•  17
    Mutation and evolution: Conceptual possibilities
    with Adi Livnat
    Bioessays 46 (2): 2300025. 2024.
    Although random mutation is central to models of evolutionary change, a lack of clarity remains regarding the conceptual possibilities for thinking about the nature and role of mutation in evolution. We distinguish several claims at the intersection of mutation, evolution, and directionality and then characterize a previously unrecognized category: complex conditioned mutation. Empirical evidence in support of this category suggests that the historically famous fluctuation test should be revisit…Read more
  •  10
    Facts, Objectivity, Failure, and Trust
    Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 10 (1): 78. 2023.
  •  9
    Explaining the Ontogeny of Form: Philosophical Issues
    In Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains section titled: The Old Problem (Agenda) of the Ontogeny of Form Explaining the Ontogeny of Form Epistemological Issues: Representation Epistemological Issues: Explanation Epistemological Issues: Methodology Unexplored Issues and Summary Acknowledgment References.
  •  378
    The allure of perennial questions in biology: temporary excitement or substantive advance? Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9533-5 Authors Alan C. Love, Department of Philosophy, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave. S, Minneapolis, MN 55455-0310, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
  •  31
    Susannah Gibson. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xv+215, index. $34.95 (review)
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 6 (2): 337-340. 2016.
    “To arrange in or analyse into classes according to shared qualities or characteristics; to make a formal or systematic classification” (OED). For many, classification provokes images of dull cataloging and arcane knowledge. However, in the eighteenth century it was neither dull nor arcane and had momentous import for natural philosophers and everyday individuals alike. Susannah Gibson has captured this expertly in her new book, and the subtitle accents the stakes: How Eighteenth-Century Science…Read more
  •  210
    The inapplicability of variations on theory reduction in the context of genetics and their irrelevance to ongoing research has led to an anti-reductionist consensus in philosophy of biology. One response to this situation is to focus on forms of reductive explanation that better correspond to actual scientific reasoning (e.g. part–whole relations). Working from this perspective, we explore three different aspects (intrinsicality, fundamentality, and temporality) that arise from distinct facets o…Read more
  •  62
    Catherine Kendig, ed. Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice. London: Routledge, 2016. Pp. xx+247. $153.00
    with Max Dresow
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1): 217-222. 2018.
    Nobody wants unnatural kinds. Just as we prefer all natural ingredients in our food, so also we prefer natural kinds in our ontology and epistemology. Philosophers contrast natural with merely “conventional” kinds, and scientists advocate for natural rather than artificial classification systems. A central plank of the desired naturalness is “mind independence”—the property of existing independent of human interests and desires. Natural kinds are discovered, not made. They reflect the structure …Read more
  •  27
    The concept of teleonomy has been attracting renewed attention recently. This is based on the idea that teleonomy provides a useful conceptual replacement for teleology, and even that it constitutes an indispensable resource for thinking biologically about purposes. However, both these claims are open to question. We review the history of teleological thinking from Greek antiquity to the modern period to illuminate the tensions and ambiguities that emerged when forms of teleological reasoning in…Read more
  •  4
    Beyond the Meme
    University of Minnesota Press. 2019.
    Contributors: Sabina Leonelli Nancy J. Nersessian Michel Janssen Jacob G. Foster James A. Evans Mark A. Bedau Marshall Abrams Gilbert B. Tostevin Salikoko S. Mufwene Massimo Maiocchi Joseph D. Martin Paul E. Smaldino Claes Andersson Anton Törnberg Petter Törnberg Beyond the Meme assembles interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural evolution, providing a nuanced understanding of it as a process in which dynamic structures interact on different scales of size and time. The volume demonstrates how …Read more
  •  9
    The ongoing debate about a “replication crisis” has put scientific failure in the spotlight, not only in psychological research and the social sciences but also in the life sciences. However, despite this increased salience of failure in research, the concept itself has so far received little attention in the literature (for an exception, see Ref. 1). The lack of a systematic perspective on scientific failure—a daily experience for researchers—hampers our understanding of this complex phenomenon…Read more
  • Evolution evolving? Reflections on big questions
    Journal of Experimental Evolution 332 315-320. 2019.
