Paul Griffiths is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and works primarily in the Philosophy of Science and more particularly Philosophy of Biology. Born in England in 1962, he received a B.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1984 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Australian National University in 1989 under the supervision of Kim Sterelny. He taught previously at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Queensland and the University of Otago. He spends part of each year at the University of Exeter in the Egenis: the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences. Griffiths is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. [1] [2] [3]
Griffiths, together with Russell Gray developed a theoretical perspective on biological development, heredity, and evolution known as developmental systems theory (DST). [4]
Together with his former advisor Kim Sterelny, in 1999, Griffiths published Sex and Death , a comprehensive treatment of problems and alternative positions in the philosophy of biology. This book incorporated a number of the positions developed in previous articles on the range of topics in the philosophy of biology. [5]
His latest book, published in 2013, in collaboration with Karola Stotz, focuses on the philosophy of genetics. [6]
In 2022 he was appointed Challis Professor of Philosophy. [7]
In 2017, he was awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship. [8]
John Maynard Smith was a British theoretical and mathematical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J. B. S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution with George R. Price, and theorised on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signalling theory.
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process. Thirdly, it is a phenotypic trait or adaptive trait, with a functional role in each individual organism, that is maintained and has evolved through natural selection.
Conrad Hal Waddington was a British developmental biologist, paleontologist, geneticist, embryologist and philosopher who laid the foundations for systems biology, epigenetics, and evolutionary developmental biology.
Douglas Alexander Spalding was a British biologist who studied animal behaviour and worked in the home of Viscount Amberley.
Deborah Charlesworth is a population geneticist from the UK, notable for her important discoveries in population genetics and evolutionary biology. Her most notable research is in understanding the evolution of recombination, sex chromosomes and mating system for plants.
In biology, saltation is a sudden and large mutational change from one generation to the next, potentially causing single-step speciation. This was historically offered as an alternative to Darwinism. Some forms of mutationism were effectively saltationist, implying large discontinuous jumps.
Alexander Rosenberg is an American philosopher and novelist. He is the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, well known for contributions to philosophy of biology and philosophy of economics.
Developmental systems theory (DST) is an overarching theoretical perspective on biological development, heredity, and evolution. It emphasizes the shared contributions of genes, environment, and epigenetic factors on developmental processes. DST, unlike conventional scientific theories, is not directly used to help make predictions for testing experimental results; instead, it is seen as a collection of philosophical, psychological, and scientific models of development and evolution. As a whole, these models argue the inadequacy of the modern evolutionary synthesis on the roles of genes and natural selection as the principal explanation of living structures. Developmental systems theory embraces a large range of positions that expand biological explanations of organismal development and hold modern evolutionary theory as a misconception of the nature of living processes.
H. Allen Orr is the Shirley Cox Kearns Professor of Biology at the University of Rochester.
William C. Wimsatt is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy, the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. He is currently a Winton Professor of the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota and Residential Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. He specializes in the philosophy of biology, where his areas of interest include reductionism, heuristics, emergence, scientific modeling, heredity, and cultural evolution.
Kim Sterelny is an Australian philosopher and professor of philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University and Victoria University of Wellington. He is the winner of several international prizes in the philosophy of science, and was previously editor of Biology and Philosophy. He is also a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the First Vice President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (2020–2023).
Gerd B. Müller is an Austrian biologist who is emeritus professor at the University of Vienna where he was the head of the Department of Theoretical Biology in the Center for Organismal Systems Biology. His research interests focus on vertebrate limb development, evolutionary novelties, evo-devo theory, and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. He is also concerned with the development of 3D based imaging tools in developmental biology.
The Altenberg Workshops in Theoretical Biology are expert meetings focused on a key issue of biological theory, hosted by the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI) since 1996. The workshops are organized by leading experts in their field, who invite a group of international top level scientists as participants for a 3-day working meeting in the Lorenz Mansion at Altenberg near Vienna, Austria. By this procedure the KLI intends to generate new conceptual advances and research initiatives in the biosciences, which, due to their explicit interdisciplinary nature, are attractive to a wide variety of scientists from practically all fields of biology and the neighboring disciplines.
This bibliography of biology is a list of notable works, organized by subdiscipline, on the subject of biology.
Biology & Philosophy is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles about philosophy of biology, broadly understood to span conceptual, theoretical, and methodological issues in the biological sciences.
The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) consists of a set of theoretical concepts argued to be more comprehensive than the earlier modern synthesis of evolutionary biology that took place between 1918 and 1942. The extended evolutionary synthesis was called for in the 1950s by C. H. Waddington, argued for on the basis of punctuated equilibrium by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge in the 1980s, and was reconceptualized in 2007 by Massimo Pigliucci and Gerd B. Müller.
John M. Opitz was a German-American medical geneticist and professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine. He is best known for rediscovering the concept of the developmental field in humans and for his detection and delineation of many genetic syndromes, several now known as the "Opitz syndromes" including Smith–Lemli–Opitz syndrome (SLOS), Opitz–Kaveggia syndrome (FGS1), Opitz G/BBB syndrome, Bohring–Opitz syndrome, and other autosomal and X-linked conditions. He is founder of the Wisconsin Clinical Genetics Center, the American Journal of Medical Genetics, and was a cofounder of the American College and American Board of Medical Genetics.
In biology, reciprocal causation arises when developing organisms are both products of evolution as well as causes of evolution. Formally, reciprocal causation exists when process A is a cause of process B and, subsequently, process B is a cause of process A, with this feedback potentially repeated. Some researchers, particularly advocates of the extended evolutionary synthesis, promote the view that causation in biological systems is inherently reciprocal.
Karola Stotz was a German scholar of philosophy of biology, cognitive science, and philosophy of science. With Paul E. Griffiths, she pioneered the use of experimental philosophy methods in the field of philosophy of science.
Kevin Neville Lala is an English evolutionary biologist who is Professor of Behavioural and Evolutionary Biology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Educated at the University of Southampton and University College London, he was a Human Frontier Science Program fellow at the University of California, Berkeley before joining the University of St Andrews in 2002. He is one of the co-founders of niche construction theory and a prominent advocate of the extended evolutionary synthesis. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Biology. He has also received a European Research Council Advanced Grant, a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, and a John Templeton Foundation grant. He was the president of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association from 2007 to 2010 and a former president of the Cultural Evolution Society. Lala is currently an external faculty of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.