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Specific to papers included in Developmental Systems Theory (DST) is the belief that the study of development requires a systems-level model. Such a model would abstract away from the specific biological details of any particular developmental process in order to isolate the general properties of developing systems. Contrasting with Developmental Modularity, DST maintains that identifying the function of individual developmental modules at the cellular and molecular levels is intractably complicated and is incapable of representing the structure found at the abstract systems-level, systems properties are emergent. However, reflecting an internal dispute, the systems studied are either individual developing organisms (expressing particular phenotypes) or systems of ecologically-coupled populations of developing organisms (as they co-evolve with each other). |
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Related
Siblings
- Developmental Constraints (74)
- Developmental Modularity (50)
- Ecological Developmental Biology (60)
- Epigenetic Inheritance (120)
- Evolutionary Developmental Biology (394)
- Genetic Program (33)
- Innateness (59 | 52)
- Nature and Nurture (154)
- Process Structuralism (37)
- Developmental Biology, Misc (106)
Contents
148+ found
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| 1 — 50 / 148 |
- Beyond Biological Limits: Autopoiesis and Emergence in the Systemic Continuum Paradigm.Ignacio Lucas de León - manuscriptThis fourth preprint in the Systemic Continuum Paradigm (PSC) series extends autopoiesis—traditionally confined to living organisms—across non-biological substrates such as advanced neural networks, robotics, and augmented intelligence. Building on the prior three preprints, we argue that self-maintenance and operational closure can arise whenever synergy surpasses a critical threshold, irrespective of substrate. Key contributions include: 1. Revisiting Autopoiesis Beyond Biology: Grounding Maturana & Varela’s concept of self-production in the PSC framework to show how informational “metabolism” can maintain system identity without purely (...)
- The Universal Collapse Protocol: An Information First Framework for Physics, Consciousness, and System Transformation.Kingsley Nkrumah - manuscriptThis paper proposes that collapse phenomena across physics, biology, cognition, and cosmology exhibit a shared structural sequence that cannot be explained within a matter first ontology. Through cross domain analysis, I identify a five stage invariant—collapse, threshold, irreversibility, reorganization, and stabilization—that recurs in quantum decoherence, cellular apoptosis, identity restructuring, stellar collapse, and thermodynamic transitions. I formalize this invariant as the Back End Law, a substrate independent informational protocol governing system transitions under instability. To evaluate its ontological implications, I introduce the (...)
- Not just metaphors: Plant bioacoustics and the regulative role of sound.Tiago Rama - manuscriptMusical metaphors represent a means by which biologists illustrate a particularly complex phenomenon: how organisms regulate their life processes according to their living conditions. This explanatory role can be traced back to the early embryologists and organicism. Also, nowadays, musical metaphors are used by those who resist viewing organic processes as reading (performing) a musical score written in a genetic script. In contrast to this reductionist view, organic processes are presented under a Jazz band view in which organic activities are (...)
- Extended Cognition, Extended Selection, and Developmental Systems Theory.Robert D. Rupert - manuscriptI respond to Karola Stotz's criticisms of my previously published challenges to the inference from developmental systems theory to an extended view of cognition.
- Causal Specificity, Biological Possibility and Non-parity about Genetic Causes.Marcel Weber - manuscriptSeveral authors have used the notion of causal specificity in order to defend non-parity about genetic causes (Waters 2007, Woodward 2010, Weber 2017, forthcoming). Non-parity in this context is the idea that DNA and some other biomolecules that are often described as information-bearers by biologists play a unique role in life processes, an idea that has been challenged by Developmental Systems Theory (e.g., Oyama 2000). Indeed, it has proven to be quite difficult to state clearly what the alleged special role (...)
- Is nativism in psychology reconcilable with the parity thesis in biology?Slobodan Perovic & Ljiljana Radenovic - 2008The Modern Synthesis of Darwinism and genetics regards non-genetic factors as merely constraints on the genetic variations that result in the characteristics of organisms. Even though the environment (including social interactions and culture) is as necessary as genes in terms of selection and inheritance, it does not contain the information that controls the development of the traits. S. Oyama’s account of the Parity Thesis, however, states that one cannot conceivably distinguish in a meaningful way between nature-based (i.e., gene-based) and nurture-based (...)
- Developmental Synergistic Information.Tiago Rama - forthcoming - Theory in Biosciences.This article characterizes Oyama’s concept of ontogenesis of information formally. I apply the mathematical notion of synergistic information to the framework proposed by Griffiths et al. (2015) for developmental information and specificity. This allows us to examine the specificity revealed by the interaction of variables as a result of interventions on interactions. I define Developmental Synergistic Information as the specificity of interacting variables obtained by measuring how much mutual information interventions on interactions carry about the effect variable. To formalise this (...)
- What Lies Between: Transition Cost as the Missing Mechanism in Identity Theory.Alice Pau - 2026 - Zenodo.The question of how systems transition between stable identity configurations has generated substantial theoretical work — but has left largely unexamined a prior problem: what determines whether such a transition is possible, and at what cost. Existing frameworks, including Uexküll's Umwelt theory, Waddington's epigenetic landscape, Friston's free energy principle, Anokhin's theory of the functional system, and Ashby's ultrastability, each approach this question from directions that converge without meeting. None provides a formal account of the structural cost of transition — a (...)
- Architecture of Limitation Observational System Stack v1.0 - Technical Architecture and Operational Documentation (2nd edition).F. L. Schaut - 2026 - Zenodo.The Architecture of Limitation Observational System (AoLOS) Stack v1.0 provides the technical architecture and operational documentation for the execution environment supporting the Architecture of Limitation (AoL) research program. -/- The document describes the stack through which constraint-governed reasoning experiments are deployed, instrumented, compared, and observed within language-model environments. It introduces the major architectural components of AoLOS, including kernel hierarchies, apertures, instrumentation layers, concordance systems, deployment profiles, protocol considerations, and stewardship boundaries. -/- AoLOS should not be confused with the Architecture of (...)
- Institutional Diversity and Innovative Recombination.Nathan Goodman, Otto Lehto & Mikayla Novak - 2025 - European Economic Review 174 (May 2025):104998.In Explaining Technology, Koppl et al. (2023) argue that “recombination is the essential driver of technological evolution” (p. 3). Modelling combinatorial innovation as a self-propelling, “autocatalytic” process raises the question of what explanatory role, if any, is left for institutional analysis. Although the authors grant institutions only an auxiliary explanatory role, they hint at the functional importance of market institutions, trade networks, patent law, and entrepreneurship. Our paper argues that institutions matter because they crucially affect aggregate levels and rates of (...)
- Biology should not dispense with sexes.Paul E. Griffiths & Hamish G. Spencer - 2025 - Current Biology 35 (7):244-248.It has been argued that biological sex, defined by the production of one or other type of anisogamous gametes — eggs and sperm — is “an incoherent category, one that has perhaps outlived its use.”1 The idea of biological sex is an outmoded construct that should be ‘eliminated’ by scientific progress2, like the four humours of medieval medicine. Furthermore, the distinction between biological males and females should be replaced by a “multivariate and nonbinary” categorization scheme3 or by “reproductive dimorphism”, a (...)
- Plasticity in the life sciences.Antonine Nicoglou - 2024 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Analyzes the reasons why biologists have referred to and continue to refer to plasticity. Since the early twentieth century, plasticity has become an important topic in biology. Some even wondered whether plasticity has acquired in biology the theoretical importance that the concept of the gene enjoyed at the beginning of the last century. In this historical and epistemological analysis, Antonine Nicoglou shows how the recurrence of the general idea of plasticity throughout the history of the life sciences indicates its essential (...)
