Eric Desjardins

Eric Desjardins
Western University | UWO · Department of Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy

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21
Publications
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278
Citations

Publications

Publications (21)
Preprint
Full-text available
Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do-i.e. their functional traits-within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, com...
Article
Functional diversity holds the promise of understanding ecosystems in ways unattainable by taxonomic diversity studies. Underlying this promise is the intuition that investigating the diversity of what organisms actually do—i.e. their functional traits—within ecosystems will generate more reliable insights into the ways these ecosystems behave, com...
Article
Full-text available
The human immune system is critical for maintaining health and providing protection from infectious diseases and cancer. Major advances in our understanding of the immune system have largely emerged from studies using animal models such as mice. However, this mouse-centric research has also limited our ability to comprehend the human immune system...
Article
While many recognise that rigid historical and compositional goals are inadequate in a world where climate and other global systems are undergoing unprecedented changes, others contend that promoting ecosystem services and functions encourages practices that can ultimately lower the bar of ecological management. These worries are foregrounded in di...
Article
This paper brings a philosophical perspective on computer simulations in the field of geomorphology. The first part of our analysis presents a general framework within which to interpret and evaluate the adequacy of simulations models pursuing three broad epistemic goals (modes): prediction, explanation, and exploration. It also explains the divers...
Article
Full-text available
While many recognize that rigid historical and compositional goals are inadequate in a world where climate and other global systems are undergoing unprecedented changes, others contend that promoting ecosystem services and functions encourages practices that can ultimately lower the bar of ecological management. These worries are foregrounded in di...
Article
Full-text available
Broadening contingents of ecologists and environmental scientists have recently begun to promote ecological resilience both as a conceptual framework and as a practical goal. As some critics have noted, this growing interest has brought with it a multiplication of notions of ecological resilience. This paper reviews how and why the notion of ecolog...
Chapter
Several review articles in immunology indicate that while we have an increasing body of knowledge about the immunology of the mouse, this is translating very poorly into clinical outcomes for humans. This raises several issues for the scientific community, including some related to the apparent inadequacy of the mouse as a model for understanding a...
Chapter
Despite burgeoning interest in new and more complex accounts of the organism-environment dyad, biologists and philosophers of biology have paid little attention to the history of these ideas and to their broader deployment in the social sciences and in other disciplines outside biology. Even in biology and philosophy of biology, detailed conceptual...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Computer simulations have become an increasingly important part of geomorphological investigation in the last decades. Simulations can be used not only to make specific predictions of the evolution of a geomorphic system (predictive modelling), but also to test theories and learn about geomorphic form and process in a timely and non destructive way...
Book
This volume explores the interactions between organisms and their environments and how this “entanglement” is a fundamental aspect of all life. It brings together the work and ideas of historians, philosophers, biologists, and social scientists, uniting a range of new perspectives, methods, and frameworks for examining and understanding the ways th...
Presentation
Like many other scientific disciplines, geomorphology has over the last two decades witnessed a phenomenal rise in the use of computational modelling as a tool for predicting changes, testing hypotheses and generating new knowledge. This turn marks an especially important shift for geomorphology, which has traditionally employed empirical and obser...
Article
This essay examines the claim “path dependence entails irreversibility” from the point of view of evolutionary biology. I argue that evolutionary irreversibility possesses many faces, sometimes conflicting with path dependence. I propose an account of path dependence that does not rely on irreversibility and explain why it more naturally coexists w...
Article
Biologists in the last 50years have increasingly emphasized the role of historical contingency in explaining the distribution and dynamics of biological systems. However, recent work in philosophy of biology has shown that historical contingency carries various interpretations and that we are still lacking a general understanding of “historicity,”...
Article
Full-text available
This paper analyzes the relevance and interconnection of two forms of historicity in ecological restoration, namely historical fidelity and path dependence. Historical fidelity is the practice of attempting to restore an ecological system to some sort of idealized past condition. Path dependence occurs when a system can evolve in alternative local...
Article
In “Spandrels,” Gould and Lewontin criticized what they took to be an all-too-common conviction, namely, that adaptation to current environments determines organic form. They stressed instead the importance of history. In this paper, we elaborate upon their concerns by appealing to other writings in which those issues are treated in greater detail....

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