ABSTRACTS
Jan Baedke, Ruhr University Bochum
German Holism and the Organism: Adolf Meyer-Abich's work on symbiosis and teleology
TBA
Daniel S. Brooks, Ruhr University Bochum
The Organism as Metaphor: Negotiations of Standards and Adequacy in Conceptualizing Scientific Phenomena
Generating criteria for scientific significance often requires relying on flexible conceptual apparatuses that capture, or at least suggest, what is at stake in conceptualizing an object of study. These apparatuses, such as doctrines, metaphors, or theoretical frameworks, in turn codify standards against which scientific contributions are interpreted as conducive (or not) to making progress on community-spanning scientific problems. In this talk, I will investigate competing roles of the organism as one such conceptual apparatus as it bears on conceptualizing life and society, respectively. In particular, I will analyze the inferential components involved in contrasting the organism-as-machine analogy in biology to the organism-as-embedded-historical- process metaphor in sociology. Crucially, reliance on these ideas in their respective domains of application serve in both cases to simplify the object of study at stake: Machines are simpler than organisms and organisms are simpler than societies. However, a key shift occurs when the organism transitions from target of analysis to source of insight. Namely, whereas machine analogies tend to portray the organism as a simple system when seen as a target of analysis, sociological metaphors deploy the organism as an exemplar of a complex system from which to draw insight for conceptualizing social systems. Implicit in this shift, I will argue, is an acknowledgement of the need for ‘conceptual negotiations’ between different scientific communities that vie for authority in setting research agendas attached to investigating open- ended scientific phenomena. I motivate this by first reviewing Herbert Spencer’s idea of the “social organism” and Émile Durkheim’s contrast between “mechanical” and “organic” solidarity, before then, secondly, scrutinizing the uptake of these ideas by organicist biologists Joseph Needham and Ralph Gerard. I conclude with parting thoughts on the continued potential, and limitations, of relying on the organism metaphor while the nature of the organism is still itself under negotiation.
Tatjana Buklijas, University of Auckland
Body-environment relationship, collective and intergenerational trauma and epigenetics in Aotearoa, New Zealand
In my talk I start from a personal experience of participation in a 2019 event that explored the legacy of, and healing from, collective and intergenerational trauma caused by the colonization of New Zealand Māori. I then discuss how the indigenous understandings of the relationship between the body and its environment came together with the concepts of the collective and intergenerational trauma developed in scientific disciplines from psychiatry to the new molecular discipline of epigenetics, between ca. 1970s and early 2000s. I place these developments in the political context of a “globalized” world where, from the 1990s, the until-then separate groups gained new political power as they united under of the new concept of indigeneity. Similarities in the conceptualization of body-environment relationship played an important role in creating a common understanding of the impacts of colonization, but here I want to look at differences, and the ways in which historical events specific to Aotearoa New Zealand influenced how the New Zealand Māori understood the profound and heritable impact of the changed natural, political and social environment upon their bodies.
Alejandro Fábregas-Tejeda, Ruhr University Bochum
Symmetries and Asymmetries of the Organism-Environment Relationship
‘Organism’ and ‘environment’ are arguably two central biological concepts which are often juxtaposed with each other. Out of this juxtaposition, biologists construe a relationship that is of paramount importance in manifold fields and explanations, in addition to granting intelligibility to the segregation of variables in experimental settings. However, despite its prominence in the theories and practices of biology, the organism-environment relationship in itself has not received sufficient attention in the history and philosophy of science beyond some of its well-explored facets (e.g., adaptation). It remains unclear what kind of relationship is instantiated when ‘organism’ and ‘environment’ are considered relata.
Here, I argue that, for gaining a better understanding of the organism-environment relationship, one first needs to (i) spell out what kind of relatum the environment is, and unravel (ii) the symmetries and (iii) the asymmetries subtending this pairing. Regarding (i), I maintain that if we grasp the multiplicity of ontologically very heterogeneous factors that are included as components of a purportedly singular entity, i.e., the environment of an organism, we face the realization that we are dealing with an abstraction, a higher-order composite entity formed through a process of aggregation. For axis (ii), I develop a taxonomy of different construals of organism-environment reciprocity (i.e., ontological co-constitution, mutual structural fitting, concomitant reaction, and reciprocal causation). I maintain that a view of ‘reciprocal causation’ is apt for contemporary debates, especially for highlighting how environmental factors alter developmental trajectories, and how, in turn, organisms shape their surroundings with protracted ecological and evolutionary consequences. With reference to axis (iii), I substantiate how different construals of reciprocity impact how organism-environment separation (or the lack thereof) is theorized. Moreover, I argue that there are good reasons for retaining a separation between organism and surroundings, their complex interwovenness notwithstanding. An organism is a self-individuating relatum which enacts multiple boundaries that experience shifts throughout its life cycle; in contrast, the environment is an indexical: its reference does not have proximal limits and it is context-dependent. Furthermore, I contend that the notion of ‘organismal agency’ is crucial for spelling out the foundational asymmetries of this pairing. In the organism-environment relationship, only the former relatum is a bounded locus of causation (i.e., an agent) which performs goal-directed actions and exhibits intrinsic normativity.
