The Multi-Causal Basis of Developmental Potential Construction.

In this article we analyse the issue of what accounts for developmental potential, i.e., the possible phenotypes a developing organism can manifest during ontogeny.

Herd Immunity: History, Concepts, and Ethical Rationale.

Public health emergencies are fraught by epistemic uncertainty, which raises policy issues of how to handle that uncertainty and devise sustainable public health responses. Among such responses, a herd immunity policy might be an option. Particularly before the development of vaccines, the current COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the polarized nature of the political debate concerning the ethical feasibility of herd immunity strategies.

The road from evidence to policies and the erosion of the standards of democratic scrutiny in the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses extraordinary public health challenges. In order to respond to such challenges, most democracies have relied on so-called 'evidence-based' policies, which supposedly devolve to science the burden of their justification. However, the biomedical sciences can only provide a theory-laden evidential basis, while reliable statistical data for policy support is often scarce.

DNA is not an ontologically distinctive developmental cause.

In this article I critically evaluate the thesis that DNA is an ontologically distinctive developmental cause. I shall critically analyse different versions of the latter thesis by taking into consideration concrete developmental cases. I shall argue that DNA is neither a developmental determinant nor an ontologically distinctive developmental cause.

The Interactive Construction of Biological Individuality Through Biotic Entrenchment.

In this article, we propose to critically evaluate whether a closure of constraints interpretation can make sense of biotic entrenchment, the process of assimilation and functional integration of environmental elements of biotic origin in development and, eventually, evolution. In order to achieve the aims of our analysis, we shall focus on multi-species partnerships, biological systems characterised by ontogenetic dependencies of various strengths between the partners. Our main research question is to tackle the foundational problem posed by the dynamics of biotic entrenchment characterising multi-species partnerships for the closure of constraints interpretation, namely, to understand for which biological system (i.

From Biological Determination to Entangled Causation.

Biologists and philosophers often use the language of determination in order to describe the nature of developmental phenomena. Accounts in terms of determination have often been reductionist. One common idea is that DNA is supposed to play a special explanatory role in developmental explanations, namely, that DNA is a developmental determinant.

Beyond blindness: On the role of organism and environment in trial generation.

In this paper we aim to amend the traditional analogy at the heart of evolutionary epistemologies. We shall first argue, contrary to what has been frequently done, that both hypothesis generation and the processes of generation of genetic and phenotypic change are often directed as well as environmentally conditioned. Secondly, we shall argue that environmental influence does not affect trial generation directly but that environmental information is processed by the epistemic agent and by the biological organism respectively.

Mutational randomness as conditional independence and the experimental vindication of mutational Lamarckism.

The Modern Synthesis enshrined natural selection as the driver of adaptive evolution mainly by eliminating competing explanations. One of the eliminated competitors was Lamarckism, particularly 'mutational Lamarckism', a hypothesis according to which mutations may be directed towards producing phenotypes that improve the performance of the organism in a particular environment. Contrary to this hypothesis, the Modern Synthesis' view claims that mutations are 'random', even though the precise meaning of the term was never formally explicated.

A soul of truth in things erroneous: Popper's "amateurish" evolutionary philosophy in light of contemporary biology.

This paper will critically assess Popper's evolutionary philosophy. There exists a rich literature on the topic with which we have many reservations. We believe that Popper's evolutionary philosophy should be assessed in light of the intriguing theoretical insights offered, during the last 10 years or so, by the philosophy of biology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology.