Ecological communities are seldom, if ever, biological individuals. They lack causal boundaries as the populations that constitute communities are not congruent and rarely have persistent functional roles regulating the communities’ higher-level properties. Instead we should represent ecological communities indexically, by identifying ecological communities via the network of weak causal interactions between populations that unfurl from a starting set of populations. This precisification of ecological communities helps identify how community properties remain invariant, and why they have robust characteristics. This respects the diversity and aggregational nature of these complex systems while still vindicating them as units worthy of investigation.

A first step is taken towards articulating a constructive empiricist philosophy of mathematics, thus extending van Fraassen's account to this domain. In order to do so, I adapt Field's nominalization program, making it compatible with an empiricist stance. Two changes are introduced: (a) Instead of taking conservativeness as the norm of mathematics, the empiricist countenances the weaker notion of quasi-truth (as formulated by da Costa and French), from which the formal properties of conservativeness are derived; (b) Instead of quantifying over spacetime regions, the empiricist only admits quantification over occupied regions, since this is enough for his or her needs.

In their book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there cannot be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there cannot be an evolutionary theory of adaptation. This article focuses mainly on the a priori argument.

There has recently been a renewed interest in the “force” interpretation of evolutionary biology. In this article, I present the general structure of the arguments for the force interpretation and identify a problem in its overly permissive conditions for being a Newtonian force. I then attempt a solution that (1) helps to illuminate the difference between forces and other types of causes and (2) makes room for random genetic drift as a force. In particular, I argue that forces are not different in kind from other types of causes but rather that forces are situated on a continuum of causes distinguished by their unifying power.

Mammalian placental pregnancy is a neglected problem case for theories of organismality. This example is closer to home than those typically discussed within philosophy of biology. I apply evolutionary and immunological accounts of organismality to the “counting question”: How many organisms are present during a placental pregnancy? I conclude that an evolutionary approach yields the answer two, because of bottlenecking, germ-soma sequestration, and sexual recombination. By contrast, an immunological approach answers one, because of pervasive interactions across the placenta. This analysis expands and refines recent work on a biologically informed metaphysics of pregnancy, an undertheorized area of philosophy of science.

Is phenomenal consciousness a problem for the brain sciences? An increasing number of researchers hold not only that it is but that its very existence is a deep mystery. That this problematic phenomenon exists is generally taken for granted: It is asserted that phenomenal consciousness is just phenomenologically obvious. In contrast, I hold that there is no such phenomenon and, thus, that it does not pose a problem for the brain sciences. For this denial to be plausible, however, I need to show that phenomenal consciousness is not phenomenologically obvious. That is the goal of this article.

Brown and Pooley’s ‘dynamical approach’ to physical theories asserts, in opposition to the orthodox position on physical geometry, that facts about physical geometry are grounded in, or explained by, facts about dynamical fields, not the other way round. John Norton has claimed that the proponent of the dynamical approach is illicitly committed to spatiotemporal presumptions in ‘constructing’ space-time from facts about dynamical symmetries. In this article, I present an abstract, algebraic formulation of field theories and demonstrate that the proponent of the dynamical approach is not committed, in special relativity, to the illicit presumptions to which Norton refers.

Recently Coleman and Wiley presented a new defense of the species-are-individuals thesis, based on an analysis of the use of binomial species names by biologists. Here I point out some problems in their defense and I argue that although in some domains of biological science species are best understood as individuals, Coleman and Wiley fail to establish that this is true for the whole of biology.

Using evolutionary game theory, I consider how guilt can provide individual fitness benefits to actors both before and after bad behavior. This supplements recent work by philosophers on the evolution of guilt with a more complete picture of the relevant selection pressures.

Using climate policy debates as a case study, I argue that a certain response to the argument from inductive risk, the hedging defense, runs afoul of a reasonable ethical principle: the no-passing-the-buck principle according to which scientists ought to offer their scientific judgment when such judgment is both possible and needed in public policy debates.

The article examines the process of niche standardization in medical research as an example of democratizing strategies implemented in industry-funded science. I argue that niche standardization can lead to undesirable epistemic and ethical consequences, if the various goals of research are not properly aligned. I examine two examples: the case of Sarafem, approved for the treatment of premenstrual dysphoric disorder in women, and the case of BiDil, approved for exclusive use in African Americans for the treatment of congestive heart failure. I conclude by cautioning against the unqualified support of democratizing strategies in industry-funded research.

