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  1. How many ways can you die? Multiple biological deaths as a consequence of the multiple concepts of an organism.Piotr Grzegorz Nowak & Adrian Stencel - 2022 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (2):127-154.
    According to the mainstream position in the bioethical definition of death debate, death is to be equated with the cessation of an organism. Given such a perspective, some bioethicists uphold the position that brain-dead patients are dead, while others claim that they are alive. Regardless of the specific opinion on the status of brain-dead patients, the mere bioethical concept of death, according to many bioethicists, has the merit of being unanimous and univocal, as well as grounded in biology. In the (...)
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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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  • What is a hologenomic adaptation? Emergent individuality and inter-identity in multispecies systems.Javier Suárez & Vanessa Triviño - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 187 (11).
    Contemporary biological research has suggested that some host–microbiome multispecies systems (referred to as “holobionts”) can in certain circumstances evolve as unique biological individual, thus being a unit of selection in evolution. If this is so, then it is arguably the case that some biological adaptations have evolved at the level of the multispecies system, what we call hologenomic adaptations. However, no research has yet been devoted to investigating their nature, or how these adaptations can be distinguished from adaptations at the (...)
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  • The hologenome concept of evolution: a philosophical and biological study.Javier Suárez - 2019 - Dissertation, University of Exeter
    The hologenome concept of evolution is a hypothesis about the evolution of animals and plants. It asserts that the evolution of animals and plants was partially triggered by their interactions with their symbiotic microbiomes. In that vein, the hologenome concept posits that the holobiont (animal host + symbionts of the microbiome) is a unit of selection. -/- The hologenome concept has been severely criticized on the basis that selection on holobionts would only be possible if there were a tight transgenerational (...)
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  • How to Get out of the Labyrinth of Time? Lessons Drawn from Callender.Jerzy Gołosz - forthcoming - Logic and Logical Philosophy:1-24.
    Callender [2017] claims that contemporary science demonstrates that there is no objective present and no objective flow of time, especially since all sensed events come from the past, our various senses need different amounts of time to react, and there are enough asymmetries in the physical world to explain our experience of time. This paper holds that, although Callender’s arguments for the subjectivity of the flow of time are unconvincing, the scientific discoveries and arguments he indicates can still be applied (...)
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  • Environmentality in biomedicine: microbiome research and the perspectival body.Joana Formosinho, Adam Bencard & Louise Whiteley - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 91 (C):148-158.
    Microbiome research shows that human health is foundationally intertwined with the ecology of microbial communities living on and in our bodies. This challenges the categorical separation of organisms from environments that has been central to biomedicine, and questions the boundaries between them. Biomedicine is left with an empirical problem: how to understand causal pathways between host health, microbiota and environment? We propose a conceptual tool – environmentality – to think through this problem. Environmentality is the state or quality of being (...)
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  • Do Somatic Cells Really Sacrifice Themselves? Why an Appeal to Coercion May be a Helpful Strategy in Explaining the Evolution of Multicellularity.Adrian Stencel & Javier Suárez - 2021 - Biological Theory 16 (2):102-113.
    An understanding of the factors behind the evolution of multicellularity is one of today’s frontiers in evolutionary biology. This is because multicellular organisms are made of one subset of cells with the capacity to transmit genes to the next generation and another subset responsible for maintaining the functionality of the organism, but incapable of transmitting genes to the next generation. The question arises: why do somatic cells sacrifice their lives for the sake of germline cells? How is germ/soma separation maintained? (...)
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  • What’s all the fuss about? The inheritance of acquired traits is compatible with the Central Dogma.M. Polo Camacho - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-15.
    The Central Dogma of molecular biology, which holds that DNA makes protein and not the other way around, is as influential as it is controversial. Some believe the Dogma has outlived its usefulness, either because it fails to fully capture the ins-and-outs of protein synthesis (Griffiths and Stotz, 2013; Stotz, 2006), because it turns on a confused notion of information (Sarkar, 2004), or because it problematically assumes the unidirectional flow of information from DNA to protein (Gottlieb, 2001). This paper evaluates (...)
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  • The stability of traits conception of the hologenome: An evolutionary account of holobiont individuality.Javier Suárez - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (1):1-27.
    Bourrat and Griffiths :33, 2018) have recently argued that most of the evidence presented by holobiont defenders to support the thesis that holobionts are evolutionary individuals is not to the point and is not even adequate to discriminate multispecies evolutionary individuals from other multispecies assemblages that would not be considered evolutionary individuals by most holobiont defenders. They further argue that an adequate criterion to distinguish the two categories is fitness alignment, presenting the notion of fitness boundedness as a criterion that (...)
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  • Withdrawal Aversion as a Useful Heuristic for Critical Care Decisions.Piotr Grzegorz Nowak & Tomasz Żuradzki - 2019 - American Journal of Bioethics 19 (3):36-38.
    While agreeing with the main conclusion of Dominic Wilkinson and colleagues (Wilkinson, Butcherine, and Savulescu 2019), namely, that there is no moral difference between treatment withholding and withdrawal as such, we wish to criticize their approach on the basis that it treats the widespread acceptance of withdrawal aversion (WA) as a cognitive bias. Wilkinson and colleagues understand WA as “a nonrational preference for withholding (WH) treatment over withdrawal (WD) of treatment” (22). They treat WA as a manifestation of loss aversion (...)
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  • Scrutinizing microbiome determinism: why deterministic hypotheses about the microbiome are conceptually ungrounded.Javier Suárez - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (1):1-26.
    This paper addresses the topic of determinism in contemporary microbiome research. I distinguish two types of deterministic claims about the microbiome, and I show evidence that both types of claims are present in the contemporary literature. First, the idea that the host genetics determines the composition of the microbiome which I call “host-microbiome determinism”. Second, the idea that the genetics of the holobiont (the individual unit composed by a host plus its microbiome) determines the expression of certain phenotypic traits, which (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Defining Death: Toward a Biological and Ethical Synthesis.John P. Lizza, Christos Lazaridis & Piotr G. Nowak - forthcoming - American Journal of Bioethics:1-12.
    Much of the debate over the definition and criteria for determining our death has focused on disagreement over the correct biological account of death, i.e., what it means for any organism to die. In this paper, we argue that this exclusive focus on the biology of death is misguided, because it ignores ethical and social factors that bear on the acceptability of criteria for determining our death. We propose that attention shift from strictly biological considerations to ethical and social considerations (...)
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  • Superorganisms of the Protist Kingdom: A New Level of Biological Organization.Łukasz Lamża - 2020 - Foundations of Science 26 (2):281-300.
    The concept of superorganism has a mixed reputation in biology—for some it is a convenient way of discussing supra-organismal levels of organization, and for others, little more than a poetic metaphor. Here, I show that a considerable step forward in the understanding of superorganisms results from a thorough review of the supra-organismal levels of organization now known to exist among the “unicellular” protists. Limiting the discussion to protists has enormous advantages: their bodies are very well studied and relatively simple, and (...)
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  • Do heritable immune responses extend physiological individuality?Sophie Juliane Veigl - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (4):1-20.
    Immunology and its philosophy are a primary source for thinking about biological individuality. Through its discriminatory function, the immune system is believed to delineate organism and environment within one generation, thus defining the physiological individual. Based on the paradigmatic instantiations of immune systems, immune interactions and, thus, the physiological individual are believed to last only for one generation. However, in recent years, transgenerationally persisting immune responses have been reported in several phyla, but the consequences for physiological individuality have not yet (...)
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