Studies In History And Philosophy Of Biological And Biomedical Sciences[JOURNAL]
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200 papers
Revisiting darwinian teleology: A case for inclusive fitness as design explanation.
Huneman P
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Aug · PMID 31326324 · Publisher ↗
This paper elaborates a general framework to make sense of teleological explanations in Darwinian evolutionary biology. It relies on an attempt to tie natural selection to a sense of optimization. First, after assessing...
This paper elaborates a general framework to make sense of teleological explanations in Darwinian evolutionary biology. It relies on an attempt to tie natural selection to a sense of optimization. First, after assessing the objections made by any attempt to view selection as a maximising process within population genetics, it understands Grafen's Formal Darwinism (FD) as a conceptual link established between population genetics and behavioral ecology's adaptationist framework (without any empirical commitments). Thus I suggest that this provides a way to make sense of teleological explanations in biology under their various modes. Then the paper criticizes two major ways of accounting for teleology: a Darwinian one, the etiological view of biological functions, and a non-Darwinian one, here labeled "intrinsic teleology" view, which covers several subtypes of accounts, including plasticity-oriented conceptions of evolution or organizational views of function. The former is centered on traits while the latter is centered on organisms; this is shown to imply that both accounts are unable to provide a systematic understanding of biological teleology. Finally the paper argues that viewing teleology as maximization of inclusive fitness along the FD lines as understood here allows one to make sense of both the design of organisms and the individual traits as adaptions. Such notion is thereby claimed to be the proper meaning of teleology in evolutionary biology, since it avoids the opposed pitfalls of etiological views and intrinsic-teleology view, while accounting for the same features as they do.
Neo-Paleyan biology.
Lewens T
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Aug · PMID 31324581 · Publisher ↗
There is a 'Neo-Paleyan' tradition in British evolutionary theorising, which began with Darwin and continues to the present day. This tradition conceives of adaptation in terms of design, and it often puts natural select...
There is a 'Neo-Paleyan' tradition in British evolutionary theorising, which began with Darwin and continues to the present day. This tradition conceives of adaptation in terms of design, and it often puts natural selection in the role of an ersatz designer. There are significant disanalogies between Paleyan conceptions of design and modern conceptions of adaptation and selection, which help to explain why the neo-Paleyan programme is sometimes treated with hostility. These general disanalogies do not suffice to dismiss the most interesting forms of recent neo-Paleyanism, which draw on theoretical principles such as Fisher's Fundamental Theorem to ground a general approach to what we can call (following Grafen) the 'criterion' of evolutionary design. It is important to distinguish between justifications of this 'criterion' and justifications of approaches to nature which presuppose that natural selection produces good designs.
Policing the social body: Medicine and the administration of legal gender recognition in France and Italy, an historical perspective.
Fiorilli O
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Dec · PMID 31303529 · Publisher ↗
This paper explores the role of medicine in the regulation of legal gender recognition for trans and gender diverse people in France and Italy. I focus on the processes that led the two countries to establish for the fir...
This paper explores the role of medicine in the regulation of legal gender recognition for trans and gender diverse people in France and Italy. I focus on the processes that led the two countries to establish for the first time a procedure for legal gender change in the 1980s/1990s. Despite the differences, both in France and in Italy medical knowledge and technologies were embedded in the procedures for legal gender change and health professionals took a role as gatekeepers to gender recognition. The medicalization of legal gender recognition, I argue, was part of the deploying of a bio-political apparatus that aimed at regulating and controlling "gender transitions" through regulation and normalization rather then through repression.
An unappreciated merit of counterfactual histories of science.
Tambolo L
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2020 Jun · PMID 31296435 · Publisher ↗
This paper critically engages with Ian Hesketh's (2016) analysis of counterfactual histories of science. According to such analysis, extant counterfactual histories-especially of biology-have a rather conservative flavor...
This paper critically engages with Ian Hesketh's (2016) analysis of counterfactual histories of science. According to such analysis, extant counterfactual histories-especially of biology-have a rather conservative flavor, since due to the authors' concern for plausibility, they typically converge on actual science, in the sense that their endpoints coincide with (or are very similar to) those of the corresponding actual scientific developments. As a result, Hesketh argues, not only does the ambition-often proclaimed-to exhibit the centrality of contingency in history of science remain unfulfilled: counterfactual narratives in the history of biology also end up with valuing the past in view of its contribution to the establishment of present-day science. Contrary to this analysis, we contend that an unappreciated merit of counterfactual histories of science converging on actual science lies in the fact that they put present science in a different light, since by being approached from a counterfactual angle, differing from established history, present-day science appears in a new perspective.
