philosophy-of-biology.
47 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-027 | Adding causality to individuality | Of Krakauer et al.’s (2020) three mutual-information “individuality” terms (A* = I(S_{t+1}; S_t), A = I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t), nC = I(S_{t+1}; E_t | S_t)), Bourrat argues that nC and A* are not individuality measures. He then proposes the interventional  = I(S_{t+1}; Ŝ_t) (Eq. 6) and two ETI criteria: C1, a normalised Â_{S2}/H(Ŝ2) ≥ Â_{S1}/H(Ŝ1)|θ₀, and C2, low Var(Â_{S2} | Ê2 = ê2k). None of these is computed on any system. The paper’s claim that  ≡ I(S_{t+1}; S_t | E_t) = A in Krakauer’s model is false in general. | Read |
| NOTE-064 v2 | Bourrat 2023, a coarse-graining account of individuality | Bourrat proposes that a partition of particles into collectives defines individuals when the “projected” prediction (coarse-grain at t1, then evolve the coarse-grained state) differs from the “truthful” one (evolve at the fine grain, then coarse-grain at t2) by δC = C_T − C_P < θ, across many traits (Eqs. 1–2). He argues that, because measurement and computation are finite, coarse-graining can be the only way to predict at all: in his example, 100 operations predict 10 entities for 10 timesteps or 2 collectives for 50. That indispensability is his whole case for the “quasi-ontological” status of collectives at Godfrey-Smith and Kerr’s fifth stage. Nothing is computed on any model. | Read |
| NOTE-094 v4 | Nahas & Sachs — What’s at stake in naturalizing teleology | The paper argues that “naturalizing teleology” serves at least two relatively autonomous projects with different success criteria. One is scientific: whether an organism-centred account improves biology, which requires operationalisable models that may trade truth for usefulness. The other is philosophical: whether organismal teleology reshapes the liberal-versus-scientific naturalism debate about mind in nature, which requires truth but no operationalisation. It applies the distinction to one recurring dispute, the demarcation of teleological systems from dissipative structures. In the scientific context, models “cannot and need not” demarcate (§4.1: Cusimano & Sterner; McShea & Babcock). In the philosophical context, preferences between accounts turn on unstated commitments (§4.2: García-Valdecasas’s Aristotelian case for Deacon over the Organizational Approach). | Read |
| NOTE-100 v2 | Bourrat — Reproducees, reproducers, Darwinian individuals | Bourrat builds a nested vocabulary. A reproducee is a B that comes after A, is caused by A, and is of A’s relevant class. A reproducer is a reproducee with reproductive autonomy, meaning it can reproduce across a range of backgrounds. A Darwinian individual is a reproducer with high reproductive causal control, meaning heredity survives as the parent’s description is made finer. On that vocabulary, genes of multicellular organisms are, like hearts, mere reproducees, but with high control. Material overlap is necessary for reproducers, which are whole life cycles, and unnecessary for reproducees, so Griesemer and Godfrey-Smith partly talk past each other. Both quantities get an information-theoretic recipe (conditional MI after Bertschinger et al. 2008 for autonomy; interventional MI across grains, Griffiths et al.’s INF, for control), and neither is computed. | Read |
| NOTE-101 v2 | Luque — Philosophical analysis of the Price equation | Luque argues that the Price equation, Δz̄ = Cov(w, z) + E(wΔz) (eq. 1, p. 7), is a Kuhnian “generalization-sketch”, like f = ma. It is not a model, has no predictive power on its own, and becomes empirical only when a specific model interprets it. On that reading the critics’ charges (van Veelen 2005; van Veelen et al. 2012; Nowak & Highfield 2011) that it is “a tautology” and “lacks predictive power” are either false or ask too much, and he recommends that evolutionary biologists adopt it as their unifying framework. | Read |
| NOTE-109 v2 | Bender et al. — What Lives? (definitions of life) | Three LLMs (Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3 70B), each run 3 times on both orderings of every pair, rated 68 hand-solicited definitions of life on a −1 to 1 “correlation” rubric. The averaged matrix, cut by complete-linkage clustering at an elbow, gives 8 clusters, 45/68 of them (66%) in “Cognitive Autonomy” (n=24) and “Dissipative Self-Organizing Systems” (n=21). The clusters are weak: the repo’s own saved statistics give an overall silhouette of 0.079, and cross-model agreement is an unadjusted Rand index of 71–79% against a chance level of about 62–74%. The headline that life is “a continuous semantic landscape” is not tested against any alternative. | Read |
