197 Text: 7,322 Notes: 247 References: 1,407 To appear in Biology and Philosophy 22(5) 2

Process philosophy’—based on contributions of Alfred North Whitehead (1867-1947)—has resources that would be useful in philosophy of chemistry. This approach would particularly appropriate for dealing with questions involving time-dependent self-organization in far-from-equilibrium open systems. Such spontaneous generation of coherent dynamic structure is of central importance in many fields (i...

The distinction proposed by Ernst Mayr and François Jacob between functional biology evolutionary is a fundamental key for clear conclusive treatment of two problems that, recurrently, are placed in the field Philosophy Biology: that which concerns possible character teleological biological explanations relative to autonomy Biology relation Physics Chemistry. Without supporting an alternative s...

Historically, philosophers of biology have tended to sidestep the problem of development by focusing primarily on evolutionary biology and, more recently, on molecular biology and genetics. Quite often, development has been misunderstood as simply, or even primarily, a matter of gene activation and regulation. Nowadays a growing number of philosophers of science are focusing their analyses on t...

The rise of molecular genetics has had a fundamental influence on the development of philosophy of biology because of its central role in the debate concerning reductionism. I begin by describing notable attempts to reduce Mendelian genetics to molecular genetics, the lightning rod of reductionist attempts in philosophy of biology. I then suggest that the syntactic reductionist may wish to focu...