Emergence, hierarchy and top-down causation in evolutionary biology
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
Title: Emergence, Hierarchy, and Top-down Causation in Evolutionary Biology
General rights This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: Summary The concept of emergence and the related notion of 'downward causation' have arisen in numerous branches of science, and have also been extensively discussed in philosophy. Here I examine emergence and do...
متن کاملEmergence, hierarchy and top-down causation in evolutionary biology.
The concept of emergence and the related notion of 'downward causation' have arisen in numerous branches of science, and have also been extensively discussed in philosophy. Here, I examine emergence and downward causation in relation to evolutionary biology. I focus on the old, but ongoing discussion in evolutionary biology over the 'levels of selection' question: which level(s) of the biologic...
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Top-down causation has been suggested to occur at all scales of biological organization as a mechanism for explaining the hierarchy of structure and causation in living systems (Campbell, 1974; Auletta et al., 2008; Davies, 2006b, 2012; Ellis, 2012). Here we propose that a transition from bottom-up to top-down causation – mediated by a reversal in the flow of information from lower to higher le...
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Both bottom-up and top-down causation occur in the hierarchy of structure and causation. A key feature is multiple realizability of higher level functions, and consequent existence of equivalence classes of lower level variables that correspond to the same higher level state. Five essentially different classes of top-down influence can be identified, and their existence demonstrated by many rea...
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We argue that intelligible appeals to interlevel causes (top-down and bottom-up) can be understood, without remainder, as appeals to mechanistically mediated effects. Mechanistically mediated effects are hybrids of causal and constitutive relations, where the causal relations are exclusively intralevel. The idea of causation would have to stretch to the breaking point to accommodate interlevel ...
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Interface Focus
سال: 2011
ISSN: 2042-8898,2042-8901
DOI: 10.1098/rsfs.2011.0046