| NOTE-111 v2 | Baedke et al. — Unknotting reciprocal causation | The paper gives an epistemic, not a metaphysical, tool for organism–environment reciprocal causation. The loop is “unrolled” into two ordered series of states, O_n and E_n, joined by interventionist (Woodward) causal arrows, and an experienced-environment node Ex_n is added as the interface. Its authors argue that this one diagram keeps an epistemically set organism–environment boundary and maps constitutive, mediational, relational, relocational and physical niche construction onto shared causal patterns. They support this with worked cases, including two multi-species ones (bumblebee–eggplant; rumen microbes–ruminant host). | Read |
| NOTE-114 v2 | SEP — Biological individuals | A survey that maps biological individuals by crossing two axes: organism / some parts of organisms / some groups of organisms, against living agent (physiological) / Darwinian (evolutionary) individual. The result is nine regions, each given one example (fruit fly, gene, eusocial colony, lysosome, clade, heart, coral reef, virus, squid+Vibrio). “Part” is never defined, and the entry gives no criterion for which parts or groups count: the placements are the authors’ tentative judgements, “moving from less contentious to more contentious examples” (§7). | Read |
| NOTE-115 v2 | Meincke — A process view of pregnancy | Meincke argues that substance ontology forces a binary count of individuals. The Containment View fails empirically, following Kingma. Kingma’s Parthood View either loses foster–neonate identity (“Parts-of-Substances”) or cannot count consistently (“Substances-as-Parts”). If organisms are autopoietic processes, a pregnant individual is instead an asymmetrically bifurcating “hypercomplex” process. The foster is “something in between zero and one” and the whole is “something in between one and two”, and the bifurcation runs on past birth through lactation (“postnatal pregnancy”). | Read |
| NOTE-137 v2 | Hazelwood — Emerging dilemma for reciprocal causation | Hazelwood defines RC as “the process of natural selection is both a cause and effect of processes such as niche construction” and EC as “natural selection is an emergent causal process”. He argues they are incompatible. Emergence here is Wilson’s synchronic dependence plus autonomy, cashed out as Pence’s composition. If EC holds, niche construction partly composes selection, so the two fail Woodward’s independent-fixability condition and cannot stand in a causal relation. If EC fails, selection is either non-causal (statisticalism) or individual-level, which is incoherent because relative fitness needs a population (Millstein, Sober). EES proponents should drop RC but can keep niche construction as a genuine cause of the evolutionary product. | Read |
| NOTE-148 v2 | Baedke — The Organism (Cambridge Element) | Baedke treats “organism” as a nexus concept with an organizational dimension and a relational dimension, joined by the various kinds of biological individuality. He argues that the standard “persister” (self-maintenance, closure) criterion cannot single organisms out, because colonies, holobionts and ecosystems meet it too, and that organisms are also “overcomers”, able to destabilize and reorganize their own closure. Organisms are then individuated relationally by tracing diachronic causal paths in the unrolled O/E model of Baedke et al. 2021 (LIT-110). The overcomer claim rests on three illustrative cases, anglerfish, sea slug and jumping ant, and is asserted, not shown, to hold of organisms only (p. 40). | Read |
| NOTE-155 v2 | Trappes — Defining the niche for niche construction | Trappes compares NCT’s evolutionary niche with the ecological niche. The evolutionary niche is the sum of selection pressures on a population (Odling-Smee, Laland & Feldman 2003), read “externally” as the environmental factors that produce fitness differences. The ecological niche is the conditions that permit continued existence; for a population, mean absolute fitness ≥ 1. Even at their closest, against the realized population niche, the two differ in extension. Habitat degradation is in the evolutionary niche but not the ecological one, and commensalism and non-limiting resources are in the ecological niche but not the evolutionary one. So NCT’s niche is not the “simple translation” of Hutchinson’s niche its proponents claim, and the evolutionary significance of niche construction must be shown case by case rather than following from the definition. | Read |
| NOTE-159 v2 | SEP — Philosophy of microbiology | O’Malley & Parke argue in four steps that philosophy should attend to microbes. Microbes do most of the planet’s biological work and underlie every major transition. Microbiology founded medicine, molecular biology and genomics. Microbes are unusually good material models, including for phenomena once defined by animals (predation, ageing, kin recognition, cognition). Microbiome research bears on individuality and causation. They are sceptical about the strongest microbiome claims. Whether host and microbiome form one unit of selection is “still disputed”. Claims that microbiomes change the “self” are “usually expressed in very vague language”. The 2026 revision adds that Asgard-archaea phylogenies may make eukaryogenesis “first and foremost a story about diversification within Archaea” rather than a transition in individuality. | Read |