Chemical arbitrariness and the causal role of molecular adapters.
Lean OM
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Dec · PMID 31281071 · Publisher ↗
Jacques Monod (1971) argued that certain molecular processes rely critically on the property of chemical arbitrariness, which he claimed allows those processes to "transcend the laws of chemistry". It seems natural, as s...
Jacques Monod (1971) argued that certain molecular processes rely critically on the property of chemical arbitrariness, which he claimed allows those processes to "transcend the laws of chemistry". It seems natural, as some philosophers have done, to interpret this in modal terms: a biological relationship is chemically arbitrary if it is possible, within the constraints of chemical "law", for that relationship to have been otherwise than it is. But while modality is certainly important for understanding chemical arbitrariness, understanding its biological role also requires an account of the concrete causal-functional features that distinguish arbitrary from non-arbitrary phenomena. In this paper I elaborate on this under-emphasised aspect by offering a general account of these features: arbitrary relations are instantiated by mechanisms that involve molecular adapters, which causally couple two properties or processes which would otherwise be uncorrelated. Additionally, adapters work by acting as intermediate rather than cooperating causes.
Imitating nature: Analogy and experiment in D'Arcy Thompson's Science of Form.
Holmes M
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Dec · PMID 31257101 · Publisher ↗
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's "Science of Form" - the explanation of biological development and morphology through physical forces and mathematical laws - has traditionally been viewed as an idiosyncratic, even heretical,...
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson's "Science of Form" - the explanation of biological development and morphology through physical forces and mathematical laws - has traditionally been viewed as an idiosyncratic, even heretical, episode in the history of evolutionary biology. Yet recent scholarship has sought to overturn this view by demonstrating that Thompson was active in contemporary scientific networks. This paper argues that a key influence upon Thompson's seminal work, On Growth and Form (1917), may be far more practical, and lie closer to home, than previously realised: experimental demonstrations of basic concepts in physics. Harnessing previously unpublished archival sources, this paper traces Thompson's correspondence with Charles Darling, Arthur Worthington and Cecil Warburton. In these exchanges, Thompson described his own experiments, or requested that experiments be conducted on his behalf. This correspondence, and its subsequent inclusion in the first edition of On Growth and Form, revises our current picture of Thompson from that of an abstract thinker to keen experimentalist. Moreover, his contact with physicists indicates that simple experiments enabled extensive crosstalk between early twentieth century physics and biology.
Anticipatory measure: Alex Comfort, experimental gerontology and the measurement of senescence.
Moreira T
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Oct · PMID 31248807 · Publisher ↗
Ageing is routinely measured by counting the number of years lived since the birth of an individual but at least since at least the 1930s, the validity, precision and sensitivity of chronological age as a measure has bee...
Ageing is routinely measured by counting the number of years lived since the birth of an individual but at least since at least the 1930s, the validity, precision and sensitivity of chronological age as a measure has been criticised across the biological and behavioural sciences of ageing. This quest that has been reinforced by the contemporary investment in the possibility of technologically manipulating the rate of ageing to delay the onset the age-associated diseases. This paper explores the epistemic, institutional and political conditions that led to the formulation, at the turhn of the 1970s, of Alex Comfort's (1920-2000) seminal proposal to measure human biological ageing rate. Drawing on published and archival sources, I argue that Comfort's suggested measure of ageing can be understood as a form of 'anticipation work', and should be understood as an effort to evidence, and to make present, the technological and social promises that Comfort linked to experimental gerontology.
Misunderstanding graphs: The confusion of biological clade diversity diagrams and archaeological frequency seriation diagrams.
Lyman RL
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Oct · PMID 31227256 · Publisher ↗
Graph perception involves the accurate decipherment of (often quantitative) data displayed in visual form. Because graph style may reflect discipline-specific tradition, similar graph styles in distinct disciplines can b...
