Biology

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the French philosopher of science Edmond Goblot wrote three prescient papers on function and teleology. He advanced the remarkable thesis that functions are, as a matter of conceptual analysis, selected effects. He also argued that "selection" must be understood broadly to include both evolutionary natural selection and intelligent design. Here, I do three things. First, I give an overview of Goblot's thought. Second, I identify his core thesis about function. Third, I argue that, despite its ingenuity, Goblot's expansive construal of "function" cannot be right. Still, Goblot deserves (long-overdue) credit for his work. 

Kinesin is a molecular motor that transports cargo around cells by "walking" along microtubules. Over the course of its relatively short history, research to characterize its walking movement witnessed an important "reconstitution" of the phenomenon of kinesin motility. This case of phenomenon reconstitution suggests an important lesson for philosophers interested in scientific phenomena. Standard philosophical models of phenomenon reconstitution take it to be driven by explanatory considerations. In the case of kinesin research, however, the reconstitution took place entirely within an experimental program dedicated to characterizing, not explaining, the phenomenon of kinesin's walk.

Neto (2019) argues for lineage pluralism, because lineages exist in different ways and in various biological domains. This paper presents another type of lineage that supports lineage pluralism. By building on Babcock's (forthcoming) argument regarding biological fission, I focus on molecular genes to show that fission during DNA replication complicates the ontology of genetic lineages. This is because it is unclear if genes persist through DNA replication. Whether genes persist alters the lineages they generate. The upshot of this argument reveals that gene concepts proposed in the philosophical and biological literature do not align monistic views of genetic lineages.

We address the following two questions that run through the function debate referring to genome biology: the spatial question (SQ), i.e., what are the criteria for singling out functional genomic segments, and the temporal question (TQ), i.e., at which point a previously nonfunctional activity of a genomic segment becomes functional. We respond to SQ by arguing for a moderate integration of the causal role approach with evolutionary considerations, whereas as to TQ, we argue that current genomics recommends a transitioning functionality framework for genomic objects.