| NOTE-170 v2 | Takola & Schielzeth — Hutchinson’s niche for individuals | The paper defines the individualized (ecological) niche as the environmental conditions under which a particular individual has an expected lifetime reproductive success of ≥ 1, counting each offspring as 0.5 per parent in outcrossers. The authors split it into five sub-concepts: realized (A), potential (B), time-slice (C), prospective (D) and trajectory-based (E), plus a “fundamental individualized niche” set aside as practically interchangeable with the potential niche. The individual niche has n + s dimensions, adding intraspecific axes such as density and morph frequency. Its boundary is the expected-LRS isocline of 1, which is estimable only by marginalizing fitness functions across individuals. The authors themselves call the concept “mostly of a metaphorical value”. | Read |
| NOTE-173 v3 | Griesemer & Shavit — Scaffolding individuality (3Cs) | The paper sets out an idealized three-stage sequence of interaction types, which it calls a “first and rough sketch” (§1). Stage 1 is coordination in collections (pairwise, “aggregative” interactions of co-located individuals). Stage 2 is cooperation in conexuses (a connected web of binary interactions whose benefits can still be counted per member). Stage 3 is collaboration in communities: heterogeneous multi-way interactions around a shared goal, in which generatively entrenched “core” interactions give organizational closure. Table 1 puts the transition to a new level of individuality between stages 2 and 3 only. The paper asserts, rather than argues, that this describes evolutionary transitions non-circularly and that individuality is a special case of collectivity. Its one argued conclusion is hedged: community-level inheritance “seem[s] likely to evolve in tandem” with community-level individuality (§3). | Read |
| NOTE-184 v2 | SEP — Units and levels of selection | Lloyd’s own four-question anatomy of “unit of selection”: interactor, reproducer (formerly replicator), manifestor of adaptation, and beneficiary. She combines it with a split between two multilevel schools, Wrightian “Evolutionary Change” and Fisherian “Adaptationist/KS”. She uses the two to argue for a verdict, not merely to map the debates. The verdict is that most rejections of group, species and holobiont selection come from demanding that an interactor also be a manifestor of engineering adaptation. By her account, genic pluralism, the ETI models and Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian populations each fuse roles that should be kept apart. The support is argument plus citation of Wade, Goodnight and others. The entry reports no new results of its own. | Read |
| NOTE-341 | The Computational Boundary of a “Self” | A hypothesis essay. A Self is the set of parts that pursue goals together, and its boundary is the farthest region of space and time it can measure and act on, its “cognitive light cone”. Selves grow from homeostatic loops by adding memory, anticipation and networks, and cells form larger Selves by sharing bioelectric state through gap junctions. Every level that has its own goal is a Self, so living systems hold many nested Selves at once; the paper says this against IIT in one bracket. It has no model, no measurement of the light cone and no new data, and it confines claims about experience to a closing speculation. | Read |
| NOTE-415 | Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics | Proposes a “restated second law” (systems pushed from equilibrium resist the applied gradients by every available means) and reads Bénard cells, vortices, life and ecosystem succession as successive gradient destroyers, with the second law “necessary but not sufficient” for life. The law is asserted, not derived. The physics examples show organized structures raising dissipation, not that they must. The ecological evidence is one unreplicated marsh comparison and thermal-scanner and satellite correlations, one of whose tables is internally inconsistent. | Read |
| NOTE-421 | Life as we know it | The flow of internal and active states in an ergodic system with a Markov blanket, written in Helmholtz form, can be redescribed as gradient descent on a variational free energy once the variational density is set equal to the posterior over external states. On that redescription such systems “appear” to infer and to bound their own entropy, which the paper calls the marks of life. One simulated soup shows a blanket-enclosed cluster that predicts external motion and falls apart under lesions. The free energy is variational, not thermodynamic. The candle flame is excluded by a one-sentence assertion. The paper’s own reported p-value is not reproduced by the null it describes. | Read |
