History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences最新文献

Like most scientific and medical disciplines, forensic medicine employs evidence from experimental studies. Yet, unlike most disciplines, forensic medicine is primarily interested in the post-hoc evaluation of individual causal claims. How does experimental work that is performed under laboratory conditions bear on the assessment of field cases? We argue that experimental studies in forensic medicine help identify or exclude potential causes of death. Potential causes will not explain why an individual died. Yet they can be important to rebut claims to the impossibility of a certain course of events. We support our argument by looking at experimental studies of asphyxiation. These studies have been central to recent academic and public debate of death-in-custody. While some take the studies to show that restraint positions employed by law enforcement can cause death, others dispute this. We analyze the causal claims put forward by experimental asphyxiation studies and show that some attempts to disprove the risks associated with restraint positions involve 'false advertising': a mismatch between the study's methodology and its purported goals.

In marine science, VR technologies are being used to model underwater space and enable virtual geoscience fieldtrips for teaching and research. The vast potential in adapting these technologies alongside their speedy application suggests challenges in relation to the standardization of these technologies and what forms of representation come to matter in these contexts. This raises the question regarding how the use of VR technologies produce and transfer knowledge about marine environments. To address this question, I explore VR technologies as tools for mediating human-ocean relations, analyzing processes and technologies used in marine science to produce VR models and digital environments of oceanic spaces that give meaning to the marine. Doing so, I argue that VR technologies flatten the vast materiality of the oceans to create an illusion of depth that is anchored in the "objectivity" of the visual. Additionally, VR oceans currently represent a shift from other representations of the oceans as global or planetary, as they are being used to assist the production of local, place-based engagements of the seas, specifically through positionality and spatial awareness (aka proprioception), which differs from previous representations of the sea based on sight.

Environmental DNA (eDNA)-genetic material left behind by organisms in their ecosystems-has been increasingly positioned as an important tool for studying biodiversity, especially in marine environments. Advances in genetic methods now allow scientists to filter eDNA from seawater and use molecular tools to sequence it, generating a catalog of organisms likely present in the ecosystem without ever seeing them. Thus, eDNA sampling differs substantially from conventional biodiversity monitoring approaches that rely on visual observation-both opening new realms of monitoring while also coming into conflict with different ways of knowing and sensing marine ecosystems. How do researchers navigate the promises and pitfalls of an emerging technology such as eDNA? In this paper, I conduct a case study of an oceanographic expedition incorporating eDNA sampling for the first time to understand how researchers negotiate the perceived benefits and challenges of adopting this emergent research repertoire. Through semi-structured interviews with 30 participants, I use a valuographic approach to characterize how researchers describe the desirable outcomes they hope to achieve via eDNA monitoring. Overall, I find that researchers articulated several broad outcomes they were hoping to achieve using eDNA approaches: ocean discovery and exploration, organism measurement and identification, comparisons across time and space, and policy and management applications. However, these outcomes and their interconnections were also disputed. Researchers surfaced practical challenges such as methodological constraints and cost, epistemic tensions surrounding the shift away from visual identification, and skepticism about the validity of eDNA-based comparisons. Moreover, researchers rarely discussed broader societal or ethical implications of eDNA approaches, underscoring a gap in consideration of its role beyond scientific inquiry. By characterizing these value-driven dissonances, this study illuminates potential barriers to eDNA's widespread adoption and reveals how methodological and epistemic tensions can shape the proliferation of new scientific approaches more broadly.

The growing interest in astrobiology renewed the enthusiasm of contemporary scholars to explore the Earth Systems Science theories of the twentieth century and scholars who influenced the later development of astrobiology. Vladimir I. Vernadsky seems to be recognized as one such scholar. In this paper, I provide an analysis of one such theory, Vladimir I. Vernadsky's theory of the biosphere, and explore his conception of evolution in nature. I begin my research with the presentation of Vernadsky's conceptual framework by explaining the meaning of the term "biosphere" and identifying the fundamental assumptions of his holistic theory. Next, I turn to the analysis of the concepts of living and inert matter, questioning their distinction and mutual relations. Whilst the differences between living and inert matter should enable us to demarcate these two domains of the biosphere and distinguish them at the ontological and conceptual levels, it seems that such an objective remains unattainable for Vernadsky. I find the reason for this conclusion in Vernadsky's endorsement of a specific relation of reciprocal causality between living and inert matter. As I show, the relation of reciprocal causality emphasises the causal activity of the living matter and unifies it with the inert matter of the biosphere, leading to the unique conception of the common evolution of the living and inert matter, i.e., the evolution of the biosphere. However, Vernadsky's synthesis of living and inert matter causes certain difficulties in the theory, reflected in our inability to clearly differentiate between living and inert matter at the ontological and conceptual levels.

