•  127
    Goal directedness and the field concept
    Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    A long-standing problem in understanding goal-directed systems has been the insufficiency of mechanistic explanations to make sense of them. This paper offers a solution to this problem. It begins by observing the limitations of mechanistic decompositions when it comes to understanding physical fields. We argue that introducing the field concept, as it has been developed in field theory, alongside mechanisms is able to provide an account of goal directedness in the sciences.
  •  13
    Evolutionary trends and goal directedness
    Synthese 201 (5): 1-26. 2023.
    The conventional wisdom declares that evolution is not goal directed, that teleological considerations play no part in our understanding of evolutionary trends. Here I argue that, to the contrary, under a current view of teleology, field theory, most evolutionary trends would have to be considered goal directed to some degree. Further, this view is consistent with a modern scientific outlook, and more particularly with evolutionary theory today. Field theory argues that goal directedness is prod…Read more
  •  12
    Synergies Among Behaviors Drive the Discovery of Productive Interactions
    with Jake P. Keenan
    Biological Theory 18 (1): 43-62. 2023.
    When behaviors assemble into combinations, then synergies have a central role in the discovery of productive patterns of behavior. In our view—what we call the Synergy Emergence Principle (SEP)—synergies are dynamic attractors, drawing interactions toward greater returns as they happen, in the moment. This Principle offers an alternative to the two conventionally acknowledged routes to discovery: directed problem solving, involving forethought and planning; and the complete randomness of trial a…Read more
  •  249
    Resolving teleology's false dilemma
    Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 139 (4): 415-432. 2023.
    This paper argues that the account of teleology previously proposed by the authors is consistent with the physical determinism that is implicit across many of the sciences. We suggest that much of the current aversion to teleological thinking found in the sciences is rooted in debates that can be traced back to ancient natural science, which pitted mechanistic and deterministic theories against teleological ones. These debates saw a deterministic world as one where freedom and agency is impossib…Read more
  •  360
    An externalist teleology
    Synthese 199 (3-4): 8755-8780. 2021.
    Teleology has a complicated history in the biological sciences. Some have argued that Darwin’s theory has allowed biology to purge itself of teleological explanations. Others have been content to retain teleology and to treat it as metaphorical, or have sought to replace it with less problematic notions like teleonomy. And still others have tried to naturalize it in a way that distances it from the vitalism of the nineteenth century, focusing on the role that function plays in teleological expla…Read more
  •  17
    The Missing Two-Thirds of Evolutionary Theory
    Cambridge University Press. 2020.
    In this Element, we extend our earlier treatment of biology's first law. The law says that in any evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, there is a tendency for diversity and complexity to increase. The law plays the same role in biology that Newton's first law plays in physics, explaining what biological systems are expected to do when no forces act, in other words, what happens when nothing happens. Here we offer a deeper explanation of certain features of the law, devel…Read more
  •  43
    Machine wanting
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4b): 679-687. 2013.
    Wants, preferences, and cares are physical things or events, not ideas or propositions, and therefore no chain of pure logic can conclude with a want, preference, or care. It follows that no pure-logic machine will ever want, prefer, or care. And its behavior will never be driven in the way that deliberate human behavior is driven, in other words, it will not be motivated or goal directed. Therefore, if we want to simulate human-style interactions with the world, we will need to first understand…Read more
  •  16
    1 The Zero-Force Evolutionary Law 2 Randomness, Hierarchy, and Constraint 3 Diversity 4 Complexity 5 Evidence, Predictions, and Tests 6 Philosophical Foundations 7 Implications.
  •  31
    Freedom and purpose in biology
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 58. 2016.
  •  15
    Philosophy of Biology: A Contemporary Introduction
    with Alexander Rosenberg
    Routledge. 2007.
