Philosophy of Biology

The paper examines ontological presuppositions and epistemological branches of Peace and Conflict Studies. It describes the narrower use of the concepts ‗ontology‘ and ‗epistemology‘ as sub-branch and branch of philosophy respectively and later focus on their meanings in the context of particular areas of inquiry. It highlights the most basic of the core field definition and distinction issues in Peace and Conflict Studies—what peace is; the nature, causes, outbreak, and dynamics of conflict; and the means for resolving conflict and building sustainable peace. It presents and offers answers to key ontological questions: what exist, in what form do they exist, what are the conditions under which they exist, what is their relationships with other things that are said to exist regarding the field of Peace and Conflict Studies. Furthermore, the paper reviews ways of knowing, understanding, explaining and justifying the ontological presuppositions. Thus it discusses the three epistemological branches of Peace and Conflict Studies proposed by Johan Galtung—empirical peace studies, critical peace studies, and constructive peace studies—and their implications for values, empirical data and theory. In light of this epistemology, the author posits that values, followed by data, take preeminence in the applied Social Sciences field of Peace and Conflict Studies.

Intelligent design theorist William Dembski hasproposed an``explanatory filter''fordistinguishing between events due to chance, lawful regularity or design. We show that ifDembski's filter were adopted as a scientificheuristic, some classical developments inscience would not be rational, and thatDembski's assertion that the filter reliablyidentifies rarefied design requires ignoringthe state of background knowledge. Ifbackground information changes even slightly, the filter's conclusion will vary wildly. Dembski fails to ...

The antinomy of teleological judgment has increasingly been under­ stood as a conflict between regulative principles. But it is not clear why regulative principles can be in conflict at all, since Kant otherwise takes the realization that two conflicting principles are regulative to be sufficient to resolve an antinomy. I argue that in Kant's view regulative principles do not conflict with one another only if they are reducible to reason's interest in systematicity. Given that the prin­ ciples of this antinomy do conflict, they must not be reducible to reason's interest in systematicity. I argue that teleology is thus not reducible to reason's interest because it is fundamentally unlawful. I then use this irreducibility to account for Kant's appeal to the supersensible in this context.

This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with substance ontology. We illustrate the consequences of embracing an ontology of processes in biology by considering some of its implications for physiology, genetics, evolution, and medicine. And we attempt to locate the subsequent chapters of the book in relation to the position we defend.

This paper is a short response to a paper by sociologist Pablo Shyfter, "Functions by Agreement." He argues that philosophers have been short-sighted in thinking about functions because they tend to approach the issue through a set of realistic and naturalistic commitments. He thinks that whether or not a trait has a function, and which function it has, is a thoroughly conventional matter and it depends almost entirely on our research perspectives and goals. I suggest that his view is an extension of Robert Cummins' view and I defend the etiological theory from some of his criticisms.

I claim that explanations of human behaviour by Edward O. Wilsonand Charles Lumsden are constituted by a religiously functioningmetaphysics: emergent materialism. The constitutive effects areidentified using six criteria, beginning with a metaphorical re-description of dissimilarities between levels of organization interms of the lower level, and consist of conceptual andexplanatory reductions (CER). Wilson and Lumsden practice CER,even though CER is not

False beliefs and delusions are usually regarded negatively, especially in
psychology and evolutionary biology. Recently, McKay and Dennett (2009b) have argued that there are ungrounded beliefs which confer benefits on individuals even if they are false. I propose to expand this class of beliefs to include the belief that one has free will, and I will defend the claim that this belief is advantageous, even if it is false. One derives one’s belief in control from one’s experience of control, which is generated by a set of cognitive systems termed “control systems.” While the control systems and the interpretive mechanism are useful in and of themselves, the belief in personal free will is adaptive because it directly leads to fitness-increasing behaviors. As such, we have good reason to regard the belief that one has free will as an adaptive, ungrounded belief. This paper will also suggest that further research on the possible distinction between belief in personal free will and belief in general free will may put us in a better position to understand recent, apparently contradictory data on individuals’ beliefs regarding free will and other related phenomena.

