Journal ArticleDOI
Teleological Explanations in Evolutionary Biology
TLDR
It is argued that teleological explanations in biology are not only acceptable but indeed indispensable and there are at least three categories of biological phenomena whereteleological explanations are appropriate.Abstract:
The ultimate source of explanation in biology is the principle of natural selection. Natural selection means differential reproduction of genes and gene combinations. It is a mechanistic process which accounts for the existence in living organisms of end-directed structures and processes. It is argued that teleological explanations in biology are not only acceptable but indeed indispensable. There are at least three categories of biological phenomena where teleological explanations are appropriate.read more
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Book ChapterDOI
‘Downward Causation’ in Hierarchically Organised Biological Systems
TL;DR: The authors made remarks made in part in reaction to other presentations, including those of Medawar, Edelman, and Monod, and in a final section to the presentations of Dobzhansky, Thorpe, Eccles, Birch, Rensch and Skolimowski.
Journal ArticleDOI
Is junk DNA bunk? A critique of ENCODE
TL;DR: Older arguments for junk grounded in the C-value paradox are reviewed, and a thought experiment is proposed to challenge ENCODE’s ontology.
Book
Biological complexity and integrative pluralism
TL;DR: In this paper, a collection of essays by a leading philosopher of science presents a defence of integrative pluralism as the best description for the complexity of scientific inquiry today, arguing that the tendency of some scientists to unify science by reducing all theories to a few fundamental laws of the most basic particles that populate our universe is ill-suited to the biological sciences, which study multi-component, multi-level, evolved complex systems.
Journal ArticleDOI
Categories, life, and thinking
TL;DR: Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical as mentioned in this paper, and it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines.
Book ChapterDOI
Teleological and teleonomic: a new analysis
TL;DR: The problem of teleology and causality in biology has been studied extensively in the philosophical literature (see, e.g., the authors for a review of some of the most relevant works).
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