    John Bonner managed a long and productive career that balanced specialized inquiry into cellular slime molds with general investigations of big questions in evolutionary biology, such as the origins of multicellular development and the evolution of complexity. This commentary engages with his final paper (“The evolution of evolution”), which argues that the evolutionary process has changed through the history of life. In particular, Bonner emphasizes the possibility that natural selection plays …Read more
  •  11
    Free will, determinism, and intuitive judgments about the heritability of behavior
    with E. A. Willoughby, Matthew McGue, W. G. Iacona, Jack Quigley, and James J. Lee
    Behavior Genetics 49 136-153. 2019.
    The fact that genes and environment contribute differentially to variation in human behaviors, traits and attitudes is central to the field of behavior genetics. Perceptions about these differential contributions may affect ideas about human agency. We surveyed two independent samples (N = 301 and N = 740) to assess beliefs about free will, determinism, political orientation, and the relative contribution of genes and environment to 21 human traits. We find that lay estimates of genetic influenc…Read more
  •  18
    Evolvability in the fossil record
    with M. Grabowski, D. Houle, L. H. Liow, A. Porto, M. Tsuboi, K. L. Voje, and G. Hunt
    Paleobiology 48 (2): 186-209. 2022.
    The concept of evolvability—the capacity of a population to produce and maintain evolutionarily relevant variation—has become increasingly prominent in evolutionary biology. Paleontology has a long history of investigating questions of evolvability, but paleontological thinking has tended to neglect recent discussions, because many tools used in the current evolvability literature are challenging to apply to the fossil record. The fundamental difficulty is how to disentangle whether the causes o…Read more
  •  11
    The star-nosed mole is aptly named. Its distinctive snout consists of 22 tendrils ringing a pair of nostrils and, from some angles, the entire setup resembles a misshapen star. The tendrils are fleshy and look a bit like fingers, and, like fingers, they have a certain dexterity. But why? Why does the mole have such a singular appendage as opposed to something more ordinary? What is the function or purpose of this bizarre structure? From the dedicated work of Ken Catania, of Vanderbilt Universit…Read more
  •  9
    Co-option of stress mechanisms in the origin of evolutionary novelties
    with G. P. Wagner
    Evolution 76 394-413. 2022.
    It is widely accepted that stressful conditions can facilitate evolutionary change. The mechanisms elucidated thus far accomplish this with a generic increase in heritable variation that facilitates more rapid adaptive evolution, often via plastic modifications of existing characters. Through scrutiny of different meanings of stress in biological research, and an explicit recognition that stressors must be characterized relative to their effect on capacities for maintaining functional integrity,…Read more
  •  12
    For several decades, a debate has been waged over how to interpret the significance of fossils from the Burgess Shale and Cambrian Explosion. Stephen Jay Gould argued that if the “tape of life” was rerun, then the resulting lineages would differ radically from what we find today, implying that humans are a happy accident of evolution. Simon Conway Morris argued that if the “tape of life” was rerun, the resulting lineages would be similar to what we now observe, implying that intelligence would s…Read more
  •  13
    Reframing research on evolutionary novelty and co-option: Character identity mechanisms versus deep homology
    with James DiFrisco and G. P. Wagner
    Seminars in Cell and Developmental Biology. forthcoming.
    A central topic in research at the intersection of development and evolution is the origin of novel traits. Despite progress on understanding how developmental mechanisms underlie patterns of diversity in the history of life, the problem of novelty continues to challenge researchers. Here we argue that research on evolutionary novelty and the closely associated phenomenon of co-option can be reframed fruitfully by: (1) specifying a conceptual model of mechanisms that underwrite character identit…Read more
  •  17
    The hierarchical basis of serial homology and evolutionary novelty
    with James DiFrisco and G. P. Wagner
    Journal of Morphology 284 (1). 2023.
