Studies In History And Philosophy Of Biological And Biomedical Sciences[JOURNAL]
Sun
200 papers
Modelling with words: Narrative and natural selection.
Dimech DK
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Apr · PMID 28222354 · Publisher ↗
I argue that verbal models should be included in a philosophical account of the scientific practice of modelling. Weisberg (2013) has directly opposed this thesis on the grounds that verbal structures, if they are used i...
I argue that verbal models should be included in a philosophical account of the scientific practice of modelling. Weisberg (2013) has directly opposed this thesis on the grounds that verbal structures, if they are used in science, only merely describe models. I look at examples from Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) of verbally constructed narratives that I claim model the general phenomenon of evolution by natural selection. In each of the cases I look at, a particular scenario is described that involves at least some fictitious elements but represents the salient causal components of natural selection. I pronounce the importance of prioritising observation of scientific practice for the philosophy of modelling and I suggest that there are other likely model types that are excluded from philosophical accounts.
Disentangling life: Darwin, selectionism, and the postgenomic return of the environment.
Meloni M
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Apr · PMID 28196347 · Publisher ↗
In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism's traits. In the case of humans, the sur...
In this paper, I analyze the disruptive impact of Darwinian selectionism for the century-long tradition in which the environment had a direct causative role in shaping an organism's traits. In the case of humans, the surrounding environment often determined not only the physical, but also the mental and moral features of individuals and whole populations. With its apparatus of indirect effects, random variations, and a much less harmonious view of nature and adaptation, Darwinian selectionism severed the deep imbrication of organism and milieu posited by these traditional environmentalist models. This move had radical implications well beyond strictly biological debates. In my essay, I discuss the problematization of the moral idiom of environmentalism by William James and August Weismann who adopted a selectionist view of the development of mental faculties. These debates show the complex moral discourse associated with the environmentalist-selectionist dilemma. They also well illustrate how the moral reverberations of selectionism went well beyond the stereotyped associations with biological fatalism or passivity of the organism. Rereading them today may be helpful as a genealogical guide to the complex ethical quandaries unfolding in the current postgenomic scenario in which a revival of new environmentalist themes is taking place.
On ideals of objectivity, judgments, and bias in medical research - A comment on Stegenga.
Jukola S
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Apr · PMID 28188111 · Publisher ↗
By using Stegenga's article Is meta-analysis the platinum standard of evidence as a case study, this paper shows how different notions of objectivity can affect discussions concerning medical research. I argue that the i...
By using Stegenga's article Is meta-analysis the platinum standard of evidence as a case study, this paper shows how different notions of objectivity can affect discussions concerning medical research. I argue that the ideal of objectivity that underlies Stegenga's article is both unattainable in practice and insufficient and unnecessary in principle to capture some of the ways in which biases may enter medical knowledge production.
Expectation and futurity: The remarkable success of genetic determinism.
Esposito M
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Apr · PMID 28092810 · Publisher ↗
Genetic determinism is nowadays largely questioned and widely criticized. However, if we look at the history of biology in the last one hundred years, we realize that genetic determinism has always been controversial. Wh...
Genetic determinism is nowadays largely questioned and widely criticized. However, if we look at the history of biology in the last one hundred years, we realize that genetic determinism has always been controversial. Why, then, did it acquire such relevance in the past despite facing longstanding criticism? Through the analysis of some of the ambitious expectations of future scientific applications, this article explores the possibility that part of the historical success of genetic determinism lies in the powerful rhetorical strategies that have connected the germinal matter with alluring bio-technological visions. Indeed, in drawing on the recent perspectives of "expectation studies" in science and technology, it will be shown that there has been an interesting historical relationship between reductionist notions of the gene as a hereditary unit, coded information or functional DNA segment, and startling prophecies of what controlling such an entity might achieve. It will also be suggested that the well-known promissory nature of genomics is far older than the emergence of biotechnology in the 1970s. At least from the time of the bio-utopias predicted by J.B.S. Haldane and J. S. Huxley, the gene has often been surrounded by what I call the "rhetoric of futurity": a promissory rhetoric that, despite momentous changes in the life sciences throughout the 20th century, has remained relatively consistent over time.
Animal extrapolation in preclinical studies: An analysis of the tragic case of TGN1412.