| NOTE-425 | Energy flow and the organization of life | An essay arguing that life, beginning with the reductive citric-acid cycle, was forced into existence as a channel relieving geochemical free-energy stresses, like lightning or a hurricane. The framework is Jaynesian entropy maximization over states that include currents, not entropy-production principles. The emergence of life is a phase-transition “collapse” of a metastable abiotic earth. The structure of core metabolism is the only evidence. The authors state that the thesis is not quantitatively demonstrated. | Read |
| NOTE-444 | An Organizational Account of Biological Functions | Functions are contributions to a differentiated self-maintaining organization by traits that organization produces and maintains (C1–C3). Closure alone grounds teleology and normativity but is shared by flames and hurricanes; differentiation is what makes functions meaningful. The account unifies “why is T there?” and “what is T for?” in current organization, and distinguishes functional, useful, dysfunctional, primary and secondary contributions. Reproduction is left to future “second-order” self-maintaining systems. | Read |
| NOTE-458 | Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action | Minimal agency needs a self-individuated system that is the source of modulations of its coupling with the environment and regulates them by norms it generates. An autonomous organization, a precarious network of mutually enabling processes, generates all three when it adaptively modulates its coupling for its own maintenance. Life is sufficient, not necessary. The definition is a proposal: the authors say asymmetry’s formalization is incomplete and modeller-relative. | Read |
| NOTE-468 | Biological organisation as closure of constraints | A constraint acts on a process while being conserved at that process’s time scale; closure is a set of constraints, each directly dependent on and generative for another, that cannot be split. This separates closure from cycles of processes, grounds functions, and gives a boundary criterion, refined by a preliminary count-based tendency to closure for symbionts and by nested separated closures for levels. Applied only to schematic examples; closure is not claimed to define organisms. | Read |
| NOTE-555 | Conceptualization of the Holobiont Paradigm as It Pertains to Corals | A mini-review arguing that corals must be studied as holobionts. The holobiont is defined by location (coral plus microbiota in body, mucus and skeleton), and its membership can change. Traits belong to host–symbiont combinations: a novel anemone–alga pairing out-performed both natural ones in oxygen flux at 32–34 °C, and two octocorals lost symbionts by different routes, one per host cell and one with host cells. It asks, without answering, whether the holobiont is the unit of selection. | Read |
| NOTE-562 | Cancer across the tree of life: cooperation and cheating in multicellularity | A review framing cancer as cheating on five foundations of multicellular cooperation and surveying cancer-like phenomena across the independent origins of complex multicellularity. Division-of-labour cheating appears in every form, resource and environment cheating only in animals and plants so far. Complex multicellularity is read as a cheater detection and suppression system, with proliferative units as a possible intermediate level of selection. | Read |
| NOTE-586 | The Major Transitions in Evolution—A Philosophy-of-Science Perspective | A philosopher’s overview of the major evolutionary transitions. It defines a transition as the evolution of a higher-level unit from formerly free-living ones, doubts that transitions are inevitable or that one theory explains them at the right grain, treats genic and hierarchical approaches as compatible, and argues that the transitions make the hierarchy an explanandum and the highest occupied level the privileged level of organisms. | Read |
| NOTE-719 v2 | Di Paolo — Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency | Autopoiesis, read as conservation, gives only an all-or-nothing norm that an observer can see and the system cannot use. Sense-making needs adaptivity in addition: a graded capacity to monitor and regulate tendencies toward the viability boundary, which yields good, neutral and bad ways of staying alive for the system itself. Agency is the regulation of coupling with the environment, not coupling itself. The argument is conceptual, with one footnoted model (the Chemoton), and the closing section on non-metabolic values is declared speculative. | Read |
