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1、PHILOSOPHY SUMMER SCHOOL IN CHINA2011 SESSION: PHILOSOPHY OF BIOLOGYSOUTHWEST UNIVERSITY, CHONGQING25 July-14 August 2011Dr. Brian Garvey (Lancaster University) director:EVOLUTION AND HUMAN NATUREProfessor Paul E. Griffiths (University of Sydney)PHILOSOPHY, GENETICS AND EVOLUTIONProfessor Armand M.

2、Leroi (Imperial College London)ARISTOTLES BIOLOGYDr. Fern Elsdon-Baker (British Council)COMMUNICATING BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES IN GLOBALLY DIVERSE CULTURESCOURSE DESCRIPTIONSEVOLUTION AND HUMAN NATUREDr Brian Garvey (Lancaster University)Lecture 1. Introducing sociobiologyI will start by introducing Edwa

3、rd O. Wilson, explaining what sociobiology in general is (i.e. sociobiology of animals). I will explain kin selection and reciprocal altruism, both of which played significant roles in Wilsons theories. I will discuss Wilsons suggestions on how this might apply to humans, and the attempts of others

4、to put this into practise.Lecture 2. The sociobiology controversyThis lecture will be about early reactions to Wilsons work:(1) Political criticisms: the alleged links to racial science and eugenics; the alleged fatalism about human nature, and consequently about social hierarchies, war, sexist beha

5、viour in men, etc.(2) Scientific criticisms: since this will be a major theme of the whole course, I will here only briefly discuss the early scientific criticisms: the alleged genetic determinism and panglossianism; the highly speculative nature of the project.Lecture 3. Introducing Evolutionary Ps

6、ychologyThis lecture will discuss Evolutionary Psychology as a successor to sociobiology; how (as Evolutionary Psychologists characterise it) their view attempts to shift the focus from patterns of behaviour being products of evolution to cognitive modules being products of evolution. I will explain

7、 the ideas they have taken from earlier cognitive science, in particular the massive modularity thesis, and their evolutionary arguments for it.Lecture 4. Criticisms of the massive modularity thesisHere I will assess the evolutionary, and other, arguments for massive modularity. In particular, I wil

8、l present the arguments of Fodor and others to show that there are severe limitations on what modularity can explain.Lecture 5. Criticisms of Evolutionary Psychologys methodologyHere I will discuss criticisms of Evolutionary Psychologys methodological assumptions, in particular the possible problem

9、of lack of evidence (and Evolutionary Psychologists response to this), and their alleged commitment to a panglossian paradigm. I will offer some case-studies, including Cosmides alleged findings about the Wason card-sorting test.Lecture 6. The issue of genetic determinismHere I will address the ques

10、tions: what is genetic determinism? Is it a straw man? I will explain the differences between genetic determinism and genetic selectionism, and raise the possibility that Evolutionary Psychologists are only committed to the latter. Then I will present Developmental Systems Theory as a challenge to g

11、enetic selectionism, and possible implications of this for Evolutionary PsychologyLecture 7. Nature and NurtureThis lecture will be about attempts that have been made to define innate and acquired, and about how the distinction may have to be abandoned. I will discuss Evolutionary Psychologys positi

12、on on the issue their denial that they are nativists on the ground that they reject the distinction. I will then ask: why do they nonetheless appear to be nativists? Are they sneaking nativism in by the back door? (This lecture will draw on a paper of my own: “Nature, Nurture and Why the Pendulum St

13、ill Swings”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 35 (2), 2005.)Lecture 8. Possible implications of Evolutionary Psychology for human free willHere I will discuss the question of whether evolutionary theories of human nature, if true, imply that we have less free will then we might have thought. I will a

14、gain bring up the issue of genetic determinism, but will also suggest that the massive modularity thesis, independently of genetic determinism, may be the source of the problem. (This lecture will draw on another paper of mine “Free Will, Compatibilism, and the Human Nature Wars”, forthcoming in Tho

