Philosophy of biology

The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant), philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the research of David Hull. Philosophers of science then began paying increasing attention to biology, from the rise of Neodarwinism in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering. Other key ideas include the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions, and the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience. Philosophers of biology examine the practices, theories, and concepts of biologists with a view toward better understanding biology as a scientific discipline (or group of scientific fields). Scientific ideas are philosophically analyzed and their consequences are explored. Philosophers of biology have also explored how our understanding of biology relates to epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics and whether progress in biology should compel modern societies to rethink traditional values concerning all aspects of human life. It is sometimes difficult to separate the philosophy of biology from theoretical biology. "What is a biological species?" "What is natural selection, and how does it operate in nature?" "How should we distinguish disease states from non-disease states?" "What is life?" "What makes humans uniquely human?" "What is the basis of moral thinking?" "Is biological materialism & deterministic molecular biology compatible with free will?" "How is rationality possible, given our biological origins?" "Is evolution compatible with Christianity or other religious systems?" "Are there laws of biology like the laws of physics?" Ideas drawn from philosophical ontology and logic are being used by biologists in the domain of bioinformatics.

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A subcellular biochemical model for T6SS dynamics reveals winning competitive strategies

Yuexia Luna Lin

The type VI secretion system (T6SS) is a broadly distributed interbacterial weapon that can be used to eliminate competing bacterial populations. Although unarmed target populations are typically used to study T6SS function in vitro, bacteria most likely e ...

OXFORD UNIV PRESS2023

SPAHM: the spectrum of approximated Hamiltonian matrices representations

Ksenia Briling, Alberto Fabrizio

Physics-inspired molecular representations are the cornerstone of similarity-based learning applied to solve chemical problems. Despite their conceptual and mathematical diversity, this class of descriptors shares a common underlying philosophy: they all r ...

2022

Multi-omics reveals abundant mitochondrial genomic and circadian expression variation in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel

Maria Litovchenko

Modern biology rapidly generates a wealth of data,which can only be analysed computationally.Despite the variety of available data types,most of them aim to provide an answer to one question: how does genotypic diversity translates into phenotypes? This qu ...

EPFL2020

Philosophy

Philosophy (love of wisdom in ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its own methods and assumptions. Historically, many of the individual sciences, like physics and psychology, formed part of philosophy. But they are considered separate academic disciplines in the modern sense of the term.

Teleology in biology

Teleology in biology is the use of the language of goal-directedness in accounts of evolutionary adaptation, which some biologists and philosophers of science find problematic. The term teleonomy has also been proposed. Before Darwin, organisms were seen as existing because God had designed and created them; their features such as eyes were taken by natural theology to have been made to enable them to carry out their functions, such as seeing.

Orthogenesis

Orthogenesis, also known as orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution, evolutionary progress, or progressionism, is an obsolete biological hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolve in a definite direction towards some goal (teleology) due to some internal mechanism or "driving force". According to the theory, the largest-scale trends in evolution have an absolute goal such as increasing biological complexity.

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