Like other major aspects of sociality, kinship receives distinctive treatments from biologists and anthropologists. For anthropologists, the study of kinship has traditionally been an arena for documenting cultural diversity, and about finding patterns in the midst of, and trajectories through, that diversity. Throughout most of anthropology’s disciplinary history, kinship was thought to hold at least one key to understanding human cultures, both to how those cultures are related to one another and to understanding the structure and function of other large-scale cultural institutions, such as those associated with religion or economic exchange. By contrast, mention kinship to your average biologist and you’ll likely be directed to research focused on Hymnoptera and Termita, and models addressing general evolutionary puzzles—for example, the problem of evolutionary altruism and the phenomenon of reproductive specialization—that have been applied paradigmatically to the social insects, w

Questions about what human nature is and how we can learn about it are difficult to answer. They are difficult not just because humans are complex creatures whose behavior is deeply embedded in the cultural environment that they are a part of, but also because it is not obvious what a concept of human nature is supposed to do or what it is for. The concept of human nature is often used as a normative concept, one that can serve as a guide to action, showing us how we ought to behave. Less commonplace is an approach that seeks a descriptive account of human nature, one that characterizes what humans do and are disposed to do.
I argue in this essay that the normative and descriptive approaches are at odds and that we should not expect a single concept of human nature to play both roles. Furthermore, there are deep problems with normative accounts. They often ignore or contradict the contemporary scientific worldview, and they often merely reflect biases about how we ought to be and what we ought to do. Human nature in this sense becomes politicized and serves in arguments about the moral status of issues like homosexuality, abortion, or biomedical enhancement. Because of the problems inherent in normative notions of human nature, I offer a descriptive alternative. My alternative attempts to align the scientific study of the human with human nature.

Although this is a long review, I do not cover but perhaps two thirds of the contents of The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature, and very briefly indeed. As we can read in the press release, this book draws on two decades of research: it contains data, analyses, research protocols and theoretical background from this huge work. Folkbiology is the interdisciplinary perspective on how do people ordinarily understand the biological world. In The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature we appreciate how far the implications of this field can go. In this overview I choose a geographical approach: we fly from Guatemala, to Wisconsin, then to Middle East. We then land in university classes and end up in school classrooms. This tour gives me the really minimum base for a tentative critical summary of the book. In the tour I include not only findings, but also research methods that I suppose can be stimulating for EE&O readers.

KEY WORDS: folkbiology; folktaxonomy; folkecology; biology education; environment; anthropology; cognitive psychology.

REVIEW OF: The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature, by Scott Atran and Douglas Medin. Cambridge, Massachussets: The MIT Press, 2008. Pp. viii + 333. H/b $ 40.00.

Una “questione degli individui” in biologia può essere articolata secondo le linee distinte da Francisco Suárez nella V delle sue Disputationes Metaphysicae (Disputatio 5. De unitate individuali eiusque principio, 1597). In questo contributo, dopo aver mostrato perché contare gli nidividui in biologia è tanto importante quanto complicato, propongo di distinguere tre modi possibili per contare (tramite i concetti sortali, tramite proprietà estrapolate da organismi-tipo, tramite la teoria dell’evoluzione) e li discuto.

In my talk, I will present key ideas of my four-year research project "Bio-Agency and Natural Freedom" which aims to defeat free will scepticism on a fresh metaphysical basis informed by biology. I will proceed from the diagnosis that a convincing naturalist account of both human free will and human agency is prevented from the outset by the mechanistic-physicalist view of nature espoused by the majority of metaphysicians. More specifically, I will show that mechanistic physicalism, being part of a broadly substance or thing ontological orientation, makes it impossible to explain how human agency fits into the natural world and that, as a consequence of this, we are at a loss with respect to human free will too. In other words, we need to solve the problem of agency first before we can hope to solve the problem of free will, and to this end we need to radically revise our most fundamental ontological commitments. On this basis, I will then propose a therapy that reflects and brings together two recent developments in the philosophy of biology: the increasing interest in, and appreciation of, bio-agency, i.e., the capability of organisms to interact with the environment in an adaptive manner, and the emerging turn towards an understanding of organisms as processes rather than as substances or things. Human as well as non-human agents, I will argue, are biological beings and, i.e., a particular type of process. They are dynamical from tip to toe and endowed with agential capacities as a function of their dynamical organisation. Metaphysically speaking, this means to endorse a process ontology of both biological agents and their actions. I will explain how the resulting bio-process account of agency solves the metaphysical problem of agency, and I conclude by indicating how this may also help us with tackling the problem of free will.

