Arantza Etxeberria

François Jacob viewed the living world as interconnected by reproductive links, suggesting that biology should not limit itself to studying individual organisms given their ephemeral nature. He believed that reproduction was the cause and purpose of life, asserting that the genetic program played a crucial role in physiology and evolutionary biology, offering a potential unifying framework for biology. While acknowledging the importance of Jacob’s idea of reproduction as a nexus, there are criticisms regarding his reliance on genetic programs. Various approaches to understanding the causes of reproduction—including formal, material, and externally scaffolded factors—are explored and highlight some perspectives that extend beyond the concept of genetic programming. Furthermore, criticisms and objections to the organizational aspects and significance of reproduction in life are addressed. Finally, the relational nature of reproduction is presented as a crucial aspect that necessitates considering collaborative and distributed models.

We analyze the conditions for agency in natural and artificial systems. In the case of basic (natural) autonomous systems, self-construction and activity in the environment are two aspects of the same organization, the distinction between which is entirely conceptual: their sensorimotor activities are metabolic, realized according to the same principles and through the same material transformations as those typical of internal processes (such as energy transduction). The two aspects begin to be distinguishable in a particular evolutionary trend, related to the size increase of some groups of organisms whose adaptive abilities depend on motility. Here a specialized system develops, which, in the sensorimotor aspect, is decoupled from the metabolic basis, although it remains dependent on it in the self-constructive aspect. This decoupling reveals a complexification of the organization. In the last section of the article this approach to natural agency is used to analyze artificial systems by posing two problems: whether it is possible to artificially build an organization similar to the natural, and whether this notion of agency can be grounded on different organizing principles.

The idea of ‘environment’ is reconsidered by comparing a view of it as surroundings with one that sees it as a network of relations through which organisms constitute one another. Drawing on insights from developmental plasticity, symbiosis, epigenetics, ecological networks, and niche construction, this paper argues that organisms shape not only their own conditions of existence but also those of other species, generating multilayered surroundings rather than a singular environment. This framework is applied to anthropogenic evolution, where human activities restructure the developmental, ecological, and evolutionary contexts of countless organisms. By integrating perspectives from the Modern Synthesis, evo-devo, and niche construction, the paper shows that human-driven changes exemplify environmental entanglement and interdependent surroundings, challenging traditional boundaries between organism and environment and motivating a more relational ontology of life

Cultural stigma and medical pathologization have long shaped scientific and social perceptions of menstruation, limiting both research and clinical attention. This paper outlines three major sources of negative perceptions and examines their influence on scientific discourse and cultural attitudes. To counter these biases and misconceptions, evolutionary accounts of menstruation are explored, which emphasize its crucial role in human physiology and reproduction. Two evolutionary approaches to adaptation are compared: one adopts a functionalist stance that assigns specific functions to traits. While this perspective offers a naturalized and positive understanding of menstruation, it remains insufficient to capture the phenomenon’s full complexity. In response, the paper draws on a second approach, organismal and relational, which emphasizes whole-organism adaptation within developmental and ecological contexts. This contrast is also reflected in evolutionary medicine, where organismal approaches support integrative views of disease patterns. Revisiting late 20th-century debates on whether menstruation is adaptive or a byproduct, the paper presents key elements of the alternative organismal-relational perspective. This framework makes it possible to distinguish three broad categories of menstrual pathologies and supports the claim that organismal evolutionary perspectives offer a richer understanding of menstrual health.

The metaphysics of science often contrasts the biological with the social and presents the biological as a domain marked by determinism and essentialism. Although the biology-social construction dichotomy has made it possible to denounce abuses due to harmful categorizations legitimized and based on a false biological essentialism, the metaphysics of social construction runs the risk of trivializing and dematerializing biology. This article seeks to demonstrate that contemporary biology cannot be justified in sustaining deterministic or essentialist discourses because of its complexity, which can be understood in the form of inherent relational properties of living beings. En la metafísica de la ciencia a menudo se contrapone lo biológico con lo social y se presenta lo biológico como un dominio marcado por el determinismo y el esencialismo. Aunque la dicotomía biología-construcción social ha permitido denunciar abusos debidos a categorizaciones dañinas legitimadas en base a un falso esencialismo biológico, la metafísica de la construcción social corre el riesgo de trivializar y desmaterializar la biología. En este artículo se busca demostrar que no puede justificarse que la biología contemporánea sustente discursos deterministas o esencialistas debido a su complejidad, que puede entenderse en forma de propiedades inherentes relacionales de los seres vivos.