Lemoine M
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Feb · PMID 28039775 · Publisher ↗
According to the received view, the transportation view, animal extrapolation consists in inductive prediction of the outcome of a mechanism in a target, based on an analogical mechanism in a model. Through an analysis o...
According to the received view, the transportation view, animal extrapolation consists in inductive prediction of the outcome of a mechanism in a target, based on an analogical mechanism in a model. Through an analysis of the failure of preclinical studies of TGN1412, an innovative drug, to predict the tragic consequences of its first-in-man trial in 2006, the received view is challenged by a proposed view of animal extrapolation, the chimera view. According to this view, animal extrapolation is based on a hypothesis about how human organisms work, supported by the amalgamation of results drawn from various experimental organisms, and only predicting the 'predictive grid', that is, a global framework of the effects to be expected.
Biology meets physics: Reductionism and multi-scale modeling of morphogenesis.
Green S, Batterman R
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Feb · PMID 28024174 · Publisher ↗
A common reductionist assumption is that macro-scale behaviors can be described "bottom-up" if only sufficient details about lower-scale processes are available. The view that an "ideal" or "fundamental" physics would be...
A common reductionist assumption is that macro-scale behaviors can be described "bottom-up" if only sufficient details about lower-scale processes are available. The view that an "ideal" or "fundamental" physics would be sufficient to explain all macro-scale phenomena has been met with criticism from philosophers of biology. Specifically, scholars have pointed to the impossibility of deducing biological explanations from physical ones, and to the irreducible nature of distinctively biological processes such as gene regulation and evolution. This paper takes a step back in asking whether bottom-up modeling is feasible even when modeling simple physical systems across scales. By comparing examples of multi-scale modeling in physics and biology, we argue that the "tyranny of scales" problem presents a challenge to reductive explanations in both physics and biology. The problem refers to the scale-dependency of physical and biological behaviors that forces researchers to combine different models relying on different scale-specific mathematical strategies and boundary conditions. Analyzing the ways in which different models are combined in multi-scale modeling also has implications for the relation between physics and biology. Contrary to the assumption that physical science approaches provide reductive explanations in biology, we exemplify how inputs from physics often reveal the importance of macro-scale models and explanations. We illustrate this through an examination of the role of biomechanical modeling in developmental biology. In such contexts, the relation between models at different scales and from different disciplines is neither reductive nor completely autonomous, but interdependent.
Kamikazes and cultural evolution.
Allen-Hermanson S
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Feb · PMID 27951454 · Publisher ↗
Is cultural evolution needed to explain altruistic selfsacrifice? Some contend that cultural traits (e.g. beliefs, behaviors, and for some "memes") replicate according to selection processes that have "floated free" from...
Is cultural evolution needed to explain altruistic selfsacrifice? Some contend that cultural traits (e.g. beliefs, behaviors, and for some "memes") replicate according to selection processes that have "floated free" from biology. One test case is the example of suicide kamikaze attacks in wartime Japan. Standard biological mechanisms-such as reciprocal altruism and kin selection-might not seem to apply here: The suicide pilots did not act on the expectation that others would reciprocate, and they were supposedly sacrificing themselves for country and emperor, not close relatives. Yet an examination of both the historical record and the demands of evolutionary theory suggest the kamikaze phenomenon does not cry out for explanation in terms of a special non-biological selection process. This weakens the case for cultural evolution, and has interesting implications for our understanding of altruistic self-sacrifice.
Sewall Wright, shifting balance theory, and the hardening of the modern synthesis.
Ishida Y
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2017 Feb · PMID 27907853 · Publisher ↗
The period between the 1940s and 1960s saw the hardening of the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology. Gould and Provine argue that Wright's shifting balance theory of evolution hardened during this period. But their...
The period between the 1940s and 1960s saw the hardening of the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology. Gould and Provine argue that Wright's shifting balance theory of evolution hardened during this period. But their account does not do justice to Wright, who always regarded selection as acting together with drift. This paper presents a more adequate account of the development of Wright's shifting balance theory, paying particular attention to his application of the theory to the geographical distribution of flower color dimorphism in Linanthus parryae. The account shows that even in the heyday of the hardened synthesis, the balance or interaction of evolutionary factors, such as drift, selection, and migration, occupied pride of place in Wright's theory, and that between the 1940s and 1970s, Wright developed the theory of isolation by distance to quantitatively represent the structure of the Linanthus population, which he argued had the kind of structure posited by his shifting balance theory. In the end, Wright arrived at a sophisticated description of the structure of the Linanthus population, where the interaction between drift and selection varied spatially.