15、mas Reydon and Katie Plaisance eds. Philosophy of Behavioural Biology, Boston Studies in Philosophy and Science, Springer.)Lecture 9. New directions in (small-e, small-p) evolutionary psychology I: Evo-devo and the mindHere I will introduce Bullers distinction between Evolutionary Psychology and evo

16、lutionary psychology the former being a research programme with a specific set of commitments (the modularity thesis, genetic selectionism, etc.), the latter being any research programme that uses evolution to understand human nature. I will present evo-devo and show how it challenges both gene-cent

17、red and adaptationist views of evolution, and offers a different way of thinking about modularity. I will make some suggestions on how this might affect the issue of human nature, both in supplying a critical stance towards Evolutionary Psychology, and in suggesting a positive alternative approach.

18、(This lecture will draw to some extent on a paper by Paul Griffiths: “Evo-Devo Meets the Mind: Towards a Developmental Evolutionary Psychology”, in Roger Sanson and Robert Brandon eds. Integrating Evolution and Development, MIT Press, 2007.)Lecture 10. New directions in evolutionary psychology II: E

19、xtende/embedded cognitionI will introduce Clarks concept of Extended/embedded cognition the idea that much cognition goes on outside the head, and that consequently we can explain much of our cognitive capacities without having to presuppose as much internal processing as cognitive science has tradi

20、tionally thought. I will discuss how this provides an alternative to the Evolutionary Psychology view that the mind must contain many information-rich inbuilt modules. Rowlands evolutionary arguments for large-scale embedded cognition will be presented, and Ratcliffes will be discussed as a case-stu

21、dy.COURSE TEXT: Selected readings-PHILOSOPHY, GENETICS AND EVOLUTIONProfessor Paul E. Griffiths (University of Sydney)Lecture 1. IntroductionI will briefly outline how philosophy of biology came to be a recognized sub-discipline in philosophy. I will outline with examples, three sort of work that fa

22、ll under the heading of philosophy of biology:1. Work on general questions in philosophy of science using biology as a test case2. Work on conceptual issues in biological theory3. Work on the implications of biology for traditional philosophical questionsI will briefly indicate the content of the fo

23、llowing lecturesLecture 2. Evolution and PurposeThe focus of this lecture will be on attempts to derive purpose in nature from evolutionary theory. This will require a brief outline of how evolutionary explanations work, and of some of the philosophical issues raised by the adaptationism debate in e

24、volutionary biology. I will outline the three main forms of adaptationism that have been defended by biologists and philosophers: Empirical Adaptationism: Natural selection is a powerful and ubiquitous force, and there are few constraints on the biological variation that fuels it. To a large degree,

25、 it is possible to predict and explain the outcome of evolutionary processes by attending only to the role played by selection Methodological Adaptationism: The best way for scientists to approach biological systems is to look for features of adaptation and good design. Adaptation is a good “organiz

26、ing concept” for evolutionary research. Explanatory Adaptationism: The apparent design of organisms, and the relations of adaptedness between organisms and their environments, are the key questions in biology. Explaining these phenomena is the core intellectual mission of evolutionary theory. The ta

27、ke-home message of this lecture will be that the key conceptual role of the idea of adaptation in modern biology (explanatory adaptationism) is independent of the empirical issues about the relative role of adaptation and other causes in shaping the diversity of life empirical adaptationism).Lecture

28、 3. Evolutionary Biology and the Proximal BiosciencesThe focus of this lecture will be on the relationship between evolutionary biology and the experimental, laboratory-based work that makes up most of the practice of modern biology, particularly genetics and molecular biology.I will outline Ernst M

29、ayrs concepts of ultimate and proximal biology and criticize those concepts in light of Niko Tinbergens four questions model of biological explanation. I will outline some recent attempts by philosophers of biology to argue that the proximal biosciences are epistemically independent of evolutionary

30、biology and criticize their arguments.The take-home message of this lecture will be that evolutionary biology defines what counts as a living system, and which of the activities of such systems constitute being alive, and thus that evolutionary biology frames the questions of the other biosciences.L