El embarazo es un tema relativamente novedoso en los debates filosóficos. Introducido fundamentalmente desde perspectivas feministas, plantea desafíos a las posiciones tradicionales. Consideramos que la exploración de estas cuestiones es especialmente para la filosofía de la biología, pues obliga a reconsiderar la naturaleza de la reproducción, así como la concepción convencional de la biología del embarazo, y a revisar cómo la literatura más reciente sobre su evolución obliga a cambiar el modelo. Este trabajo sostiene que el estudio filosófico del embarazo tiene el potencial de transformar significativamente los debates actuales en la filosofía de la biología. En particular, puede reformular nuestra comprensión de los organismos y sus procesos, afectando conceptos clave como la individualidad, las relaciones inter-organísmicas, la temporalidad, la historicidad y la fisión. Pregnancy is a relatively new topic in philosophical debates. Introduced mainly by feminist perspectives, it raises issues that constitute challenges to traditional positions in philosophy. We examine some of these related to pregnancy, such as the subject and experience, ontologies, the problem of counting entities, and origin or birth. The discussion of these questions is relevant to the philosophy of biology. As such, it forces us to reconsider the problem of reproduction as well as the conventional conception of the biology of pregnancy, and to review how the more recent literature on its evolution forces us to change the model. On this basis, the main argument of this paper is that the question of pregnancy has an enormous potential to influence and suggest changes in current arguments in the philosophy of biology, mainly in the conceptions involved in the understanding of organisms and their processes, such as individuality, relationa-lity and temporality, historicity and fission.

Cultural stigma and medical pathologization have long shaped scientific and social perceptions of menstruation, limiting both research and clinical attention. This paper outlines three major sources of negative perceptions and examines their influence on scientific discourse and cultural attitudes. To counter these biases and misconceptions, evolutionary accounts of menstruation are explored, which emphasize its crucial role in human physiology and reproduction. Two evolutionary approaches to adaptation are compared: one adopts a functionalist stance that assigns specific functions to traits. While this perspective offers a naturalized and positive understanding of menstruation, it remains insufficient to capture the phenomenon’s full complexity. In response, the paper draws on a second approach, organismal and relational, which emphasizes whole-organism adaptation within developmental and ecological contexts. This contrast is also reflected in evolutionary medicine, where organismal approaches support integrative views of disease patterns. Revisiting late 20th-century debates on whether menstruation is adaptive or a byproduct, the paper presents key elements of the alternative organismal-relational perspective. This framework makes it possible to distinguish three broad categories of menstrual pathologies and supports the claim that organismal evolutionary perspectives offer a richer understanding of menstrual health.

The concept of autonomy, as the capacity of a system to govern itself according to its own normativity, is central to modernity. Its theoretical significance spans across various scientific and philosophical fields. Traditionally, however, autonomy has been conceived as arising within the boundaries attributed to the individual in an abstract, internalist and self-sufficient manner. During the last decades, this conception has been challenged at different scales and requires a revision that crosses the boundaries of the individual and takes into account the material embeddedness, open interactivity, and deep interdependency of natural and social phenomena. We propose that autonomous systems are better understood as emerging-from and depending-on different scales of interactivity, collectivity, extensionality, environmentality, and through the lenses of integrativity and sustainability. This updated approach we call Outonomy.

This chapter examines conceptualizations of the environment in biology and addresses the different organism/environment asymmetries appearing in autonomy views and evolutionary theories. It argues for recognizing the environment not merely as an external background, but also as co-constitutive and relational, insofar as life is shaped by epigenetic, exposomic, and interorganismal dynamics. Two perspectives emerge, environments as surroundings and as entanglements, both required for developing an “outonomy” framework that expands biological autonomy theory to include environmental agency and interdependence.

Criticisms of the “container” model of pregnancy picturing female and embryo as separate entities multiply in various philosophical and scientific contexts during the last decades. In this paper, we examine how this model underlies received views of pregnancy in evolutionary biology, in the characterization of the transition from oviparity to viviparity in mammals and in the selectionist explanations of pregnancy as an evolutionary strategy. In contrast, recent evo-devo studies on eutherian reproduction, including the role of inflammation and new maternal cell types, gather evidence in favor of considering pregnancy as an evolved relational novelty. Our thesis is that from this perspective we can identify the emergence of a newhistoricalindividual in evolution. In evo-devo, historical units are conceptualized as evolved entities which fulfill two main criteria, their continuous persistence and their non-exchangeability. As pregnancy can be individuated in this way, we contend that pregnant females are historical individuals. We argue that historical individuality differs from, and coexists with, other views of biological individuality as applied to pregnancy (the physiological, the evolutionary and the ecological one), but brings forward an important new insight which might help dissolve misguided conceptions.

In September 2008, 10 years after the untimely death of Pere Alberch (1954–1998), the 20th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology gathered a group of Pere’s students, col- laborators, and colleagues (Figure 1) to celebrate his contribu- tions to the origins of EvoDevo. Hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) outside Vienna, the group met for two days of discussion. The meeting was organized in tandem with a congress held in May 2008 at the Cavanilles Institute for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (ICBiBE) in Valencia, Spain. The talks at the KLI were equal parts: nostalgic remembrance, excitement over new ways of thinking about old problems, and an unrepressed vitriol against the resurgence of reductionist thinking in EvoDevo. Here we highlight some of the key aspects of Pere’s life and work that informed and infused the talks.

