Biosystematists debate whether, and how, to include DNA sequence assertions in biological species definitions. In this paper the author distinguishes two ways to assert DNA sequences in species definitions: the alternational DNA sequence method and the DNA sequence consensus method. The author describes and explains the two methods and argues for using the alternational DNA sequence method because it is logical, requires no preliminary aligning of DNA sequences and no consensus-making, is useful for identifying individual specimens, and captures intra-species variation. On the other hand, DNA sequence consensus species defining is illogical, does require preliminary aligning of observed sequences and a consensus-making step, is not useful for identifying individual specimens, and does not capture intraspecies variation.
This paper examines how evidential standards are constructed, interpreted, and enforced in paleoanthropology and funerary archaeology, focusing on claims of deliberate burial practices in Homo naledi. We begin by tracing how criteria for identifying burials have been historically articulated within funerary archaeology. We then turn to the debate sparked by Berger and colleagues’ 2023 preprint, which claims intentional burial by H. naledi, analyzing the ensuing public peer review and critical responses—a snapshot of an ongoing discussion that offers a rich empirical terrain for philosophical analysis. We argue that, in its earlier stage, disagreement did not primarily concern the identification of relevant standards, but rather how such standards are conceptualized and applied—a phenomenon we believe is not an unusual feature of paleoanthropological debates. We distinguish between checklist-based and scaffolding-based construals of evidential standards: the former is primarily concerned with the collection of relevant types of data, while the latter focuses on the inferential architecture that connects data to the claims they are meant to support. We then show how critical assessments of H. naledi burial claims suggested failures of adherence under both accounts. We further extend our analysis to the arguments presented in the second preprint (published as the version of record in September 2025), emphasizing how they relate to the original debate. Finally, we show how a scaffolding-based construal of evidential standards comes with norms of adherence in the communication of science, and discuss their implications in high-visibility paleoanthropology.
Richerson, Boyd, and Henrich argue that certain skills exhibit such a high degree of complexity that they likely cannot be invented alone. Such complex skills, they claim, call for an evolutionary explanation, via cumulative, stepwise changes over time, transmitted via social learning, or “cumulative cultural evolution.” Assuming that complexity means the number of parts in a whole or the density of interactions among the parts, it remains unclear whether we are to judge a skill “complex” on grounds of the complexity of its performance, the complexity of its products, or the complexity of its developmental process. In this paper, I argue that the complexity in performance and products, while mostly used in the existing literature, do not simultaneously motivate cumulative explanation and unify many targets of such explanations. As a positive alternative, I argue that complexity in development is a better criterion for filtering skills that require cumulative explanation.
Hybridization and genetic admixture between species have long generated controversy in conservation biology. While some conservationists regard hybridization as a major threat to biodiversity, recent genomic research suggests that gene flow between species is widespread in evolutionary history and may enhance adaptive capacity in rapidly changing environments. Despite this growing recognition, conservation policy—particularly under the U.S. Endangered Species Act—remains ambiguous regarding the status and management of admixed populations. This paper examines whether conservationists have general reasons to prevent hybridization and admixture. I argue that there is no prima facie justification for a blanket commitment to preventing interspecies genetic mixing. After introducing the stakes of this issue through the historical Red Wolf Recovery Program, I analyze two prominent arguments commonly invoked to justify anti-hybridization positions: appeals to genetic purity and concerns about ‘extinction through introgression.’ I argue that genetic purity lacks intrinsic conservation value and that worries about introgressive extinction are often overstated and misapply arguments for the intrinsic value of species. Furthermore, efforts to prevent hybridization can undermine other conservation goals, including maintaining genetic diversity and ecological connectivity. In place of general prohibitions, I defend a contextual approach to hybridization, according to which the value or harm of admixture must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, considering its ecological, evolutionary, and cultural consequences.
A widely held view in biology is that higher Linnaean categories or ranks (genera, families, etc.) ought to be regarded as ‘mere conventions’. That is typically understood to mean that their utility and application stem from (relatively) recent conventions that have been adopted for their usage in biological classification. There are no underlying theories or robust ontological concepts of these higher ranks, in contrast to taxonomic groupings like species or populations (disputed as those underlying concepts or theories may be). Absent these conventions, the application of higher ranks are in important ways arbitrary, reflecting their lack of theoretical and conceptual grounding. Indeed, some taxonomists have argued that this lack of grounding justifies adopting rank-free taxonomies. Michael Devitt (2023a) challenges this entrenched view, calling it an exaggerated skepticism. Instead, he takes the continued use of higher Linnaean ranks as evidence that they reflect “minimal category concepts,” which do genuine theoretical and explanatory work by marking out a relative level of taxonomic hierarchy. We disagree. Here, we unpack what it means to treat Linnaean categories as mere conventions, arguing they are better understood as informational proxies for phylogenetic hierarchies. Yet, Devitt is right to focus on this case, as it provides an exemplar of how scientists retain the utility of scientific practices that outlive their underlying initial theoretical and conceptual justification. We conclude by offering an alternative explanation for this in the context of a pragmatic account of science that treats Linnaean classification as a biological formalization.
Although mental disorder categories were originally developed to explain and predict human psychology and behavior, in certain cases, namely, in cases involving animal caregiving and welfare, these categories have been extended to animal minds. This is in tension with the views of the majority of the scientific community, which tend towards skepticism about the utilization of mental health categories in non-human cases. This paper considers the feasibility of applying mental disorder categories to animals, and explores why different fields have drawn different conclusions on the matter. Using a comparison between human obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) and animal stereotypic behavior, and drawing on literature in psychiatry, philosophy of science, animal models, and philosophy of disability, I explore the various considerations relevant to whether and how mental disorders can be attributed to cases of abnormal animal behavior.
A multitude of distinct gene concepts coexist in genetics. Although these concepts are associated with different experimental techniques, referents and theoretical assumptions, they can nevertheless be ordered in a hierarchical classification, thus providing a relatively straightforward schema for understanding how different gene concepts relate to one another. In turn, this may explain how genetics operates as a conceptually coherent discipline despite divergences in how genes are conceptualized in different research and explanatory contexts.
Homeostasis is a core biological concept concerning the way organisms maintain quantities within a given range. Mathematical models of homeostasis build on mechanisms for feedback control from engineering. The concept of control also figures centrally in causal analysis, where it is typically linked to interventions. This paper uses dynamic causal models (Iwasaki and Simon, 1994) to bridge these three domains, leading to the correction of a misunderstanding common in all of them. In each, control is regularly understood as aiming to maintain certain variables at constant values. Yet paradigm control feedback and homeostatic mechanisms do not maintain these variables constant, and intervening on them would destroy the mechanisms’ functions. Instead of focusing on how feedback loops allegedly maintain constancy, dynamic causal models reveal how control systems exploit such lower-scale feedback loops to produce higher-scale causal relationships. The discussion points toward a novel engineering-inspired approach to causal inference, and clarifies how biological and engineered systems combine existing mechanisms to perform increasingly complex functions.
Biological individuals have been at the centre of a series of persistent debates, both in philosophy and biology. Many of these discussions have developed under the assumption that biological individuals form a heterogenous kind of objects comprised by various interrelated sub-kinds, such as evolutionary and physiological individuals. In recent years, however, some works have started to question the overall status of this broad kind, including its explanatory capabilities and other seemingly defensible characteristics that earlier stages of the discussions had taken for granted. This paper follows that trail but starts from a slightly different point. I look at a series of contrasts, ambiguities, and foundational aspects of biological individuality to suggest that biological individuals are more fragmented than usually recognized.
The study of animal consciousness typically focuses on the distribution question: i.e., which animal taxa are conscious. However, recent work has instead suggested a dimensional approach to build up ‘consciousness profiles’ for different species; giving us the what it is like to be that animal. Here I apply a similar approach to understanding animal affect, the dimension most relevant to welfare. Different animals will have varied sets of affects, that they may experience to differing degrees. I introduce a framework for mapping out the affective ranges and intensities of different animals, using clusters of physiological and behavioural markers to construct affect profiles for each species or taxa. These profiles could help inform research on the evolution, function, and distribution of animal consciousness and affect, as well as identify the interests and welfare risks for different species.
In the past decades, there has been a significant shift in the labels used to describe human populations in large-scale genomic studies. Such labels are known as population descriptors. The once prevalent descriptor “race” has progressively given way to the concept of “ancestry”. Ancestry is measured through genetic similarity: individuals who are genetically similar are considered to have shared ancestry. The use of rigorous techniques—including measurement procedures—to assess “ancestry” give it a cloak of objectivity, which in turn justifies the widespread adoption of the concept. However, this objectivity might only be apparent once we understand the challenges to measuring ancestry. This paper contributes to the literature by bridging the previously disconnected fields of philosophy of measurement and human population genetics. To do so, I draw on model-based accounts of measurement to describe practices of measuring ancestry. I then outline two measurement challenges in clustering humans based on genetic ancestry. The first is the challenge of coordination which describes the circularity between theoretical assumptions and measurement outcomes, also known as the theory-ladenness of observation. The second is the issue of biases, which include the problems of sampling biases and the issue of proxy variables. Finally, I outline potential solutions to address these challenges.
Recent advances in neuroscience have introduced a wave of technologies and experimental paradigms aimed at studying animal behavior under more natural conditions. These approaches promise to reconcile the control of laboratory settings with the complexity of real-world environments. Although these methods, here collectively termed naturalistic neuroscience, are often regarded as groundbreaking, this paper critically assesses their conceptual underpinnings and methodological consequences. Specifically, I examine the assumptions held by proponents of what I call the ‘conventional framework’ of naturalistic neuroscience, who seek to more accurately capture animals’ true, unaltered behavior. By closely attending to experimental practices involving nonhuman animal models, I show how distinct theoretical assumptions shape what is meant by naturalistic and how these differences challenge an often-invoked ideal of methodological pluralism. I discourage treating naturalistic neuroscience as a unified enterprise, arguing that the conventional discourse obscures the diversity of scientific aims and practices, both fostering theoretical fragmentation and impeding efforts to unify the study of behavior.
In a human changed world, many non-human organisms face a host of challenges related to their ability to migrate or remain in place. We argue for a right to a livable locality for non-human organisms further developing and applying arguments for a right to livability in the context of human climate migration. We argue that the right to a livable locality for non-human organisms emerges from the social practice of the international state system. We demonstrate that non-human organisms can be understood as a type of by-catch within the territorial net this social practice casts. Incorporating a right to a livable locality of non-human organisms into conservation practice is advantageous because it frees conservation from a dominant historical and normative evaluative scheme—in situ conservation. In a changing and warmer world, an over emphasis on in situ conservation makes conservation success difficult to achieve. A shift to livability considerations in conservation can guide normative evaluation in emergent conservation paradoxes and problems that arise due to environmental and climatic change.
The anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake provides an evolutionary account of the universal human characteristics of making music, dancing, and producing artworks. She suggests that art-making behavior is a cross-cultural phenomenon that evolved as participative group performances for fostering group cohesion. This phenomenon evolved from a biological adaptation of hominins for increased parental care. In this paper, I will motivate Dissanayake’s concept of artification and the evolutionary trajectory of it from Pleistocene hominins ≈ 2.5 mya, focusing on the inference of the socio-cognitive conditions required for the evolution of ritual ceremonies and the proxies to infer the timeline of these components in the fossil record offered by Dissanayake. Then, I will suggest that Dissanayake’s account provides the wrong chronology of the origin of parental care. I will then propose a solution to the origin of parental care and suggest it is at the origin of hominin evolution of prosociality. Based on this claim, I will suggest using evidence from comparative studies and cognitive paleoarcheology that the socio-cognitive conditions for ritual ceremonies evolved earlier in time than suggested by Dissanayake, highlighting gradual, multi-species developments.
This article offers a basic characterization and typology of contemporary theories of sex eliminativism while critically examining their scope and limitations. Through an analysis of the work by Evron, Watkins and DiMarco and Ciccia, I assess whether sex eliminativism constitutes a viable epistemological and ontological strategy. I argue that, while these approaches allow us to problematize the naturalization of sex and reveal its role in the reproduction of social hierarchies, they also face major theoretical and empirical challenges, particularly in their most radical versions. Finally, I propose a minimal pluralist realism as an alternative that preserves the critical power of these approaches without falling victim to an empirically and epistemologically weak approach.
There is only one kind of adaptationism: explanatory adaptationism. Explanatory adaptationism claims that adaptation is the “big question” in evolutionary biology and that natural selection is the “big answer” to that question. In recent decades, philosophers of biology have largely come to agree, first, that explanatory adaptationism is only one kind of adaptationism among many (at the high end, seven) and, second, that these kinds are logically independent and so can, in principle, be accepted or rejected in any combination. On the surface, this is true. Beneath the surface, it is not. When the arguments supporting various forms of allegedly non-explanatory adaptationism are interrogated closely, each turns out to essentially rely on explanatory adaptationism. That is, all kinds of adaptationism are justificatorily dependent on explanatory adaptationism. The different kinds of adaptationism should be recognized as different ways of articulating the import of explanatory adaptationism. In the last analysis, every adaptationist is an explanatory adaptationist.