| NOTE-720 v2 | Weber & Varela — Life after Kant | An argument, not a model: Kant’s natural purposes (§§ 64–65), Jonas’s metabolism and Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis converge on an intrinsic teleology, in which a self-producing system’s maintenance of its own identity is its purpose and the source of value for it. The boundary is in the definition (components “constitute the system as a distinguishable unity”), but no test tells a produced boundary from an imposed one, and a multicellular organism is said not to be autopoietic itself. Value is “objective” only relative to the organism, though one passage reaches a right to life. | Read |
| NOTE-727 | Rubin, Roli, Stano & Damiano — Genealogies of organizational closure | A conceptual genealogy of the notions of closure (closure to information, cyclic, operational, semantic, catalytic, metabolic, closure to efficient causation, closure of constraints) from mathematical logic, cybernetics, systems theory, thermodynamics, relational biology and the biology of cognition. Its thesis is that closure is best read as a circular organization of efficient causes by which a living system produces the conditions of its own existence. That is not feedback, self-organization or a catalytic cycle, and it cannot be exhaustively characterized as a state-determined syntactic procedure. Current AI, agentic LLM systems included, is said to approximate closure without instantiating it. The genealogy is historical; the non-computability and AI verdicts are asserted or argued from Rosen, not demonstrated. | Read |
| NOTE-729 | Bickhard — Autonomy, Function, and Representation | A far-from-equilibrium system that contributes to its own maintenance has functions: its contributions serve its persistence, and the thermodynamic asymmetry between persisting and decaying gives function and dysfunction, relative to that system. A candle flame qualifies. A system that switches among self-maintaining processes according to how it has differentiated its environment (recursive self-maintenance) has representation: the indication that an interaction will succeed can be false, and the system can find that out. Etiological, informational and Dretskean accounts are rejected as epiphenomenal or observer-dependent. The argument is conceptual, with no model. | Read |
| NOTE-730 | Barandiaran — Organizational Accounts of Malfunction | The dual-order organizational account of malfunction (Saborido, Moreno and Mossio), on which a trait malfunctions when it meets first-order constitutive norms but fails a second-order regulatory shift between regimes, is too narrow and unnecessarily complicated. Barandiaran replaces it with a normative field over the viability space: at each precarious state, the minimum constant parametric change that avoids disintegration. A trait functions when its operation correlates positively with that field, subfunctions when it does so too slowly, malfunctions when it does not, and is nonfunctional when it does nothing where it must. Regulatory traits can malfunction by the same standard. Conceptual, with a one-variable toy model. | Read |
| NOTE-747 | Watson — Agency, Goal-Directed Behavior, and Part-Whole Relationships | A comparative, scale-relative notion of agency. Given a decomposition into parts with goals of their own, a whole is more agential than its parts when its organization lets them resolve more of their mutual constraints than they would at the equilibrium of the old organization. It shows this as delayed gratification. The essay argues this, and shows in cited models that unsupervised, bottom-up learning can produce such organization. It gives no threshold for an additional agent and no formula beyond comparing total frustration. | Read |
| NOTE-952 | Pattee — the physics of symbols | The epistemic cut is the separation of subject from object, symbol from referent, controller from controlled, which dynamical laws cannot describe without losing the function across it (von Neumann’s regress). Measurement codes a rate-dependent dynamical state into quiescent symbols and control is its converse; both are executed by non-integrable (non-holonomic) constraints. The cut is epistemic, not ontological, and in life it arises first at the genotype–phenotype control interface: in Pattee’s account control of construction came first, not measurement. | Read |
| NOTE-977 | Shpak, Stadler, Wagner and Altenberg — Simon–Ando decomposability and fitness landscapes | States Simon and Ando’s (1961) theorem for x(t+1) = (A* + εC)x, with A* block-diagonal, as existence statements: as ε → 0 the non-leading eigenvectors approach the blocks’, and times T0 < T1 < T2 < T3 exist that separate within-block relaxation, quasi-equilibrium, aggregate cross-block dynamics and global equilibrium. No rate in ε and no bound on aggregation error is given. It then applies an entrywise proxy (minimal within-class rate ≫ maximal cross-class rate) to mutation–selection on hypercubes, which low mutation rates meet trivially, and to recombination, which rarely meets it. It concludes that Simon–Ando aggregation is one source of dynamical sufficiency among several, distinct from symmetry (equitable partitions) and from linkage-equilibrium character aggregation. | Read |