- Advanced Data Integration for Smart Healthcare: Leveraging Blockchain and AI Technologies.P. Selvaprasanth - 2024 - Journal of Theoretical and Computationsl Advances in Scientific Research (Jtcasr) 8 (1):1-7.The integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies offers a transformative approach to data integration in smart healthcare systems. As healthcare systems generate vast amounts of sensitive and complex data, efficient and secure integration is critical to improving patient outcomes, optimizing medical workflows, and ensuring data privacy. Blockchain technology provides a decentralized and immutable data-sharing platform that ensures the security, integrity, and privacy of medical records. Concurrently, AI plays a pivotal role in processing and analyzing these vast datasets to (...)
- Integrating evolutionary, developmental and physiological mismatch.Paul E. Griffiths & Pierrick Bourrat - 2023 - Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health 11 (1):277–286.Contemporary evolutionary medicine has unified the idea of ‘evolutionary mismatch’, derived from the older idea of ‘adaptive lag’ in evolution, with ideas about the mismatch in development and physiology derived from the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) paradigm. A number of publications in evolutionary medicine have tried to make this theoretical framework explicit. The integrative theory of mismatch captures how organisms track environments across space and time on multiple scales in order to maintain an adaptive match to the (...)
- Does the Problem of Variability Justify Barrett’s Emotion Revolution?Raamy Majeed - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (4):1421-1441.The problem of variability concerns the fact that empirical data does not support the existence of a coordinated set of biological markers, either in the body or the brain, which correspond to our folk emotion categories; categories like anger, happiness, sadness, disgust and fear. Barrett (2006a, b, 2013, 2016, 2017a, b) employs this fact to argue (i) against the faculty psychology approach to emotion, e.g. emotions are the products of emotion-specific mechanisms, or “modules”, and (ii) for the view that emotions (...)
- Evolutionary Causation and Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2023 - In José Manuel Viejo & Mariano Sanjuán, Life and Mind - New Directions in the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences. Springer.Disputes about the causal structure of natural selection have implications for teleosemantics. Etiological, mainstream teleosemantics is based on a causalist view of natural selection. The core of its solution to Brentano’s Problem lies in the solution to Kant’s Puzzle provided by the Modern Synthesis concerning populational causation. In this paper, I suggest that if we adopt an alternative, statisticalist view on natural selection, the door is open for two reflections. First, it allows for setting different challenges to etiological teleosemantics that (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 11 citations
- An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems.Amanda Corris - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (4):1-21.Organisms live not as discrete entities on which an independent environment acts, but as members of a reproductive lineage in an ongoing series of interactions between that lineage and a dynamic ecological niche. These interactions continuously shape both systems in a reciprocal manner, resulting in the emergence of reliably co-occurring configurations within and between both systems. The enactive approach to cognition describes this relationship as the structural coupling between an organism and its environment; similarly, Developmental Systems Theory emphasizes the reciprocal (...)
- Rethinking hereditary relations: the reconstitutor as the evolutionary unit of heredity.Sophie J. Veigl, Javier Suárez & Adrian Stencel - 2022 - Synthese 200 (5):1-42.This paper introduces the reconstitutor as a comprehensive unit of heredity within the context of evolutionary research. A reconstitutor is the structure resulting from a set of relationships between different elements or processes that are actively involved in the recreation of a specific phenotypic variant in each generation regardless of the biomolecular basis of the elements or whether they stand in a continuous line of ancestry. Firstly, we justify the necessity of introducing the reconstitutor by showing the limitations of other (...)
- Development and microbiology.Aja Watkins - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (4):1-30.On the basis of findings from developmental biology, some researchers have argued that evolutionary theory needs to be significantly updated. Advocates of such a “developmental update” have, among other things, suggested that we need to re-conceptualize units of selection, that we should expand our view of inheritance to include environmental as well as genetic and epigenetic factors, that we should think of organisms and their environment as involved in reciprocal causation, and that we should reevaluate the rates of evolutionary change. (...)
