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130Instinct in the ‘50s: The British Reception of Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive BehaviorBiology and Philosophy 19 (4): 609-631. 2004.At the beginning of the 1950s most students of animal behavior in Britain saw the instinct concept developed by Konrad Lorenz in the 1930s as the central theoretical construct of the new ethology. In the mid 1950s J.B.S. Haldane made substantial efforts to undermine Lorenz''s status as the founder of the new discipline, challenging his priority on key ethological concepts. Haldane was also critical of Lorenz''s sharp distinction between instinctive and learnt behavior. This was inconsistent with…Read more
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196The fearless vampire conservator: Phillip Kitcher and genetic determinismIn Christoph Rehmann-Sutter & Eva M. Neumann-Held (eds.), Genes in Development: Rethinking the Molecular Paradigm, Duke University Press. pp. 175-198. 2006.Genetic determinism is the idea that many significant human characteristics are rendered inevitable by the presence of certain genes. The psychologist Susan Oyama has famously compared arguing against genetic determinism to battling the undead. Oyama suggests that genetic determinism is inherent in the way we currently represent genes and what genes do. As long as genes are represented as containing information about how the organism will develop, they will continue to be regarded as determining…Read more
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57A balanced intervention ladder: promoting autonomy through public health actionPublic Health 129 (8): 1092--1098. 2015.The widely cited Nuffield Council on Bioethics âIntervention Ladderâ structurally embodies the assumption that personal autonomy is maximized by non-intervention. Consequently, the Intervention Ladder encourages an extreme ânegative libertyâ view of autonomy. Yet there are several alternative accounts of autonomy that are both arguably superior as accounts of autonomy and better suited to the issues facing public health ethics. We propose to replace the one-sided ladder, which has any in…Read more
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40God, Genesis and Germlines (review)Metascience 18 (1): 85-86. 2009.The 23rd volume in the respected series Ô Basic Bioethics’, this book contains seven original and two reprinted essays and a substantial introductory chapter by the editor. The main concern of the editor, and of several contributors, is to dispel the view that organised reli- gion has been consistently hostile to new biomedical developments. Instead, they emphasise that the practice of medicine is endorsed by the Church and by Jewish tradition. In principle, germline mod- ification might count a…Read more
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1Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Behavioral Genetics and Developmental ScienceIn Kathryn Hood, Halpern E., Greenberg Carolyn Tucker, Lerner Gary & M. Richard (eds.), Handbook of Developmental Science, Behavior and Genetics, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 41--60. 2010.
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245Experimental philosophy of sciencePhilosophy Compass 3 (3). 2008.Experimental philosophy of science gathers empirical data on how key scientific concepts are understood by particular scientific communities. In this paper we briefly describe two recent studies in experimental philosophy of biology, one investigating the concept of the gene, the other the concept of innateness. The use of experimental methods reveals facts about these concepts that would not be accessible using the traditional method of intuitions about possible cases. It also contributes to th…Read more
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99Philosophy of Biology in Britain (review)Metascience 16 535-537. 2007.The Royal Institute of Philosophy’s London lecture series for 2004–2005 offers a useful snapshot of the current state of philosophy of biology in Britain. With one or two exceptions the papers are not simply current research articles. The authors map out questions they feel need more research, analyse ongoing debates, or outline the program of their own previously published work. This presumably reflects the fact that the papers are based closely on public lectures. It also makes for surprisingl…Read more
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26Dissecting developmental biologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 53 134-138. 2015.
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Developmental Systems Theory: What Does it Explain, and How Does It Explain It?In Richard M. Lerner & Janette B. Benson (eds.), Embodiment and Epigenesis: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Understanding the Role of Biology Within the Relational Developmental System Part A: Philosophical, Theoretical, and Biological Dimensions, Elsevier. pp. 65--94. 2013.
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3Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously (review)Philosophy in Review 25 (3): 213-215. 2005.
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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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96Current Emotion Research in PhilosophyEmotion Review 5 (2): 215-222. 2013.There remains a division between the work of philosophers who draw on the sciences of the mind to understand emotion and those who see the philosophy of emotion as more self-sufficient. This article examines this methodological division before reviewing some of the debates that have figured in the philosophical literature of the last decade: whether emotion is a single kind of thing, whether there are discrete categories of emotion, and whether emotion is a form of perception. These questions ha…Read more
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263The 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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306Basic 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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241How 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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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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126Replicator 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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660Biological 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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143Evo-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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121Modularity, 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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350Darwinism, 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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64Genes: 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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96The 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.
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 |