Yael Friedmann, University of Oslo
Who Is the Patient? The Mixture Between Individualistic and Anti-Individualistic Understandings in Recent Medical Trends
Recent developments in biological research divide medical attention between different understandings of the patient. Genetic research, on the one hand, and ecological research, on the other, constitute tension between the medical focus on individuals and collectives, creating unsettled boundaries between the patient and its environment. Initiatives such as personalized medicine and one health medicine aim to categorize diseases based on different understandings of the patient. However, the tension between individualistic and anti-individualistic trends is also evident in the initiatives themselves. In this talk, I will show how individualistic and anti-individualistic understandings play a mixed role on both ends of the conceptual debate.
Giuseppe Fusco, University of Padova
Being an individual: A biologist’s view
What is an individual in biology? Possibly, the most sensible answer to this question is that there is no unambiguous answer. We tend to figure out an individual as ourselves, i.e. as a well-integrated entity, reasonably well defined in space and time, characterized by genetic homogeneity (all cells in our body have the same genome) and genetic uniqueness (no one else has our genome, if we do not have a twin), as well as by physiological unity and autonomy. However, that is simply not the case for many living beings. The living units that we call ‘an individual’ across the whole tree of life do not show the same set of alleged attributes of individuality. With other words, there are different kinds of individual out there. This has an impact on our description and understanding of biological phenomena, since the individual is an entity at the core of a number of biological processes, from reproduction to development and evolution. As for evolution, the individual is at the same time a fundamental unit of natural selection and other evolutionary mechanisms, and a product of the evolutionary history, since new kinds of individuals have evolved through cooperation and integration of pre-existing ones. With other words, individuality evolves.
Saana Jukola, Ruhr University Bochum
Individualized approaches to nutrition and public health: from population-level guidelines to p-nutrition
Diet-related morbidities are a major disease burden. It has been estimated that better dietary habits could prevent as much as 20% of deaths globally (Afshin et al. 2019). Given how dietary choices influence health, the need for health-promoting nutrition advice is clear. However, nutrition science and advice are facing a ‘credibility crisis’ (Penders at al. 2017) in which the effectiveness of traditional public health interventions is called into question. Education campaigns, taxation and other interventions directed at populations are claimed to have only limited impact in changing individuals’ eating behaviour and thus in improving health outcomes. Relatedly, critics have questioned the reliability and relevance of population-based evidence, in particular observational studies. Consequently, proposals for individualizing nutritional evidence and advice have become increasingly popular. In particular, approaches that make use of technologies and methods that have arisen in the postgenomic era aim to challenge the traditional approach to nutrition by generating evidence on the individual variation in response to food. The replacement of the traditional dietary guidelines based on population evidence and aimed at populations by personalized recommendations based on this individualized evidence is hoped to lead to better public health outcomes.
In this talk, I examine the ethical and sociopolitical implications of what I call p-nutrition (cf. Lemoine 2017), i.e., approaches that promise to provide more effective dietary interventions by utilizing genetic, microbial etc. information about individuals and interindividual variation. By drawing on the philosophy of public health and public health ethics, I argue that the trend towards p-nutrition can have problematic consequences. This is because dominant modes of conceptualizing p-nutrition focus on biological variation as a cause of differences between health outcomes, while overlooking the effects of social and environmental factors. This may lead to responsibilizing at-risk individuals for their own health instead of motivating interventions targeting social determinants of health.
Christian Köchy, University of Kassel
Task-free Situations: Investigating Organisms in their Contexts
The assertion of organismic quality is not a conviction that concerns only the special structure of living beings as wholes consisting of parts. It is also always a statement that researchers make in certain situations of investigation and on the basis of certain theoretical presuppositions as well as using certain methodological means.
