•  471
    Functional diversity: An epistemic roadmap
    with Christophe Malaterre, Antoine C. Dussault, Sophia Rousseau-Mermans, Gillian Barker, Beatrix E. Beisner, Eric Desjardins, Tanya I. Handa, Steven W. Kembel, Geneviève Lajoie, Virginie Maris, Alison D. Munson, Jay Odenbaugh, Timothée Poisot, B. Jesse Shapiro, and Curtis A. Suttle
    BioScience 10 (69): 800-811. 2019.
    Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, compared to considering only species diversity. But this promise also rests on several conceptual and methodological—i.e. epistemic—assumptions that cut …Read more
  •  326
    Fitness, probability and the principles of natural selection
    with Alexander Rosenberg
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (4): 693-712. 2004.
    We argue that a fashionable interpretation of the theory of natural selection as a claim exclusively about populations is mistaken. The interpretation rests on adopting an analysis of fitness as a probabilistic propensity which cannot be substantiated, draws parallels with thermodynamics which are without foundations, and fails to do justice to the fundamental distinction between drift and selection. This distinction requires a notion of fitness as a pairwise comparison between individuals taken…Read more
  •  294
    Matthen and Ariew’s Obituary for Fitness: Reports of its Death have been Greatly Exaggerated (review)
    with Alexander Rosenberg
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 343-353. 2005.
    Philosophers of biology have been absorbed by the problem of defining evolutionary fitness since Darwin made it central to biological explanation. The apparent problem is obvious. Define fitness as some biologists implicitly do, in terms of actual survival and reproduction, and the principle of natural selection turns into an empty tautology: those organisms which survive and reproduce in larger numbers, survive and reproduce in larger numbers. Accordingly, many writers have sought to provide a …Read more
  •  210
    Darwinism without populations: a more inclusive understanding of the “Survival of the Fittest”
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (1): 106-114. 2011.
    Following Wallace’s suggestion, Darwin framed his theory using Spencer’s expression “survival of the fittest”. Since then, fitness occupies a significant place in the conventional understanding of Darwinism, even though the explicit meaning of the term ‘fitness’ is rarely stated. In this paper I examine some of the different roles that fitness has played in the development of the theory. Whereas the meaning of fitness was originally understood in ecological terms, it took a statistical turn in t…Read more
  •  139
    Causal processes, fitness, and the differential persistence of lineages
    Philosophy of Science 75 (5): 560-570. 2008.
    Ecological fitness has been suggested to provide a unifying definition of fitness. However, a metric for this notion of fitness was in most cases unavailable except by proxy with differential reproductive success. In this article, I show how differential persistence of lineages can be used as a way to assess ecological fitness. This view is inspired by a better understanding of the evolution of some clonal plants, colonial organisms, and ecosystems. Differential persistence shows the limitation …Read more
  •  120
    Épistémologie
    with Alexandre Guay
    In J. Prud’Homme, P. Doray & F. Bouchard (eds.), Sciences, technologies et sociétés de A à Z, Les Presses De L'université De Montréal. pp. 85-87. 2015.
    --
  •  104
    Building upon a non-standard understanding of evolutionary process focusing on variation and persistence, I will argue that communities and ecosystems can evolve by natural selection as emergent individuals. Evolutionary biology has relied ever increasingly on the modeling of population dynamics. Most have taken for granted that we all agree on what is a population. Recent work has reexamined this perceived consensus. I will argue that there are good reasons to restrict the term “population” to …Read more
  •  97
    Given the complexity of most phenomena, we have to delegate much epistemic work to other knowers and we must find reasons for relying on these specific knowers and not others. In our societies, these other knowers are often called experts and we rely on their epistemic authority more and more. For many complex phenomena such as climate change, genetically modified crops, and immunization, the experts that are called upon are scientific experts. For that reason, finding good reasons and justifica…Read more
  •  96
    Symbiosis, lateral function transfer and the (many) saplings of life
    Biology and Philosophy 25 (4): 623-641. 2010.
    One of intuitions driving the acceptance of a neat structured tree of life is the assumption that organisms and the lineages they form have somewhat stable spatial and temporal boundaries. The phenomenon of symbiosis shows us that such ‘fixist’ assumptions does not correspond to how the natural world actually works. The implications of lateral gene transfer (LGT) have been discussed elsewhere; I wish to stress a related point. I will focus on lateral function transfer (LFT) and will argue, using…Read more
  •  93
    We argue that ecology in general and biodiversity and ecosystem function research in particular need an understanding of functions which is both ahistorical and evolutionarily grounded. A natural candidate in this context is Bigelow and Pargetter’s evolutionary forward-looking account which, like the causal role account, assigns functions to parts of integrated systems regardless of their past history, but supplements this with an evolutionary dimension that relates functions to their bearers’ a…Read more
  •  87
    E. O. Wilson (1974: 54) describes the problem that social organisms pose: “On what bases do we distinguish the extremely modified members of an invertebrate colony from the organs of a metazoan animal?” This framing of the issue has inspired many to look more closely at how groups of organisms form and behave as emergent individuals. The possible existence of “superorganisms” test our best intuitions about what can count and act as genuine biological individuals and how we should study them. As …Read more
  •  62
    Fitness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web 17 (8): 457-473. 2011.
  •  48
    Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 4: Evolutionary Indeterminism.
  •  44
    Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature's paradigmatic individuals, science suggests that organisms are only one of the many ways in which the natural world could be organized. When living beings work together--as in ant colonies, beehives, and bacteria-metazoan symbiosis--new collective …Read more
  •  26
    The Epistemic Revolution Induced by Microbiome Studies: An Interdisciplinary View
    with Eric Bapteste, Philippe Gerard, Catherine Larose, Manuel Blouin, Fabrice Not, Liliane Campos, Géraldine Aïdan, M. André Selosse, M. Sarah Adénis, Sébastien Dutreuil, Eduardo Corel, Chloé Vigliotti, Philippe Huneman, F. Joseph Lapointe, and Philippe Lopez
    Biology 10. 2021.
    International audience.
  •  19
    Our intuitive assumption that only organisms are the real individuals in the natural world is at odds with developments in cell biology, ecology, genetics, evolutionary biology, and other fields. Although organisms have served for centuries as nature’s paradigmatic individuals, science suggests that organisms are only one of the many ways in which the natural world could be organized. When living beings work together—as in ant colonies, beehives, and bacteria-metazoan symbiosis—new collective in…Read more
  •  1
    Précis de Philosophie de la biologie [Handbook Philosophy of Biology] (edited book)
    with Eric Bapteste, Thierry Hoquet, Anouk Barberousse, Francesca Merlin, and Vincent Devictor
    Vuibert Press. 2014.
    La philosophie de la biologie est un domaine extrêmement actif de la recherche dans la tradition philosophique anglo-saxonne. Elle réunit philosophes et biologistes autour de la question de la définition des concepts fondamentaux : gène, cellule, organisme, espèce, développement, évolution, adaptation, etc. Ce livre, qui rassemble les contributions d’une trentaine de spécialistes français et étrangers, présente en 24 chapitres l’état de la recherche actuelle dans tous les principaux domaines de …Read more
  • Fitness
    In J. Pfeifer & Sahotra Sarkar (eds.), The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Psychology Press. pp. 310--315. 2006.