History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences最新文献

{"title":"Did Mendel breed mice?","authors":"Péter Poczai","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00760-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00760-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Scientific legends are rarely born fully formed, and the story of Mendel's mice is no exception. When the mice appear in the historical record, they do so through contradicting accounts on the most basic questions of what the animals looked like and what, if anything, was done with them. This story also reminds us that Mendel was not the isolated genius of popular imagination but a friar navigating a hostile bishop, considerable institutional pressures, and the deep suspicion with which the Church regarded the study of heredity in nineteenth-century Moravia. Whether or not he crossed those mice, the persistence of the story illustrates something broader about how scientific reputations are constructed and maintained. The various accounts converge on the same outcome, in which details that feel appropriate to a legend accumulate around it regardless of whether the evidence supports them. The mice of Mendel, plausible yet unverifiable and irresistible, are a particularly instructive example of these processes at work.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13569588/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148946323","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rethinking the trade-off hypothesis in evolutionary epidemiology.","authors":"Davide Coraci","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00756-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00756-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The trade-off hypothesis plays a foundational role in the theoretical framework of modern evolutionary epidemiology, proposing that pathogen fitness is maximized at intermediate levels of virulence. Despite its influence on the study of host-pathogen interactions, the hypothesis has been criticized for its limited empirical support and the conceptual ambiguities surrounding the definition of virulence. This paper reassesses the scientific status of the trade-off hypothesis by interpreting the dependencies among epidemiological parameters as constitutive principles. Therefore, the results of the seminal 1982 work of Anderson and May are reinterpreted as a shift in the constitutive principles underpinning the paradigm of evolutionary epidemiology. This perspective provides a novel basis for evaluating the empirical support for the trade-off hypothesis and reassessing the debate regarding its validity.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148914274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A systems approach to the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on human-nature connection.","authors":"Irina Salmi","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00758-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00758-x","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In environmental sciences, research on psychological and physical human-nature connection has recently expanded, revealing a diverse phenomenon associated with well-being, prosociality, and pro-environmentality. This paper argues that in his time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) described a similar phenomenon with similar consequences, explaining its origin and importance in a nuanced manner that is able to bring new insights to the current theoretical frameworks on human-nature connection. In this paper, an interpretation of Rousseau's philosophy with a systems approach is presented. Furthermore, by integrating it with temporary philosophy of systems biology and other relevant underpinnings, a framework for nature connectedness called the life-sustenance hypothesis is advanced, suggesting that all organisms are guided by two fundamental, parallel orientations: A self-sustaining orientation for self-preservative purposes and a life-sustaining orientation for sustaining surrounding life. Rousseau did not speak in these terms, but referred to different 'manners-of-being', the dynamics of which can be described with his central terms, amour-de-soi, amour-propre, and pitié. He suggested that the modern, individualistic lifestyle has introduced an excessive imbalance in these manners-of-beings, with harmful consequences on our well-being and the way we treat other beings. One possible solution Rousseau explored to resolve this imbalance-along with the political, educational, and domestic ones-was restoring personal inner peace, 'harmony with Nature'. The experience of harmony, I suggest, greatly resembles the immersive psychological nature connectedness depicted by contemporary research. Rousseau's system of thought is able to bring clarity into why we experience nature connectedness, and why it affects us the way it does.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13550017/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148908220","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The epistemological foundations of organicism: a reconstruction of Steiner's Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (1886).","authors":"Christoph J Hueck","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00745-2","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00745-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Rudolf Steiner's Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (Outline of an Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview, 1886) seeks to articulate the epistemological foundations of Goethe's scientific method. Here I reconstruct the book with a particular focus on the cognition of organisms and read it in systematic relation to Kant, whose analysis of teleological judgment provides the clearest foil for Steiner's project. The guiding question is under what epistemic conditions living beings can become objects of genuine knowledge rather than merely regulative judgment. I reconstruct the argument in five steps: (1) pure experience as a structureless manifold; (2) thinking as a self-transparent and law-governed activity within experience; (3) cognition as the reunification of perception and concept under empirical constraint; (4) the contrast between inorganic and organic cognition; and (5) the claim that organisms can be understood through Goethe's concept of Typus, a developing method, and an intuitive power of judgment (anschauende Urteilskraft). Steiner's reconstruction of Goethe thus yields a position that transforms Kant's view of teleological judgment as merely regulative. A concluding section considers the relevance of this argument for current debates on organism-centred theoretical biology and the relation between subject and object in biological cognition. I suggest that Goethe's method as interpreted by Steiner deserves renewed attention as a systematic attempt to articulate the epistemological conditions of a participatory science of the organic.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13534190/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148876475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Hereditarianism: a century of the science of inequality.","authors":"Gökhan Akbay","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00754-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00754-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Hereditarianism, the belief that genetic factors significantly influence differences in behavioral traits and social outcomes, remains relevant in the age of polygenic embryo screening and social science genomics. Although early twentieth-century monogenic versions of hereditarianism-suggesting specific genes for traits like feeble-mindedness, nomadism, and pauperism-may now seem outdated, similar reasoning persisted into the early twenty-first century through candidate gene studies. With the advent of high-resolution genomic association studies, the understanding of complex traits has shifted toward a massively polygenic architecture, moving away from the \"gene for X\" paradigm. Nevertheless, the aspiration to identify purely genetic causes persists, and a more nuanced form of hereditarian theory continues to exist. This paper explores the evolution of hereditarianism in its various forms, examining its connections to racism and anti-egalitarian politics. In a sense, this work is an extension of the twentieth century critique of hereditarianism, in line with key figures like Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould. The paper begins with early twentieth-century eugenics and the hereditarian approach to IQ in the United States, progresses to modern scientific racism, and concludes with an evaluation of causal claims in contemporary social science genomics. A consistent theme across these periods and fields is the belief in the potential for genetic explanations of social inequalities both within and between groups.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148563870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Pragmatist-Artifactualist view of experimental model organisms: the case of epigenetic inheritance.","authors":"Mariano Martín-Villuendas","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00748-z","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00748-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Model organisms have long occupied a central place in the life sciences, driving major discoveries and stabilizing knowledge about biological mechanisms conserved across taxa. However, their dominance has often eclipsed experimental model organisms-specimens chosen for their capacity to illuminate local hypotheses, usually associated with organism-specific features. This paper advances a twofold argument. First, I contend that overreliance on model organisms constrains the generation of novel hypotheses and narrows the conceptual landscape of biological inquiry. Using epigenetic inheritance as a case study, I show how this focus has systematically marginalized forms of inheritance that depart from conventional assumptions (i.e., germline/material overlap and transgenerational stability). Here, I concentrate on external intergenerational epigenetic inheritance. Second, I argue that merely vindicating the use of experimental model organisms is insufficient without examining the philosophical assumptions that structure their epistemic function. Specifically, I demonstrate that the representationalist conception-models as surrogates for target systems-permeates the conceptualization of experimental model organisms through the idea of representational function, thereby reinforcing framed trajectory-dependent inquiry. This representationalist conceptualization undermines the capacity of experimental model organisms to support framing exploratory inquiry oriented to test conceptually disruptive ideas, such as external intergenerational epigenetic inheritance. To overcome this limitation, I develop a Pragmatist-Artifactualist framework that reconceptualizes the epistemic role of experimental model organisms and restores their potential to expand the boundaries of biological understanding.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13391654/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148563881","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Life as we don't know it: plant life in the history and philosophy of science an introduction.","authors":"Fabrizio Baldassarri","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00752-3","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00752-3","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This introduction discusses the challenges plant life has represented in the history and philosophy of science, and outlines the topics dealt with by the contributors. Understanding plant life, behaviour, and nature reveals a crucial feature to deal with several corners of science and society, but also to deal with the environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13364942/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148439111","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charles Lyell's theological preformationism: the role of the \"Author of nature\" in the uniformitarian balance of nature and the evolution of natural species.","authors":"Bogdana Stamenković Jajčević","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00751-4","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00751-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper explores the role of the \"Author of nature\" in Charles Lyell's uniformitarianism. I start with a brief explanation of the term \"uniformitarianism\" and the identification of the fundamental hypotheses of Lyell's theory. Moving forward, I explore his idea of the balance of nature and show that Lyell believes that natural equilibrium represents a state of stability in inorganic and organic nature. As I show, the stability of inorganic nature is achieved through the alternate activity of natural - aqueous and igneous - forces, while the balance of organic nature is established via two processes: migrations of species and struggle for survival. However, the inorganic and organic natures are connected by a unilateral causal relation which enables the first to cause changes within the second. That being the case, the activity of inorganic forces can disturb the balance of organic nature and trigger modifications in the structure of organisms, leading to their evolution. Yet equilibrium can be restored through the interventions of the \"Author of nature\", who, as the instrument of evolution, equips every organism with useful variations necessary for their survival. Since organic nature represents an essential part of the natural system, the \"Author of nature\", through his actions, creates and preserves the balance of the whole nature. Thus, it appears that Lyell opts for a specific version of preformationism and that his uniformitarianistic worldview presupposes a significant regulative role for the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient intelligent being.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148407074","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The sentience of animals in John Dewey's organic naturalism.","authors":"John R Shook","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00750-5","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00750-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>An evolutionary naturalism hospitable for life and its sentience should have been a philosophical priority since Darwin, but dualistic temptations have swayed vitalisms, emergentisms, and panpsychisms. Tracing sentience's evolution from biological beginnings was the modest naturalistic proposal from pragmatist John Dewey. Curiously, his endorsement in his 1925 Experience and Nature of affective sentience across the animal world has gone almost entirely unnoticed by philosophy, psychology, and animal research. However, those disciplines may be converging on minimum expectations for sentient learning and behavior that Dewey had already proposed and defended. For Dewey, identifying and explaining cognitive conduct cannot be about outer behavioral adjustments or inner physiological operations taken separately - their organized coordination within environing conditions is the minimum situation for scientific investigations. An organism is perpetually engaging its environs (what it can sense) through enactions (what it can do) from energizations (what it can power) activated from its sensings-doings, in order to sustain itself as an organized entity. Hard dilemmas about demoting feeling to impotence or banishing experience from nature dissolve when vitality's own qualities are empirically respected. Dewey's organic naturalism endorses zoopsychism, finding that behavioral, life, and physical sciences together discover how the existential and experiential lives of animals are accountable in naturalistic terms.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148406989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The ontological status of behaviour: lessons from experimental neurosis (1900-1950).","authors":"Rodrigo J De Marco","doi":"10.1007/s40656-026-00746-1","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-026-00746-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how early twentieth-century comparative psychology treated behaviour as a primary site for studying regulation, dysfunction, and adaptation, using experimental neurosis as a historical case study. Beginning with Pavlov's observation that dogs exposed to irresolvable conflict developed persistent behavioural and autonomic disturbances, the paradigm expanded through mid-century work by Liddell, Gantt, and Masserman, who introduced new species, longitudinal designs, and ecologically grounded conditions revealing dysregulation as a multilevel, temporally extended phenomenon. In this tradition, behaviour was not construed as mechanistic output but as an autonomous level of organisation whose structured patterns, i.e., variability, context-sensitivity, stability, and breakdown, made internal regulatory dynamics experimentally accessible in ways physiology alone could not. Hybrid methodologies integrating laboratory control with naturalistic observation showed that pathological breakdown provides access to organisational features obscured during normal function. By mid-century, however, this behaviourally rich framework was displaced by reductionist approaches based on standardised assays and physiological endpoints. Recent historiography documents this shift as an epistemological transformation in which behaviour was redefined from interface to index, from organised system to dependent variable. These tensions persist in contemporary neuroscience and translational research, where behaviour is routinely subordinated to mechanism despite gaps between circuit-level manipulation and behavioural explanation. This historical analysis supports the claim that mechanistic approaches which bypass behaviour incur explanatory loss, eliminating the domain in which neurophysiological processes acquire functional meaning. Progress in understanding psychopathology requires restoring behaviour to ontological and epistemological centrality as the irreducible interface through which adaptive and pathological regulation become scientifically accessible.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"48 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2026-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13346283/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148407070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}