This article uses the case study of so called “task-free” laboratory experiments conducted on rats in the 1920s by Tamara Dembo (1902-1993), an assistant of psychological-field theorist Kurt Lewin, under the guidance of Dutch ethologist and phenomenologist Frederik J. J. Buytendijk. Dembo's experiments are not only an ideal example of the context of theoretical assumptions and methodological implementations that accompany organismic convictions. They also demonstrate the constellation of interactions between biological, psychological and philosophical issues that characterizes German “Tierpsychologie” (comparative psychology) in the early 20th century. Moreover, they form the intersection of social figurations, with which various contextual models also meet: Köhler's Gestalt approach, Lewin's field approach, Uexküll's environmental approach, and Buytendijk's (and Plessner's) situational approach. Furthermore, with these attempts Gestalt psychology (Lewin, Köhler) and phenomenology (Buytendijk, Plessner) also come into fruitful contact. Last but not least, conceived in opposition to behavioural analyses (maze trial) ,“task-free situations” form a paradigmatic experimental framework in which the reduced control of investigators allow animals to be understood as freely acting agents whose “Umweltintentionalität” (environmental intentionality) show that purposeful relationships do not end at the organismic level, but always concern the “organism-in-environment” level.
Simon Lohse, Radboud University
Exploring the Uncertainty Paradox in Precision Medicine
Precision medicine (PM) promises a more fine-grained understanding of diseases and innovative therapies that are precisely tailored to individual patient groups. To achieve this goal, it relies on the analysis of complex evidence, using omics as well as e-health technologies, aiming for a reconstruction of the patient organism in its environment. However, there are deep epistemic concerns about PM’s ability to deliver on its promises. In particular, there seems to be a high degree of uncertainty in PM in practice, with systematic links to other much-noticed aspects of this field – such as its complexity, its reliance on big data tools, and its aim to reorganise disease taxonomies – that are in need of further exploration. This talk will take first steps in this direction and provide a critical overview of sources and aspects of uncertainty in PM on an ontological, epistemological/methodological and practical level. This will generate a high-resolution picture of what has been called the “uncertainty paradox” and also shine a new light on the place of the organism in PM. In a final step, I will discuss implications of my analysis for the theoretical and practical assessment of translational research and therapy in the context of PM.
Daniel W. McShea, Duke University
Agency in Teleological Systems
Here I argue that agency in an entity arises from its capacity to depart from the external forces directing it. And the entities we think of as having strong agency are those in which such capacities arise mainly from with internal sources of direction. Unsurprisingly, most of these are organisms, but certain artifacts also show significant agency, and perhaps other entities as well. In this view, agency is a matter of degree. The greater the degree of control that internal sources of direction have over the trajectory of an entity, the greater the agency. Agency in this view is closely tied to teleology, in particular to a theory of goal directedness called field theory. Under field theory, teleological entities are directed by fields. A homing torpedo is directed by the sound field coming off the target ship. A sunflower's movement over the course of a day is directed by the light field emanating from the sun. Agency in turn is revealed by disobedience, by the failure of a teleological entity to obey the directives of the external fields that drive it, a failure that arises from the internal properties of the entity. And extreme agency occurs in entities whose properties include internal fields – fields that direct them toward the entity's own ends. In other words, entities with agency have their own agenda.
Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon
Re-Evaluating the Extended Health Hypothesis
The extended health hypothesis suggests that certain features of our biological and social environment can be so intimately connected and tightly integrated so that the unit of care and of medical intervention extends beyond the intuitive boundaries of skin and skull. Morar and Skorburg (2018) have argued that claims of health and disease cannot be predicated anymore on a narrow conception of an individual organism. Nor could they, for practical reasons, fall into excess and, while affirming the interconnectedness of biological and social systems, extend human health to the health of other non-human animals or to the health of the environment writ large (Atlas & al. 2010). In support of this hypothesis, we have marshalled evidence from microbial biology in order to show that a host’s physiological capacities are constituted by both the host’s genetics and by its microbiome. In light of new evidence, we re-evaluate in this presentation the strength of this hypothesis and re-assess its potential medical benefits.
Matteo Mossio, University of Paris
Organisms as autonomous systems
In this talk I will discuss what does it mean to understand biological organisms as autonomous systems, i.e. as self-determining, intrinsically purposive adaptive natural agents. I will make explicit the meaning of each of these key-features, as it is being elaborated by the contemporary theory of biological (and cognitive) autonomy. I will notably focus on the twofold role played by development in characterizing organisms: on the one hand, the ontogenetic unfolding of autonomous systems’ distinctive complexity requires developmental processes while, on the other hand, these processes are themselves regulated by the autonomous systems being formed. With this picture in hand, I will discuss in particular how the theory of autonomy allows identifying multicellular organisms in nature, and discriminating them from other biological associations as symbioses, colonies or ecosystems.
Daniel Nicholson, George Mason University
Teleonomy and the Distinction between Intrinsic and Extrinsic Purposiveness
Perhaps no problem has been more hotly and extensively debated in the history of biological thought than the teleological dimension of life. Biologists find it difficult to resist the temptation of describing what organisms do in terms purposes and goals, yet they often feel embarrassed about such teleological appeals because they are often perceived to be incompatible with modern science. This predicament is illustrated by Haldane’s oft-quoted remark that “teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public”. One of the most influential attempts to legitimize teleological language in biology is the concept of ‘teleonomy’, a term proposed by Pittendrigh in 1958 that has become increasingly prevalent in biology. What are we to make of this terminological shift? Hull has remarked—referring back to Haldane’s quip—that “today the mistress has become a lawfully-wedded wife. Biologists no longer feel obligated to apologize for their use of teleological language; they flaunt it. The only concession which they make to its disreputable past is to rename it ‘teleonomy’”. In this talk I aim to bring some clarity to the longstanding debate about teleology in biology by rescuing the ancient distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic forms of purposiveness. As I will show, this distinction allows us to make sense of the historical development of this debate and to map out the various proposals that have been offered to account for organismic purposiveness. It also enables us to helpfully demarcate the aspects of the problem that have already been adequately dealt with from the aspects that still require further investigation. Teleonomy, as it turns out, has not solved the problem of organismic purposiveness. I will conclude by outlining what a more promising approach to the problem might look like.
Guido I. Prieto, Ruhr University Bochum
Organisms vs. biological individuals: The missing demarcation
Organism-centered philosophical stances in the biosciences have always been jeopardized not only by reductionist gene- and population-centered competing perspectives but also by their intrinsic lack of a substantial understanding of what the organism is. If the organism concept is to be defended as the central conceptual and explanatory unit in the life sciences, it needs to be spelled out in the first place and this usually involves demarcating work. Minimally, organisms are living beings and, as such, they bear certain properties, participate in specific causal dynamics, and show special persistence conditions that starkly contrast with those of non-living matter. The demarcation of organisms (qua living systems) from non-living matter was central to the organicist tradition in the early 20th century and remains the focus in the contemporary organizational camp. But organisms are also embedded in their environments, usually so inextricably that demarcating organism from environment is tricky. The organism-environment distinction has received special attention in the debates on reciprocal causation and niche construction theory and features prominently in the debates on agency and teleonomy. What these debates have in common is their strong emphasis on the active role of the organism in modifying its environment and thus participating in the creation of the conditions for its persistence and the modulation of its evolutionary trajectories. However, both the organism-qua-living-system and the organism-environment demarcating projects ultimately fail in offering a thorough understanding of what organisms are: the latter, because it assumes an intuitive notion of the organism and leaves it unexplained, and the former, because it equates ‘organism’ with ‘living system’, overlooking the fact that living systems come in extremely diverse and nested forms. These projects can offer at best partial answers to questions such as: what is the organismal status of a tissue-forming cell? Or, what is the organism in a siphonophoran; each cell, each zooid, or the whole colony? These kinds of questions belong to a third demarcation project that has largely been neglected: organism vs. biological individual. In this talk, I aim at fleshing out the organism-individual problem in contemporary debates in the philosophy of the life sciences by charting the manifold positions at stake in the relationship between these two concepts. These range from mere conflation between the terms ‘organism’ and ‘individual’ to their demarcation either by the notion of organisms as ‘paradigmatic’ individuals or by pointing to certain properties that organisms, but not other biological individuals, purportedly have (e.g., autonomy). Then, I will unearth the roots of the organism-individual problem. In particular, I shall discuss Samir Okasha’s recent suggestion that the organism-individual conundrum rests on a category mistake upon which the whole debate on biological individuality has been built. According to Okasha’s reconstruction, the problem of biological individuality is, in fact, a problem of organismality and thus the term ‘organism’ should be preferred over the term ‘individual’. I will go a step beyond this suggestion and propose that, in order to integrate the debates of organismality and biological individuality as a ground for demarcating the organism from other individuals, the very notion of biological individual needs to be critically reassessed. I will end up with a proposal for such a reassessment and a novel organism concept that emerges from the previous considerations.
Adrian Stencel, Jagiellonian University
Evolutionary agents as units of selection? Case study: Holobionts
The dispute about the unit of selection in relation to the holobiont debate is still awaiting resolution. The bone of contention is whether a host and its horizontally acquired micro-organisms should be considered as jointly constituting a unit of selection or whether this designation should be limited only to a host and its vertically inherited micro-organisms, i.e. solely to a holobiont that reproduces as a whole. Those who defend the latter idea tend to bring a great number of different ideas to the table in order to justify it. In this talk I will elaborate on one idea which has not received much attention: agency. Firstly, I will argue that reproducing as a whole is important for a holobiont, because it creates a ‘common interest’ and, as a result, enables us to treat a holobiont as an agent pursuing a single goal. Secondly, I will show that many scholars do not grant the status of a unit of selection to holobionts, as they believe holobionts do not function as agents. Therefore, I will demonstrate the link between agency and units of selection in the holobiont debate.