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22Chance in the Modern SynthesisIn Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence (eds.), Chance in Evolution, University of Chicago. 2016.The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology is taken to be that period in which a consensus developed among biologists about the major causes of evolution, a consensus that informed research in evolutionary biology for at least a half century. As such, it is a particularly fruitful period to consider when reflecting on the meaning and role of chance in evolutionary explanation. Biologists of this period make reference to “chance” and loose cognates of “chance,” such as: “random,” “contingent,” …Read more
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51Reuniting philosophy and science to advance cancer researchBiological Reviews 98 (5): 1668-1686. 2023.Cancers rely on multiple, heterogeneous processes at different scales, pertaining to many biomedical fields. Therefore, understanding cancer is necessarily an interdisciplinary task that requires placing specialised experimental and clinical research into a broader conceptual, theoretical, and methodological framework. Without such a framework, oncology will collect piecemeal results, with scant dialogue between the different scientific communities studying cancer. We argue that one important wa…Read more
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8Sometimes you ride the Pegasus, sometimes you take the road: Mitchell on laws in biologyTheoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 38 (3): 373-388. 2024.Mitchell’s philosophical contributions are part of an ongoing conversation among philosophers and scientists about laws and unification in biology, going back at least to Darwin. This article situates Mitchell in this conversation, explains why and how she has correctly guided us away from false idols, and engages several difficult questions she leaves open. I argue that there are different epistemic roles laws (or models describing lawlike regularities) play in biological inquiry. First, they p…Read more
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309Four Ways of Going "Right" Functions in Mental DisorderPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 30 (2): 181-191. 2023.Abstract:In this paper, I distinguish four ways in which aspects or features of mental illness may be said to be functional. I contend that discussion of teleological perspectives on mental illness has unfortunately tended to conflate these senses. The latter two senses have played important practical roles both in predicting and explaining patterns of behavior, cognition, and affective response, atnd relatedly, in developing successful interventions. I further argue that functional talk in this…Read more
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8CooperationIn Sahorta Sarkar & Anya Plutynski (eds.), Companion to the Philosophy of Biology, Blackwell. pp. 415-430. 2008.
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19Going big by going small: Trade-offs in microbiome explanations of cancerStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 97 (C): 101-110. 2023.
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13Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer, by Vinay Prasad, Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 31 (2): 275-278. 2022.
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106Clinical Decisions Using AI Must Consider Patient ValuesNature Medicine 28. 2022.Built-in decision thresholds for AI diagnostics are ethically problematic, as patients may differ in their attitudes about the risk of false-positive and false-negative results, which will require that clinicians assess patient values.
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76How is cancer complex?European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 1-30. 2021.Cancer is typically spoken of as a “complex” disease. But, in what sense are cancers “complex”? Is there one sense, or several? What implications does this complexity have – both for how we study, and how we intervene upon cancers? The aim of this paper is first, to clarify the variety of senses in which cancer is spoken of as "complex" in the scientific literature, and second, to discover what explanatory and predictive roles such features play.
