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6739Prisoners of Abstraction? The Theory and Measure of Genetic Variation, and the Very Concept of 'Race'Biological Theory 7 (1): 401-412. 2013.It is illegitimate to read any ontology about "race" off of biological theory or data. Indeed, the technical meaning of "genetic variation" is fluid, and there is no single theoretical agreed-upon criterion for defining and distinguishing populations (or groups or clusters) given a particular set of genetic variation data. Thus, by analyzing three formal senses of "genetic variation"—diversity, differentiation, and heterozygosity—we argue that the use of biological theory for making epistemic cl…Read more
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697Ontologies and Politics of Biogenomic 'Race'Theoria. A Journal of Social and Political Theory (South Africa) 60 (3): 54-80. 2013.All eyes are turned towards genomic data and models as the source of knowledge about whether human races exist or not. Will genomic science make the final decision about whether racial realism (e.g., racial population naturalism) or anti-realism (e.g., racial skepticism) is correct? We think not. We believe that the results of even our best and most impressive genomic technologies underdetermine whether bio-genomic races exist, or not. First, different sub-disciplines of biology interested …Read more
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188The Structure of Scientific TheoriesStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.Scientific inquiry has led to immense explanatory and technological successes, partly as a result of the pervasiveness of scientific theories. Relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and plate tectonics were, and continue to be, wildly successful families of theories within physics, biology, and geology. Other powerful theory clusters inhabit comparatively recent disciplines such as cognitive science, climate science, molecular biology, microeconomics, and Geographic Information Science (GIS).…Read more
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1038Fisherian and Wrightian Perspectives in Evolutionary Genetics and Model-Mediated Imposition of Theoretical AssumptionsJournal of Theoretical Biology 240 218-232. 2006.I investigate how theoretical assumptions, pertinent to different perspectives and operative during the modeling process, are central in determining how nature is actually taken to be. I explore two different models by Michael Turelli and Steve Frank of the evolution of parasite-mediated cytoplasmic incompatility, guided, respectively, by Fisherian and Wrightian perspectives. Since the two models can be shown to be commensurable both with respect to mathematics and data, I argue that the differe…Read more
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736On the dangers of making scientific models ontologically independent: Taking Richard Levins' warnings seriouslyBiology and Philosophy 21 (5): 703-724. 2006.Levins and Lewontin have contributed significantly to our philosophical understanding of the structures, processes, and purposes of biological mathematical theorizing and modeling. Here I explore their separate and joint pleas to avoid making abstract and ideal scientific models ontologically independent by confusing or conflating our scientific models and the world. I differentiate two views of theorizing and modeling, orthodox and dialectical, in order to examine Levins and Lewontin’s, among o…Read more
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807An obstacle to unification in biological social science: Formal and compositional styles of scienceGraduate Journal of Social Science 2 (2): 40-100. 2005.I motivate the concept of styles of scientific investigation, and differentiate two styles, formal and compositional. Styles are ways of doing scientific research. Radically different styles exist. I explore the possibility of the unification of biology and social science, as well as the possibility of unifying the two styles I identify. Recent attempts at unifying biology and social science have been premised almost exclusively on the formal style. Through the use of a historical example of def…Read more
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180Character analysis in cladistics: Abstraction, reification, and the search for objectivityActa Biotheoretica 57 (1-2): 129-162. 2009.The dangers of character reification for cladistic inference are explored. The identification and analysis of characters always involves theory-laden abstraction—there is no theory-free “view from nowhere.” Given theory-ladenness, and given a real world with actual objects and processes, how can we separate robustly real biological characters from uncritically reified characters? One way to avoid reification is through the employment of objectivity criteria that give us good methods for identify…Read more
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1701The mind, the lab, and the field: Three kinds of populations in scientific practiceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52 12-21. 2015.Scientists use models to understand the natural world, and it is important not to conflate model and nature. As an illustration, we distinguish three different kinds of populations in studies of ecology and evolution: theoretical, laboratory, and natural populations, exemplified by the work of R.A. Fisher, Thomas Park, and David Lack, respectively. Biologists are rightly concerned with all three types of populations. We examine the interplay between these different kinds of populations, and t…Read more
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885Review of Michael Ruse, The Philosophy of Human Evolution. 2012. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978052113372. $26.99 Paperback. (review)Evolution 68 (3): 920-21. 2013.