Spot the difference: Causal contrasts in scientific diagrams.
Scholl R
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27838600 · Publisher ↗
An important function of scientific diagrams is to identify causal relationships. This commonly relies on contrasts that highlight the effects of specific difference-makers. However, causal contrast diagrams are not an o...
An important function of scientific diagrams is to identify causal relationships. This commonly relies on contrasts that highlight the effects of specific difference-makers. However, causal contrast diagrams are not an obvious and easy to recognize category because they appear in many guises. In this paper, four case studies are presented to examine how causal contrast diagrams appear in a wide range of scientific reports, from experimental to observational and even purely theoretical studies. It is shown that causal contrasts can be expressed in starkly different formats, including photographs of complexly visualized macromolecules as well as line graphs, bar graphs, or plots of state spaces. Despite surface differences, however, there is a measure of conceptual unity among such diagrams. In empirical studies they often serve not only to infer and communicate specific causal claims, but also as evidence for them. The key data of some studies is given nowhere except in the diagrams. Many diagrams show multiple causal contrasts in order to demonstrate both that an effect exists and that the effect is specific - that is, to narrowly circumscribe the phenomenon to be explained. In a large range of scientific reports, causal contrast diagrams reflect the core epistemic claims of the researchers.
Theoretical ecology as etiological from the start.
Donhauser J
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27780082 · Publisher ↗
The world's leading environmental advisory institutions look to ecological theory and research as an objective guide for policy and resource management decision-making. In addition to the theoretical and broadly philosop...
The world's leading environmental advisory institutions look to ecological theory and research as an objective guide for policy and resource management decision-making. In addition to the theoretical and broadly philosophical merits of doing so, it is therefore practically significant to clear up confusions about ecology's conceptual foundations and to clarify the basic workings of inferential methods used in the science. Through discussion of key moments in the genesis of the theoretical branch of ecology, this essay elucidates a general heuristic role of teleological metaphors in ecological research and defuses certain enduring confusions about work in ecology.
The impact of A. R. Wallace's Sarawak Law paper reassessed.
van Wyhe J
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27721035 · Publisher ↗
This article examines six main elements in the modern story of the impact of Alfred Russel Wallace's 1855 Sarawak Law paper, particularly in the many accounts of Charles Darwin's life and work. These elements are: Each o...
This article examines six main elements in the modern story of the impact of Alfred Russel Wallace's 1855 Sarawak Law paper, particularly in the many accounts of Charles Darwin's life and work. These elements are: Each of these are very frequently repeated as straightforward facts in the popular and scholarly literature. It is here argued that each of these is erroneous and that the role of the Sarawak Law paper in the historiography of Darwin and Wallace needs to be revised.
Robustness and evidence of mechanisms in early experimental atherosclerosis research.
Parkkinen VP
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27721023 · Publisher ↗
This article considers the evaluation of experimental evidence for a causal relation between cholesterol and atherosclerosis from the beginning of the 1900s until the late 1950s. It has been argued that the medical commu...
This article considers the evaluation of experimental evidence for a causal relation between cholesterol and atherosclerosis from the beginning of the 1900s until the late 1950s. It has been argued that the medical community failed to see the implications of this early research, and at first unjustifiably rejected a causal link between cholesterol and atherosclerosis. This article argues to the contrary that the medical community was justified to conclude based on the experimental evidence that cholesterol (dietary or blood) is probably not an effective target for preventive treatment. However, the evidence would have been sufficient to ascribe to cholesterol a contributing causal role in atherosclerotic heart disease. This view is argued for based on a rational reconstruction of the researchers' evaluation of evidence, specifically, the robustness of evidence for a manipulable dependence between cholesterol and atherosclerosis on the one hand, and the evidence for a mediating mechanism on the other. The case study is used to illustrate that robustness is a feasible methodological principle even when evidence is discordant, and evidence of mechanism should be evaluated on a par with evidence of statistical dependence in establishing causal claims.
AIC and the challenge of complexity: A case study from ecology.
Moll RJ, Steel D, Montgomery RA
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27697630 · Publisher ↗
Philosophers and scientists alike have suggested Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), and other similar model selection methods, show predictive accuracy justifies a preference for simplicity in model selection. This ep...
