Walter Veit

Synthetic meat made from animal cells will transform how we eat. It will reduce suffering by eliminating the need to raise and slaughter animals. But it will also have big public health benefits if it becomes widely consumed. In this paper, we discuss how “clean meat” can reduce the risks associated with intensive animal farming, including antibiotic resistance, environmental pollution, and zoonotic viral diseases like influenza and coronavirus. Since the most common objection to clean meat is that some people find it “disgusting” or “unnatural,” we explore the psychology of disgust to find possible counter-measures. We argue that the public health benefits of clean meat give us strong moral reasons to promote its development and consumption in a way that the public is likely to support. We end by depicting the change from farmed animals to clean meat as a collective action problem and suggest that social norms rather than coercive laws should be employed to solve the problem.

Interdisciplinary research is becoming more and more popular. Many funding bodies encourage interdisciplinarity, as a criterion that promises scientific progress. Traditionally this has been linked to the idea of integrating or unifying disciplines. Using evolutionary game theory as a case study, Till Grüne-Yanoff (2016) argued that there is no such necessary link between interdisciplinary success and integration. Contrary to this, this paper argues that evolutionary game theory is a genuine case of successful integration between economics and biology, shedding lights on the many dimensions along which integration can take place.

In this article, I respond to commentaries by Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg and by David Spurrett on my target article “Complexity and the Evolution of Consciousness,” in which I have offered the first extended articulation of my pathological complexity thesis as a hypothesis about the evolutionary origins and function of consciousness. My reply is structured by the arguments raised rather than by author and will offer a more detailed explication of some aspects of the pathological complexity thesis.

This paper aims to articulate an anarchist challenge to a widespread assumption in the rapidly growing philosophical literature on models, modeling-practices, and model-based science. I argue that the various entities and practices called “models” and “modeling-practices” are too heterogeneous, too context-sensitive, and serve too many scientific purposes and roles, as to constitute unified scientific phenomena that would allow for useful epistemic and ontologies analyses. Just like Feyerabend once argued that there are no general useful inferences to be drawn about the method of “science”, I argue that the same lesson will apply to “model-based science”, hence calling my view model anarchism.