Graph perception involves the accurate decipherment of (often quantitative) data displayed in visual form. Because graph style may reflect discipline-specific tradition, similar graph styles in distinct disciplines can be subject to misinterpretation. Both archaeologist James A. Ford and paleobiologist Stephen Jay Gould confused spindle diagrams representing archaeological frequency seriation and paleontological clade diversity analysis as displaying the same kinds of data and representing the same processes. Similarities between the two kinds of analysis are, however, limited to the use of the same graph style-spindle diagrams-to illustrate the history of frequencies of things. The kinds of frequencies differ in two ways between the two disciplines; frequencies are of low-level Linnaean taxa within a clade representing a higher taxon in paleobiology, and are frequencies of artifact specimens within each of several types in archaeology. Further, frequencies are absolute in clade diversity and relative in frequency seriation. Clade diversity analysis, as practiced by Gould and colleagues, is a time-series analysis that requires knowing the age of taxa prior to analysis of the shape of the spindle diagram. Frequency seriation in archaeology involves ordering multiple collections of artifacts that share at least some types; ordering is based on similar frequencies and a presumed unimodal frequency distribution, and the order is inferred to be a chronology. Different analytical assumptions and goals result in discipline specific rules of graph decipherment, though each of the two kinds of analyses can be performed in each of the two disciplines.
Placebo trials without mechanisms: How far can they go?
Teira D
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Oct · PMID 31221503 · Publisher ↗
In this paper, I suggest that placebo effects, as we know them today, should be understood as experimental phenomena, low-level regularities whose causal structure is grasped through particular experimental designs with...
In this paper, I suggest that placebo effects, as we know them today, should be understood as experimental phenomena, low-level regularities whose causal structure is grasped through particular experimental designs with little theoretical guidance. Focusing on placebo interventions with needles for pain reduction -one of the few placebo regularities that seems to arise in meta-analytical studies- I discuss the extent to which it is possible to decompose the different factors at play through more fine-grained randomized clinical trials. My sceptical argument is twofold. On the one hand, I argue that experiments alone are not enough to standardize interventions, and that it is necessary to include theories. On the other hand, I argue that the social interactions that seem to be part of placebo effects are difficult, if not impossible, to blind. Therefore, the measurement biases arising from the participants' reactivity to the experimental setup cannot be controlled for. Further decomposition of placebo effects requires a theoretical account of the existing experimental regularities that may guide further tests.
Treatment for whom? Towards a phenomenological resolution of controversy within autism treatment.
Pantazakos T
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Oct · PMID 31003862 · Publisher ↗
Autism's mainstream, behavioural treatment has recently faced allegations from neurodiversity activists, who claim that behaviourism is methodologically faulted and in serious breach of patient consent and human rights....
Autism's mainstream, behavioural treatment has recently faced allegations from neurodiversity activists, who claim that behaviourism is methodologically faulted and in serious breach of patient consent and human rights. In the present paper, I delve into this mounting controversy to suggest, contra behaviourism, that people with autism diagnoses do not just display a divergent set of behaviours, but should be seen to operate in 'worlds' different to those in typical neurological conditions. To philosophically accommodate this difference in 'worlds' and to utilise it in thinking about treatment orientation, I use Edmund Husserl's concept of the life-world (lebenswelt). I proffer that the autistic life-worlds should be used as the basis of treatment evaluation. I suggest that phenomenological ways of approaching autism, currently understudied, should be further developed and that behavioural treatment should be accordingly 'filtered' to accommodate the autistic life-worlds, and with them certain criticisms from neurodiversity.
Race and nutrition in the New World: Colonial shadows in the age of epigenetics.
Baedke J, Nieves Delgado A
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Aug · PMID 30885596 · Publisher ↗
This paper addresses historical dimensions of epigenetic studies on human populations. We show that postgenomic research on health disparities in Latin America reintroduces old colonial views about the relations between...
This paper addresses historical dimensions of epigenetic studies on human populations. We show that postgenomic research on health disparities in Latin America reintroduces old colonial views about the relations between race, environment, and social status. This especially refers to the idea - common in colonial humoralism and epigenetics - that different types of bodies are in balance and closely linked with particular local environments and lifestyles. These social differences become embodied as physiological and health differences. By comparing Spanish chronicles of the New World with recent epidemiological narratives on Mexican populations in social epigenetics (especially on obesity), we identify four characteristics that both share in distinguishing races, such as indigenous or mestizos from Spaniards or non-Mexicans: (i) Race is not intrinsic to bodies but emerges as a particular homeostatic body-environment relation; (ii) the stability of one's race is warranted through the stability of one's local environment and lifestyle, especially nutrition; (iii) every race faces specific life challenges in a local environment to maintain its health; and (iv) every race shows a unique social status that is closely linked to its biological status (e.g., disease susceptibility). Based on these similarities, we argue that currently in Latin America the field of epigenetics appears on the scene with a worrisome colonial shadow. It reintroduces long forgotten exclusionary and stereotypic perspectives on indigenous and mestizos, and biologizes as well as racializes social-cultural differences among human groups.
Reforming uncultivated minds: The species transmutation debate and American science of life in the antebellum agricultural press, 1820-1859.
