Showing papers in "Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences in 2010"

TL;DR: The view that formal inquiry can provide a kind of confirmation-theoretic support for evolutionary models is discussed, and an example of how-possibly explanation interacting with testing practice is offered.

TL;DR: The central figure behind this shift, at least in Anglo-American intellectual life, was the philosopher Herbert Spencer, who introduced into the English-speaking world one of the authors' most enduring dichotomies: organism and environment.

TL;DR: This paper will outline the recent history of attempts to reveal the origins of the eukaryote cell, with special attention to the argumentative strategies used to support claims about the first eukARYote cell.

TL;DR: It is shown that mechanistic explanation by protein synthesis and natural selection are more closely analogous than they appear--both possess all three of these core elements of a mechanism widely recognized in the mechanisms literature.

TL;DR: The major criticisms that have been waged against cell theory are examined, and it is argued that these too can be interpreted through the prism of biological atomism as attempts to relocate the true biological atom away from the cell to a level of organization above or below it.

TL;DR: The making of a history for astrology accompanied the construction of various models of the relation between occult knowledge and its contexts in the enlightenment as well as how the environmental medical programmes emerged.

TL;DR: The extent to which judicial astrology was practiced in the medieval west is considered, including the work of John Dunstaple and the writing of the Jewish astrologer Sahl b.

TL;DR: An account of miRNA research and the shift from viewing these tiny regulatory entities as minor curiosities to seeing them as major players in the post-transcriptional regulation of genes is provided.

TL;DR: It is argued that cell theory had far-reaching consequences for how biologists conceptualized the reproductive relationships between germs and adult organisms, and the view of cells as autonomous agents which helped both Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to think of inheritance as a lawful process.

TL;DR: The article argues that notions of rlung/pneuma/wind/ qi constitute a particularly interesting area for an exploration of culture-bound syndromes, as they reside in the meeting point between material and non-material, physical and mental, as well as the psychological, spiritual and religious.

TL;DR: The construction of osteoporosis as a disease of quantifiable risk diagnosed by medical imaging machines reflects contemporary trends in medicine, including the quantification of disease, the risk factor model, medical disciplinary boundaries, and global standardization of medical knowledge.

TL;DR: The paper argues that the astrology curriculum is better understood as the set of practices that constituted it and gave it meaning for both masters and students, and begins to reconstruct what occurred in the classroom by drawing on published and unpublished lecture notes.

TL;DR: It is argued that the standard list of explananda, which includes facts like trait frequencies or the survival of particular organisms, is incomplete: natural selection can also explain a specific kind of individual-level fact that involves traits.

TL;DR: This paper reassesses Robert Koch's work on tropical infections of humans and cattle as being inspired by an underlying interest in epidemiology as well as highlighting differences between infection and disease and described the role of various sub-clinical states of disease.

TL;DR: The paper proposes a (non-exclusive) model called Imitation & Internalisation, which can be applied to phenomena as diverse as hypnotism, the placebo effect, and catching faith by association with believers (Pascal's wager).

TL;DR: Only recently did empiricists return to discuss conceptual considerations, including top-down definitions of units of function that through cellular mechanisms select the DNA sequences which comprise 'genomic-footprints' of functional entities.

TL;DR: The college founded in 1371 by Charles V's first physician, Gervais Chrétien, was in fact much more to theological studies than to medicine and the quadrivium.

TL;DR: It is argued that the BST is an unsuitable candidate for the rôle that Boorse has cast it to play, namely, to underpin medicine with a theoretical, value-free science of health and disease and should be extended to any naturalist claim to underpin medical practice with a value- free theory ofhealth and disease defined in terms of an evolutionary view of biological fitness.

TL;DR: The resulting scientific conclusions embed value valences in the ADHD concept; social uptake of that valenced concept begins another round of interest in its implications and support of the science.

TL;DR: Evidence from Burnet's published work, as well as personal papers from the period he worked on the phages, demonstrates the direct impact that his experiments with phages had on the development of his characteristic scientific style and approaches, which manifested themselves in his later career and theories.

TL;DR: This paper explores the relationship between astrology and demonic magic, focusing on feelings, rites and apparatus, and perceptions that the more the practitioner's body was implicated in the divinatory procedure, the more likely it was to be illicit.

TL;DR: The development of techniques based on mitochondria opened up new possibilities and brought this first phase of the study of oxidative phorphorylation to a close.

TL;DR: It is argued that some specific difficulties can arise with determining whether a culture-bound syndrome is a real disorder in each of these three senses and the frequent assumption that real disorders will necessarily occur universally, and that those that occur only in certain environments are suspicious is not generally justified.

TL;DR: This paper clarifying and defending the claim that cumulative selection can explain adaptation provided that the environmental resources are limited and why this limitation of environmental resources means is relevant for the explanatory power of natural selection.

TL;DR: The virtues of decomposition and recomposition are illustrated with recent work on circadian rhythms, which has both identified critical intracellular operations that maintain endogenous oscillations and have also addressed the integration of cells into multicellular systems in which cells constitute units.

TL;DR: This paper shows that technologies, based on the electrical effects of chemical reactions taking place in containers, had a far-reaching impact on the concept of the biological cell.

TL;DR: The cell theory is one of the most celebrated achievements of modern biological science as discussed by the authors, and it has faced repeated criticism from some biologists since its very inception in the nineteenth century, and why some continue to criticize the cell theory, and how has it managed to keep burying its undertakers?

TL;DR: The contributions to this problem of the evolutionary biologist August Weismann and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein are discussed, which conclude that instincts arise through a neo-Darwinian process but are not cognitions in the sense that they involve stored knowledge.

TL;DR: It is argued that immunology is founded on a view of the organism as a discrete, autonomous entity, and on a concomitant notion of the immune response as essentially reactive, and suggests that Pirquet's unique view of immune responsiveness presents an account of organismic or biological identity that encapsulates, rather than reduces, its ecological complexity.