- Deleuze, Developmental Systems Theory and the Philosophy of Nature.Michael James Bennett - 2019 - In Michael James Bennett & Tano S. Posteraro, Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pp. 75-96.Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 3 citations
- Essence in the Age of Evolution: A New Theory of Natural Kinds.Christopher J. Austin - 2018 - London, UK: Routledge.This book offers a novel defence of a highly contested philosophical position: biological natural kind essentialism. This theory is routinely and explicitly rejected for its purported inability to be explicated in the context of contemporary biological science, and its supposed incompatibility with the process and progress of evolution by natural selection. Christopher J. Austin challenges these objections, and in conjunction with contemporary scientific advancements within the field of evolutionary-developmental biology, the book utilises a contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of "dispositional properties", or (...)
- Developmental Systems Theory as a Process Theory.Paul Edmund Griffiths & Karola Stotz - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré, Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 225-245.Griffiths and Russell D. Gray (1994, 1997, 2001) have argued that the fundamental unit of analysis in developmental systems theory should be a process – the life cycle – and not a set of developmental resources and interactions between those resources. The key concepts of developmental systems theory, epigenesis and developmental dynamics, both also suggest a process view of the units of development. This chapter explores in more depth the features of developmental systems theory that favour treating processes as fundamental (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 19 citations
- A Developmental Systems Account of Human Nature.Karola Stotz & Paul Griffiths - 2018 - In Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens, Why We Disagree About Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 00-00.It is now widely accepted that a scientifically credible conception of human nature must reject the folkbiological idea of a fixed, inner essence that makes us human. We argue here that to understand human nature is to understand the plastic process of human development and the diversity it produces. Drawing on the framework of developmental systems theory and the idea of developmental niche construction we argue that human nature is not embodied in only one input to development, such as the (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (3 more)Export citationBookmark 4 citations
- Which Kind of Causal Specificity Matters Biologically?Marcel Weber - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (3):574-585.Griffiths et al. (2015) have proposed a quantitative measure of causal specificity and used it to assess various attempts to single out genetic causes as being causally more specific than other cellular mechanisms, for example, alternative splicing. Focusing in particular on developmental processes, they have identified a number of important challenges for this project. In this discussion note, I would like to show how these challenges can be met.
- Causal Selection vs Causal Parity in Biology: Relevant Counterfactuals and Biologically Normal Interventions.Marcel Weber - 2017 - In Waters C. Kenneth & Woodward James, Philosophical Perspectives on Causal Reasoning in Biology. Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science. Vol. XXI. University of Minnesota Press.Causal selection is the task of picking out, from a field of known causally relevant factors, some factors as elements of an explanation. The Causal Parity Thesis in the philosophy of biology challenges the usual ways of making such selections among different causes operating in a developing organism. The main target of this thesis is usually gene centrism, the doctrine that genes play some special role in ontogeny, which is often described in terms of information-bearing or programming. This paper is (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct download (3 more)Export citationBookmark 8 citations
- The Dispositional Genome: Primus Inter Pares.Christopher J. Austin - 2015 - Biology and Philosophy 30 (2):227-246.According to the proponents of Developmental Systems Theory and the Causal Parity Thesis, the privileging of the genome as “first among equals” with respect to the development of phenotypic traits is more a reflection of our own heuristic prejudice than of ontology - the underlying causal structures responsible for that specified development no more single out the genome as primary than they do other broadly “environmental” factors. Parting with the methodology of the popular responses to the Thesis, this paper offers (...)
- (1 other version)Ontological Issues in the Life Sciences.James DiFrisco, Gaëlle Pontarotti, Federico Boem, Guillaume Schlaepfer, Ewelina Sokolowska & Eva Fernández-Labandera - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (2):176-181.
