biology
Biodiversity refers to the diversity of life forms, so numerous that we have yet to identify most of them. For E.O. Wilson, biodiversity is “the greatest wonder of this planet.” We have never fathomed its limits, and we do not know the true number of species on Earth, even to the nearest order of magnitude.
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GAIA: The hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock that the earth is a living organism. It is an organic world picture as opposed to the mechanized world picture of the scientific revolution. (see machine) The name Gaia means Earth Goddess and was suggested to Lovelock by William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies. Leaving aside the anthropological element, the central element of Gaia theory is that the earth is a self-regulating system in which biological life does not simply adapt to conditions which happen to sustain life but in fact ensures the stablity (homeostasis) of those conditions. It is a form of coevolution between organism and environment.
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In 1892, Charles Darwin categorized human affects into seven or eight discrete expressions, each with its own facial display: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, interest, perhaps shame, and their combination. (The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals) According to Darwin, "The same state of mind is expressed throughout the world with remarkable uniformity." He postulated that these innate patterns of feeling and facial display evolved as social signals "understood" by all members to enhance species survival. (cf ritualization ) For Darwin, our expressions of emotion are universal (that is, innate not learned) and they are products of our evolution. They are also, at least to some extent, involuntary, and feigned emotions are rarely fully convincing.
The concept of homology, or morphological correspondence, was the central tenet of philosophical anatomy. It was used to define structural similarity. Homologies, which are now defined in terms of evolution, were formerly interpreted in a transcendental sense. Whereas homologous parts are now considered to have descended from a common ancestor, in the pre-Darwinian era they were usually looked upon as evidence of an ideal pattern imposed on nature, or a blueprint in the mind of the creator.
Read MoreThe tendency to ignore or sometimes even to deny that one's left arm or leg is paralyzed was termed anosognosia, ("unaware of illness") by the French neurologist Francois Babinski, who first observed it clinically in 1908. In anosognosia, the patient is unaware of or denies a paralyzed limb, and in hemianosognosia, the patient behaves as if half the body were nonexistent. The "counterfeit" limb is a milder version of anosognosia, where the limb seems less than real. Oliver Sachs describes how his paralyzed leg had "vanished, taking its place with it...The leg had vanished taking its 'past' away with it. I could no longer remember having a leg." (See Oliver Sachs, A Leg to Stand On, New York, 1984,)
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covid virus + antibodies
An Antibody is a large protein molecule which latches on to and neutralizes foreign invaders such as bacteria and viruses. Each antibody acts only on a very specific target molecule, known as an antigen. (It can also coat microbes in a way to make them palatable to scavenger cells such as microphages.)
Read MoreAccording to Leroi-Gourhan: the technological object is nothing outside of the technological ensemble to which it belongs. "As one encounters a new device or system,...it is crucial to ask what the form of this thing presupposes about the people who will use it." (Langdon Winner)
Artifact/ideas: The ideas embodied in material things: the increased crystallization of knowledge and practice in the physical structure of artifacts, in addition to mental structures. Through the combination and superimposition of task-relevant structure, artifacts came to embody kinds of knowledge that would be exceedingly difficult to represent mentally. (see Bruno Latour, "Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands." Knowledge and Society 6: 1-40, 1986.) (see tech philosophy for "the fabrication of scientific facts and technical artifacts." )
Catalysts are chemical substances that modify reaction rates without themselves being changed in the process. Their kinetics are characterized by threshold and amplification phenomena. Enzymes are the major class of biological catalysts.
Read MoreAutopoesis is both a concept about self-maintaining systems, especially biological ones, and an epistemological theory about cognition and self-reference.
Read MoreWhile genes are usually thought to entail some direct causal consequence in the expression of a character, a central tenet of genetics is that a mutant locus or the normal allele does not "control a character," but is only a differential. The production of a character involves many genes.
Read MoreIn coevolutionary processes, the fitness of one organism or species depends on the characteristics of the other organisms or species with which it interacts, while all simultaneously adapt and change." At every moment natural selection is operating to change the genetic composition of populations in response to the momentary environment, but as that composition changes it forces a concommittent change in the environment itself.
Read MoreCybernetics: (derives from the Greek word for steersman, which was used by Plato in the sense of "government."):The technology of process control was developed by Norbert Weiner into "the field of control and communication theory (based on statistical information) , whether in the machine or animal" . The terms was first introduced in 1947. See Wiener Cybernetics.
Read MoreOne of the most important issues in the premodern biology of the 18th century was the struggle between preformationist and epigenetic theories of development. The preformationist view was that the adult organism was contained, already formed in miniature, in the sperm, and that development was the growth and solidification of this miniature being. Preformationists assumed that the germs of all living beings were preformed and had been since the Creation. Preformationism sought to maintain and secure--against the irritation posed by the complexity of organic phenomena--the claim for a thorough and rational determination of the material world.
Read MoreIn many of his essays, Steven J. Gould has suggested complications or revisions to any simple version of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. (see, for example Wonderful Life, an graphic account of some contingencies of natural history -- as opposed to any predictable, progressive process) He has also proposed a number of alternative concepts to simple adaptation. In "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm," ( Proceedings of the Royal Society of London , 205, 281-288) Gould and Lewontin warned against "naive adaptationism" in the explanation of traits that had emerged for other reasons. Using the dome and spandrels of the basilica of San Marco as an illustration, Gould and Lewontin showed that some traits have no specific function, but are present for reasons of architecture, development, or history. The triangular spaces of the spandrels at San Marco are simple solutions to the problem of filling in the spaces left by placing a dome on four arches. In themselves, they should not be called adaptations, as they serve no function on their own. (but they may become part of a "Bauplan.")