Rouyan A
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Aug · PMID 30797669 · Publisher ↗
The paper traces a debate about species transmutation that unfolded in agricultural periodicals published in the Northeastern United States between 1820 and 1859. The reformers who curated the content of these publicatio...
The paper traces a debate about species transmutation that unfolded in agricultural periodicals published in the Northeastern United States between 1820 and 1859. The reformers who curated the content of these publications promoted agricultural improvement by disseminating knowledge about relevant science and technology topics. The widespread belief in the transmutation of grains provided them with an opportunity for sharing scientific knowledge about plant heredity and botanical classification systems, encouraging experimentation among audiences prejudiced against "book farming," and recalling the tenets of natural theology which described nature as orderly and predictable. The reformers did not manage to eradicate the belief in species transmutation which remained popular throughout the nineteenth century. However, in their assessment of the theoretical contributions of botanists and practical experiments conducted by farmers, they negotiated the authority of scientific expertise in the study of nature and delineated standards of scientific inquiry into agricultural matters. The reformers' engagement with the transmutation debate thus contributed to the professionalization of agricultural improvement, laying the groundwork for the activities of agricultural research institutions that emerged in the second half of the century.
Synthesis of contraries: Hughlings Jackson on sensory-motor representation in the brain.
Chirimuuta M
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Jun · PMID 30782510 · Publisher ↗
This paper examines the concept of representation in the brain which occurs in the writings of the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911). Jackson was immersed in Victorian physiological psychology, a hybrid of B...
This paper examines the concept of representation in the brain which occurs in the writings of the neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911). Jackson was immersed in Victorian physiological psychology, a hybrid of British associationism and a reflex theory of the operation of the nervous system. Furthermore, Jackson was deeply influenced by Herbert Spencer, and I argue that Spencer's progressivist evolutionary ideas are in tension with the more mechanistic approach of the reflex theory. I also discuss Jackson's legacy in the 20th century and the longstanding debate about localisation of function in the brain.
Between mice and sheep: Biotechnology, agricultural science and animal models in late-twentieth century Edinburgh.
García-Sancho M, Myelnikov D
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Jun · PMID 30709688 · Full text
In this paper, we investigate the ways in which a group of scientists in Edinburgh worked across mice and sheep during the last quarter of the twentieth century. With this local episode, we show the utility of an intersp...
In this paper, we investigate the ways in which a group of scientists in Edinburgh worked across mice and sheep during the last quarter of the twentieth century. With this local episode, we show the utility of an interspecies perspective to investigate recent historical transformations in the life sciences. We argue that the emergence of animal biotechnology was the result of interactions between neoliberal policymakers, science administrators, molecular biologists, agricultural breeders, and the laboratory and farm organisms with which they worked. During the early 1980s, all these actors believed that the exportation of genetic engineering techniques from mice to farm animals would lead to more effective breeding programmes in the agricultural sciences. However, the circulation of people, money, expertise and infrastructures that the experiments required, as well as the practical constraints of working with mice and sheep, resisted a simple scaling-up from one organism to the other. This displaced the goals of the Edinburgh scientists from the production of transgenic sheep to stem cell research and human regenerative medicine. We account for this unexpected shift by looking at the interplay between science policy and its implementation via collective action and bench work across different organisms. The emergence of animal biotechnology in Edinburgh also provides historiographical insights on the birth of Dolly the sheep and, more generally, on the interactions between the molecular and the reproductive sciences at the fall of the twentieth century.
Propositional content in signals.
Skyrms B, Barrett JA
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Apr · PMID 30704834 · Publisher ↗
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Macroevolution evolving: Punctuated equilibria and the roots of Stephen Jay Gould's second macroevolutionary synthesis.
Dresow M
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Jun · PMID 30679066 · Publisher ↗
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Seeing nature as a 'universal store of genes': How biological diversity became 'genetic resources', 1890-1940.
Bonneuil C
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Jun · PMID 30679065 · Publisher ↗
Till late in the 20th century, biological diversity has been understood and addressed in terms of "genetic resources". This paper proposes a history of this "genetic resources" concept and the biopolitical practices it w...