Philosophers and scientists alike have suggested Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), and other similar model selection methods, show predictive accuracy justifies a preference for simplicity in model selection. This epistemic justification of simplicity is limited by an assumption of AIC which requires that the same probability distribution must generate the data used to fit the model and the data about which predictions are made. This limitation has been previously noted but appears to often go unnoticed by philosophers and scientists and has not been analyzed in relation to complexity. If predictions are about future observations, we argue that this assumption is unlikely to hold for models of complex phenomena. That in turn creates a practical limitation for simplicity's AIC-based justification because scientists modeling such phenomena are often interested in predicting the future. We support our argument with an ecological case study concerning the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park, U.S.A. We suggest that AIC might still lend epistemic support for simplicity by leading to better explanations of complex phenomena.
Beyond blindness: On the role of organism and environment in trial generation.
Baravalle L, Vecchi D
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27693906 · Publisher ↗
In this paper we aim to amend the traditional analogy at the heart of evolutionary epistemologies. We shall first argue, contrary to what has been frequently done, that both hypothesis generation and the processes of gen...
In this paper we aim to amend the traditional analogy at the heart of evolutionary epistemologies. We shall first argue, contrary to what has been frequently done, that both hypothesis generation and the processes of generation of genetic and phenotypic change are often directed as well as environmentally conditioned. Secondly, we shall argue that environmental influence does not affect trial generation directly but that environmental information is processed by the epistemic agent and by the biological organism respectively. Thirdly, we suggest conceiving hypothesis generation as a process of manipulative abduction and the generation of biological variation as a process mediated by phenotypic plasticity. Finally, we argue that manipulative abduction and environmentally-induced biological variation modulated by plasticity are analogous because they both involve a conjectural response to environmental cues. Our analysis thus vindicates a revised version of evolutionary epistemology ascribing a fundamental role to both organism and environment in trial generation. This perspective, in our opinion, offers support to the thesis, inspired by the theory of embodied cognition, that hypothesis generation is sometimes explained by an appeal to phenotypic plasticity.
Diagnosis and causal explanation in psychiatry.
Maung HH
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27661409 · Full text
In clinical medicine, a diagnosis can offer an explanation of a patient's symptoms by specifying the pathology that is causing them. Diagnoses in psychiatry are also sometimes presented in clinical texts as if they pick...
In clinical medicine, a diagnosis can offer an explanation of a patient's symptoms by specifying the pathology that is causing them. Diagnoses in psychiatry are also sometimes presented in clinical texts as if they pick out pathological processes that cause sets of symptoms. However, current evidence suggests the possibility that many diagnostic categories in psychiatry are highly causally heterogeneous. For example, major depressive disorder may not be associated with a single type of underlying pathological process, but with a range of different causal pathways, each involving complex interactions of various biological, psychological, and social factors. This paper explores the implications of causal heterogeneity for whether psychiatric diagnoses can be said to serve causal explanatory roles in clinical practice. I argue that while they may fall short of picking out a specific cause of the patient's symptoms, they can nonetheless supply different sorts of clinically relevant causal information. In particular, I suggest that some psychiatric diagnoses provide negative information that rules out certain causes, some provide approximate or disjunctive information about the range of possible causal processes, and some provide causal information about the relations between the symptoms themselves.
Darwin, Hume, Morgan, and the verae causae of psychology.
Clatterbuck H
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Dec · PMID 27643957 · Publisher ↗
Charles Darwin and C. Lloyd Morgan forward two influential principles of cognitive ethological inference that yield conflicting results about the extent of continuity in the cognitive traits of humans and other animals....
Charles Darwin and C. Lloyd Morgan forward two influential principles of cognitive ethological inference that yield conflicting results about the extent of continuity in the cognitive traits of humans and other animals. While these principles have been interpreted as reflecting commitments to different senses of parsimony, in fact, both principles result from the same vera causa inferential strategy, according to which "We ought to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances". Instead, the conflict stems from Darwin's and Morgan's views about the true causes of human psychology. Darwin holds a thoroughly Humean philosophy of the human mind, from which he infers significant continuity between human and animal minds. In contrast, Morgan argues that Humean cognitive mechanisms cannot account for a class of uniquely human behaviors, and therefore, he concludes that there is a significant discontinuity between human and animal cognition. This historical debate is informative for current controversies in comparative psychology.
