James Griesemer

University of California, Davis | UCD · Department of Philosophy

I characterize a role for “environments” as ecological scaffolding of organism development in the evolution of novelty. I interpret Rainey’s bacterial experimental system for empirically modeling evolutionary transition to multicellularity as an ecological-developmental problem in terms of a formal model of Kauffman’s concept of evolution into the...

Processes of evolutionary transition (ET), becoming part of a new reproducing collective while losing the capacity of independent reproduction, seem difficult to track without circularity, since their features—units of selection, individuality, inheritance at multiple levels (MLS1, MLS2)—are products of one process. We describe ET in a non-circular...

We track and analyze the re-situation of scientific knowledge in the field of human population genomics ancestry studies. We understand re-situation as a process of accommodating the direct or indirect transfer of objects of knowledge from one site/situation to (one or many) other sites/situations. Our take on the concept borrows from Mary S. Morga...

Scientific philosophers examine the nature and significance of levels of organization, a core structural principle in the biological sciences. This volume examines the idea of levels of organization as a distinct object of investigation, considering its merits as a core organizational principle for the scientific image of the natural world. It appr...

I describe a data journey drawn from a case study of research in human population genomics. The case is framed in dialogue with a project on what has been called the “re-situation” of scientific knowledge (Morgan 2014). The kind of journey described elicits a missing concept—“dataset-centric” biology—in the conversation around the emergence of “big...

How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is increasingly coupled with the newer necessity of “impact or perish”—the requirement that a publication have “impact,” as measured by a variety of metrics, in...

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the biologist Joseph Grinnell made a distinction between science and sentiment for producing fact-based generalizations on how to conserve biodiversity. We are inspired by Grinnellian science, which successfully produced a century-long impact on studying and conserving biodiversity that runs orthogonal to...

This book, containing 18 chapters, combines the hierarchy-of-hypotheses (HoH) approach with hypothesis networks for invasion biology. This book aims to further develop the HoH approach by inviting critical comments (Part I), apply it to 12 major invasion hypotheses (Part II) and explore how it can be expanded to a hierarchically structured hypothes...

Susan Leigh Stars (1954-2010) Werk bewegt sich zwischen Infrastrukturforschung, Sozialtheorie, Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Ökologie und Feminismus. Die wegweisenden historischen und ethnografischen Texte der US-amerikanischen Technik- und Wissenschaftssoziologin liegen mit diesem Band erstmals gesammelt auf Deutsch vor. Ihre Arbeiten zu Grenzobjekten,...

Biological reproduction is a material process of intertwined, recursive propagule generation and development, assuming that development produces simple life cycles. Most organisms, however, have more or less complex life cycles. Here, I attempt to reconcile recent articulations of a reproducer account with traditional approaches to complex life cyc...

Biological reproduction is a material process of intertwined, recursive propagule generation and development, assuming that development produces simple life cycles. Most organisms, however, have more or less complex life cycles. Here, I attempt to reconcile recent articulations of a reproducer account with traditional approaches to complex life cyc...

The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions ab...

The multifaceted work of the late Susan Leigh Star is explored through a selection of her writings and essays by friends and colleagues. Susan Leigh Star (1954–2010) was one of the most influential science studies scholars of the last several decades. In her work, Star highlighted the messy practices of discovering science, asking hard questions ab...

Gánti's chemoton model of the minimal chemical organization of living systems and life criteria for the living state and a living world are characterized. It is argued that these are better interpreted as part of a heuristic pursuit of an exact theoretical biology than as a "definition of life." Several problems with efforts to define life are disc...

This chapter argues that historical and philosophical studies of David Wake’s 50-year investigation of the salamanders (Order Caudata) reveal a sustained effort to demonstrate the continuing value of taxon-centered research as opposed to or distinct from model organism research. Wake is an evolutionary morphologist involved in the emergence of Evo-...

The chapter offers an account of “reproducers” in counterpoint to replicator concepts, treating development as entwined with heredity, to make conceptual room for the ongoing empirical revolutions in recent mechanistic studies of inheritance systems beyond the gene. The essay examines the character and status of “hybrids” as a means of exploring th...

What gets integrated in integrative scientific practices has been a topic of much discussion. Traditional views focus on theories and explanations, with ideas of reduction and unification dominating the conversation. More recent ideas focus on disciplines, fields, or specialties; models, mechanisms, or methods; phenomena, problems. How integration...