In the evolutionary biology of the Modern Synthesis the study of patterns refers to how to identify and systematise order in lineages, looking for hierarchies or for branching/splitting events in the tree of life, whereas the resulting order is supposed to be due to underlying processes or mechanisms. But patterns and processes play distinct roles in evo-devo: four different views on the role of patterns and processes in descriptions and explanations of development and evolution: A) transformational; B) generative; C) processual; and D) complex are reviewed in this paper. Then, this discussion is related to two issues in evo-devo: homology and variation.

This monographic issue contains a long article bringing together the Lullius Lectures delivered by Professor Sandra Mitchell during the Xth Conference of the Society of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science in Spain, that took place in Salamanca (16-19 November, 2021). The publication of her Lectures is complemented by six original articles that address and examine different aspects of Sandra Mitchell’s contributions to the philosophy of science. In this introduction to the monograph, the editors present the broad outlines of the Lullius Lectures given by Mitchell on the landscape of integrative pluralism. We accompany this overview with a review of some of the fundamental concepts of her philosophy as reviewed and discussed by the original articles included in the monograph on integrative pluralism (Deulofeu & Suarez, 2023; and Van Der Merwe, 2023), emergence (Onnis, 2023), scientific laws (Andersen, 2023; and Plutynski, 2023), and realism (Bertolaso & Sterpetti, 2023).

EI objetivo de este artículo es analizar ciertas críticas a la aplicación de la nocion de informacíon en biología, teniendo en cuenta tanto la historia del concepto como las diferentes posiciones actuales. Creemos que la motivacíon principal de las críticas es negar que los genes sean un factor causal excepcional en el desarrollo, y favorecer la imagen de la vida como un sistema organizado que requiere diferentes recursos. Aunque compartimos el rechazo deI reduccionismo genetico, argumentamos que éste no es atribuible a la analogía informacional y que, por tanto, no es necesario abandonarla completamente.The goal of this article is to analize certain criticisms to the notion of information in biology, taking into account both the history of the concept and some recent positions. We think that the main motivation behind the criticisms is to deny that genes are an exceptional cause in development, and to favor an image of life as an organized system that requires diffirent resources. While we share the rejection of genetic reductionism, we argue that it is not entirely due to the informational analogy and that, therefore, it is not necessary to abandon this analogy.

Jorge Mpodozis presents natural drift as an organism-centered view of biological evolution. Currently, many other research programs in biology and philosophy of biology pursue organismic perspectives in evolution. We consider some of the features appearing in the article in this light in order to highlight what is special in Mpodozis’s proposal. We contend that collaborations among research programs would be valuable and suggest that the major contribution of natural drift for organismic projects lies in its dynamic organizational features.

This paper examines evolutionary ontologies from Darwin’s work to the genesis and maturation of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis, followed by the onset of the more inclusive framework of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. We show how, in an attempt to unify different biological fields under evolutionary principles, the first synthetic theory of evolution progressively disregarded the relevance of organismic-level properties and processes. Yet, failure to reduce the systemic nature and ecological dynamics of the organism (including properties of agency and organization) to that framework raises some important drawbacks. In particular, the two fundamental dimensions of developmental and ecological dynamics were largely neglected. These are the ones that highlight the relational properties of organisms and lead to recent views in, respectively, Evo-Devo and Niche Construction Theory. On this account, we argue that these two aspects illuminate how, while the Modern Synthesis became increasingly reductionist and monistic, the Extended Synthesis is currently being constituted by a pluralistic array of models capable of accommodating different ontological levels, among which that of organisms stands out due to its flexibility and potential inclusiveness.

We examine aspects of Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology, concerning the knowledge of life and its consequences on science and vitalism. His concept of life stems from the idea of a living individual endowed with creative subjectivity and norms, a Kantian view which “disconcerts logic.” In contrast, we examine two naturalistic perspectives in the 1970s exploring the logic of life (JacobJacob, François) and the logic of the living individual (MaturanaMaturana, Humberto and VarelaVarela, Francisco). Canguilhem can be considered to be a precursor of the second view, but there are divergences; for example, unlike them, he does not dismiss vitalism, often referring to it in his work, and even at times describing himself as a vitalist. The reason may lie in their different views of science.

The aim of this article is to examine how the notion of biological autonomy may be linked to other notions of autonomy usual in philosophical discussions. Starting in the 70s, the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed a theory of life as autopoiesis which gives rise to a new conception of autonomy: biological autonomy. The development of this concept implies the recovery of the notion of the organism in a scientific context in which biology and philosophy of biology are focused on the study of the gene by Molecular Biology and evolution by natural selection, by the so called Modern Synthesis. Here we try to show some implications of the concept of life as autonomy for current biology and how this concept can be related to other more usual ones in philosophy