31、ecture 4. The GeneThe focus of this lecture will be on classical, transmission genetics, including the application of the principles of classical genetic analysis to hereditary disease, agricultural genetics, and population genetics. The key philosophical question to be explored is the nature of the

32、oretical entities. We will contrast the treatment of the gene as an intervening variable a calculating device - with its treatment as a physical unit. The take-home message of the lecture, following the main thrust of recent scholarship is that Mendelian genetics was primarily an experimental practi

33、ce (genetic analysis) which allowed the exploration of other biological questions. As such, the Mendelian conception of the gene is still alive and well in fields in which similar experimental practices are still used.Lecture 5. Genes as physical objectsThe focus of this lecture will be molecular ge

34、netics. The most important philosophical question to be explored in this lecture is that of whether Mendelian genetics reduces to molecular biology. I will argue that, although molecular biology shows that there is nothing more to genetics than the molecular processes it reveals, the idea of an, Men

35、delian old theory being reduced to a new, molecular theory does not fit the case of genetics. I will argue that the sense on which molecular biological research is an example of successful reductionistic research is best captured by the neo-Mechanist accounts of reduction as the elucidation of under

36、lying mechanisms associated with authors such as William Bechtel.The take-home message of this lecture is that the discoveries of genetics cant be fitted into the simple model of growing knowledge about an object called the gene. Instead, various uses of the term gene relate to different ways of thi

37、nking about what the genetic system does in evolution, heredity and development. Each of these ways of thinking is grounded in real facts about what the underlying molecules are doing, but it is not possible to reduce them all to one, uniform way of chopping DNA sequences up into genes. Lecture 6. G

38、enes and behaviour This lecture will focus on behavioral genetics (including psychiatric genetics). I will explain briefly how quantitative genetics more broadly emerged from the work of Fisher and found applications in agricultural research and evolutionary genetics. The primary philosophical issue

39、 here is the relationship between correlational explanations, based on population-level statistical data, and mechanical explanations, based on causal analysis. We will look at the different concept of gene-environment interaction that these techniques necessitate, and at how scientists frame their

40、research so as to sidestep practical obstacles arising from their techniques.The take-home message of this lecture is that traditional concerns about behavior genetics are being overcome through the adoption of more experimental, as opposed to observational, techniques and through the molecularisati

41、on of nurture, which is allowing gene-environment interaction to become a focus of research rather than a methodological obstacle. Lecture 7. The reactive genomeThis lecture focuses on postgenomics and systems biology. I will outline the task of genome annotation posed by the success of major sequen

42、cing projects, and look at the ENCODE project as an example of postgenomics. The lecture will outline the demise of the idea that coding genes are the main functional elements of the genome, and that they contain a self-executing program, and then explore some potential replacements for that idea: 1

43、. Postgenomic accounts of gene regulation - regulated recruitment and combinatorial specificity of transcription complexes and the postulated role of small RNAs. 2. The idea of systems biology I will look at the various sense in which this phrase is used and their relation or lack thereof to the old

44、 tradition of systems theory.The philosophical topics to be explored in this lecture are twofold. First, I will use the material to develop further the account of reduction and reductionism given in the last lecture. I will argue that postgenomic biology reinforces the idea that the organization of

45、parts, as much as the parts themselves, is the key to explanations of how living systems function and that this supports a weak, Bechtel-style anti reductionism. I will criticize recent defenses of reductionism, such as that of Alexander Rosenberg, from this perspective.Second, I will reflect on the

46、 trend to data-driven, descriptive science in the research described and use this to exemplify some of the themes in the recent neo-Mechanist literature. Contemporary molecular bioscience does not consist of general laws and theories that unify diverse phenomena, but rather a cast of parts and mecha

47、nisms who only overarching pattern is phylogenetic. I will assess the frequently made assertion that systems biology in particular is a descriptive, rather than an explanatory enterprise, using a mechanist account of explanation.The take-home message of this lecture is that the genome is not an inne

48、r controller, but a reactive structure embedded in a wider environment, and that it is this system that biology is now trying to understand. The sciences that are creating this new understanding are molecular in nature, but the leap from this to traditional part-whole reductionism can only be made b

