Studies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences
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Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · Oct 2020
Historical ArticleIssues of biopolitics of reproduction in post-war Greece.
The Greek biopolitics of reproduction during the post-war period was determined by the demographic figures. Instead of a rise in births, Greece experienced a constant downward trajectory of the birth rate throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The country also witnessed population instability due to the massive immigration in the 1960s and the wave of repatriation in the next decade. ⋯ The key debates were birth control and abortion because these issues of reproduction were entangled with major social fermentations caused by urbanization, modernization, eugenics, and feminism. The Constitution of 1974 was instrumental in changing the biopolitics of reproduction by introducing equal rights to men and women. It provoked a series of legal transformations with regard to marriage, family, and reproduction.
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Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · Jun 2017
Schrödinger's code-script: not a genetic cipher but a code of development.
In his book What is Life? Erwin Schrödinger coined the term 'code-script', thought by some to be the first published suggestion of a hereditary code and perhaps a forerunner of the genetic code. The etymology of 'code' suggests three meanings relevant to 'code-script which we distinguish as 'cipher-code', 'word-code' and 'rule-code'. Cipher-codes and word-codes entail translation of one set of characters into another. ⋯ Ignorant of its properties, however, he later abandons 'protein' and adopts in its place a hypothetical, isomeric 'aperiodic solid' whose atoms he imagines rearranged in countless different conformations, which together are responsible for the patterns of ontogenetic development. In an attempt to explain the large number of combinations required, Schrödinger referred to the Morse code (a cipher) but in doing so unwittingly misled readers into believing that he intended a cipher-code resembling the genetic code. We argue that the modern equivalent of Schrödinger's code-script is a rule-code of organismal development based largely on the synthesis, folding, properties and interactions of numerous proteins, each performing a specific task.
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Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · Dec 2016
AIC and the challenge of complexity: A case study from ecology.
Philosophers and scientists alike have suggested Akaike's Information Criterion (AIC), and other similar model selection methods, show predictive accuracy justifies a preference for simplicity in model selection. This epistemic justification of simplicity is limited by an assumption of AIC which requires that the same probability distribution must generate the data used to fit the model and the data about which predictions are made. This limitation has been previously noted but appears to often go unnoticed by philosophers and scientists and has not been analyzed in relation to complexity. ⋯ S. A. We suggest that AIC might still lend epistemic support for simplicity by leading to better explanations of complex phenomena.
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Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci · Aug 2016
Biography Historical ArticleThe "History" of Victorian Scientific Naturalism: Huxley, Spencer and the "End" of natural history.
As part of their defence of evolutionary theory, T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer argued that natural history was no longer a legitimate scientific discipline. ⋯ It affected their conceptions of human agency, contingency, and directionality in history. Examining Huxley's and Spencer's responses to the "end" of natural history reveals some of the deep divisions within scientific naturalism and the inherent problems of naturalism in general. Whereas Huxley chose to separate the natural and the historical, Spencer opted to fuse them into a single system.
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I develop a distinction between two types of psychological hedonism. Inferential hedonism (or "I-hedonism") holds that each person only has ultimate desires regarding his or her own hedonic states (pleasure and pain). Reinforcement hedonism (or "R-hedonism") holds that each person's ultimate desires, whatever their contents are, are differentially reinforced in that person's cognitive system only by virtue of their association with hedonic states. I'll argue that accepting R-hedonism and rejecting I-hedonism provides a conciliatory position on the traditional altruism debate, and that it coheres well with the neuroscientist Anthony Dickinson's theory about the evolutionary function of hedonic states, the "hedonic interface theory." Finally, I'll defend R-hedonism from potential objections.