- Explaining Causal Selection with Explanatory Causal Economy: Biology and Beyond.Laura R. Franklin-Hall - 2015 - In Pierre-Alain Braillard & Christophe Malaterre, Explanation in Biology. An Enquiry into the Diversity of Explanatory Patterns in the Life Sciences. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 413-438.Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes — and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled (...)Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 23 citations
- Developmental Systems Theory.Paul Griffiths & Adam Hochman - 2015 - eLS:1-7.Developmental systems theory (DST) is a wholeheartedly epigenetic approach to development, inheritance and evolution. The developmental system of an organism is the entire matrix of resources that are needed to reproduce the life cycle. The range of developmental resources that are properly described as being inherited, and which are subject to natural selection, is far wider than has traditionally been allowed. Evolution acts on this extended set of developmental resources. From a developmental systems perspective, development does not proceed according to (...)
- Контуры нового мирового порядка.Leonid Grinin - 2015 - Философия И Общество 3 (4):7-33.Мировой порядок как система определенных идей и правил, господ-ствующих в международной политике, стал формироваться в Европе начиная с XVI в., окончательно утвердившись в XIX столетии. Однако этот порядок держится обычно в пределах трех-четырех десятилетий, а затем под влиянием изменившихся обстоятельств и нового баланса сил меняется. В настоящее время мы как раз переживаем период смены ми-рового порядка и начала формирования новой его системы. В статье анализируется начало ослабления мирового порядка, основанного на американской гегемонии, рассматриваются характерные черты и методы, которые используют США (...)
- The Comet Cometh: Evolving Developmental Systems.Johannes Jaeger, Manfred Laubichler & Werner Callebaut - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (1):36-49.In a recent opinion piece, Denis Duboule has claimed that the increasing shift towards systems biology is driving evolutionary and developmental biology apart, and that a true reunification of these two disciplines within the framework of evolutionary developmental biology may easily take another 100 years. He identifies methodological, epistemological, and social differences as causes for this supposed separation. Our article provides a contrasting view. We argue that Duboule’s prediction is based on a one-sided understanding of systems biology as a science (...)
- Programming the Emergence in Morphogenetically Architected Complex Systems.Franck Varenne, Pierre Chaigneau, Jean Petitot & René Doursat - 2015 - Acta Biotheoretica 63 (3):295-308.Large sets of elements interacting locally and producing specific architectures reliably form a category that transcends the usual dividing line between biological and engineered systems. We propose to call them morphogenetically architected complex systems (MACS). While taking the emergence of properties seriously, the notion of MACS enables at the same time the design (or “meta-design”) of operational means that allow controlling and even, paradoxically, programming this emergence. To demonstrate our claim, we first show that among all the self-organized systems studied (...)
- Engineering and evolvability.Brett Calcott - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (3):293-313.Comparing engineering to evolution typically involves adaptationist thinking, where well-designed artifacts are likened to well-adapted organisms, and the process of evolution is likened to the process of design. A quite different comparison is made when biologists focus on evolvability instead of adaptationism. Here, the idea is that complex integrated systems, whether evolved or engineered, share universal principles that affect the way they change over time. This shift from adaptationism to evolvability is a significant move for, as I argue, we can (...)
- Processes of life: essays in the philosophy of biology.John Dupré - 2014 - New York: Oxford University Press.John Dupré explores recent revolutionary developments in biology and considers their relevance for our understanding of human nature and society. He reveals how the advance of genetic science is changing our view of the constituents of life, and shows how an understanding of microbiology will overturn standard assumptions about the living world.
- The Evolution of Epigenetics.Gary Felsenfeld - 2014 - Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 57 (1):132-148.Since the early days of embryology, a central puzzle for biologists has been how a fertilized egg can execute a clearly defined and reproducible program that leads ultimately to a complex organism. It was clear that all of the information necessary to create the adult must already reside in the zygote, but how that information was translated into a complex organism was obscure. Even as recently as the late 1940s, the molecular mechanisms associated with early development were unknown and, in (...)
- Why how and why aren’t enough: more problems with Mayr’s proximate-ultimate distinction.Brett Calcott - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (5):767-780.Like Laland et al., I think Mayr’s distinction is problematic, but I identify a further problem with it. I argue that Mayr’s distinction is a false dichotomy, and obscures an important question about evolutionary change. I show how this question, once revealed, sheds light on some debates in evo-devo that Laland et al.’s analysis cannot, and suggest that it provides a different view about how future integration between biological disciplines might proceed.