I propose a conceptual framework aimed at non-expert understanding of immunity and the immune system. Such an account is needed, to replace the prevailing public view that human immune systems can be evaluated in terms of “strong” versus “weak” defenses against disease. While accessible to common-sense, the prevailing view encourages misunderstanding, contributes to pressing social problems, and is incompatible with our best current scientific and philosophical understanding of immunity. Building on my earlier work on context-dependent understanding, I motivate a new conceptual framework for understanding of immunity that is accessible to non-experts (i.e., non-technical), engages and respects everyday experience, addresses concerns about bodily autonomy and control, and reflects our best scientific and philosophical theories about immunity and the immune system. Importantly, this conceptual approach treats non-expert understanding as epistemically beneficial in its own right, arising from a two-way mutualistic relation between expert and non-expert perspectives. The result is a simple conceptual framework consisting of three core ideas: immunity is yours, efficient, and specific (YES). The YES schema is compatible with current insights from theoretical immunology and can help address current social problems associated with vaccine skepticism and hesitancy. I conclude with some implications of this view for recent philosophical accounts of understanding.
We propose that minimal morality (experiencing “ought-thoughts”) and minimal normativity (having expectations or “standards”) historically emerged in the context of parental care among animals. Subsequently, in animals that formed stable, personalized societies, the moral motivation was functionally extended to enable interdependent social relationships (bonds, with kin, but also with non-kin as same-sex social or pair bonds), whereas the presence of normative expectations for the partner’s behavior in social bonds emerged concomitantly because the ever-present risk of shirking requires evaluation of the partner’s social actions. This social evaluation is extended toward the actions of other group members whenever individuals can switch to other bonded partners or allies. The spectrum of responses to partners’ actions can range from shunning to punishment, depending on the strength of the fitness-augmentation effects of bonds or alliances. We do not expect individuals to socially evaluate the actions of non-group members, except in dispersal situations. This functional hypothesis for the evolution of morality and normativity is supported by extensive behavioral and physiological evidence from various social animals. In sum, we argue that morality and normativity are fundamentally social, both serving to sustain dyadic relationships of interdependence that are inherently threatened by free riding. Human morality and normativity are an extension of this basic dyadic version, by involving group-level interdependencies, and presumably also by involving an awareness of the same motivations and social evaluations in others, which, through language-based negotiation and reflection, permits the explicit formulation of moral prescriptions, which may therefore vary culturally.
This paper considers the continued use of simpler model organisms in newer forms of toxicological research in order to inform philosophical understandings of the epistemic roles played by such organisms in the contemporary life sciences. We focus on the emerging domain of ‘precision toxicology’ and consider three uses of model organisms within it, namely as (1) models of toxic effects and other forms of environmental exposures; (2) indicator species; and (3) bioremediators. We analyze the epistemic implications of these uses, arguing that they represent hybrid forms of modelling in comparison to traditional uses of model organisms, and identify similarities and differences between these emerging research practices and the model organism repertoire being adapted for use in this domain. Model organisms are simultaneously viewed as tools for intervention and representation within precision toxicology, in ways that differ from the model organism repertoire both in terms of the extent to which the models fit applied research goals and how they foster evolutionary and developmental understanding. Hence we argue that model organisms remain highly influential models in the life sciences but are being used in research more closely associated with the concept of ‘precision,’ and characterized by an ethos of intervention particularly in response to the environmental challenges associated to climate change and attention to the evolutionary and developmental grounding of health and disease. In closing, we reflect on the ways in which using the analytic framing associated with the repertoires approach facilitates the tracking of these developments in the contemporary life sciences. We also assess how they may affect the construction and significance of model systems over coming decades particularly in relation to precision-related research.
An agential and organismic view of development has brought back certain concepts in biology, such as teleology and normativity. What are the goals and norms that a developmental system pursues? Where do phenotypes in ontogenesis come from? The common answer is that genes contain the recipe to build organisms. However, the agential and organismic view of development seeks to offer a different answer beyond any reductionist explanations. For this reason, teleological development has become a central explanans in developmental and evolutionary biology. However, the motivation for this article is that teleological development as an explanandum has not been treated with the same intensity and rigor despite its ubiquity as an explanans. In particular, a common and now widely adopted strategy for explaining teleological development is to appeal to a closely related, yet fundamentally distinct, conception of teleology: the theory of autonomous systems, a theory forged to deal with physiological-level processes, not developmental ones. This article explores the (generally unanalyzed) differences between teleological development and teleological physiology by arguing that autonomous systems theory falls short of explaining the specificity of teleological development. The main conclusion is that the agential and organismic views in biology ought to be broadened to include different goals beyond self-maintenance; that to be alive is not only about the maintenance of an organization. The distinctiveness of teleological development entails specific philosophical puzzles—what I call Bernard and Baer’s desiderata—that are neither present in nor solved by autonomous systems theory.
