Homeostasis and the Forgotten Vitalist Roots of Adaptation

Turner, J. Scott

doi:10.1007/978-94-007-2445-7_11

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…I try to show that we cannot disregard these unique characteristics of life without losing all hope of building up a unified, coherent and independent biology. (Russell 1945: viii) J. S. Turner (2013) credits the French developmental biologist Claude Bernard with a materialist form of vitalism.² Erwin Schrödinger, in his landmark essay What Is Life?, encapsulates the idea that living things, while material entities, nevertheless make distinct methodological demands on the natural sciences:…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

Scarfe

2019

Process Studies

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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. ContentsAcknowledgements vii Contributors ix Foreword xi Part I. Introduction1. A Manifesto for a Processual Philosophy of Biology (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement 324186, on which JD was the Principal Investigator and DJN was a Research Fellow. We are very grateful to the ERC for its support. More specifically, the majority of the papers herein originated at the workshop "Process Philosophy of Biology", the first major event funded by the grant, held in Exeter in November 2014. We would like to thank all the participants in that event, which marked the first step on the road to this publication.We must also thank Stephan Guttinger and Anne Sophie Meincke, the other two Research Fellows on the project, who have been essential contributors to each stage of the development of the project, both intellectually and practically. Additionally, anyone who has run a large research project will know how important it is to have a capable administrator, and we have been very fortunate to have Chee Wong in that capacity. We are most grateful for her tireless contributions to the project's management.Finally, we have had the privilege of inviting a very substantial number of colleagues from around the world to workshops, colloquia, and other kinds of collaborative research visits. We will not try to name them, if only because we would surely leave someone out, but we are grateful to them all. More even than is obvious from the many authors who have contributed to the volume, this is an output that has been influenced by an extended international and interdisciplinary academic community.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

Scarfe

2019

Process Studies

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Properties of Life: Toward a Coherent Understanding of the Organism

Rosslenbroich

2016

Acta Biotheor

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The question of specific properties of life compared to nonliving things accompanied biology throughout its history. At times this question generated major controversies with largely diverging opinions. Basically, mechanistic thinkers, who tried to understand organismic functions in terms of nonliving machines, were opposed by those who tried to describe specific properties or even special forces being active within living entities. As this question included the human body, these controversies always have been of special relevance to our self-image and also touched practical issues of medicine. During the second half of the twentieth century, it seemed to be resolved that organisms are explainable basically as physicochemical machines. Especially from the perspective of molecular biology, it seemed to be clear that organisms need to be explained solely by the chemical functions of their component parts, although some resistance to this view never ceased. This research program has been working quite successfully, so that science today knows a lot about the physiological and chemical processes within organisms. However, again new doubts arise questioning whether the mere continuation of this analytical approach will finally generate a fundamental understanding of living entities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the quest for a new synthesis actually comes from analytical empiricists themselves. The hypothesis of the present paper is that empirical research has been developed far enough today, that it reveals by itself the materials and the prerequisites to understand more of the specific properties of life. Without recourse to mysterious forces, it is possible to generate answers to this age-old question, just using recent, empirically generated knowledge. This view does not contradict the results of reductionistic research, but rather grants them meaning within the context of organismic systems and also may increase their practical usefulness. Although several of these properties have been discussed before, different authors usually concentrated on a single one or some of them. The paper describes ten specific properties of living entities as they can be deduced from contemporary science. The aim is to demonstrate that the results of empirical research show both the necessity as well as the possibility of the development of a new conception of life to build a coherent understanding of organismic functions.

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Homeostasis and the physiological dimension of niche construction theory in ecology and evolution

Turner

2016

Evol Ecol

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Homeostasis and the Forgotten Vitalist Roots of Adaptation

Cited by 6 publications

References 39 publications

Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology

Properties of Life: Toward a Coherent Understanding of the Organism

Homeostasis and the physiological dimension of niche construction theory in ecology and evolution

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