Unknotting reciprocal causation between organism and environment

Thermal Energy Exchange between Organism and Environment

The effects of weather are manifested in an organism-environment relationship through the mediu m of thermal or h eat exchange_ Meteorological param eters alone may be quite meaningless when used in interpreting animal responses because weather instruments do not respond to the thermal regime of the atmosphere in the same way that a living organism does _ Further, weather instruments are often ...

Redrawing the Boundary between Organism and Environment

In this position paper, I argue that a fruitful, and as yet largely unexplored, avenue for artificial life research lies in modelling organisms (specifically, phenotypes) and environment as a single dynamical system. From this perspective, the origin and evolution of life is the progressive control of the dynamical system at a local level by constraints which are represented on an organism’s ge...

Association or causation: evaluating links between "environment and disease".

This section looks back to some ground-breaking contributions to public health, reproducing them in their original form and adding a commentary on their significance from a modern-day perspective. Robyn M. Lucas and Anthony J. McMichael review The environment and disease: association or causation? by Sir Austin Bradford Hill on establishing relationships between illness and conditions of work o...

The Organism and the Environment

The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment

Richard Lewontin, a professor of comparative zoology, is an accomplished writer who is known for his passionate, eloquent, and deeply critical accounts. Like his many other books this is a brilliant synthesis of ideas supported by facts that caution us that the problems of biology are not as simple as they seem to many -including some biologists. Organized in four short chapters, this book buil...