The trade-off hypothesis plays a foundational role in the theoretical framework of modern evolutionary epidemiology, proposing that pathogen fitness is maximized at intermediate levels of virulence. Despite its influence on the study of host–pathogen interactions, the hypothesis has been criticized for its limited empirical support and the conceptual ambiguities surrounding the definition of virulence. This paper reassesses the scientific status of the trade-off hypothesis by interpreting the dependencies among epidemiological parameters as constitutive principles. Therefore, the results of the seminal 1982 work of Anderson and May are reinterpreted as a shift in the constitutive principles underpinning the paradigm of evolutionary epidemiology. This perspective provides a novel basis for evaluating the empirical support for the trade-off hypothesis and reassessing the debate regarding its validity.
In environmental sciences, research on psychological and physical human-nature connection has recently expanded, revealing a diverse phenomenon associated with well-being, prosociality, and pro-environmentality. This paper argues that in his time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) described a similar phenomenon with similar consequences, explaining its origin and importance in a nuanced manner that is able to bring new insights to the current theoretical frameworks on human-nature connection. In this paper, an interpretation of Rousseau’s philosophy with a systems approach is presented. Furthermore, by integrating it with temporary philosophy of systems biology and other relevant underpinnings, a framework for nature connectedness called the life-sustenance hypothesis is advanced, suggesting that all organisms are guided by two fundamental, parallel orientations: A self-sustaining orientation for self-preservative purposes and a life-sustaining orientation for sustaining surrounding life. Rousseau did not speak in these terms, but referred to different ‘manners-of-being’, the dynamics of which can be described with his central terms, amour-de-soi, amour-propre, and pitié. He suggested that the modern, individualistic lifestyle has introduced an excessive imbalance in these manners-of-beings, with harmful consequences on our well-being and the way we treat other beings. One possible solution Rousseau explored to resolve this imbalance—along with the political, educational, and domestic ones—was restoring personal inner peace, ‘harmony with Nature’. The experience of harmony, I suggest, greatly resembles the immersive psychological nature connectedness depicted by contemporary research. Rousseau’s system of thought is able to bring clarity into why we experience nature connectedness, and why it affects us the way it does.
Rudolf Steiner’s Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (Outline of an Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview, 1886) seeks to articulate the epistemological foundations of Goethe’s scientific method. Here I reconstruct the book with a particular focus on the cognition of organisms and read it in systematic relation to Kant, whose analysis of teleological judgment provides the clearest foil for Steiner’s project. The guiding question is under what epistemic conditions living beings can become objects of genuine knowledge rather than merely regulative judgment. I reconstruct the argument in five steps: (1) pure experience as a structureless manifold; (2) thinking as a self-transparent and law-governed activity within experience; (3) cognition as the reunification of perception and concept under empirical constraint; (4) the contrast between inorganic and organic cognition; and (5) the claim that organisms can be understood through Goethe’s concept of Typus, a developing method, and an intuitive power of judgment (anschauende Urteilskraft). Steiner’s reconstruction of Goethe thus yields a position that transforms Kant’s view of teleological judgment as merely regulative. A concluding section considers the relevance of this argument for current debates on organism-centred theoretical biology and the relation between subject and object in biological cognition. I suggest that Goethe’s method as interpreted by Steiner deserves renewed attention as a systematic attempt to articulate the epistemological conditions of a participatory science of the organic.
Hereditarianism, the belief that genetic factors significantly influence differences in behavioral traits and social outcomes, remains relevant in the age of polygenic embryo screening and social science genomics. Although early twentieth-century monogenic versions of hereditarianism—suggesting specific genes for traits like feeble-mindedness, nomadism, and pauperism—may now seem outdated, similar reasoning persisted into the early twenty-first century through candidate gene studies. With the advent of high-resolution genomic association studies, the understanding of complex traits has shifted toward a massively polygenic architecture, moving away from the "gene for X" paradigm. Nevertheless, the aspiration to identify purely genetic causes persists, and a more nuanced form of hereditarian theory continues to exist. This paper explores the evolution of hereditarianism in its various forms, examining its connections to racism and anti-egalitarian politics. In a sense, this work is an extension of the twentieth century critique of hereditarianism, in line with key figures like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. The paper begins with early twentieth-century eugenics and the hereditarian approach to IQ in the United States, progresses to modern scientific racism, and concludes with an evaluation of causal claims in contemporary social science genomics. A consistent theme across these periods and fields is the belief in the potential for genetic explanations of social inequalities both within and between groups.
