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1109Pluralism 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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1195Formal 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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2003August 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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644Parts 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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38Character Analysis in Cladistics: Abstraction, Reification, and the Search for ObjectivityActa Biotheoretica 57 (1): 307-307. 2009.
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1230Una 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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4825Mapping 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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1151Evolutionary 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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21Review of Stephen Stich /Collected Papers. Volume 2. Knowledge, Rationality, and Morality/ (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 201308. 2013.
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531Editorial: Systematics, Darwinism, and the Philosophy of ScienceActa Biotheoretica 57 (1-2): 1-3. 2009.
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907Review 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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2407Multiculturalism 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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1744Darwin on Variation and HeredityJournal of the History of Biology 33 (3): 425-455. 2000.Darwin's ideas on variation, heredity, and development differ significantly from twentieth-century views. First, Darwin held that environmental changes, acting either on the reproductive organs or the body, were necessary to generate variation. Second, heredity was a developmental, not a transmissional, process; variation was a change in the developmental process of change. An analysis of Darwin's elaboration and modification of these two positions from his early notebooks (1836-1844) to the las…Read more
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665Prediction in selectionist evolutionary theoryPhilosophy of Science 76 (5): 889-901. 2009.Selectionist evolutionary theory has often been faulted for not making novel predictions that are surprising, risky, and correct. I argue that it in fact exhibits the theoretical virtue of predictive capacity in addition to two other virtues: explanatory unification and model fitting. Two case studies show the predictive capacity of selectionist evolutionary theory: parallel evolutionary change in E. coli, and the origin of eukaryotic cells through endosymbiosis.
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1123Consciousness Modeled: Reification and Promising PluralismPensamiento 67 (254): 617-630. 2011.Paradoxically, explorers of the territory of consciousness seem to be studying consciousness out of existence, from inside the field of "consciousness studies". How? Through their love of the phenomenon/process, they have developed powerful single models or lenses through which to understand consciousness. But in doing so, they also seek to destroy the other /equally useful/ lenses. Our opportunity lies in halting the vendettas and cross-speakings/cross-fire. The imploration is to stop the dicho…Read more
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1172Varieties of Modules: Kinds, Levels, Origins, and BehaviorsJournal of Experimental Zoology 291 116-129. 2001.This article began as a review of a conference, organized by Gerhard Schlosser, entitled “Modularity in Development and Evolution.” The conference was held at, and sponsored by, the Hanse Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, Germany in May, 2000. The article subsequently metamorphosed into a literature and concept review as well as an analysis of the differences in current perspectives on modularity. Consequently, I refer to general aspects of the conference but do not review particular presentat…Read more
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740Mathematical Modeling in Biology: Philosophy and PragmaticsFrontiers in Plant Evolution and Development 2012 1-3. 2012.Philosophy can shed light on mathematical modeling and the juxtaposition of modeling and empirical data. This paper explores three philosophical traditions of the structure of scientific theory—Syntactic, Semantic, and Pragmatic—to show that each illuminates mathematical modeling. The Pragmatic View identifies four critical functions of mathematical modeling: (1) unification of both models and data, (2) model fitting to data, (3) mechanism identification accounting for observation, and (4) pre…Read more
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544Estilos de investigación científica, modelos e insectos socialesIn Edna Suárez Díaz (ed.), Variedad Infinita. Ciencia y representación. Un enfoque histórico y filosófico, Unam and Editorial Limusa, Mexico. 2007.
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674Schaffner’s Model of Theory Reduction: Critique and ReconstructionPhilosophy of Science 76 (2): 119-142. 2009.Schaffner’s model of theory reduction has played an important role in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. Here, the model is found to be problematic because of an internal tension. Indeed, standard antireductionist external criticisms concerning reduction functions and laws in biology do not provide a full picture of the limits of Schaffner’s model. However, despite the internal tension, his model usefully highlights the importance of regulative ideals associated with the search for…Read more
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1076Alternative Definitions of Epistasis: Dependence and InteractionTrends in Ecology and Evolution 16 (9): 498-504. 2001.Although epistasis is at the center of the Fisher-Wright debate, biologists not involved in the controversy are often unaware that there are actually two different formal definitions of epistasis. We compare concepts of genetic independence in the two theoretical traditions of evolutionary genetics, population genetics and quantitative genetics, and show how independence of gene action (represented by the multiplicative model of population genetics) can be different from the absence of gene inte…Read more
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50Ontologies and Politics of Biogenomic 'Race'Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 60 (136): 54-80. 2013.
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4663The Genetic Reification of 'Race'? A Story of Two Mathematical MethodsCritical Philosophy of Race 2 (2): 204-223. 2014.Two families of mathematical methods lie at the heart of investigating the hierarchical structure of genetic variation in Homo sapiens: /diversity partitioning/, which assesses genetic variation within and among pre-determined groups, and /clustering analysis/, which simultaneously produces clusters and assigns individuals to these “unsupervised” cluster classifications. While mathematically consistent, these two methodologies are understood by many to ground diametrically opposed claims about t…Read more
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1451Introduction: Genomics and Philosophy of RaceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 52 1-4. 2015.This year’s topic is “Genomics and Philosophy of Race.” Different researchers might work on distinct subsets of the six thematic clusters below, which are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive: (1) Concepts of ‘Race’; (2) Mathematical Modeling of Human History and Population Structure; (3) Data and Technologies of Human Genomics; (4) Biological Reality of Race; (5) Racialized Selves in a Global Context; (6) Pragmatic Consequences of ‘Race Talk’ among Biologists.
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1473Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play (and 1990 movie) /Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead/ is a metatext – as a text, it interprets, builds upon, and refers to another text, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Similarly, David N. Reznick’s /The Origin then and now: An interpretative guide to the Origin of Species/ (Princeton UP, 2010) is also a metatext. In this review, I turn to the history of science to evaluate whether Reznick’s book shares three families of virtues with Stoppard’s play: (i) brevity and precision, …Read more
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256Part-whole scienceSynthese 178 (3): 397-427. 2011.A scientific explanatory project, part-whole explanation, and a kind of science, part-whole science are premised on identifying, investigating, and using parts and wholes. In the biological sciences, mechanistic, structuralist, and historical explanations are part-whole explanations. Each expresses different norms, explananda, and aims. Each is associated with a distinct partitioning frame for abstracting kinds of parts. These three explanatory projects can be complemented in order to provide an…Read more
Santa Cruz, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |