Contributions

At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical relatives are parts of entirely distinct evolutionary conversations: ‘adapting’ immediately evokes thoughts of natural selection, ‘adaptive’ (typically paired with ‘maladaptive’) is used in normative evaluations of […]

Tahar, Mathilde (2024). Du finalisme en biologie. Bergson et la théorie de l’évolution. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. As Ernst Mayr wrote, “no other ideology has influenced biology more profoundly than teleological thinking” (Mayr 1992, 117). This approach, which interprets phenomena based on their finality (telos), has permeated the history of biology since Aristotle. It […]

Cross-posted at The Brains Blog Introduction: The Role of Functions in Biology and Philosophy Biological functions play a critical role in our understanding of living organisms and their traits. Whether we’re talking about the heart, lungs, or brain, their “function” helps an organism survive, grow, reproduce, and sometimes assist others. But can we explain more […]

No field showcases the virtues of philosophy of biology more effectively than evolutionary science (although I recently learned from Gregory Rupik, 2024, that this observation is not necessarily a virtue). As a graduate student and would-be evolutionist in London in the late 1980s, I was introduced to the pioneering writings of David Hull on evolutionary […]

In 1892, Ernst Haeckel introduced the term biopsychism to express the view that all and only living beings are sentient. For Haeckel, this position was to be distinguished both from zoopsychism, the belief that all and only animals are sentient, and his preferred panpsychism, the belief that all and only matter is sentient (Haeckel 1892: […]

In a previous post, we discussed causal circularity in living systems using the continental hydrological cycle as an example (which can be consulted in the text “Do forests play a role in the continental hydrological cycle in tropical regions?”). We concluded that text by asking whether forests indeed play a role in maintaining the continental […]

Do forests grow where it rains, or does it rain where forests grow? This was the title given by Antonio Nobre, a climate researcher at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, to one of his texts on the role of the Amazon rainforest in climate regulation (Instituto Socioambiental (Brazil), 2008). Nobre often emphasizes, in his […]

Since emerging onto the stage as ‘a theory of cortical responses’ in 2005[1], Karl Friston’s free energy principle has undergone numerous costume changes. In its most modest dress, it appears as nothing more than a tautological truism[2]: in its most eye-catching ensemble it is “an existential dyad from which everything of interest about life and […]

The question of the holistic structure of an organism is a recurring theme in the philosophy of biology and has been increasingly discussed again in recent years.[2] Organisms have recently been described as complex systems[3] that autonomously create, maintain and reproduce themselves[4] while constantly interacting with their environment. Key focal points include their autopoiesis[5], autonomy[6], […]

The future of evolutionary-developmental systems biology https://meetings.embo.org/event/23-evolution-venice Every two years, I co-direct a theoretical summer school on topics related to evolutionary developmental and systems biology at the Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli in Venice. My current partner in crime is philosopher of science James DiFrisco. Future editions of the school will be co-organized by us and Nicole Repina. Since 2019, the […]