    Given the pervasiveness of gene sharing in evolution and the extent of homology across the tree of life, why is everything not homologous with everything else? The continuity and overlapping genetic contributions to diverse traits across lineages seem to imply that no discrete determination of homology is possible. Although some argue that the widespread overlap in parts and processes should be acknowledged as “partial” homology, this threatens a broad base of presumed comparative morphological …Read more
  •  7
    Developmental biology
    The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2020.
    Developmental biology is the science that investigates how a variety of interacting processes generate an organism’s heterogeneous shapes, size, and structural features that arise on the trajectory from embryo to adult, or more generally throughout a life cycle. It represents an exemplary area of contemporary experimental biology that focuses on phenomena that have puzzled natural philosophers and scientists for more than two millennia. Philosophers of biology have shown interest in developmenta…Read more
  •  5
    John Tyler Bonner: Remembering a scientific pioneer
    with Ingo Brigandt, L. A. Katz, V. Nanjundiah, S. F. Gilbert, P. R. Grant, B. R. Grant, S. A. Newman, and M. J. West-Eberhard
    Journal of Experimental Evolution (Mol Dev Evol) 332 365-370. 2019.
    Throughout his life, John Tyler Bonner contributed to major transformations in the fields of developmental and evolutionary biology. He pondered the evolution of complexity and the significance of randomness in evolution, and was instrumental in the formation of evolutionary developmental biology. His contributions were vast, ranging from highly technical scientific articles to numerous books written for a broad audience. This historical vignette gathers reflections by several prominent research…Read more
  •  11
    Accounting for the evolutionary origins of morphological novelty is one of the core challenges of contemporary evolutionary biology. A successful explanatory framework requires the integration of different biological disciplines, but the relationships between developmental biology and standard evolutionary biology remain contested. There is also disagreement about how to define the concept of evolutionary novelty. These issues were the subjects of a workshop held in November 2009 at the Universi…Read more
  •  40
    Conceptual analysis aims to uncover the basic criteria of concepts that underwrite categorizing members via the method of cases. However, conceptual analysis has not been very successful and experimental philosophy has increasingly detailed this lack of success. This essay reviews Thinking Off Your Feet: How Empirical Psychology Vindicates Armchair Philosophy by Michael Strevens, which attempts a novel defence of conceptual analysis. It is a strategic intervention that seems to preserve a relati…Read more
  •  68
    A number of biologists and philosophers have noted the diversity of interpretations of evolvability in contemporary evolutionary research. Different clusters of research defined by co-citation patterns or shared methodological orientation sometimes concentrate on distinct conceptions of evolvability. We examine five different activities where the notion of evolvability plays conceptual roles in evolutionary biological investigation: setting a research agenda, characterization, explanation, predi…Read more
  •  54
    A disposition or dispositional property is a capacity, ability, or potential to display or exhibit some outcome. Evolvability refers to a disposition to evolve. This chapter discusses why the dispositional nature of evolvability matters—why philosophical distinctions about dispositions can have scientific implications. To that end, we build a conceptual toolkit with vocabulary from prior philosophical analyses using a different disposition: protein foldability. We then apply this toolkit to addr…Read more
  •  18
    The living fossil concept: reply to Turner
    with Scott Lidgard
    Biology and Philosophy 36 (2): 1-16. 2021.
    Despite the iconic roles of coelacanths, cycads, tadpole shrimps, and tuataras as taxa that demonstrate a pattern of morphological stability over geological time, their status as living fossils is contested. We responded to these controversies with a recommendation to rethink the function of the living fossil concept. Concepts in science do useful work beyond categorizing particular items and we argued that the diverse and sometimes conflicting criteria associated with categorizing items as livi…Read more
  •  11
    The questions raised for the study of marine invertebrate larvae have implications for the evolution of development, the life histories of animals, and life in the sea more generally. These questions began to coalesce in the 19th century around two main factors. The first was the discovery of marine larvae. Through careful observation, investigators detected and confirmed that the development of animals exhibited stages surprisingly different from the previously known adults and adult-like juven…Read more