P. Kitcher's unification theory of explanation appears to endorse a reductionistic view of scientific explanation that is inconsistant with scientific practice. In this paper, I argue that this appearance is illusory. The existence of multiply realizable generalizations enable the unification theory to also count many high-level accounts as explanatory.

In a recent essay in this journal, John Maynard Smith (2000) argues that the often expressed idea that the genome is the repository of meaningful information is not merely a heuristically useful metaphor. Instead, he contends, it is a central idea in contemporary microbiology. While I am in general agreement with Maynard Smith on this issue, his account suffers, I believe, from using an inappropriate concept of ‘information.’ One result of this is that the concept of genomic information becomes burdened by a conceptual load that the biological facts cannot support. When, however, the appropriate concept of information is used, then these burdens are shed, and the result is an account that is in substantial agreement with (what I consider to be) the heart of Maynard Smith's thesis.

Mathematical methods in biology occupy a somewhat peculiar position, and the attitude of many biologists toward them is similar to that of many practical engineers toward what is called pure scientific research. The modern progressive engineer recognizes the value of pure science, which seeks for truth regardless of any possibility of practical applications; yet he still frequently shows a definite dislike towards such investigations. The whole history of civilization demonstrates that discoveries which, at the time they were made, did not show any signs of the possibility of being turned into practical use, now lie at the basis of many useful engineering devices. As Professor R. A. Millikan has said, we owe our present-day civilization to Galileo. Every educated person, be he pure scientist or engineer, recognizes this fact. And yet the frame of mind of the “practical” man is not too receptive to investigations which do not show at least some remote prospects of practical applications. Unless he can see at least hypothetically some practical results of such research, he will not give it his whole-hearted enthusiasm. The ultimate criterion in the evaluation of any research still remains its practical use. Those pure scientists who have had close contact with what is called “industrial research” know only too well the truth of the above statement.

A previous paper of mine, that criticized Suppes' probabilistic theory of causality, was in turn criticized by Deborah Rosen. This paper is a development of my argument and an answer to Rosen. It is argued that the concept of causation is used in contemporary science in a way that presupposes determinism. It is shown that deterministic assumptions are necessary for inferences from generic to individual causal relations and for various kinds of eliminative arguments.

Ten years ago the civilized world was shocked out of an unwarranted confidence in the victory of science over superstition by the news that Tennessee had outlawed the teaching of man's evolutionary origin. Within the next three years both Mississippi and Arkansas joined Tennessee in defense of Biblical truth against the scepticism of science. The furor raised by the dramatic clashes between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, has now become a faded memory. The struggle between Fundamentalists and Modernists has died down, though the embers still smoulder; and few ever think of the issues then raised, now that war and fascism threaten civilization.

In Chapter 4 of [2] Grünbaum sets out to refute Einstein's philosophy of physical geometry. The latter's theory is seen as lying within the tradition of “anti-empiricist conventionalism” of Duhem and Quine as opposed to the “qualified empiricism” of Poincaré, Carnap and Reichenbach. Consequently Grünbaum sets the stage for his critique of Einstein by discussing certain of the views of these other thinkers. But in these preliminary discussions the various theses are confused and misrepresented in such a way as to make it almost impossible to evaluate Grünbaum's final treatment of Einstein's thesis. For this reason I will deal only with those parts of this chapter in which the roots of Grünbaum's confusion are to be found. This will involve analyses of two theories which are not clearly distinguished by Grünbaum. The first is Duhem's denial of the “crucial experiment” in physics; the second is Quine's version of “pragmatism.”

The simple systems methodology is a powerful reductionistic research strategy. It has problems as implemented in developmental genetics because the organisms studied are few and unrepresentative. Stronger inferences require independent arguments that key traits are widely distributed phylogenetically. Evolutionary and developmental mechanisms of generative entrenchment and self-organization provide possible support, and are also necessary components of a developmental systems approach.

A “symptomatic act” is an act that is evidence for a state that it has no tendency to cause. In this paper I show that when the evidential value of a symptomatic act might influence subsequent choices, causal decision theory may initially recommend against its own use for those subsequent choices. And if one knows that one will nevertheless use causal decision theory to make those subsequent choices, causal decision theory may favor the one-box solution in Newcomb's problem, and may recommend against making cost-free observations. But if one can control one's future choices, then causal decision theory never recommends against cost-free observation.