Till late in the 20th century, biological diversity has been understood and addressed in terms of "genetic resources". This paper proposes a history of this "genetic resources" concept and the biopolitical practices it was related to. A semantic history of the 'resource' idiom first sheds light on how, in the age of empires and fossil industrialism, the Earth came to be considered as a stock of static mineral and living reserves. Then we follow how the gene became the unit of this "resourcist" view of biological diversity as static stocks of entities open to prospection, harnessing and "conservation". Erwin Baur, Nikolai I. Vavilov, Aleksandr S. Serebrovsky and Hermann J. Muller were key biologists who introduced a spatial turn to the gene concept. Beyond the space-time of Neo-mendelian and Morganian laboratory genetics, genes became understood though a geographical gaze at a planetary scale. The world became a "universal store of genes" (Vavilov, 1929). From 1926 to World War 2, this advent of genes as new global epistemic objects went hand in hand with genes' new modes of existence as geopolitical objects. The article documents Interwar years' scramble for genes as well as first collaborative international efforts to conserve and exchange genetic material (which prefigured post WW2 initiatives), and situates the rise of the 'genetic resources' category within mid 20th century's imperialism, high-modernism, agricultural modernization and biopolitics.
Altruistic deception.
Birch J
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Apr · PMID 30665753 · Publisher ↗
Altruistic deception (or the telling of "white lies") is common in humans. Does it also exist in non-human animals? On some definitions of deception, altruistic deception is impossible by definition, whereas others make...
Altruistic deception (or the telling of "white lies") is common in humans. Does it also exist in non-human animals? On some definitions of deception, altruistic deception is impossible by definition, whereas others make it too easy by counting useful-but-ambiguous information as deceptive. I argue for a definition that makes altruistic deception possible in principle without trivializing it. On my proposal, deception requires the strategic exploitation of a receiver by a sender, where "exploitation" implies that the sender elicits a behaviour in the receiver that is beneficial in a different type of situation and is expressed only because the signal raises the probability, from the receiver's standpoint, of that type of situation. I then offer an example of a real signal that is deceptive in this sense, and yet potentially altruistic (and certainly cooperative): the purr call of the pied babbler. Fledglings associate purr calls with food, and adults exploit this learned association, in the absence of food, to lead fledglings away from predators following an alarm call. I conclude by considering why altruistic deception is apparently so rare in non-human animals.
Paolo Boccone and the visual communication of pre-Linnean botany. A comparison between his Leiden herbarium, Paris autoprint and published Icones (1674).
Giallombardo F, van Andel TR
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Apr · PMID 30639143 · Publisher ↗
This article addresses the development of visual practices in early modern Botany by focusing on the diverse strategies of graphic representation of plant species. Naturalis Biodiversity Center holds a historic herbarium...
This article addresses the development of visual practices in early modern Botany by focusing on the diverse strategies of graphic representation of plant species. Naturalis Biodiversity Center holds a historic herbarium of 169 sheets with specimens of Mediterranean plants collected by the Sicilian Botanist Paolo Boccone (1633-1704). Part of Boccone's dried specimens served as model for the etchings published in his Icones et descriptiones rariorum plantarum (1674) and part of them were used as matrix for at least one album of botanical autoprints kept in Paris. The exceptional survival of the three collections: the original dried specimens, their autoprint impressions and the etched illustrations of the book, offers a unique insight in the material and intellectual issues addressed in the process of visual representation of plants in early modern Botany. Here we present the first scientific comparison of these three valuable 17th century botanical collections. Visual comparison revealed that the Leiden collection provided 64 specimens to Icones, while 44 specimens show a perfect matching with the autoprint impressions. In nine cases the Leiden specimens appear both in the autoprints and in the Icones, thus showing the complete process of visual translation of the plant preliminary to its wider circulation in the scientific community.
Vaccine development as a 'doable problem': The case of the meningococcal A vaccines 1962-1969.
Baylac-Paouly B
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2019 Apr · PMID 30616989 · Publisher ↗
During the period from 1962 to 1967, the development of a meningococcal A vaccine could be considered as feasible despite all the drawbacks of working with cerebrospinal meningitis A. In this paper, I analyse why and how...
During the period from 1962 to 1967, the development of a meningococcal A vaccine could be considered as feasible despite all the drawbacks of working with cerebrospinal meningitis A. In this paper, I analyse why and how this programme for vaccine development was put into place, and in particular how the problem was perceived as feasible. Deploying the concept of Doable Problems developed by Joan Fujimura, I examine the complex range of factors that led to the outcome of the trial in Yako in 1967. Thus I show how the different protagonists were mobilized and their work organized at different levels in order to produce and test a vaccine. Indeed, a number of elements seemed to stand in the way of successfully producing a vaccine, but the collaboration of the different actors under the aegis of the WHO provides interesting lessons about the management of this kind of project. Seen in a wider historical context, this approach could provide ideas and lessons for approaching current questions in vaccination from a new perspective.
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