Beyond the realism debate: The metaphysics of 'racial' distinctions.
Lemeire O
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Oct · PMID 27565209 · Publisher ↗
The current metaphysical race debate is very much focused on the realism question whether races exist. In this paper I argue against the importance of this question. Philosophers, biologists and anthropologists expect th...
The current metaphysical race debate is very much focused on the realism question whether races exist. In this paper I argue against the importance of this question. Philosophers, biologists and anthropologists expect that answering this question will tell them something substantive about the metaphysics of racial classifications, and will help them to decide whether it is justified to use racial categories in scientific research and public policy. I argue that there are two reasons why these expectations are not fulfilled. First of all, the realism question about race leads to a very broad philosophical debate about the semantics of general terms and the criteria for real kinds, rather than to a debate about the metaphysics of racial categories specifically. Secondly, there is a type of race realism that is so toothless that it is almost completely uninformative about the metaphysics of race. In response to these worries, I argue that the metaphysical race debate should rather be focused on the question in what way and to what extent 'racial' distinctions can ground the epistemic practices of various scientific disciplines. I spell out what I mean by this, and go on to demonstrate that trying to answer this question leads to a more fruitful metaphysical debate.
Koch's postulates: An interventionist perspective.
Ross LN, Woodward JF
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Oct · PMID 27315189 · Publisher ↗
We argue that Koch's postulates are best understood within an interventionist account of causation, in the sense described in Woodward (2003). We show how this treatment helps to resolve interpretive puzzles associated w...
We argue that Koch's postulates are best understood within an interventionist account of causation, in the sense described in Woodward (2003). We show how this treatment helps to resolve interpretive puzzles associated with Koch's work and how it clarifies the different roles the postulates play in providing useful, yet not universal criteria for disease causation. Our paper is an effort at rational reconstruction; we attempt to show how Koch's postulates and reasoning make sense and are normatively justified within an interventionist framework and more difficult to understand within alternative frameworks for thinking about causation.
"Triple negative breast cancer": Translational research and the (re)assembling of diseases in post-genomic medicine.
Keating P, Cambrosio A, Nelson NC
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Oct · PMID 27235853 · Publisher ↗
The paper examines the debate about the nature and status of "Triple-negative breast cancer", a controversial biomedical entity whose existence illustrates a number of features of post-genomic translational research. The...
The paper examines the debate about the nature and status of "Triple-negative breast cancer", a controversial biomedical entity whose existence illustrates a number of features of post-genomic translational research. The emergence of TNBC is intimately linked to the rise of molecular oncology, and, more generally, to the changing configuration of the life sciences at the turn of the new century. An unprecedented degree of integration of biological and clinical practices has led to the proliferation of bio-clinical entities emerging from translational research. These translations take place between platforms rather than between clinical and laboratory settings. The complexity and heterogeneity of TNBC, its epistemic and technical, biological and clinical dualities, result from its multiple instantiations via different platforms, and from the uneven distribution of biological materials, techniques, and objects across clinical research settings. The fact that TNBC comes in multiple forms, some of which seem to be incompatible or, at least, only partially overlapping, appears to be less a threat to the whole endeavor, than an aspect of an ongoing translational research project. Discussions of translational research that rest on a distinction between basic research and its applications fail to capture the dynamics of this new domain of activity, insofar as application is built-in from the very beginning in the bio-clinical entities that emerge from the translational research domain.
William Whewell's philosophy of architecture and the historicization of biology.
Quinn A
Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · 2016 Oct · PMID 27235852 · Publisher ↗
William Whewell's work on historical science has received some attention from historians and philosophers of science. Whewell's own work on the history of German Gothic church architecture has been touched on within the...
William Whewell's work on historical science has received some attention from historians and philosophers of science. Whewell's own work on the history of German Gothic church architecture has been touched on within the context of the history of architecture. To a large extent these discussions have been conducted separately. I argue that Whewell intended his work on Gothic architecture as an attempt to (help) found a science of historical architecture, as an exemplar of historical science. I proceed by analyzing the key features of Whewell's philosophy of historical science. I then show how his architectural history exemplifies this philosophy. Finally, I show how Whewell's philosophy of historical science matches some developments in a science (biological systematics) that, in the mid-to late-nineteenth century, came to be reinterpreted as a historical science. I comment briefly on Whewell as a potential influence on nineteenth century biology and in particular on Darwin.
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