The Dialectical Biologist is a 1985 book by the ecologist Richard Levins and the biologist Richard Lewontin, in which the authors sketch a dialectical approach to biology. They see "dialectics" more as a set of questions to ask about biological research, a weapon against dogmatism, than as a set of pre-determined answers.
Lewontin, Dialectical Materialism, Evolutionary Biology • SftP Magazine
Lewontin and Levins's The Dialectical Biologist remains a classic. But what does it mean to be dialectical, and how does it aid our struggle?
Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin's 'The Dialectical Biologist' - Monthly Review
Brett Clark is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Oregon and coauthor of “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” Socialist Register 2004. Richard York teaches sociology at... READ MORE
The Scientist Who Scrambled Darwin’s Tree of Life (Published 2018)
How the microbiologist Carl Woese fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life.
JBS Haldane-A Dialectical Account of Evolution
THIS paper requires a preliminary apology. It is written in Spain, and as the writer is taking a very minor part in the defence of Madrid he is unable to consult many works of reference. Readers to whom practice is as important as theory will excuse any inadequacy in citations.
The biogenic approach to cognition
After half a century of cognitive revolution we remain far from agreement about what cognition is and what cognition does. It was once thought that these questions could wait until the data were in. Today there is a mountain of data, but no way of making sense of it. The time for tackling the fundamental issues has arrived. The biogenic approach to cognition is introduced not as a solution but as a means of approaching the issues. The traditional, and still predominant, methodological stance in cognitive inquiry is what I call the anthropogenic approach: assume human cognition as the paradigm and work ‘down’ to a more general explanatory concept. The biogenic approach, on the other hand, starts with the facts of biology as the basis for theorizing and works ‘up’ to the human case by asking psychological questions as if they were biological questions. Biogenic explanations of cognition are currently clustered around two main frameworks for understanding biology: self-organizing complex systems and autopoiesis. The paper describes the frameworks and infers from them ten empirical principles—the biogenic ‘family traits’—that constitute constraints on biogenic theorizing. Because the anthropogenic approach to cognition is not constrained empirically to the same degree, I argue that the biogenic approach is superior for approaching a general theory of cognition as a natural phenomenon.
Georgie Newson - Thinking Collectives: Biological Naturalism and the Problem of Group Minds
Richard McElreath 🐈⬛ (@rmcelreath.bsky.social)
Anthropologist - Bayesian modeling - science reform - cat and cooking content too - Director @ MPI for evolutionary anthropology https://www.eva.mpg.de/ecology/staff/richard-mcelreath/
Ramin Saadat, Reasoning: From Biological Foundations to the Hidden Thread of Shared Understanding - PhilArchive
This paper investigates the nature and origins of human reasoning by synthesizing insights from classical philosophy, evolutionary biology, and contemporary neuroscience. Moving beyond the Aristotelian definition of zoon logon echon, which ...
How to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas | Aeon Essays
Biology’s next great horizon is to understand cells, tissues and organisms as agents with agendas (even if unthinking ones)
Synthetic philosophy
In this essay, I discuss Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (hereafter From Bacteria) and Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus and The Evolution of Intelligent Life (hereafter Other Minds) from a methodological perspective. I show that these both instantiate what I call ‘synthetic philosophy.’ They are both Darwinian philosophers of science who draw on each other’s work (with considerable mutual admiration). In what follows I first elaborate on synthetic philosophy in light of From Bacteria and Other Minds; I also explain my reasons for introducing the term; and I close by looking at the function of Darwinism in contemporary synthetic philosophy.
jsomers.net | I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
Guest post: If you’re going to critique science, be scientific about it
Loren K. Mell Editor’s note: This post responds to a Feb. 13 article in The Atlantic, “The Scientific Literature Can’t Save Us Now,” written by Retraction Watch cofounders Adam Marcus and Ivan Oran…
Decolonising Science Reading List
In the last couple of weeks, a lot of people have been asking me about what I’ve been reading as reference points for my commentary on the…