The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has awarded me € 341,176.50 to carry out a four-year ‘Elise Richter’ research project on “Bio-Agency and Natural Freedom” at the University of Vienna, Austria. The project explores the biological roots of free will, advancing a novel and scientifically informed libertarian account of free will (“bio-processual libertarianism”). I collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of scholars, namely Björn Brembs (Biology, Regensburg, Germany), John Dupré (Philosophy of Science, Exeter, UK), Johannes Jaeger (Biology, Vienna, Austria), Josef Quitterer (Metaphysics, Innsbruck, Austria) and Helen Steward (Metaphysics, Leeds, UK). The project will run from September 2019 to August 2023. More details on the research project are to be found on my personal website: https://www.annesophiemeincke.com/philosophy and on the website of the University of Vienna: https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/projects/bioagency-and-natural-freedom(2e075676-75f5-4871-bfd7-fdc2eedd7a29).html.

Scientists use a variety of modes of representation in their work, but philosophers have studied mainly sentences expressing propositions. I ask whether diagrams are mere conveniences in expressing propositions or whether they are a distinct, ineliminable mode of representation in scientific texts. The case of path analysis, a statistical method for quantitatively assessing the relative degree of causal determination of variation as expressed in a causal path diagram, is discussed. Path analysis presents a worst case for arguments against eliminability since path diagrams are usually presumed to be mathematically or logically “equivalent” in an important sense to sets of linear path equations. I argue that path diagrams are strongly generative, i.e., that they add analytical power to path analysis beyond what is supplied by linear equations, and therefore that they are ineliminable in a strong scientific sense.

The chapter provides a brief introductory overview of biosemiotics — the study of meaning-making mechanisms in the living world. Biosemiotics is a study of those types of sign processes that are not based on human language. We describe history of the field both before 1960 (focusing particularly on the work of Jakob von Uexküll), and after this date (in the framework of institutionalized semiotics). In addition to the phenomena and role of meaningful communication (including autocommunication, intra-species and inter-species communication) in the organization and design of organisms and communities, the problems as the semiotic thresholds, models of semiosis, role of semiosis in development and evolution, etc., are dealt from the biosemiotic point of view, i.e. on the basis of semiotic modelling.

Mechanisms are a way of explaining how biological phenomena work rather than why single elements of biological systems are there. However, mechanisms are usually described as physiological entities, and little or no attention is paid to malfunction as an independent theoretical concept. On the other hand, malfunction is the main focus of interest of applied sciences such as medicine. In this paper I argue that malfunctions are parts of pathological mechanisms, which should be considered separate theoretical entities, conceptually having a priority over physiological sequences. While pathological mechanisms can be described in terms of a Cummins-like mechanistic explanation, they show some unnoticed peculiarities when compared to physiological ones. Some features of pathological mechanisms are considered, such as outcome variability, ambivalence and dependence on a range.

BACKGROUND:
In spite of its indusrial usefulness and varied daily uses, lead (Pb) pollution is a widespread ecological problem that faces the humans in the 21th century. Pb was found to produces a wide range of toxic effects including neurotoxicity especially to the developing and young offspring. Recently, the utilization of herbal plants has received a significant attention where there has been rising awareness in their therapeutic use; among these is the garlic.
AIM OF THE WORK:
In light of the above, the current study is designed experimentally in female pregnant rats in order to investigate the beneficial role of garlic extract in the protection from the maternal and fetal cerebellar damage that produced by administration of different doses of Pb during pregnancy.
MATERIALS AND METHODS:
Positively pregnant female rats were divided into five groups; one control group, two Pb-treated groups (exposed to 160 and 320 mg/kg b.wt. of Pb, respectively) and two groups treated with both Pb and garlic (exposed to Pb as previous groups together with 250 mg/ kg b.wt. /day of garlic extract). Treatments started from day 1 till day 20 of pregnancy, where the mother rats of different experimental groups were sacrified to obtain the fetuses. Pb level in the maternal nd fetal blood and cerebellum was estimated by spectrophotometry. Specimens of the cerebellum of different mother and fetal groups were processed to histological and immunohistochemical staining for microscopic examination.
RESULTS:
The results showed that administration of Pb to pregnant rats resulted in a dose-dependent toxicity for both mothers and fetuses in the form of decrease of maternal weight gain, placental and fetal weights, brain weight and diminished fetal growth parameters, which were prominent in rat's group treated with larger dose of Pb. In Pb-treated rats, Pb level in blood and cerebellum was high when compared to the control. The histopathological examination of the cerebellum of treated dams and fetuses showed marked alterations mainly in the form of Purkinje cell degeneration and lack of deveopmet of fetal cerebellum. Co-treatment of garlic extract along with Pb resulted in a significant decrease in Pb levels as compared with those treated with Pb alone with improvement of the histopathological changes.
CONCLUSIONS:
This study was useful in evaluating the hazardous effects of uncontrolled use of Pb in general and in assessing the developmental and neurotoxicity of fetuses due to exposure during pregnancy in particular. Co-administration of garlic has beneficial effects in amelioration of Pb-induced neurotoxicity and reversing the histopathological changes of the cerebellum of mother rats and fetuses.
KEYWORDS:
garlic; glial fibrillary acidic protein; lead; purkinje cells

In Minimal Selfhood and the Origins of Consciousness, R.D.V. Glasgow seeks to ground the logical roots of consciousness in what he has previously called the ‘minimal self’. The idea is that elementary forms of consciousness are logically dependent not, as is commonly assumed, on ownership of an anatomical brain or nervous system, but on the intrinsic reflexivity that defines minimal selfhood. The aim of the book is to trace the logical pathway by which minimal selfhood gives rise to the possible appearance of consciousness. It is argued that in specific circumstances it thus makes sense to ascribe elementary consciousness to certain predatory single-celled organisms such as amoebae and dinoflagellates as well as to some of the simpler animals. Such an argument involves establishing exactly what those specific circumstances are and determining how elementary consciousness differs in nature and scope from its more complex manifestations.

Unity of science was once a very popular idea among both philosophers and scientists. But it has fallen out of fashion, largely because of its association with reductionism and the challenge from multiple realisation. Pluralism and the disunity of science are the new norm, and higher-level natural kinds and special science laws are considered to have an important role in scientific practice. What kind of reductionism does multiple realisability challenge? What does it take to reduce one phenomenon to another? How do we determine which kinds are natural? What is the ontological basis of unity? In this Element, Tuomas Tahko examines these questions from a contemporary perspective, after a historical overview. The upshot is that there is still value in the idea of a unity of science. We can combine a modest sense of unity with pluralism and give an ontological analysis of unity in terms of natural kind monism.

...negli ultimi decenni, all’interno della filosofia della scienza, si è notato un fenomeno che non si concilia facilmente con il ruolo che le viene attribuito. Ci riferiamo alla crescente frammentazione della filosofia della scienza. Le riflessioni sulla conoscenza scientifica in generale non sono certamente scomparse, ma hanno progressivamente ceduto il passo alle cosiddette “filosofie di...” (filosofia della fisica, della medicina, della biologia, dell’economia, ecc.) con una progressiva specializzazione anche nel campo dei filosofi della scienza. E’ un fenomeno che ha degli aspetti positivi, che vanno sicuramente riconosciuti. Tuttavia, si è arrivati ad un punto in cui gli stessi filosofi cominciano ad avere difficoltà a comunicare tra di loro. Anziché superare l’eccessiva (secondo molti) specializzazione dei saperi scientifici, la filosofia della scienza tende a riprodurli al suo interno. In questo modo, viene inevitabilmente meno la funzione di gettare un ponte tra la cultura umanistica e la cultura scientifica intese nel loro senso più generale e onnicomprensivo.
Il seminario vuole fare il punto della situazione invitando circa quindici filosofi della scienza italiani che hanno svolto ricerche specialistiche nei più svariati campi scientifici...