| NOTE-979 | Shpak, Stadler, Wagner and Hermisson — Aggregation of variables and system decomposition | Separates aggregation of variables, a lower-dimensional map y = Qx whose dynamics close, from decomposition into non-interacting subsets: either can hold without the other. For a linear system the aggregate operator must satisfy ĀQ = QA. For a partition, the block sums close for every state exactly when the partition is column-equitable. Equitable partitions of mutation–selection matrices reduce single- and two-peak fitness landscapes exactly, and fail for three or more peaks unless the classes are refined to overlap classes. Simon–Ando aggregation is treated as the approximate limiting case, without error bounds. | Read |
| NOTE-1065 | Ward — What is enactivism? | A conceptual paper. The usual taxonomy, which lumps every view stressing sensorimotor loops as “enactivism” and splits it into autopoietic, sensorimotor and radical variants, hides what is distinctive about The Embodied Mind. A second axis, organicist against informationalist, runs across the cognitivist–embodied one. Enactivism is organicist, and it adds the primacy of lived experience and a reciprocity in which scientific vocabularies reshape the experience they describe. Most embodied views, predictive processing among them, are informationalist. It argues for a taxonomy, not for enactivism’s truth. | Read |
| NOTE-1282 | Evolution, altruism and cognitive architecture: a critique of Sober and Wilson’s argument for psychological altruism | Sober and Wilson argue, from parental care, that natural selection would favour an ultimate desire for the child’s welfare over hedonism, on grounds of reliability. Stich grants that evolutionary and psychological altruism are independent. He rejects their arguments from imperfect belief–affect correlation, from the engineering cost of strong affect, and from redundancy. He takes seriously the fourth: hedonism depends on beliefs linking helping to one’s own feelings, and beliefs can be undermined. But if those links are sticky sub-doxastic states, hedonism is as reliable as altruism, so the argument leaves egoism open. | Read |
| NOTE-1320 | Human transgenerational responses to early-life experience: potential impact on development, health and biomedical research | A position paper of the Network in Epigenetic Epidemiology. It defines “transgenerational” broadly: any outcome in offspring of a parent’s exposure before conception or an ancestor’s. In the Överkalix cohorts (about 100 probands each), a paternal grandfather’s good mid-childhood food supply went with higher grandson mortality (rate ratio 1.67) and poor supply with lower (0.65); for paternal grandmothers and granddaughters, 2.13 and 0.72. In ALSPAC, sons of fathers who began smoking before 11 had more body fat from 13. Against multiple testing, the authors cite prior hypotheses and coherence and grant that replication is needed. Against cultural inheritance, they cite the sensitive period in the grandparent’s mid-childhood. On mechanism they stay agnostic. | Read |
| NOTE-1340 | Nicholson — The organism as a system (Weiss) | Nicholson reconstructs from Paul Weiss’s writings a non-formal concept of a system: a whole that keeps its configuration while its parts vary and turn over, whose parts are produced and constrained by the network they form, and which therefore cannot be assembled stepwise or recovered from an inventory of parts. He uses it against reductionism, genocentrism, determinism and mechanicism. The critiques rest mostly on conceptual argument, analogy and Weiss’s authority; only the one against determinism leans on cited evidence, and its one formal criterion, that the whole varies far less than the summed variances of its parts, is met by any aggregate whose whole is measured as an average. | Read |
| NOTE-1369 | Cooper and West — Division of labour and the evolution of extreme specialization | A kin-selection model of one cooperative trait with two phenotypes that invest q1 and q2 in helping. Division of labour needs accelerating returns to helping (α > 1) but is not guaranteed by it; when it evolves one phenotype is always a pure reproductive (q2 = 0), so a feedback between helper and reproductive specialization drives the extremes. Relatedness does not affect whether division evolves for an essential trait, and favours sterile helpers. The authors infer that division of labour drives major transitions; the model contains no transition. | Read |