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17Putting biodiversity conservation into practice: The importance of local culture, economy, governance, and community valuesIn Justin Garson, Anya Plutynski & Sahotra Sarkar (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Biodiversity, Routledge. pp. 281-294. 2017.Biodiversity conservation as a practical discipline has been significantly transformed over the past twenty years. Given the extent to which humans influence not only biodiversity loss, but also geographical distribution, and ecological dynamics, there has been a shift in the study of conservation as a scientific discipline from a concern strictly with ecological and biological diversity measures to an interdisciplinary field, drawing upon the human sciences. We draw upon several case studies to…Read more
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19Explaining Cancer: Finding Order in DisorderOxford University Press. 2018.This book explores a variety of conceptual and methodological questions about cancer and cancer research: Is cancer one disease, or many? If many, how many exactly? How is cancer classified? What does it mean, exactly, to say that cancer is “genetic,” or “familial”? What exactly are the causes of cancer, and how do scientists come to know about them? When do we have good reason to believe that this or that is a risk factor for cancer? How is cancer a product or byproduct of multilevel evolution…Read more
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61Safe, or Sorry? Cancer Screening and Inductive RiskIn Kevin Christopher Elliott & Ted Richards (eds.), Exploring Inductive Risk: Case Studies of Values in Science, Oup Usa. pp. 149-169. 2017.The focus of this chapter will be on the epistemic and normative questions at issue in debates about cancer screening, with a special focus on mammography as a case study. Such questions include: How do we know who needs to be screened? What are the benefits and harms of cancer screening, and what is the quality of evidence for each? How ought we to measure and compare these benefits and harms? What are the sources of uncertainty about our estimates of benefit and harm? Why are such issues so co…Read more
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36CancerStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2019.Cancer—and scientific research on cancer—raises a variety of compelling philosophical questions. This entry will focus on four topics, which philosophers of science have begun to explore and debate. First, scientific classifications of cancer have as yet failed to yield a unified taxonomy. There is a diversity of classificatory schemes for cancer, and while some are hierarchical, others appear to be “cross-cutting,” or non-nested. This literature thus raises a variety of questions about the natu…Read more
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The Origins of “Dynamic Reciprocity”: Mina Bissell’s Expansive Picture of Cancer CausationIn Oren Harman & Michael R. Dietrich (eds.), Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, University of Chicago Press. pp. 96-. 2018.This chapter discusses Mina Bissell's pathbreaking research on cancer. Along with her colleagues and students, Bissell focused her attention on how the causal pathways regulating cell behavior were a two way street. Healthy cells’ and cancer cells’ behavior are both highly context-dependent. The pathway to this insight was not direct. Bissell’s work began with research into cellular metabolism. As a result of this early research, she found that cells can “change their fate” – revert to, or activ…Read more
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59Ethical and Scientific Issues in Cancer Screening and PreventionJournal of Medicine and Philosophy 37 (3): 310-323. 2012.November 2009’s announcement of the USPSTF’s recommendations for screening for breast cancer raised a firestorm of objections. Chief among them were that the panel had insufficiently valued patients’ lives or allowed cost considerations to influence recommendations. The publicity about the recommendations, however, often either simplified the actual content of the recommendations or bypassed significant methodological issues, which a philosophical examination of both the science behind screening…Read more
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111The evolution of failure: explaining cancer as an evolutionary processBiology and Philosophy 31 (1): 39-57. 2016.One of the major developments in cancer research in recent years has been the construction of models that treat cancer as a cellular population subject to natural selection. We expand on this idea, drawing upon multilevel selection theory. Cancer is best understood in our view from a multilevel perspective, as both a by-product of selection at other levels of organization, and as subject to selection at several levels of organization. Cancer is a by-product in two senses. First, cancer cells co-…Read more
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78Is cancer a matter of luck?Biology and Philosophy 36 (1): 1-28. 2021.In 2015, Tomasetti and Vogelstein published a paper in Science containing the following provocative statement: “… only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to “bad luck,” that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells.” The paper—and perhaps especially this rather coy reference to “bad luck”—became a flash point for a series of letters and revie…Read more
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12Book ForumStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 84 101326. 2020.