Between 1966 and 1974, the US Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife carried out research on the possibilities of using waste materials for constructing artificial reefs. One of the main outcomes was the recommendation to construct reefs from waste tires. With the encouragement of the findings, more than 700 reefs containing tens of millions of tires were built along the US Atlantic seaboard. This article investigates the artificial reef study at Sandy Hook Marine Laboratory and analyses environmental claims built on its results. The results show that fisheries scientists involved in artificial reef research framed tire artificial reefs as a solution to two problems: recreational fishing enhancement and waste disposal. Their claims about the appropriateness of tire reefs became a driving force of their construction in the US.

In this paper, I critically examine and overturn a narrative from the history of American archaeology wherein historians have classified the overthrowing of the Mound Builders mythology in the late 19th century as a triumph for science. Despite there being ample evidence that Indigenous peoples constructed the mound earthworks of the eastern USA, a mythical "lost race" was invented that embodied the colonial aims of the new America. The triumph for science view relies on a naïve demarcation criterion, wherein science is identifiable by its association with the correct hypothesis. I argue that the triumph narrative obscures the historical development of archaeological practice that progressed in steps, offering a view of science that is continuous and cumulative, making it difficult to draw a fine line between science and mythmaking at any point in the 19th century. I call for the reclassification of this episode as a demonstration of the ways that epistemically rigorous methodologies can still contribute to falsehoods in a science entangled with cultural aims.

Cultural stigma and medical pathologization have long shaped scientific and social perceptions of menstruation, limiting both research and clinical attention. This paper outlines three major sources of negative perceptions and examines their influence on scientific discourse and cultural attitudes. To counter these biases and misconceptions, evolutionary accounts of menstruation are explored, which emphasize its crucial role in human physiology and reproduction. Two evolutionary approaches to adaptation are compared: one adopts a functionalist stance that assigns specific functions to traits. While this perspective offers a naturalized and positive understanding of menstruation, it remains insufficient to capture the phenomenon's full complexity. In response, the paper draws on a second approach, organismal and relational, which emphasizes whole-organism adaptation within developmental and ecological contexts. This contrast is also reflected in evolutionary medicine, where organismal approaches support integrative views of disease patterns. Revisiting late 20th-century debates on whether menstruation is adaptive or a byproduct, the paper presents key elements of the alternative organismal-relational perspective. This framework makes it possible to distinguish three broad categories of menstrual pathologies and supports the claim that organismal evolutionary perspectives offer a richer understanding of menstrual health.

The concept of regulation is used in biology to explain properties such as stability, robustness, and long-term persistence of biological systems. Regulation claims often focus, however, on the capabilities of these systems, rather than the mechanisms underlying them. In an attempt to produce a full-fledged theoretical account of regulation, a stricter concept has been proposed by Bich and colleagues based on the theory of biological autonomy. According to these authors, regulation is exerted by specialized subsystems that can change the constitutive regime of a system (enabling it to deal with a wider range of perturbations) but whose dynamics are not specified by the latter. In this paper, we present a brief survey on how regulation has been treated in biology and, more specifically, in ecology. We show how the ecological literature attributes regulatory powers either to organismic phenomena or to the propagation of perturbations through the network of relations in ecological systems. We were not able to find any study proposing a specialized subsystem dedicated to regulation in an ecological system. This raises doubts about the feasibility of a regulatory subsystem such as conceived by Bich and colleagues. Nonetheless, we argue that ecological systems may encompass more than just dynamic stability and feedback mechanisms, such that it can be worthy applying their concept to investigate regulation in these systems.