern biology. By examining the molecular biology of the 'environment', they situate genetics in the developmental biology of whole organisms…Read more
  •  104
    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
  • Adaptation and adaptationism
    In 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.
  •  53
    Tracking the shift to 'postgenomics'
    with Karola Stotz and Adam Bostanci
    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.
  •  274
    Evolutionary Psychology: History and Current Status
    In 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.
  •  67
    Review of 'Niche Construction' (review)
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (1): 11-20. 2005.
  •  33
    Developmental Systems and Evolutionary Explanation
    with R. D. Gray
    Journal of Philosophy 91 (6): 277-304. 1994.
  •  43
    Pv~P: Cambridge Journal of Undergraduate Philosophy, Issue 1, 1982.
  •  104
    Biohumanities: Rethinking the relationship between biosciences, philosophy and history of science, and society
    with Karola Stotz and Paul E. Griffiths
    Quarterly 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.
  •  186
    Gut reactions: A perceptual theory of emotion (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (3): 559-567. 2008.
  •  24
    Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution (edited book)
    with Susan Oyama and Russell D. Gray
    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
  •  94
    Molecular and Developmental Biology
    In 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