Model organisms have long occupied a central place in the life sciences, driving major discoveries and stabilizing knowledge about biological mechanisms conserved across taxa. However, their dominance has often eclipsed experimental model organisms—specimens chosen for their capacity to illuminate local hypotheses, usually associated with organism-specific features. This paper advances a twofold argument. First, I contend that overreliance on model organisms constrains the generation of novel hypotheses and narrows the conceptual landscape of biological inquiry. Using epigenetic inheritance as a case study, I show how this focus has systematically marginalized forms of inheritance that depart from conventional assumptions (i.e., germline/material overlap and transgenerational stability). Here, I concentrate on external intergenerational epigenetic inheritance. Second, I argue that merely vindicating the use of experimental model organisms is insufficient without examining the philosophical assumptions that structure their epistemic function. Specifically, I demonstrate that the representationalist conception—models as surrogates for target systems—permeates the conceptualization of experimental model organisms through the idea of representational function, thereby reinforcing framed trajectory-dependent inquiry. This representationalist conceptualization undermines the capacity of experimental model organisms to support framing exploratory inquiry oriented to test conceptually disruptive ideas, such as external intergenerational epigenetic inheritance. To overcome this limitation, I develop a Pragmatist–Artifactualist framework that reconceptualizes the epistemic role of experimental model organisms and restores their potential to expand the boundaries of biological understanding.
This introduction discusses the challenges plant life has represented in the history and philosophy of science, and outlines the topics dealt with by the contributors. Understanding plant life, behaviour, and nature reveals a crucial feature to deal with several corners of science and society, but also to deal with the environment.
Bodies are often treated as entities expected to conform to stable, idealized forms, such as binary sex, health, youth, beauty, slimness. Bodies must tend to present static and aesthetic traits. Yet this apparent stability conceals a deeper tension: bodies are continuously shaped, constrained, and reconfigured by biological processes, social norms, and technological interventions. In this paper, we develop a scientifically informed philosophical account of corporality that challenges static conceptions of the body. Drawing on a process ontology of organisms and the biological concept of autopoiesis, we argue that bodies are constantly produced, and that this production crucially includes technology. On this basis, we introduce the notion of the gendered stathetic body ("stathetic" from static and aesthetic), to describe how bodies are persistently forced to stabilize within a multidimensional "cage" of idealized traits. Through the analysis of contemporary medical and aesthetic interventions, we show that the pursuit of fixed, desirable characteristics operates as a form of mystification and constitutes a subtle yet pervasive violence against bodies. At the same time, we argue that corporality is never fully determined: it unfolds within a political field of tension, where the same technologies that enforce stabilization may also enable new forms of transformation and emancipation.
Plant “intelligence” and “sensation” are controversial notions in contemporary botany. While some scientists argue that sensory awareness, learning, memory, communication, and possibly a kind of consciousness should be ascribed to plants, a substantial part of the scientific community dismisses such claims because of insufficient evidence and the lack of neural systems in plants. In this paper, I will examine this issue from a historical and epistemological perspective. First, I will go back to a crucial precedent that is often evoked in these debates, i.e., Darwin’s remarks on plant “sensation” and “behavior” and his analogy between roots and brains in the 1880 book The Power of Movement in Plants. I will point out that the issue was already well known and controversial in the nineteenth century. I will then examine contemporary debates starting from new experiments and evidence on plant cognitive powers. I will argue that current debates are partly based on elements that have been available since Darwin, such as postulates of biological continuity among living beings and the use of analogy, leading to an epistemological contrast between the need to avoid ungrounded anthropomorphic projections and the argument that kinds of cognitive states could be realized in plants. I also finally point out that investigations on animal ethics and the revaluation of non-Western views on animism and ecology have recently been introduced into this debate to break the epistemological balance between opposing views.