- Developmental Systems Theory: What Does it Explain, and How Does It Explain It?Paul E. Griffiths & James G. Tabery - 2013 - In Richard M. Lerner & Janette B. Benson, Embodiment and Epigenesis: Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Understanding the Role of Biology Within the Relational Developmental System Part A: Philosophical, Theoretical, and Biological Dimensions. Elsevier. pp. 65--94.
- The phylogeny fallacy and the ontogeny fallacy.Adam Hochman - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (4):593-612.In 1990 Robert Lickliter and Thomas Berry identified the phylogeny fallacy, an empirically untenable dichotomy between proximate and evolutionary causation, which locates proximate causes in the decoding of ‘ genetic programs’, and evolutionary causes in the historical events that shaped these programs. More recently, Lickliter and Hunter Honeycutt argued that Evolutionary Psychologists commit this fallacy, and they proposed an alternative research program for evolutionary psychology. For these authors the phylogeny fallacy is the proximate/evolutionary distinction itself, which they argue constitutes a (...)
- From Arabidopsis and Antirrhinum to Arabia and Antioch. [REVIEW]A. C. Love - 2013 - Evolution & Development 15:158-159.From Arabidopsis and Antirrhinum to Arabia and Antioch: a review of cells to civilizations: the principles of change that shape life -/- Cells to Civilizations: The Principles of Change That Shape Life, Coen, E. 2012. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 312 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-14967-7.Remove from this listExport citationBookmark
- Overextension: the extended mind and arguments from evolutionary biology. [REVIEW]Armin W. Schulz - 2013 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (2):241-255.I critically assess two widely cited evolutionary biological arguments for two versions of the ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT): namely, an argument appealing to Dawkins’s ‘Extended Phenotype Thesis’ (EPT) and an argument appealing to ‘Developmental Systems Theory’ (DST). Specifically, I argue that, firstly, appealing to the EPT is not useful for supporting the EMT (in either version), as it is structured and motivated too differently from the latter to be able to corroborate or elucidate it. Secondly, I extend and defend Rupert’s (...)
- Evolutionary systems biology: What it is and why it matters.Orkun S. Soyer & Maureen A. O'Malley - 2013 - Bioessays 35 (8):696-705.Evolutionary systems biology (ESB) is a rapidly growing integrative approach that has the core aim of generating mechanistic and evolutionary understanding of genotype‐phenotype relationships at multiple levels. ESB's more specific objectives include extending knowledge gained from model organisms to non‐model organisms, predicting the effects of mutations, and defining the core network structures and dynamics that have evolved to cause particular intracellular and intercellular responses. By combining mathematical, molecular, and cellular approaches to evolution, ESB adds new insights and methods to the (...)
- Mechanism, Emergence, and Miscibility: The Autonomy of Evo-Devo.Denis M. Walsh - 2013 - In Philippe Huneman, Functions: selection and mechanisms. Springer. pp. 43--65.Find it on Amazon.com (collection)Remove from this list Direct downloadExport citationBookmark 18 citations
- Investigating Metalloproteinases MMP-2 and MMP-9 Mechanosensitivity to Feedback Loops Involved in the Regulation of In Vitro Angiogenesis by Endogenous Mechanical Stresses.Minh-Uyen Dao Thi, Candice Trocmé, Marie-Paule Montmasson, Eric Fanchon, Bertrand Toussaint & Philippe Tracqui - 2012 - Acta Biotheoretica 60 (1):21-40.Angiogenesis is a complex morphogenetic process regulated by growth factors, but also by the force balance between endothelial cells traction stresses and extracellular matrix viscoelastic resistance. Studies conducted with in vitro angiogenesis assays demonstrated that decreasing ECM stiffness triggers an angiogenic switch that promotes organization of EC into tubular cords or pseudo-capillaries. Thus, mechano-sensitivity of EC with regard to proteases secretion, and notably matrix metalloproteinases, should likely play a pivotal role in this switching mechanism. While most studies analysing strain regulation (...)
- Grammar as a developmental phenomenon.Guy Dove - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (5):615-637.More and more researchers are examining grammar acquisition from theoretical perspectives that treat it as an emergent phenomenon. In this essay, I argue that a robustly developmental perspective provides a potential explanation for some of the well-known crosslinguistic features of early child language: the process of acquisition is shaped in part by the developmental constraints embodied in von Baer’s law of development. An established model of development, the Developmental Lock, captures and elucidates the probabilistic generalizations at the heart of von (...)
- The Hydra model - a model for what?Alfred Gierer - 2012 - International Journal of Developmental Biology 56:437-445.The introductory personal remarks refer to my motivations for choosing research projects, and for moving from physics to molecular biology and then to development, with Hydra as a model system. Historically, Trembley’s discovery of Hydra regeneration in 1744 was the begin¬ning of developmental biology as we understand it, with passionate debates about preformation versus de novo generation, mechanisms versus organisms. In fact, seemingly conflicting bottom-up and top-down concepts are both required in combination to understand development. In modern terms, this means (...)
- More on how and why: cause and effect in biology revisited.Kevin N. Laland, John Odling-Smee, William Hoppitt & Tobias Uller - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (5):719-745.In 1961, Ernst Mayr published a highly influential article on the nature of causation in biology, in which he distinguished between proximate and ultimate causes. Mayr argued that proximate causes (e.g. physiological factors) and ultimate causes (e.g. natural selection) addressed distinct ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions and were not competing alternatives. That distinction retains explanatory value today. However, the adoption of Mayr’s heuristic led to the widespread belief that ontogenetic processes are irrelevant to evolutionary questions, a belief that has (1) hindered (...)
- Genetic Representation Explains the Cluster of Innateness‐Related Properties.Nicholas Shea - 2012 - Mind and Language 27 (4):466-493.The concept of innateness is used to make inferences between various better-understood properties, like developmental canalization, evolutionary adaptation, heritability, species-typicality, and so on (‘innateness-related properties’). This article uses a recently-developed account of the representational content carried by inheritance systems like the genome to explain why innateness-related properties cluster together, especially in non-human organisms. Although inferences between innateness-related properties are deductively invalid, and lead to false conclusions in many actual cases, where some aspect of a phenotypic trait develops in reliance on (...)
- Varieties of parity.Ulrich E. Stegmann - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (6):903-918.A central idea of developmental systems theory is ‘parity’ or ‘symmetry’ between genes and non-genetic factors of development. The precise content of this idea remains controversial, with different authors stressing different aspects and little explicit comparisons among the various interpretations. Here I characterise and assess several influential versions of parity.
- Konzepte und Konstruktionen des Lebenden: philosophische und biologische Aspekte einer künstlichen Herstellung von Mikroorganismen.Elke Witt - 2012 - Freiburg: Alber.Im Zuge der Entwicklung der Synthetischen Biologie lassen sich zur Zeit in den modernen Lebenswissenschaften Bemühungen erkennen, Leben künstlich herzustellen. Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit den erkenntnistheoretischen Aspekten der Versuche einer technischen Erzeugung von minimalen Lebensformen. Sie untersucht, auf welchen unterschiedlichen Grundannahmen die aktuellen Projekte zur Herstellung von Proto- und Minimalorganismen beruhen bzw. welche Eigenschaften von Organismen als konstitutiv für die Lebensprozesse angenommen werden.
- Cognitive biology: dealing with information from bacteria to minds.Gennaro Auletta - 2011 - New York: Oxford University Press.Providing a new conceptual scaffold for further research in biology and cognition, this book introduces the new field of cognitive biology, a systems biology approach showing that further progress in this field will depend on a deep recognition of developmental processes, as well as on the consideration of the developed organism as an agent able to modify and control its surrounding environment. The role of cognition, the means through which the organism is able to cope with its environment, cannot be (...)
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