Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

Systems biology, synthetic biology and data-driven research: A commentary on Krohs, Callebaut, and O'Malley and Soyer.

Testing times: regularities in the historical sciences.

The historical sciences, such as geology, evolutionary biology, and archaeology, appear to have no means to test hypotheses. However, on closer examination, reasoning in the historical sciences relies upon regularities, regularities that can be tested. I outline the role of regularities in the historical sciences, and in the process, blur the distinction between the historical sciences and the ...

Biomachine dreams.

1369-8486/$ see front matter 2013 Published by Elsevier Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2013.11.004 E-mail address: [email protected] 1 And the hpbio-sphere too. See, in this journal, the substantial collections in this issue and the June 2013 issue. 2 Cf. Adam Rutherford, ‘‘Synthetic biology and the rise of the ‘spider goats’,’’ Observer online edition, 14 January 2012, http://www....

Causation in the sciences: an inferentialist account.

I present an alternative account of causation in the biomedical and social sciences according to which the meaning of causal claims is given by their inferential relations to other claims. Specifically, I will argue that causal claims are (typically) inferentially related to certain evidential claims as well as claims about explanation, prediction, intervention and responsibility. I explain in ...

Thinking about evolutionary mechanisms: natural selection.

This paper explores whether natural selection, a putative evolutionary mechanism, and a main one at that, can be characterized on either of the two dominant conceptions of mechanism, due to Glennan and the team of Machamer, Darden, and Craver, that constitute the new mechanistic philosophy'. The results of the analysis are that neither of the dominant conceptions of mechanism adequately capture...

HIT and brain reward function: A case of mistaken identity (theory).

This paper employs a case study from the history of neuroscience-brain reward function-to scrutinize the inductive argument for the so-called 'Heuristic Identity Theory' (HIT). The case fails to support HIT, illustrating why other case studies previously thought to provide empirical support for HIT also fold under scrutiny. After distinguishing two different ways of understanding the types of i...