Overview
Biology, philosophy of
Biologists sometimes look perplexed when they are told of the existence of a subject called ‘The Philosophy of Biology’. What, they ask, is there to philosophise about in ...
Search Results 1 - 25 of 39. Results contain 222 matches
Thematic
Biological function
Biologists ascribe functions to biological traits. For example, they tell us that it is the function of the heart to pump blood and that it is a function ...
Thematic
Causation and laws in biology
Physicalism appears to undermine the autonomy of ‘special sciences’ such as biology, and to leave little room for proprietary biological laws or causation. Mendel’s ‘Laws’ are so-called because ...
Thematic
Cultural evolution
Cultural traits are those phenotypic traits whose development depends on social learning. These include practices, skills, beliefs, desires, values, and artefacts. The distribution of cultural traits in the ...
Thematic
Ecology
Philosophers of science have paid relatively little attention to ecology (compared to other areas of biology like evolution and genetics), but ecology poses many interesting foundational and methodological ...
Thematic
Evolution and ethics
The fact that human beings are a product of biological evolution has been thought to impinge on the study of ethics in two quite different ways. First, evolutionary ...
Thematic
Evolution and religion
Ever since the seventeenth century, there has been debate about the compatibility of scientific findings and religious doctrines. During this period, many devout people have held that science ...
Thematic
Evolution, theory of
The biological theory of evolution advances the view that the variety and forms of life on earth are the result of descent with modification from the earliest forms ...
Thematic
Evolutionary developmental biology
Evolutionary developmental biology is the study of evolutionary change (called phylogeny) as it is revealed through the embryological development of individual organisms (called ontogeny). On this approach, the ...
Thematic
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a recent approach to understanding human psychology that takes as its starting point the fact that minds, just like hearts, kidneys, eyes, and thumbs, are ...
Thematic
Evolutionary theory and social science
Ideas from evolutionary theory impinge on the social sciences in two ways. First, there is the research programme of sociobiology, which attempts to demonstrate the impact of biological ...
Thematic
Functional explanation
Explanations appealing to the functions of items are common in everyday discourse and in science: we say that the heart pumps blood because that is its function, and ...
Thematic
Genetics
Genetics studies the problem of heredity, namely why offspring resemble their parents. The field emerged in 1900 with the rediscovery of the 1865 work of Gregor Mendel. William ...
Thematic
Innate knowledge
If innate knowledge exists, there must be innate beliefs and those beliefs must count as knowledge. In consequence, the problem of clarifying the concept of innate knowledge divides ...
Thematic
Innateness
The notion of innateness plays a significant role in various important debates in philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, ethology, and biology. These debates are about whether some ...
Thematic
Life, origin of
The appearance of maggots on meat or of intestinal tapeworms supported an ancient belief in the spontaneous generation of life. This idea was challenged in the seventeenth century ...
Thematic
Models in biology
In recent years, much attention has been given by philosophers to the ubiquitous role of models and modelling in the biological sciences. Philosophical debate has focused on several ...
Thematic
Modern synthesis, the
Huxley coined the phrase, the ‘modern synthesis’ to refer to the acceptance by a vast majority of biologists in the mid-twentieth century of a ‘synthetic’ view of evolution. ...
Thematic
Molecular biology
Molecular biology is the study of the structure, function and kinetics of biologically important molecules. Historically, molecular biology has often been identified with molecular genetics. Similarly, the chief ...
Thematic
Natural kinds in biology
Species are seen as paradigmatic natural kinds in biology. However, that assumption poses a potential problem for the traditional account of natural kinds. Many biologists and philosophers argue ...
Thematic
Natural selection and adaptation
Students of the natural world have long remarked on the fact that animals and plants are well suited to the demands of their environments. ‘Adaptation’, as it is ...
Thematic
Russian Darwinism
The Russian scientific community welcomed Darwin’s evolutionary theory and made it a basis of research in a wide range of biological sciences. Russian evolutionary studies in embryology, paleontology, ...
Thematic
Sociobiology
Following Darwin, biologists and social scientists have periodically been drawn to the theory of natural selection as the source of explanatory insights about human behaviour and social institutions. ...
Thematic
Species
The diversity of life is not seamless but comes in relatively discrete packages, species. Is that packaging real, or an artefact of our limited temporal perspective on the ...
Thematic
Taxonomy
The fundamental elements of any classification are its theoretical commitments, basic units and the criteria for ordering these basic units into a classification. Two fundamentally different sorts of ...