| NOTE-1437 | Moreno & Mossio — Biological Autonomy, the Introduction | The Introduction alone. Moreno and Mossio state their programme: the organism, not natural selection, is biology’s central idea; its core is a closure of constraints, which they say fundamentally differs from the process loops and self-organisation of dissipative structures, and which grounds teleology, normativity and function. With regulation and agency, closure makes an autonomous system, an organism; ecosystems meet only closure. The arguments are announced for chapters 1–7, which this reading does not cover. | Skimmed |
| NOTE-1443 | Mossio & Bich — What makes biological organisation teleological? | Biological organisation is intrinsically teleological because it self-determines, and it self-determines only as self-constraint: closure, a set of mutually dependent constraints that channel a far-from-equilibrium flow at a second level of causation. A cycle of transformations, such as the water cycle, is not closure. Dissipative structures do not realise closure; at most, on a contested reading, they make “a single macroscopic constraint” that acts on its own boundary conditions, and so would be minimally teleological but not organised and without functions. The paper never names differentiation or time scales as a condition: it folds the “division of labour” into closure. | Read |
| NOTE-1447 | Vissio — Reasoning in Life | Vissio reads Canguilhem’s vitalism as an attitude, not a metaphysics: to live is to evaluate a milieu and institute norms. Disease is a change in vital norms that leaves the organism “confined and reduced in its capacity to change these norms”, and normativity is the “ability or capacity to redefine vital norms”. Social norms, Canguilhem argues, are different in kind because no regulatory apparatus integrates a society as one, so there is no social pathology; yet human reason and science answer to a vital exigency. | Read |
| NOTE-1452 | Giroux — Can populations be healthy? | Giroux argues against Canguilhem that health can be a property of populations. His restriction of health to the individual organism rests on normativity, which he locates in organic totalities, and on a Darwinism centred on individuals; both are weakened by later debates on units of selection and individuality. Social epidemiology supplies population-level comparisons, integral variables such as herd immunity, and Rose’s distinction between causes of cases and causes of incidence, which justify a population health that is relatively autonomous but less unified than an organism. The paper also quotes Canguilhem’s definition of health as the capacity to institute new norms. | Read |
| NOTE-1461 | Mossio, Montévil & Longo — organization as a theoretical principle | Proposes organization, understood as closure of constraints, as one of two theoretical principles for biology, the other being variation (treated in a companion paper). A principle is posited a priori, as physics posits its phase space, and it defines the domain: any system meeting both principles is biological, organisms being one class. The paper restates Montévil and Mossio’s definitions of constraint, dependence and closure, and argues without a model that closure grounds biological stability by regenerating constraints beyond their own time scales, and that it also propagates variation, so a local change can end in a new closure; rocks, flames and tables, it says, cannot do that. | Read |
| NOTE-1492 | Bechtel & Abrahamsen — dynamic mechanistic explanation | A dynamic mechanistic explanation joins a mechanistic account of parts, operations and organization to a computational model whose variables are properties of those parts and operations. In circadian research the parts came first, from experiment, and six kinds of modelling result follow (C1–C6). In cognitive science the models posit their mechanisms and are checked only by fit to behaviour. That makes them how-possibly accounts, and leaves competing architectures underdetermined. Two of the paper’s cases bear on the record: clamping a variable in a grounded model to test componency (C3), and the open question whether peripheral clocks are self-sustained or damped oscillators driven by the SCN (C6). | Read |
| NOTE-1538 | West, Fisher, Gardner and Kiers — Major evolutionary transitions in individuality | A colloquium review, with no new data or model. A transition in individuality is defined by two conditions: mutual dependence, where parts can replicate only within the larger unit, and negligible within-group conflict. It proceeds in two steps, forming a cooperative group and then transforming it, with borders that are not clear. Table 1 shows that each condition occurs without the other. Across transitions, what does the work is an ecological benefit together with how groups form, through clonal bottlenecks, lifetime monogamy or vertical transmission of clonal symbionts. Kin discrimination and the repression of competition played “relatively minor roles”. | Read |