Keyword: adaptivity

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 […]

In an unpublished manuscript datable to 1956-1957, La vision comme modèle de la connaissance[1] (Vision as a model of knowledge), the philosopher of medicine and biology Georges Canguilhem referred to specific biological-adaptive mechanisms compensating for some human vision anomalies, particularly hemianopic anomalies. In individuals in whom it tends to occur, hemianopsia (or hemianopia) involves the loss of one half of a […]

The first session of the of the IAS research seminar 2022/2023 will take place next Thursday, October 20th, at 4pm. To connect remotely please register by writing to: andrea.gambarotto@ehu.eus Biological Autonomy and Gaian Systems Sergio Rubin Georges Lemaître Centre for Earth and Climate Research, Earth and Life Institute, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium In this presentation it […]

In the first part I have claimed that dialectical thinking is part and parcel of the enactive approach. I will now try to substantiate this claim. In the 1991 book The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch draw on developmental and evolutionary biology to prepare the reader for the idea of embodied action as a […]

Published open access in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences,  44(3), 38 Abstract: The definitions and conceptualizations of health, and the management of healthcare have been challenged by the current global scenarios (e.g., new diseases, new geographical distribution of diseases, effects of climate change on health, etc.) and by the ongoing scholarship in humanities […]