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12A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology (edited book)Wiley/Blackwell. 2008.Comprised of essays by top scholars in the field, this volume offers detailed overviews of philosophical issues raised by biology. Brings together a team of eminent scholars to explore the philosophical issues raised by biology Addresses traditional and emerging topics, spanning molecular biology and genetics, evolution, developmental biology, immunology, ecology, mind and behaviour, neuroscience, and experimentation Begins with a thorough introduction to the field Goes beyond previous treatment…Read more
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31Ecology and the EnvironmentIn Michael Ruse (ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press. 2008.Ecology is the study of the interactions of organisms and their environments. The methods of ecology fall roughly into three categories: descriptive surveys of patterns of species and resource distribution and abundance, theoretical modeling, and experimental manipulations. Ecological systems are “open” systems, and patterns and processes are products of a huge number of interacting forces. Ecology and the environmental sciences have made enormous advances since the mid-twentieth century in the …Read more
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51Cancer Modeling: the Advantages and Limitations of Multiple PerspectivesIn Michela Massimi & Casey D. McCoy (eds.), Understanding Perspectivism (Open Access): Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects, Routledge. 2020.Cancer is a paradigmatic case of a complex causal process; causes of cancer operate at a variety of temporal and spatial scales, and the respects in which these causes act and interact are diverse. There are, for instance, temporal order effects, organizational effects, structural effects, and dynamic relationships between causes operating at different temporal and spatial scales. Because of this complexity, models of cancer initiation and progression often involve deliberate choices to focus on…Read more
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29Evolutionary Perspectives on Molecular Medicine: Cancer from an Evolutionary PerspectiveIn Giovanni Boniolo & Marco J. Nathan (eds.), Philosophy of Molecular Medicine: Foundational Issues in Research and Practice, Routledge. 2016.There is an active research program currently underway, which treats cancer progression as an evolutionary process. This contribution investigates the ways that cancer progression is like and unlike evolution in other contexts. The aim is to take a multi-level perspective on cancer, investigating the levels at which selection may be acting, the unit or target of selection, the relative roles of selection and drift, and the idea that cancer progression may be a by-product of selection at other le…Read more
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39The Modern SynthesisIn Sahotra Sarkar & Jessica Pfeiffer (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Science, . 2006.Huxley coined the phrase, the “evolutionary synthesis” to refer to the acceptance by a vast majority of biologists in the mid-20th Century of a “synthetic” view of evolution. According to this view, natural selection acting on minor hereditary variation was the primary cause of both adaptive change within populations and major changes, such as speciation and the evolution of higher taxa, such as families and genera. This was, roughly, a synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolutionary …Read more
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27Speciation Post Synthesis: 1960–2000Journal of the History of Biology 52 (4): 569-596. 2019.Speciation—the origin of new species—has been one of the most active areas of research in evolutionary biology, both during, and since the Modern Synthesis. While the Modern Synthesis certainly shaped research on speciation in significant ways, providing a core framework, and set of categories and methods to work with, the history of work on speciation since the mid-twentieth century is a history of divergence and diversification. This piece traces this divergence, through both theoretical advan…Read more
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48Science at the Frontiers: Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of ScienceLexington Books. 2011.Compiled by an archaeologist and philosopher of science, Science at the Frontiers: Perspectives on the History and Philosophy of Science supplements current literature in the history and philosophy of science with essays approaching the traditional problems of the field from new perspectives and highlighting disciplines usually overlooked by the canon. William H. Krieger brings together scientists from a number of disciplines to answer these questions and more in a volume appropriate for both st…Read more
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70What and How Do Cancer Systems Biologists Explain?Philosophy of Science 85 (5): 942-954. 2018.In this article, we argue, first, that there are very different research projects that fall under the heading of “systems biology of cancer.” While they share some general features, they differ in their aims and theoretical commitments. Second, we argue that some explanations in systems biology of cancer are concerned with properties of signaling networks and how they may play an important causal role in patterns of vulnerability to cancer. Further, some systems biological explanations are compe…Read more
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322Chance in the Modern SynthesisIn Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence (eds.), Chance in Evolution, University of Chicago. pp. 76-102. 2016.The modern synthesis in evolutionary biology is taken to be that period in which a consensus developed among biologists about the major causes of evolution, a consensus that informed research in evolutionary biology for at least a half century. As such, it is a particularly fruitful period to consider when reflecting on the meaning and role of chance in evolutionary explanation. Biologists of this period make reference to “chance” and loose cognates of “chance,” such as: “random,” “contingent,” …Read more
St. Louis, Missouri, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Philosophy of Medicine, Misc |