Determining whether a homoplastic trait is the result of convergence or parallelism is central to many of the most important contemporary discussions in biology and philosophy: the relation between ...evolution and development, the importance of constraints on variation, and the role of contingency in evolution. In this article, I show that two recent attempts to draw a black-or-white distinction between convergence and parallelism fail, albeit for different reasons. Nevertheless, I argue that we should not be afraid of gray areas: a clarified version of S. J. Gould's earlier account, based on a separation of underlying developmental mechanisms from the realized trait, still represents a useful approach.
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To detect the presence of antibodies in blood against SARS-CoV-2 in a highly sensitive and specific manner, here we describe a robust, inexpensive ($200), 3D-printable portable imaging platform ...(TinyArray imager) that can be deployed immediately in areas with minimal infrastructure to read coronavirus antigen microarrays (CoVAMs) that contain a panel of antigens from SARS-CoV-2, SARS-1, MERS, and other respiratory viruses. Application includes basic laboratories and makeshift field clinics where a few drops of blood from a finger prick could be rapidly tested in parallel for the presence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 with a test turnaround time of only 2-4 h. To evaluate our imaging device, we probed and imaged coronavirus microarrays with COVID-19-positive and negative sera and achieved a performance on par with a commercial microarray reader 100× more expensive than our imaging device. This work will enable large scale serosurveillance, which can play an important role in the months and years to come to implement efficient containment and mitigation measures, as well as help develop therapeutics and vaccines to treat and prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The TinyArray imager, a robust inexpensive portable imaging device, can detect antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 based on coronavirus antigen microarrays.
The word ‘environment’ has a history. Before the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of a singular, abstract entity—the organism—interacting with another singular, abstract entity—the environment—was ...virtually unknown. In this paper I trace how the idea of a plurality of external conditions or circumstances was replaced by the idea of a singular environment. The central figure behind this shift, at least in Anglo-American intellectual life, was the philosopher Herbert Spencer. I examine Spencer’s work from 1840 to 1855, demonstrating that he was exposed to a variety of discussions of the ‘force of circumstances’ in this period, and was decisively influenced by the ideas of Auguste Comte in the years preceding the publication of
Principles of psychology (1855). It is this latter work that popularized the word ‘environment’ and the corresponding idea of organism–environment interaction—an idea with important metaphysical and methodological implications. Spencer introduced into the English-speaking world one of our most enduring dichotomies: organism and environment.
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This essay is an attempt to explain why Charles Sanders Peirce's evolutionary metaphysics would not have seemed strange to its original 1890s audience. Building on the pioneering work of Andrew ...Reynolds, I will excavate the scientific context of Peirce's Monist articles—in particular "The Law of Mind" and "Man's Glassy Essence," both published in 1892—focusing on the relationship between protoplasm, evolution, and consciousness. I argue that Peirce's discussions should be understood in the context of contemporary evolutionary and physiological speculations, many of which were featured in late-1880s issues of Open Court, sister journal to the Monist.
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In this paper, I explore the work of several positivists involved with the “Metaphysical Club” of Cambridge, Massachusetts in the early 1870s—Fiske, Wright, and Abbot. Like the logical positivists of ...the 1930s, these philosophers were forced to answer a key question: with so many of its traditional domains colonized by science and so many of its traditional questions dismissed as metaphysical or useless, what is left for philosophy to do? One answer they gave was that philosophy could unify the sciences. As Fiske put it, “positive philosophy is science organized.”
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In 1749, Linnaeus presided over the dissertation “Oeconomia Naturae,” which argued that each creature plays an important and particular role in nature's economy. This phrase should be familiar to ...readers of Darwin, for he claims in the Origin that “all organic beings are striving, it may be said, to seize on each place in the economy of nature.” Many scholars have discussed the influence of political economy on Darwin's ideas. In this paper, I take a different tack, showing that Darwin's idea of an economy of nature stemmed from the views of earlier naturalists like Linnaeus and Lyell. I argue, in the first section of the paper, that Linnaeus' idea of oeconomia naturae is derived from the idea of the animal economy, and that his idea of politia naturae is an extension of the idea of a politia civitatis. In the second part, I explore the use of the concept of stations in the work of De Candolle and Lyell - the precursor to Darwin's concept of places. I show in the third part of the paper that the idea of places in an economy of nature is employed by Darwin at many key points in his thinking: his discussion of the Galapagos birds, his reading of Malthus, etc. Finally, in the last section, I demonstrate that the idea of a place in nature's economy is essential to Darwin's account of divergence. To tell his famous story of divergence and adaptation, Darwin needed the economy of nature.
This paper argues that philosophers should pay more attention to the idea of ecosystem engineering and to the scientific literature surrounding it.
Ecosystem engineering
is a broad but clearly ...delimited concept that is less subject to many of the “it encompasses too much” criticisms that philosophers have directed at
niche construction
. The limitations placed on the idea of ecosystem engineering point the way to a narrower idea of niche construction. Moreover, experimental studies in the ecosystem engineering literature provide detailed accounts of particular empirical situations in which we cannot neglect the
O
term in d
E
/d
t
= g (
O
,
E
), which helps us get beyond verbal arguments and simple models purporting to show that niche construction must not be ignored as a factor in evolution. Finally, this literature demonstrates that while ecosystem engineering studies may not require us to embrace a new evolutionary process, as niche construction advocates have claimed, they do teach us that the myriad abiotic factors concealed by the abstract term ‘environment’ are often controlled in large part by organisms.
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