Exact sciences are described as sciences whose theories are formalized. These are contrasted to inexact sciences, whose theories are not formalized. Formalization is described as a broader category than mathematization, involving any form/content distinction allowing forms, e.g., as represented in theoretical models, to be studied independently of...

New research technologies can create gaps between old and new practices that need to be integrated if historically significant, continuous research programs are to be sustained. In our study of biodiversity survey work spanning a century, we track consequences of a series of seemingly “trivial” and “technical” decisions on how to represent a specie...

A reappraisal of Lamarckism—its historical impact and contemporary significance. In 1809—the year of Charles Darwin's birth—Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published Philosophie zoologique, the first comprehensive and systematic theory of biological evolution. The Lamarckian approach emphasizes the generation of developmental variations; Darwinism stresses s...

A reappraisal of Lamarckism—its historical impact and contemporary significance. In 1809—the year of Charles Darwin's birth—Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published Philosophie zoologique, the first comprehensive and systematic theory of biological evolution. The Lamarckian approach emphasizes the generation of developmental variations; Darwinism stresses s...

I characterize Wimsatt’s approach to philosophy of science as philosophy for science and then briefly consider a theme emerging from his work that informs just one of the many current developments in philosophy of biology that he inspired: scaffolding as a problem of mechanistic explanation for functionalists. KeywordsWimsatt–Reductionism–Mechanis...

What Are "Niche Construction" and "Ecological Inheritance"? An eco-evo process of niche construction has been convincingly argued to be an important theoretical possibility that is typically ignored (Odling-Smee, Laland, and Feldman 2003; Laland and Sterelny 2006). We argue here that models of niche construction are ignored, in part, because their...

We argue that 'locality', perhaps the most mundane term in ecology, holds a basic ambiguity: two concepts of space-nomothetic and idiographic-which are both necessary for a rigorous resurvey to "the same" locality in the field, are committed to different practices with no common measurement. A case study unfolds the failure of the standard assumpti...

“Making Visible Embryos” is an admirable 15,000-word/120-image Web exhibition exploring the history of visible iconographies of embryos. The exhibit spans 250 years of European and American technical innovations. The pictures and models reveal and represent iconic images from a diversity of sources: manuals, handbooks, textbooks, scientific and med...

This article provides insights on emerging discipline of origins of life studies. It answers various questions such as the logics behind scientific concepts and the scope and limit of biological science. It is now generally accepted that life existed around 3.5 billion years ago on earth. If life began elsewhere, then the time window for life's ori...

The first comprehensive general resource on state-of-the-art protocell research, describing current approaches to making new forms of life from scratch in the laboratory. Protocells offers a comprehensive resource on current attempts to create simple forms of life from scratch in the laboratory. These minimal versions of cells, known as protocells,...

Historians, philosophers, sociologists, and biologists explore the history of the idea that embryological development and evolution are linked. Although we now know that ontogeny (individual development) does not actually recapitulate phylogeny (evolutionary transformation), contrary to Ernst Haeckel's famous dictum, the relationship between embryo...

What counts as epigenetic depends on what counts as genetic. It is argued that Weismannism, the doctrine of genetic continuity and somatic discontinuity, is the basis for an overly inclusive concept of epigenetics as every inherited resource < beyond the genes >. An alternative theoretical perspective, the < reproducer > concept, facilitates analys...

The themes, problems and challenges of developmental systems theory as described in Cycles of Contingency are discussed. We argue in favor of a robust approach to philosophical and scientific problems of extended heredity and the integration of behavior, development, inheritance, and evolution. Problems with Sterelny's proposal to evaluate inherita...

The problem of evolutionary transitionPerspectives on biological organizationWhat is development?Questions of development at multiple levels of evolutionary transitionA process perspective on reproductionHeuristic reductionismAn odd consequence of the analysis of reproductionThe gene is a developmental invariantReferencesQuestions and discussion

: What counts as epigenetic depends on what counts as genetic. It is argued that Weismannism, the doctrine of genetic continuity and somatic discontinuity, is the basis for an overly inclusive concept of epigenetics as every inherited resource “beyond the genes.” An alternative theoretical perspective, the “reproducer” concept, is introduced to fac...