No one is perfect, and this is particularly true of disease classifications. When diseases are classified according to different dimensions (topography, symptoms, morphology, aetiology, etc), some characteristics of the diseases are prioritised while others are downplayed. Moreover not all diseases are equally well characterised by a given dimension, and especially complex, chronic diseases such as cancer and diabetes have proved difficult to classify because of their heterogeneity. Their classification created tensions historically and still present challenges today. In this article we juxtapose the difficulties of classifying diabetes and cancer historically with the challenges arising in modern classifications of the two diseases. We trace the history of classifying cancer and diabetes, and find that while cancer proved difficult to classify based on its physiological features, diabetes could not readily be situated anatomically and they were classified according to different dimensions: cancer as patho-anatomical and diabetes as patho-physiological. We then discuss the limitations that come with the adoption of these classifications and how they are currently being challenged by new scientific developments. We show that the use of molecular markers to reclassify diabetes 2 and cancer allows their characterisation to cross paths i.e. to move across the classificatory dimensions that had been prioritised historically. Reopening down-prioritised dimensions comes at a price, though, and, we outline challenges as well as opportunities faced by type 2 diabetes and cancer classification. Finally, we argue that the combination of philosophical and historical analyses is well suited to cast light on classificatory tensions and challenges.
This article argues that philosophical arguments of contingency in the development of science can be advanced by starting from historical evidence produced through the framework of narratives of contingency. Narratives of contingency are conceptualized both as prospective narratives constructed by historical actors to navigate decisions at what they perceived as fork moments in the present and as an analytical framework for systematically reconstructing such decision-making processes from historical sources.The argument is developed in three steps. First, the article outlines three constraints that historical case studies must explicitly address in order to function as evidence for philosophical arguments of contingency and alternative pathway possibility. These are the identification of a juncture moment in a situated trajectory, an explanatory factor linking actors' decisions to the initiation of path-dependent sequences, and an explicit specification of analytical level and scale. Second, narratives of contingency are introduced as a historical framework that enables the systematic description and explanation of pathway decision-making processes, particularly in contexts of institutional deliberation where alternative courses of action were explicitly articulated. Third, the framework is illustrated through a case study of institutional decision-making in the early development of molecular genetics in Germany (1958-1960).
In this case study we present a novel way to assess scientific influence using computational linguistic tools. Here, we use such tools to identify semantic influence, or nuanced language patterns, with which to determine precedence of an idea and directionality of its spread. We aim to quantitatively test cell biologist and historian Karl Matlin’s claim that Günter Blobel’s ideas on protein topogenesis were more influential and had a larger impact on cell biology than the total number of citations of his 1980 paper “Intracellular Protein Topogenesis” would suggest. Examining collections of molecular cell biology journal articles from the 1980s through to the 2010s, we examine papers citing Blobel’s (Proc Natl Acad Sci 77(3):1496–1500, 1980. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.77.3.1496 ) paper, as well as relevant papers not citing it from the same time periods. We find changes in the language of these publications during the 1980s and early 1990s that can be traced back to Blobel’s introduction of the concept of protein topogenesis—or the spatial organizing of proteins that make up the cell—despite most cell biologists ignoring Blobel’s specific terms for sequences related to the phenomenon he describes, including the term “protein topogenesis” itself. We characterize language patterns from journal articles over different time periods for three different collections, each representing three communities of researchers: those citing Blobel’s paper, those citing different but related papers from around the same time, and a collection representative of the larger field relevant to each collection’s research topics. Finally, we demonstrate that the changes in language patterns of those discussing Blobel’s ideas in the 1980s and early 1990s are not limited to those directly citing his 1980 paper where the ideas were articulated. Specific terms related to the “protein topogenesis” concept first emerged within the network of researchers citing Blobel; the larger cell biology community then picked up these same language patterns and used them at similar rates five years after they were first detected in the smaller community of researchers directly citing his work. By deploying a suite of computational and quantitative methods representing auxiliary approaches to conducting history of science studies, we substantiate Matlin’s qualitative claim that the influence of Blobel’s “Intracellular Protein Topogenesis” far exceeds its citation count, and these ideas from Blobel somehow diffused into the larger community in a way that bypassed those directly citing these ideas.
Primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM) or "brain-eating amoeba disease" is a relatively rare but typically fatal infectious disease of increasing global concern. Discovery of PAM and that Naegleria fowleri is the causative agent responsible are frequently credited to a paper published by the Australian pathologists Malcolm Fowler and Rodney F. Carter in 1965. It was significant as confirmation of an earlier suspicion that free-living, non-parasitic amoebae may be opportunistic pathogens of the human central nervous system. Like many discoveries, however, the historical details are rather more complicated and involved a number of researchers and clinicians working over a decade from 1958 to 1971. Philosophical accounts of scientific discovery since Kuhn (Science, 136, 760-764, 1962) agree that discovery requires both recognition that something exists and understanding what it is. But there is little agreement about how much or what kind of understanding is required. This paper (i) excavates the complex array of observations, inferences, experiments, re-evaluations, and public statements by a number of scientific researchers and physicians that collectively resulted in the recognition of PAM as a novel form of central nervous system infection caused by a novel species of free-living amoeba; and (ii) considers how well several recent accounts of discovery apply to these achievements.
This article examines Buffon’s general theory of reproduction, concentrating on his discussion of the similarities and differences between animals and plants and his explanation of nourishment, development and reproduction as effects of the same general cause. In the ‘First Discourse’ and various of the chapters of Volume II of Buffon’s Natural History he seems to affirm two contradictory claims concerning the distinction between animals and plants: both that this distinction is absolute and indubitable and that it is false and insupportable. In this article I argue that this apparent contradiction is explained by distinguishing between what are for Buffon two distinct tasks in natural history: first, the classification of the natural world and the natural history of particular animals and plants; and second, enquiry into the general phenomena of life (nutrition, development and reproduction). It is in the first task, I argue, that the distinction between animals and plants is maintained, while it is largely inapplicable in the second. Distinguishing between these two tasks then also allows us to discern in Buffon’s work, I argue, an implicit conceptual distinction between the empirical classificatory group of plants (les végétaux), distinguished from animals, and the vegetal (le végétal), concerning processes common to both animals and plants. The emphasis on the comparison of animals and plants, together with the conceptual distinction between plants (vegetables) and the vegetal, further allows us to see, I argue, that Buffon’s general theory of reproduction is based on a vegetal model. That is, analysis of the details of Buffon’s theory shows not just—as almost all of his predecessors agreed—that animals and plants share the vegetative functions of nutrition, development and reproduction, but that the process of vegetative multiplication provides the model for reproduction in general. Theories of generation and embryological development based on analogies with the plant seed were still not uncommon in the eighteenth century. But I argue that Buffon’s general theory of reproduction presents something different in being based on the model of what we now call ‘vegetative reproduction’ (a new whole growing from a part) and in explaining the seed in these terms too. I conclude with some brief reflections on the implications of this vegetal understanding of Buffon’s general theory of reproduction for other aspects of Buffon’s natural history, particularly the introduction of the novel terminology of ‘reproduction’, the criticism of pre-existence theories and the controversy concerning the theory of the sexes of plants.
Massimo Pigliucci attempts to solve the species problem by integrating Wittgenstein's family resemblance into a scientific realist stance. He proposes that species are interest-independent natural clusters, yet he simultaneously concedes to the purpose-driven pluralism found in biological practice. We argue that this proposal leaves a central tension: it lacks a normative account to explain how an interest-independent ontology coexists with pluralistic practice. Although Pigliucci attempts to defend this realist commitment by appealing to the efficacy of scientific practice, we contend that his defense is problematic. Specifically, his defense exhibits three flaws: first, the inference from practical convergence to strong scientific realism is insufficient; second, it creates an explanatory tension regarding the coexistence of convergence and divergence; and third, it fails to rule out a more parsimonious institutional explanation. In response, we propose a practice-based moderate scientific realism. Decoupling reality from interest-independence, we formulate this realism as a dual constraint model: the reality of species is anchored in the world's causal constraints, while the objectivity of classification is maintained through the community's normative constraints. By substituting strong scientific realism with moderate scientific realism, this approach refines Pigliucci's family resemblance proposal, offering a coherent solution to the species problem that reconciles realist commitments with pluralistic practice.
GABAA and protein hypotheses aside, the lipid theory remains the most influential account of anaesthetic effects in modern pharmacology. An apparent aspect of the lipoidal model’s continued dominance is its long historical pedigree, frequently aligned with a process of steady refinement from Bibra and Harless to Hermann, Pohl, and finally Meyer/Overton. This paper problematizes this continuum by placing the genesis of a short-lived experimental entity—protagon—at the centre of the transition from the fat-solvation theory to the modern lipoidal theory of anaesthesia, which broadly identifies fat as a central mediating substance. A ‘historical ontology’ of protagon and an outline of the 19th century history of brain composition in relation to the early history of anaesthetic pharmacology, it treats the initial appearance of fat-oriented theories of anaesthesia as emergent of the focus on cerebral fat endemic to early 19th century organic principle analysis.
The Organisational Approach (OA) draws from Kant’s notion of natural purpose to offer a naturalistic account of teleology grounded in biological organisation, and a characterisation of biological purposiveness, i.e. what goals organisms have, and how they seek and achieve them. This paper re-examines the OA in light of two persistent issues: (1) whether organisational teleology can be causally realised in a way compatible with mechanism; and (2) how far the OA successfully extends across biological areas, development in particular. I distinguish two versions of the OA: a minimal model, focused on the self-maintenance of a stable organisation; a regulative model, which introduces regulation as a principle of teleological change. I argue that the minimal model successfully naturalises teleology, but at the price of a too narrow view of purposiveness as physiological self-maintenance. Instead, the regulative model offers a sui generis and potentially fruitful view of teleological change, blurring the boundary between physiology and development; however, it struggles to remain a naturalistic account. I introduce “design” and “epigeneticity” criteria for biological teleology to show how different ways of defining biological goals can either hinder or favour teleological naturalism, and thus the OA itself. This paper thus clarifies what kind of teleology the OA can naturalise, and where further theoretical work is required.
This paper offers an analysis of the DSM validation method, focusing on the role that non-empirical factors play in resolving forms of indeterminacy that cannot be settled by validator evidence alone. It begins by reconstructing the historical development and institutionalization of the DSM validation method, showing that although it emerged as an attempt to ground the classification of mental disorders in empirical evidence rather than in a priori preconceptions or contextual influences, it nonetheless came to rely on extra-empirical considerations at several crucial stages and was, in its very design, shaped by them.The paper addresses this tension by drawing on the concept of a decision point developed in the literature on science and values. By identifying a series of decision points that arise both in the application of the validation method to particular diagnostic categories and in the process of designing and developing the method itself, it argues that the incorporation of value judgments and metaphysical presuppositions constitutes a necessary and epistemically pertinent element that enabled the validation method to take shape and, when applied to specific categories, allows the validation process to move beyond its initial stages and reach a determinate conclusion.
Uncertainty has been highlighted as a paradoxical consequence of precision medicine (PM). In the life sciences and medicine, uncertainty is often conceptualized as something that can be clearly delimited and overcome by more information and better understanding derived from more research, more data, better tools etc. Building on the observation of uncertainty in PM and exploring it further by differentiating between socio-technical, epistemological and ontological uncertainty, we claim that at least some forms will likely turn out to be non-transient: Uncertainty in PM does not only result from missing or incomplete information, but also from insights into biological complexity and the destabilization of evidence frameworks. We conclude by discussing some implications for a successful implementation of PM in clinical practice by adequately navigating uncertainty.
