Books in the Elements in the Philosophy of Biology series

Analyses 'comparative thinking'. This involves situating living systems into models of various evolutionary processes, comparing them with ancestral relatives and with analogous evolutionary outcomes. The importance of comparative thinking is demonstrated via examination of comparative psychology and macroevolution.

Attempts to avoid bias in comparative psychology have harmed the science by limiting research topics and minimising animal consciousness. We can advance by treating animals as sentient research participants, and through a greater integration of the subdisciplines of comparative psychology, such as field and lab approaches to chimpanzee cognition.

Natural selection causes adaptation, the fit between an organism and its environment. For example, the white and grey coloration of snowy owls living and breeding around the Arctic Circle provides camouflage from both predators and prey. In this Element, we explore a variety of such outcomes of the evolutionary process, including both adaptations and alternatives to adaptations, such as nonadaptive traits inherited from ancestors. We also explore how the concept of adaptation is used in evolutionary psychology and in animal behavior, and the adequacy of methods used to confirm evolutionary accounts of human traits and behaviors.

Current knowledge of the genetic, epigenetic, behavioural and symbolic systems of inheritance requires a revision and extension of the mid-twentieth-century, gene-based, 'Modern Synthesis' version of Darwinian evolutionary theory. We present the case for this by first outlining the history that led to the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. In the second section we describe and compare different types of inheritance, and in the third discuss the implications of a broad view of heredity for various aspects of evolutionary theory. We end with an examination of the philosophical and conceptual ramifications of evolutionary thinking that incorporates multiple inheritance systems.

Reductionism is a widely endorsed methodology among biologists, a metaphysical theory advanced to vindicate the biologist's methodology, and an epistemic thesis those opposed to reductionism have been eager to refute. While the methodology has gone from strength to strength in its history of achievements, the metaphysical thesis grounding it remained controversial despite its significant changes over the last 75 years of the philosophy of science. Meanwhile, antireductionism about biology, and especially Darwinian natural selection, became orthodoxy in philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology. This Element expounds the debate about reductionism in biology, from the work of the post-positivists to the end of the century debates about supervenience, multiple realizability, and explanatory exclusion. It shows how the more widely accepted 21st century doctrine of "e;mechanism"e;-reductionism with a human face-inherits both the strengths and the challenges of the view it has largely supplanted.

This Element presents a philosophical exploration of the concept of the 'model organism' in contemporary biology. Thinking about model organisms enables us to examine how living organisms have been brought into the laboratory and used to gain a better understanding of biology, and to explore the research practices, commitments, and norms underlying this understanding. We contend that model organisms are key components of a distinctive way of doing research. We focus on what makes model organisms an important type of model, and how the use of these models has shaped biological knowledge, including how model organisms represent, how they are used as tools for intervention, and how the representational commitments linked to their use as models affect the research practices associated with them. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Taking a causal perspective, this Element examines to what extent and how developmental biology, having turned molecular about four decades ago, has been able to meet the vitalist challenge. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This Element introduces this literature and proposes a novel contribution. It defends a realist stance and offers a way of delineating genuine levels of selection by invoking the notion of a functional unit.

This Element is an introduction to the metaphysics of biology, offering a very general account of the nature of the living world. It argues throughout for a view of living systems as processes rather than things or, in the technical philosophical sense, substances.

What is a stem cell? The very idea offers a new perspective on fundamental questions about biological development. This book traces the origins of the stem cell concept, its use in stem cell research today, and implications of the idea for stem cell experiments, results, and hoped-for clinical advances.

A philosophical history of Social Darwinism. Discusses the meaning of the term, moving then to its origins, before moving on to Social Darwinism as found in American thought. Then explores the twentieth century, looking at Adolf Hitler, and in the Anglophone world, Julian Huxley and Edward O. Wilson.

Immunology is central to contemporary biology and medicine, but it also provides novel philosophical insights. Its most significant contribution to philosophy concerns the understanding of biological individuality: what a biological individual is, what makes it unique, how its boundaries are established and what ensures its identity through time. Immunology also offers answers to some of the most interesting philosophical questions. What is the definition of life? How are bodily systems delineated? How do the mind and the body interact? In this Element, Thomas Pradeu considers the ways in which immunology can shed light on these and other important philosophical issues. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

In this book, we consider three questions. What are ecological models? How are they tested? How do ecological models inform environmental policy and politics? Through several case studies, we see how these representations which idealize and abstract can be used to explain and predict complicated ecological systems. Additionally, we see how they bear on environmental policy and politics.

In this Element, Tudor Baetu explores the metaphysical inquiry into how mechanisms relate to issues such as causation, capacities and levels of organization, and epistemic issues related to the discovery of mechanisms and the intelligibility of mechanistic representations. He shows how the gap between them can be bridged.

Introduces game theory, before assessing working using signaling games to explore questions related to communication, meaning, language, and reference. O'Connor then addresses prosociality - strategic behavior that contributes to the successful functioning of social groups - using the prisoner's dilemma, stag hunt, and bargaining games.

This Element focuses on three challenges of evolution to religion: teleology, human origins, and the evolution of religion itself. We show how tensions arise and offer potential responses for religion. Individual religions can meet these challenges, if some of their metaphysical assumptions are adapted or abandoned.

In this Element we give an exposition of what we believe to be 'biology's first law'. We believe that through this law we can throw light on hitherto-puzzling aspects of the evolutionary process, including the tendency of organisms to diversity and the somewhat vague, but unmistakable, progressive nature of the evolutionary process.

This Element argues that knowledge of something's history makes a difference to how we engage with it aesthetically. This means that investigation of the deep past can contribute to aesthetic aims. Aesthetic engagement with fossils and landscapes is also crucial to explaining paleontology's epistemic successes.

What is the Darwinian revolution and why is it important for philosophers? These are the questions tackled in this Element. In four sections, the topics covered are the story of the revolution, the question of whether it really was a revolution, the nature of the revolution, and the implications for philosophy, both epistemology and ethics.

The role of mathematical modeling in modern evolutionary theory has raised concerns on how abstract formulae can say anything about empirical phenomena of evolution. This Element introduces philosophical approaches to this problem and proposes a new account according to which evolutionary models are based on causal and mathematical assumptions.

Biological accounts of art typically start with evolutionary, psychological or neurobiological theories. A more comprehensive framework, based also on the ecology of art and how art behaviors get expressed in engineered niches, can help us better understand the full range of art behaviors.