Development is the process that transforms an egg into a growing embryo and eventually into an adult form.
How is this process to be understood? According to Scott Gilbert, the aesthetic of embryology separates it from other areas of biology. It is an aesthetic informed by the ordered, directional change manifest during the life of individual organisms, as they develop from a single, fertilized egg into complex patterns of diifferent, yet interacting cell, tisssues, and organs.
A few questions have dominated the study of embryology:
First of all, how is the extraordinary process of development regulated? How does a single-celled organism turn into a highly differentiated one with millions or even billions of cells? Do Genes control development? see genotype / phenotype
Is the final form of the organism set from the start? Or are there different paths of development available to the embryo? (For a discussion of preformism and epigenesis, see epigenesis}
What is the relation between the sequence of development and the process of evolution? Why do embryos of different species look so similar, and how do they end up so different?
Read MoreThe immune system is engaged in a process of somatic selection. It is constantly distinguishing foreign molecules or bacteria, viruses, and even another person's skin from the molecules of an individual body, or soma. The well-spring of immunologic defense is scattered through the body in the tissues and organs of the lymphatic system and is carried out by a set of proteins called antibodies. The ultimate target of all immune responses is an antigen, which is usually a foreign molecule from a bacterium or other invader.
Read MoreHow can a cell "know" to respond to the presence or absence of an enzyme? What is it that induces genes to work only when needed?
Using a fine baby's hair, taken from his own daughter, Hans Spemann tied off and separated the two halves of a two-celled newt embryo. The cells on either side of the knot gave rise to normal newt tadpoles. When Spemann divided the egg differently, by tying it perpendicular to the furrow between the two cells of the embryo, he obtained a dramatically different result. Only one side made a normal tadpole, while the other made a disorganized mass of belly tissue. This eventually lead to the recognition that a region of the embryo, called the dorsal lip of the blastopore, was critical for the organization of the embryo. If this region of the embryo was removed, the embryo formed a blob of tissue lacking structures that normally form on the top (dorsal) side of the animal. In 1924, Spemann proved that a graft could induce host tissues adjacent to it to completely change their fate and to form a second embryo in relation to the graft. If the dorsal lip was transplanted to the presumptive belly region of another developing embryo, it organized a second embryonic axis, and two embryos formed that were joined together. Spemann dubbed this region the "organizer" because he deduced that it organized the dorsal parts of the embryo into neural structures and could induce development of another embryonic axis. All organizers share the property of influencing the formation of pattern, or morphogenesis, in tissues or cells. The basic interpretation of their special activity is that the cells of organizers produce substances that can influence the development of other cells. Such substances have been dubbed morphogens. It has long been thought that morphogens produced in one site diffuse outward and form concentration gradients from their source. The idea then is that cells surrounding the source respond to the amount of morphogen they experience. The affected area is also called the zone of polarizing activity (ZPA). Recent advances in embryology have correlated these zones with the expression of specific genes (toolkit genes)
Read MoreThe prestige of mechanistic physics after Newton led to an extended confrontation between the norms of physics and other areas of science such as biology and psychology. Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophystood as a classical prototype, or canon, by which to judge all subsequent science. Newton's great achievement was to have produced a mathematical theory of nature that provided general solutions based on a rational system of deduction and mathematical inference, coupled with experiment and critical observation. Newtonian mechanics established "universal laws" that explained the movements of the planets, the tides, and whose predictive powers were given an overwhelming demonstration with the appearance of Halley's comet, just as predicted, in 1758, long after both Halley and Newton were dead. Even today, the exploration of space is a straightforward application of classical gravitational mechanics.
Read More"If something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory." -Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of MoralsIs
Is memory primarily individual? Or is it social?
Individual memory can be thought as communication with the self over time. " I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under ever-changing forms." (Stephen Dedalus) "Memory is the real name of the relation to oneself, or the affect of self on self." (Deleuze, Foucault, p.107)
In Rewriting the Soul, Ian Hacking asks whether memory is the name of what once was called the soul. For Hacking, the Western moral tradition, encapsulated in the Delphic injunction to "know thyself," expresses a deeply rooted conviction that a self-knowledge is central to becoming a fully developed human being. In the modern area, this self-knowledge has increasingly focussed on issues of memory.
Individual memory can be broken into three classes:
personal memory claims concerning events in the past, which figure significantly in our self-descriptions; This is also called episodic memory
cognitive memory claims, concerning things we learned in the past; (also called semantic, or categorical memory)
habit-memory , our capacities to reproduce performances (like riding a bicycle)-- also called procedural memory.
How does the physical brain give rise to the psychological mind? How do the laws of mental life emerge from the brain?
The hypothesis of all those who examine the brain as "organ of the mind" is that a close enough analysis of the workings of the brain would, if we also had the key to psychophysiology, lead to a knowledge of consciousness. The psychophysiological hypothesis, at least in its narrow version of it, seeks point-to-point mappings of brain, consciousness, and memory.