    Is life a purely physical process? What is human nature? Which of our traits is essential to us? In this volume, Daniel McShea and Alex Rosenberg – a biologist and a philosopher, respectively – join forces to create a new gateway to the philosophy of biology; making the major issues accessible and relevant to biologists and philosophers alike. Exploring concepts such as supervenience; the controversies about genocentrism and genetic determinism; and the debate about major transitions central to …Read more
  •  38
    What would a Grand Unified Theory of big-scale evolution look like? Here is one answer. It would unify the various trends that have been documented and suspected, the features of life that have been said to increase over its history—body size, fitness, intelligence, versatility, evolvability, energy intensiveness, energy rate density, and complexity-in-the-sense-of-part-types, and complexity-in-the-sense-of-hierarchy. It would show us how these putative trends are related to each other, how they…Read more
  •  12
    Drosophila Mutants Suggest a Strong Drive Toward Complexity in Evolution
    Evolution and Development 15 (1): 53-62. 2013.
    The view that complexity increases in evolution is uncontroversial, yet little is known about the possible causes of such a trend. One hypothesis, the Zero Force Evolutionary Law (ZFEL), predicts a strong drive toward complexity, although such a tendency can be overwhelmed by selection and constraints. In the absence of strong opposition, heritable variation accumulates and complexity increases. In order to investigate this claim, we evaluate the gross morphological complexity of laboratory muta…Read more
  • What is a part
    with Edward P. Venit
    In G. P. Wagner (ed.), The Character Concept in Evolutionary Biology, Academic Press. pp. 259--284. 2001.
  •  13
    Biology and value theory
    with Robert McShea
    In Jane Maienschein & Michael Ruse (eds.), Biology and the foundation of ethics, Cambridge University Press. pp. 307--327. 1999.
  •  22
    A post‐modern vision of artificial life (review)
    Complexity 1 (5): 36-38. 1996.
  •  62
    Four solutions for four puzzles
    Biology and Philosophy 27 (5): 737-744. 2012.
    Barrett et al. present four puzzles for the ZFEL-view of evolution that we present in our 2010 book, Biology’s First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems. Our intent in writing this book was to present a radically different way to think about evolution. To the extent that it really is radical, it will be easy to misunderstand. We think Barrett et al. have misunderstood several crucial points and so we welcome the opportunity to clarify.
  •  120
    Upper-directed systems: a new approach to teleology in biology
    Biology and Philosophy 27 (5): 663-684. 2012.
    How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence and their plasticity? Here I argue that all seemingly goal-directed systems—e.g., a food-seeking organism, human-made devices like thermostats and torpedoes, biological development, human goal seeking, and the evolutionary process itself—share a common organization. Specifically, they consist of an entity that moves within a larger containing structure, one that directs its behavior in a general way without …Read more
  •  20
    Gene‐talk talk about sociobiology
    Social Epistemology 6 (2). 1992.
    No abstract
  •  99
    Complexity and evolution: What everybody knows
    Biology and Philosophy 6 (3): 303-324. 1991.
    The consensus among evolutionists seems to be that the morphological complexity of organisms increases in evolution, although almost no empirical evidence for such a trend exists. Most studies of complexity have been theoretical, and the few empirical studies have not, with the exception of certain recent ones, been especially rigorous; reviews are presented of both the theoretical and empirical literature. The paucity of evidence raises the question of what sustains the consensus, and a number …Read more
  •  48
    Functional complexity in organisms: Parts as proxies (review)
    Biology and Philosophy 15 (5): 641-668. 2000.
    The functional complexity, or the number of functions, of organisms hasfigured prominently in certain theoretical and empirical work inevolutionary biology. Large-scale trends in functional complexity andcorrelations between functional complexity and other variables, such assize, have been proposed. However, the notion of number of functions hasalso been operationally intractable, in that no method has been developedfor counting functions in an organism in a systematic and reliable way.Thus, stu…Read more
  •  94
    A revised darwinism
    Biology and Philosophy 19 (1): 45-53. 2004.