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846Evo-Devo as a Trading ZoneIn Alan Love (ed.), Conceptual Change in Biology: Scientific and Philosophical Perspectives on Evolution and Development, Springer Verlag, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 2015.Evo-Devo exhibits a plurality of scientific “cultures” of practice and theory. When are the cultures acting—individually or collectively—in ways that actually move research forward, empirically, theoretically, and ethically? When do they become imperialistic, in the sense of excluding and subordinating other cultures? This chapter identifies six cultures – three /styles/ (mathematical modeling, mechanism, and history) and three /paradigms/ (adaptationism, structuralism, and cladism). The key ass…Read more
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2205Interweaving categories: Styles, paradigms, and modelsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 43 (4): 628-639. 2012.Analytical categories of scientific cultures have typically been used both exclusively and universally. For instance, when styles of scientific research are employed in attempts to understand and narrate science, styles alone are usually employed. This article is a thought experiment in interweaving categories. What would happen if rather than employ a single category, we instead investigated several categories simultaneously? What would we learn about the practices and theories, the agents and …Read more
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2953Realism, Antirealism, and Conventionalism about RacePhilosophy of Science 81 (5): 1039-1052. 2014.This paper distinguishes three concepts of "race": bio-genomic cluster/race, biological race, and social race. We map out realism, antirealism, and conventionalism about each of these, in three important historical episodes: Frank Livingstone and Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1962, A.W.F. Edwards' 2003 response to Lewontin (1972), and contemporary discourse. Semantics is especially crucial to the first episode, while normativity is central to the second. Upon inspection, each episode also reveals a v…Read more
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1120Pluralism in evolutionary controversies: styles and averaging strategies in hierarchical selection theoriesBiology and Philosophy 28 (6): 957-979. 2013.Two controversies exist regarding the appropriate characterization of hierarchical and adaptive evolution in natural populations. In biology, there is the Wright-Fisher controversy over the relative roles of random genetic drift, natural selection, population structure, and interdemic selection in adaptive evolution begun by Sewall Wright and Ronald Aylmer Fisher. There is also the Units of Selection debate, spanning both the biological and the philosophical literature and including the impassio…Read more
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1202Formal Biology and Compositional Biology as Two Kinds of Biological TheorizingDissertation, Indiana University, HPS. 2003.There are two fundamentally distinct kinds of biological theorizing. "Formal biology" focuses on the relations, captured in formal laws, among mathematically abstracted properties of abstract objects. Population genetics and theoretical mathematical ecology, which are cases of formal biology, thus share methods and goals with theoretical physics. "Compositional biology," on the other hand, is concerned with articulating the concrete structure, mechanisms, and function, through developmental and …Read more
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651Parts and theories in compositional biologyBiology and Philosophy 21 (4): 471-499. 2006.I analyze the importance of parts in the style of biological theorizing that I call compositional biology. I do this by investigating various aspects, including partitioning frames and explanatory accounts, of the theoretical perspectives that fall under and are guided by compositional biology. I ground this general examination in a comparative analysis of three different disciplines with their associated compositional theoretical perspectives: comparative morphology, functional morphology, and …Read more
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2021August Weismann on Germ-Plasm VariationJournal of the History of Biology 34 (3): 517-555. 2001.August Weismann is famous for having argued against the inheritance of acquired characters. However, an analysis of his work indicates that Weismann always held that changes in external conditions, acting during development, were the necessary causes of variation in the hereditary material. For much of his career he held that acquired germ-plasm variation was inherited. An irony, which is in tension with much of the standard twentieth-century history of biology, thus exists – Weismann was not a …Read more
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39Character Analysis in Cladistics: Abstraction, Reification, and the Search for ObjectivityActa Biotheoretica 57 (1): 307-307. 2009.
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1238Una Revisión Crítica de los Estilos de Investigación Científica: Teoría, Práctica y EstilosIn Sergio Martínez, Xiang Huang & Godfrey Guillaumin (eds.), Historia, prácticas y estilos en la filosofía de la ciencia. Hacia una epistemología plural, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. 2011.
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4846Mapping Kinds in GIS and CartographyIn Catherine Kendig (ed.), Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice, Routledge. pp. 197-216. forthcoming.Geographic Information Science (GIS) is an interdisciplinary science aiming to detect and visually represent patterns in spatial data. GIS is used by businesses to determine where to open new stores and by conservation biologists to identify field study locations with relatively little anthropogenic influence. Products of GIS include topographic and thematic maps of the Earth’s surface, climate maps, and spatially referenced demographic graphs and charts. In addition to its social, political,…Read more
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21Review of Stephen Stich /Collected Papers. Volume 2. Knowledge, Rationality, and Morality/ (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201308. 2013.
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1163Evolutionary Developmental Biology Meets Levels of Selection: Modular Integration or Competition, or Both?In Werner Callebaut & Diego Rasskin-Gutman (eds.), Modularity. Understanding the Development and Evolution of Natural Complex Systems, Mit Press. 2005.
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537Editorial: Systematics, Darwinism, and the Philosophy of ScienceActa Biotheoretica 57 (1-2): 1-3. 2009.
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919Review of Space, Time, and Number in the Brain (review)Mathematical Intelligencer 37 (2): 93-98. 2015.Albert Einstein once made the following remark about "the world of our sense experiences": "the fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." (1936, p. 351) A few decades later, another physicist, Eugene Wigner, wondered about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences, concluding his classic article thus: "the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor des…Read more
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2421Multiculturalism requires sustained and serious philosophical reflection, which in turn requires public outreach and communication. This piece briefly outlines concerns raised by the philosophy of multiculturalism and, conversely, multiculturalism in philosophy, which ultimately force us to reconsider the philosopher’s own role and responsibility. I conclude with a provocative suggestion of philosophy as /public diplomacy/. (As this is intended to be a piece for a general audience, secondary lit…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |