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  1. Contrast Classes and Agreement in Climate Modeling.Corey Dethier - 2024 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (14):1-19.
    In an influential paper, Wendy Parker argues that agreement across climate models isn’t a reliable marker of confirmation in the context of cutting-edge climate science. In this paper, I argue that while Parker’s conclusion is generally correct, there is an important class of exceptions. Broadly speaking, agreement is not a reliable marker of confirmation when the hypotheses under consideration are mutually consistent—when, e.g., we’re concerned with overlapping ranges. Since many cutting-edge questions in climate modeling require making distinctions between mutually consistent (...)
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  • Empirical adaptationism revisited: is it testable and is it worth testing?Mingjun Zhang - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (6):1-23.
    Empirical adaptationism is often said to be an empirical claim about nature, which concerns the overall relative causal importance of natural selection in evolution compared with other evolutionary factors. Philosophers and biologists who have tried to clarify the meaning of empirical adaptationism usually share, explicitly or implicitly, two assumptions: (1) Empirical adaptationism is an empirical claim that is scientifically testable; (2) testing empirical adaptationism is scientifically valuable. In this article, I challenge these two assumptions and argue that both are unwarranted (...)
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  • The Aims and Structures of Ecological Research Programs.William Bausman - 2019 - Philosophical Topics 47 (1):1-20.
    Neutral Theory is controversial in ecology. Ecologists and philosophers have diagnosed the source of the controversy as: its false assumption that individuals in different species within the same trophic level are ecologically equivalent, its conflict with Competition Theory and the adaptation of species, its role as a null hypothesis, and as a Lakatosian research programme. In this paper, I show why we should instead understand the conflict at the level of research programs which involve more than theory. The Neutralist and (...)
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  • Objectivity and orgasm: the perils of imprecise definitions.Samantha Wakil - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2315-2333.
    Lloyd analyzes every proposed evolutionary explanation of female orgasm and argues that all but one suffers from serious evidential errors. Lloyd attributes these errors to two main biases: androcentrism and adaptationism. This paper begins by arguing that the explanation Lloyd favors—the by-product account—is guilty of the androcentrism which supposedly implicates the other explanations of female orgasm with numerous evidential discrepancies. This suggests that there is another error afflicting orgasm research in addition to the biases Lloyd identities. I attempt to diagnose (...)
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  • El holobionte/hologenoma como nivel de seleccion.Javier Suárez - 2021 - Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 36 (1):81-112.
    The units or levels of selection debate concerns the question of what kind of biological systems are stable enough that part of their evolution is a result of the process of natural selection acting at their level. Traditionally, the debate has concerned at least two different, though related, questions: the question of the level at which interaction with the environment occurs, and the question of the level at which reproduction occurs. In recent years, biologists and philosophers have discussed a new (...)
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  • Not null enough: pseudo-null hypotheses in community ecology and comparative psychology.William Bausman & Marta Halina - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4):30.
    We evaluate a common reasoning strategy used in community ecology and comparative psychology for selecting between competing hypotheses. This strategy labels one hypothesis as a “null” on the grounds of its simplicity and epistemically privileges it as accepted until rejected. We argue that this strategy is unjustified. The asymmetrical treatment of statistical null hypotheses is justified through the experimental and mathematical contexts in which they are used, but these contexts are missing in the case of the “pseudo-null hypotheses” found in (...)
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  • The enduring enigma of reason.Catarina Dutilh Novaes - 2018 - Mind and Language 33 (5):513-524.
    In The Enigma of Reason, Mercier and Sperber (M&S) present and defend their interactionist account of reason. In this piece, I discuss briefly the points of agreement between M&S and myself and, more extensively, the points of disagreement, most of which pertain to details of the evolutionary components of their account. I discuss in particular the purported modular nature of reason; their account of myside bias as an optimum/adaptation; and the claim that reason thus construed must be an individual‐level and (...)
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  • Gender as a historical kind: a tale of two genders?Marion Godman - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (3-4):21.
    Is there anything that members of each binary category of gender have in common? Even many non-essentialists find the lack of unity within a gender worrying as it undermines the basis for a common political agenda for women. One promising proposal for achieving unity is by means of a shared historical lineage of cultural reproduction with past binary models of gender. I demonstrate how such an account is likely to take on board different binary and also non-binary systems of gender. (...)
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  • Is behavioural flexibility evidence of cognitive complexity? How evolution can inform comparative cognition.Irina Mikhalevich, Russell Powell & Corina Logan - 2017 - Interface Focus 7.
    Behavioural flexibility is often treated as the gold standard of evidence for more sophisticated or complex forms of animal cognition, such as planning, metacognition and mindreading. However, the evidential link between behavioural flexibility and complex cognition has not been explicitly or systematically defended. Such a defence is particularly pressing because observed flexible behaviours can frequently be explained by putatively simpler cognitive mechanisms. This leaves complex cognition hypotheses open to ‘deflationary’ challenges that are accorded greater evidential weight precisely because they offer (...)
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  • (1 other version)Units and levels of selection.Elisabeth Lloyd - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The theory of evolution by natural selection is, perhaps, the crowning intellectual achievement of the biological sciences. There is, however, considerable debate about which entity or entities are selected and what it is that fits them for that role. This article aims to clarify what is at issue in these debates by identifying four distinct, though often confused, concerns and then identifying how the debates on what constitute the units of selection depend to a significant degree on which of these (...)
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  • Diagnosing errors in climate model intercomparisons.Ryan O’Loughlin - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (2):1-29.
    I examine error diagnosis (model-model disagreement) in climate model intercomparisons including its difficulties, fruitful examples, and prospects for streamlining error diagnosis. I suggest that features of climate model intercomparisons pose a more significant challenge for error diagnosis than do features of individual model construction and complexity. Such features of intercomparisons include, e.g., the number of models involved, how models from different institutions interrelate, and what scientists know about each model. By considering numerous examples in the climate modeling literature, I distill (...)
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  • Technology-driven surrogates and the perils of epistemic misalignment: an analysis in contemporary microbiome science.Javier Suárez & Federico Boem - 2022 - Synthese 200 (6):1-28.
    A general view in philosophy of science says that the appropriateness of an object to act as a surrogate depends on the user’s decision to utilize it as such. This paper challenges this claim by examining the role of surrogative reasoning in high-throughput sequencing technologies as they are used in contemporary microbiome science. Drawing on this, we argue that, in technology-driven surrogates, knowledge about the type of inference practically permitted and epistemically justified by the surrogate constrains their use and thus (...)
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  • A relic of design: against proper functions in biology.Emanuele Ratti & Pierre-Luc Germain - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-28.
    The notion of biological function is fraught with difficulties—intrinsically and irremediably so, we argue. The physiological practice of functional ascription originates from a time when organisms were thought to be designed and remained largely unchanged since. In a secularized worldview, this creates a paradox which accounts of functions as selected effect attempt to resolve. This attempt, we argue, misses its target in physiology and it brings problems of its own. Instead, we propose that a better solution to the conundrum of (...)
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  • Simulationism and the Function(s) of Episodic Memory.Arieh Schwartz - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (2):487-505.
    According to simulationism, the function of episodic memory is not to remember the past, but to help construct representations of possible future episodes, by drawing together features from different experiential sources. This article suggests that the relationship between the traditional storehouse view, on which the function of memory is remembering, and the simulationist approach is more complicated than has been typically acknowledged. This is attributed, in part, to incorrect interpretations of what remembering on the storehouse view requires. Further, by appeal (...)
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  • Reciprocal Causation and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.Andrew Buskell - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (4):267-279.
    Kevin Laland and colleagues have put forward a number of arguments motivating an extended evolutionary synthesis. Here I examine Laland et al.'s central concept of reciprocal causation. Reciprocal causation features in many arguments supporting an expanded evolutionary framework, yet few of these arguments are clearly delineated. Here I clarify the concept and make explicit three arguments in which it features. I identify where skeptics can—and are—pushing back against these arguments, and highlight what I see as the empirical, explanatory, and methodological (...)
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  • An organisational approach to biological communication.Ramiro Frick, Leonardo Bich & Alvaro Moreno - 2019 - Acta Biotheoretica (2):103-128.
    This paper aims to provide a philosophical and theoretical account of biological communication grounded in the notion of organisation. The organisational approach characterises living systems as organised in such a way that they are capable to self-produce and self-maintain while in constant interaction with the environment. To apply this theoretical framework to the study of biological communication, we focus on a specific approach, based on the notion of influence, according to which communication takes place when a signal emitted by a (...)
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  • Astrobiology as Hybrid Science: Introduction to the Thematic Issue.Linnda R. Caporael - 2018 - Biological Theory 13 (2):69-75.
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  • Exaptation Revisited: Changes Imposed by Evolutionary Psychologists and Behavioral Biologists.Elisabeth A. Lloyd & Stephen Jay Gould - 2017 - Biological Theory 12 (1):50-65.
    Some methodological adaptationists hijacked the term “exaptation,” and took an occasion of Stephen Jay Gould’s misspeaking as confirmation that it possessed an evolutionarily “designed” function and was a version of an adaptation, something it was decidedly not. Others provided a standard of evidence for exaptation that was inappropriate, and based on an adaptationist worldview. This article is intended to serve as both an analysis of and correction to those situations. Gould and Elisabeth Vrba’s terms, “exaptation” and “aptation,” as originally introduced, (...)
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  • Epidemiological Models and Epistemic Perspectives: How Scientific Pluralism may be Misconstrued.Nicolò Gaj - forthcoming - Foundations of Science:1-21.
    In a scenario characterized by unpredictable developments, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiological models have played a leading part, having been especially widely deployed for forecasting purposes. In this paper, two real-world examples of modeling are examined in support of the proposition that science can convey inconsistent as well as genuinely perspectival representations of the world. Reciprocally inconsistent outcomes are grounded on incompatible assumptions, whereas perspectival outcomes are grounded on compatible assumptions and illuminate different aspects of the same object (...)
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  • An analysis of the disagreement about added value by regional climate models.Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Melissa Bukovsky & Linda O. Mearns - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11645-11672.
    In this paper we consider some questions surrounding whether or not regional climate models “add value,” a controversial issue in climate science today. We highlight some objections frequently made about regional climate models both within and outside the community of modelers, including several claims that regional climate models do not “add value.” We show that there are a number of issues involved in the latter claims, the primary ones centering on the fact that different research questions are being pursued by (...)
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  • A Brief (Hi)Story of Just-So Stories in Evolutionary Science.Michal Hubálek - 2020 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 51 (5):447-468.
    In this essay, I examine the usage of the term “just-so story.” I attempt to show that just-so storytelling can be seen as an epistemic concept that, in various ways, tackles the epistemological an...
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  • Criteria for Holobionts from Community Genetics.Elisabeth A. Lloyd & Michael J. Wade - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (3):151-170.
    We address the controversy in the literature concerning the definition of holobionts and the apparent constraints on their evolution using concepts from community population genetics. The genetics of holobionts, consisting of a host and diverse microbial symbionts, has been neglected in many discussions of the topic, and, where it has been discussed, a gene-centric, species-centric view, based in genomic conflict, has been predominant. Because coevolution takes place between traits or genes in two or more species and not, strictly speaking, between (...)
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  • Stranger in a strange land: an optimal-environments account of evolutionary mismatch.Rick Morris - 2020 - Synthese 197 (9):4021-4046.
    In evolutionary medicine, researchers characterize some outcomes as evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch problems arise as the result of organisms living in environments to which they are poorly adapted, typically as the result of some rapid environmental change. Depression, anxiety, obesity, myopia, insomnia, breast cancer, dental problems, and numerous other negative health outcomes have all been characterized as mismatch problems. The exact nature of evolutionary mismatch itself is unclear, however. This leads to a lack of clarity about the sorts of problems that (...)
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  • Perspectives on integrating genetic and physical explanations of evolution and development.Alan Love, Thomas Stewart, Gunter Wagner & Stuart Newman - 2017 - Integrative and Comparative Biology:icx121.
    In the 20th century, genetic explanatory approaches became dominant in both developmental and evolutionary biological research. By contrast, physical approaches, which appeal to properties such as mechanical forces, were largely relegated to the margins, despite important advances in modeling. Recently, there have been renewed attempts to find balanced viewpoints that integrate both biological physics and molecular genetics into explanations of developmental and evolutionary phenomena. Here we introduce the 2017 SICB symposium “Physical and Genetic Mechanisms for Evolutionary Novelty” that was dedicated (...)
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  • Causal-role myopia and the functional investigation of junk DNA.Stefan Linquist - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-23.
    The distinction between causal role and selected effect functions is typically framed in terms of their respective explanatory roles. However, much of the controversy over functions in genomics takes place in an investigative, not an explanatory context. Specifically, the process of component-driven functional investigation begins with the designation of some genetic or epigenetic element as functional —i.e. not junk— because it possesses properties that, arguably, suggest some biologically interesting organismal effect. The investigative process then proceeds, in a bottom-up fashion, to (...)
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  • What we (should) talk about when we talk about fruitfulness.Silvia Ivani - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1):1-18.
    What are the relevant values to the appraisal of research programs? This question remains hotly debated, as philosophers have recently proposed many lists of values potentially relevant to scientific appraisal. Surprisingly, despite being mentioned in many lists, little attention has been paid to fruitfulness. It is unclear how fruitfulness should be explicated, and whether it has any substantial role in scientific appraisal. In this paper, I argue we should explicate fruitfulness as the capacity to develop of research programs. Moreover, I (...)
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  • Task Allocation and the Logic of Research Questions: How Ants Challenge Human Sociobiology.Ryan Ketcham - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (1):52-68.
    After biologist Deborah Gordon made a series of experimental discoveries in the 1980s, she argued that a change in terminology regarding the division of labor among castes of specialists was needed. Gordon’s investigations of the interactive effects of ants in colonies led her to believe that the established approach Edward O. Wilson had pioneered was biased in a way that made some alternative candidate adaptive explanations invisible. Gordon argued that this was because the term “division of labor” implied a division (...)
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  • A Taxonomy of Non-fitness.Marta Linde-Medina - 2017 - Biological Theory 12 (1):1-3.
    The current evolutionary taxonomy is biased towards traits that enhance the organism’s fitness. Here, an extended taxonomy aimed to correct this bias is proposed, which distinguishes among different categories of non-fitness traits based on their usefulness for the organism as well as their origin. It is suggested these new non-fitness categories could help to solve the controversy surrounding the term exaptation in evolutionary psychology.
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  • The Nature of Programmed Cell Death.Pierre M. Durand & Grant Ramsey - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (1):30-41.
    In multicellular organisms, cells are frequently programmed to die. This makes good sense: cells that fail to, or are no longer playing important roles are eliminated. From the cell’s perspective, this also makes sense, since somatic cells in multicellular organisms require the cooperation of clonal relatives. In unicellular organisms, however, programmed cell death poses a difficult and unresolved evolutionary problem. The empirical evidence for PCD in diverse microbial taxa has spurred debates about what precisely PCD means in the case of (...)
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  • Values as heuristics: a contextual empiricist account of assessing values scientifically.Christopher ChoGlueck & Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-29.
    Feminist philosophers have discussed the prospects for assessing values empirically, particularly given the ongoing threat of sexism and other oppressive values influencing science and society. Some advocates of such tests now champion a “values as evidence” approach, and they criticize Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism for not holding values to the same level of empirical scrutiny as other claims. In this paper, we defend contextual empiricism by arguing that many of these criticisms are based on mischaracterizations of Longino’s position, overstatements of (...)
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