49、y assimilating molecular bioscience to traditional philosophical models of scientific theories which do not fit.Lecture 8. Outside the GeneThis lecture will examine epigenetic inheritance, parental effects, and phenotypic plasticity. It will introduce the idea of ecological developmental biology and

50、 reinterpret that research program via the idea of developmental niche construction. The lecture will suggest that biological advances are subverting the nature/nurture dichotomy by relocating nurture at the molecular-level.A historical section will discuss the ancient distinction between epigenesis

51、t and preformation. Epigenesis was and is the focus on a contingent developmental process rather than a preformed or predetermined product. In the 1940s Conrad Waddington integrated this concept into his view of genetics - epigenetics - to stress the dynamic and interactive nature of development. Th

52、e relatively new, molecular definition of the term - as changes in gene expression that do not involve changes in the genetic material can be interpreted as just a handful of mechanisms within the wide range epigenetic processes that define development. This will be followed by an outline of the ide

53、as of the evolutionary thinkers of the 1940s who thought in terms of phenotypic plasticity and the adaptive norm. The philosophical themes of this lecture will not be from the general philosophy of science, but will relate to specific debates in recent philosophy of biology. In particular, the lectu

54、re will look at current incarnations of the nature/nurture controversy, and show how the kind of scientific material described in the lecture can be used to support several radical theoretical agendas the multiple inheritance systems view, developmental systems theory, and alternative evolutionary p

55、rocesses such as genetic assimilation/accommodation. I will argue that at the very least the material reviewed tells strongly against the idea that the gene is the unit of evolution and in favour of the view that evolution is at bottom a phenotypic-level process. The take-home message of this lectur

56、e is that recent developments lend considerable support to a form of molecular epigenesis.Lecture 9. The gene in evolutionThis lecture focuses on comparative genomics and molecular systematics. I will give a basic sense of the logic behind both parsimony and maximum likelihood methods in phylogeneti

57、c systematics. I will also introduce some of the key ideas in the philosophy of systematics, showing that molecular systematic is conducted on the basis of a taxonomic philosophy that is phylogenetic, rather than phenetic or evolutionary in Mayrs sense. The take home message of this lecture is: Noth

58、ing in the genome makes sense except in the light of evolution.Lecture 10. On the parts of animals.The title of this lecture is the title of one of the works of Aristotle, usually regarded as the first philosopher to think about biology. His question remains a good one today what is the correct way

59、to divide an animal into its proper parts? In molecular biology this question arises for the genome what are the proper parts of a biomolecule?I will outline in more detail the idea of homology, introduced in the previous lecture, and its companion concept of analogy. I will explain the development

60、of these ideas in recent molecular biology and show how they have been modified and supplemented with additional concepts.The main philosophical issue in this lecture will be the relationship between the concept of homology and evolutionary biology. I will outline some opposing views on this issue p

61、ut forward by contemporary biologists and philosophers, and examine their arguments.The take-home message of this lecture is that, while nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, this is an empirical discovery, not an a priori truth. If evolutionary theory turned out to be fal

62、se, much of the detailed theory developed by biologists would remain valid and could be construed in light of some alternative explanatory framework.COURSE TEXT: Kim Sterelny & Paul E. Griffiths, Sex and Death: An Introduction to Philosophy of Biology (University of Chicago Press, 1999).-ARISTOTLES

63、BIOLOGYProfessor Armand M. Leroi (Imperial College London)Title: Aristotle: Dead or Alive? Aristotle was the first biologist. He didnt call himself one but he was the first thinker to consider the entire world of living things as a subject of study. His scope was immense: he wrote 11 books that coll

64、ectively form a “Great Course” in biology but many scholars have argued that biological thinking pervades his entire philosophical system. In this course I will outline what he tried to do, how he did it, and how modern science is still imbued with the consequences of his great project. Lecture 1. Plato v. Aristotle, or, what is science? Pick up any of Aristotles biological works Historia Animalium, say and you find yourself reading a work that is recognisably science.