Keywords:Epigenetic inheritance;theoretical significance;true causes

Maynard Smithis analysis of units of evolution is compared to traditional approaches generalizing Darwinis principles. Maynard Smithis key principle of multiplication is elaborated into a general account of the process of reproduction that integrates concepts of heredity and development and is applicable to all levels of the biological hierarchy. T...

Developmental systems theory (DST) expands the unit of replication from genes to whole systems of developmental resources, which DST interprets in terms of cycling developmental processes. Expansion seems required by DST's argument against priv- ileging genes in evolutionary and developmental explanations of organic traits. DST and the expanded rep...

In a previous study, using experimental metapopulations of the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we investigated phase III of Wright's shifting balance process (Wade and Griesemer 1998). We experimentally modeled migration of varying amounts from demes of high mean fitness into demes of lower mean fitness (as in Wright's characterization of phase...

Using demes from experimental metapopulations of the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we investigated phase 3 of Wright's shifting balance process. Using parent demes of high, intermediate, and low mean fitness, we experimentally modeled migration of varying amounts from demes of high mean fitness into demes of lower mean fitness (like phase 3) a...

Using demes from experimental metapopulations of the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum, we investigated phase 3 of Wright's shifting balance process. Using parent demes of high, intermediate, and low mean fitness, we experimentally modeled migration of varying amounts from demes of high mean fitness into demes of lower mean fitness (like phase 3) a...

Reconstructing the Past seeks to clarify and help resolve the vexing methodological issues that arise when biologists try to answer such questions as whether human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas. It explores the case for considering the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony as a useful principle for evaluat...

Scientists use a variety of modes of representation in their work, but philosophers have studied mainly sentences expressing propositions. I ask whether diagrams are mere conveniences in expressing propositions or whether they are a distinct, ineliminable mode of representation in scientific texts. The case of path analysis, a statistical method fo...

Accounts of the relation between theories and models in biology concentrate on mathematical models. In this paper I consider the dual role of models as representations of natural systems and as a material basis for theorizing. In order to explicate the dual role, I develop the concept of a remnant model, a material entity made from parts of the nat...

Propositions are no more constitutive of science than they are of any activity: a body of knowledge is not all there is to the life of science. Thus I take the premise underlying the topic of this symposium to be uncontroversial, there is a “non-propositional” side of science and of biology in particular. From time to time, however, philosophers as...

Scientific work is heterogeneous, requiring many different actors and viewpoints. It also requires cooperation. The two create tension between divergent viewpoints and the need for generalizable findings. We present a model of how one group of actors managed this tension. It draws on the work of amateurs, professionals, administrators and others co...

Objets fronti_re = s'adaptent pour prendre en compte plusieurs points de vue et maintenir une identité entre eux Cet espace de travail se construit grâce à des objets-frontières tels que des systèmes de classification, qui relient entre eux les concepts communs et les rôles sociaux divergents de chaque groupe professionnel. Les objet-frontière cont...

We develop an account of laboratory models, which have been central to the group selection controversy. We compare arguments for group selection in nature with Darwin's arguments for natural selection to argue that laboratory models provide important grounds for causal claims about selection. Biologists get information about causes and cause-effect...

In this paper I contrast two causal explanations of the outcome of a set of laboratory experiments in population ecology conducted by Thomas Park in the 1940s and 1950s. These experiments shed light on the problem of adducing evidence for the operation of competition (see Lloyd 1987 for a recent philosophical discussion) and are central to the grou...

The speculations at the end of the last section suggest that there is a way of unifying the goals of philosophy of science. The price is not negligible, however. The deductive standard is given up in favor of a new analytical tool with largely unknown properties. Moreover, the historical study of science can no longer be done independently of philo...

Accounts of the structure of scientific theories in twentieth century philosophy of science have tended to focus on epistemological questions to the near exclusion of the metaphysical consequences of their solutions. This emphasis can be understood as resulting from the interest and concerns of the logical positivist movement and continued by propo...

The theoretical problem of integrating evolution, heredity, de-velopment, and cognition has a long pedigree with a compli-cated history. Many of these fields were considered the subjects of one science in the 19 th century (Maienschein 1987). Leading theoretical biologists of the age wrote large, expansive treatises that biologists now can read onl...