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Revisiting N.I. Vavilov’s “The Law of Homologous Series in Variation” (1922)
We discuss N. I. Vavilov’s 1922 landmark publication, “The Law of Homologous Series in Variation,” and highlight its salient points. Vavilov drew...
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Interlude: The Cluster of Plasticity and the Impact of Its Transfer
I explicate the cluster of concepts related to plasticity, which are deployed as an inseparable conceptual bundle: ‘environment/milieu’ tropes, e.g.,...
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Schelling’s Philosophy of Nature
This chapter deals with the basic outlines of Schelling’s conception of living nature. It had a profound influence on the development of biology,...
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Revisiting T. C. Schneirla’s “Interrelationships of the ‘Innate’ and the ‘Acquired’ in Instinctive Behavior” (1956)
During the postwar period, the concept of instinct came to encapsulate the debate around the importance of nature versus nurture. The fact that...
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The eco-ethical contribution of Menico Torchio – a forgotten pioneer of European Bioethics
BackgroundIn 1926, Fritz Jahr described bio-ethics (German: bio-ethik) as “the assumption of moral obligations not only towards humans, but towards...
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Introduction: Organization as a Scientific Blind Spot
For most of the twentieth century, biology forgot or largely neglected organization. By this term, I mean a certain mode of interaction among the...
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Introduction: Vitalism and Its Legacies in Twentieth Century Life Sciences and Philosophy
Vitalism has spent most of the twentieth century, and part of the twenty-first, being perhaps the most misunderstood and reviled philosophy of life,...
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„Ein Wasserwerfer hat keinen Rückwärtsgang“ - Von den Schwierigkeiten, Staatsgewalt „sauber“ zu vollziehen
Wenn abstrakte Rechtsvorschriften in konkrete Handlungen überführt werden, dann benötigen diejenigen, die es machen sollen, eine Handlungsethik, die...
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Precedent as a path laid down in walking: Grounding intrinsic normativity in a history of response
While developments of a shared intellectual tradition, the enactivist approach and the organizational account proffer importantly different accounts...
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Croizat’s form-making, RNA networks, and biogeography
Advances in technology have increased our knowledge of the processes that effect genomic changes and of the roles of RNA networks in...
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Biological Autonomy
The nature of biological autonomy and the choice of an appropriate framework for understanding it are subjects of ongoing debates in philosophy of...
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Between the genotype and the phenotype lies the microbiome: symbiosis and the making of ‘postgenomic’ knowledge
Emphatic claims of a “microbiome revolution” aside, the study of the gut microbiota and its role in organismal development and evolution is a central...
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Canguilhem and the Logic of Life
We examine aspects of Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology, concerning the knowledge of life and its consequences on science and vitalism. His concept...
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Darwin’s empirical claim and the janiform character of fitness proxies
Darwin’s claim about natural selection is reconstructed as an empirical claim about a causal connection leading from the match of the physiology of...
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The History of Integration: From Spencer to Sherrington and Later
Integration is now very successful in the field of life sciences: neuroscience, physiology, and a whole part of biology claim to be “integrative.”...
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An End to Ends?
Life is dynamic and partially predictable, requiring life-specific language and metaphors. The fundamental units of biology have changed through...
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Introduction: sketches of a conceptual history of epigenesis
This is an introduction to a collection of articles on the conceptual history of epigenesis, from Aristotle to Harvey, Cavendish, Kant and Erasmus...
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Revisiting Hans Böker’s "Species Transformation Through Reconstruction: Reconstruction Through Active Reaction of Organisms" (1935)
Against the common historiographic narratives of evolutionary biology, the first decades of the 20th century were theoretically far richer than...
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Genes and Natural Selection Finalize Nature
The power, form, and function of living things depend on nutrition and reproduction, which in turn depend on the unique power, form, and function of...
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The proximate-ultimate distinction and the active role of the organism in evolution
The validity and utility of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology have recently been under debate. Opponents of the distinction argue that it...