•  8
    Biocivilisations: A New Look at the Science of Life
    Chelsea Green Publishing. 2023.
    Biocivilisations is an important, original rethinking of the mystery of life and its deep uncertainty, exploring the complex civilisations that existed on Earth long before humans. What is life? Many scientists believe life can be reduced to ‘mechanistic’ factors, such as genes and information codes. Yet there is a growing army of scientists, philosophers and artists who reject this view. The gene metaphor is not only too simplistic but deeply misleading. If there is a way to reduce life to a si…Read more
  •  608
    All SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programmes that were conceived and put into practice since the 1960s have been based on anthropocentric ideas concerning the definition of intelligence on a cosmic-wide scale. Brain-based neuronal intelligence, augmented by AI, are currently thought of as being the only form of intelligence that can engage in SETI-type interactions, and this assumption is likely to be connected with the dilemma of the famous Fermi paradox. We argue that high le…Read more
  •  324
    Serial Endosymbiosis Theory, or SET, was conceived and developed by Lynn Margulis, to explain the greatest discontinuity in the history of life, the origin of eukaryotic cells. Some predictions of SET, namely the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts, withstood the test of the most recent evidence from a variety of disciplines including phylogenetics, biochemistry, and cell biology. Even though some other predictions fared less well, SET remains a seminal theory in biology. In this paper, I fo…Read more
  •  1919
    Natural intelligence and anthropic reasoning
    Biosemiotics 13 (tba): 1-23. 2020.
    This paper aims to justify the concept of natural intelligence in the biosemiotic context. I will argue that the process of life is (i) a cognitive/semiotic process and (ii) that organisms, from bacteria to animals, are cognitive or semiotic agents. To justify these arguments, the neural-type intelligence represented by the form of reasoning known as anthropic reasoning will be compared and contrasted with types of intelligence explicated by four disciplines of biology – relational biology, evol…Read more
  •  952
    Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Machinocene: Illusions of instrumental reason
    Filozofija I Društvo 30 (4): 543-570. 2019.
    In their seminal work, Dialectics of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno interpreted capitalism as the irrational monetization of nature. In the present work, I analyze three 21st century concepts, Anthropocene, Capitalocene and Machinocene, in light of Horkheimer and Adorno’s arguments and recent arguments from the philosophy of biology. The analysis reveals a remarkable prescience of the term “instrumental reason”, which is present in each of the three concepts in a profound and cryptic way. …Read more
  •  5
    Numerous studies in microbiology, eukaryotic cell biology, plant biology, biomimetics, synthetic biology, and philosophy of science appear to support the principles of the epistemological theory inspired by evolution, also known as “Evolutionary Epistemology”, or EE. However, that none of the studies acknowledged EE suggests that its principles have not been formulated with sufficient clarity and depth to resonate with the interests of the empirical research community. In this paper I review evi…Read more
  •  4
    Flora or Mona Lisa?
    Philosophy Now 133 18-19. 2019.
  •  12
    The Astrobiological Cat
    Philosophy Now 135 34-37. 2019.
  •  376
    Principles of Information Processing and Natural Learning in Biological Systems
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (2): 227-245. 2021.
    The key assumption behind evolutionary epistemology is that animals are active learners or ‘knowers’. In the present study, I updated the concept of natural learning, developed by Henry Plotkin and John Odling-Smee, by expanding it from the animal-only territory to the biosphere-as-a-whole territory. In the new interpretation of natural learning the concept of biological information, guided by Peter Corning’s concept of “control information”, becomes the ‘glue’ holding the organism–environment i…Read more