Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

How counterfactuals of Red-Queen theory shed light on science and its historiography
Publication date: August 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 64 Author(s): Joachim L. Dagg A historical episode of evolutionary theory, which has lead to the Red Queen theory of the evolutionary maintenance of sex, includes two striking contingencies. These are used to explore alternative what-if scenarios, in order to test some common opinions about such counterfactuals. This sheds new light on the nature of science and its historiography. One counterfactual leads to an unexpected convergence of its result to th...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - July 4, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

“How complex and even perverse the real world can be” W.D. Hamilton's early work on social wasps (1964–1968)
This article asks: How did Hamilton attempt to test his theory and hypothesis against the complexity of the biological world? The article reconstructs Hamilton's empirical work with social wasps between 1963 and 1968, the years before and after the publication of the groundbreaking “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior” in 1964. It points out the centrality of Hamilton's work on wasps and shows how the British scientist attempted to test theories and hypotheses with naturalistic, developmental, and physiological observations as well as, at times, with experimental manipulations. The article offers a new perspecti...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - July 1, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Climate science, truth, and democracy
Publication date: Available online 29 June 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Author(s): Evelyn Fox Keller This essay was written almost ten years ago when the urgency of America's failure as a nation to respond to the threats of climate change first came to preoccupy me. Although the essay was never published in full, I circulated it informally in an attempt to provoke a more public engagement among my colleagues in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. In particular, it was written in almost direct respon...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - June 30, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

HIT and brain reward function: A case of mistaken identity (theory)
Publication date: August 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 64 Author(s): Cory Wright, Matteo Colombo, Alexander Beard This paper employs a case study from the history of neuroscience—brain reward function—to scrutinize the inductive argument for the so-called ‘Heuristic Identity Theory’ (HIT). The case fails to support HIT, illustrating why other case studies previously thought to provide empirical support for HIT also fold under scrutiny. After distinguishing two different ways of understanding the t...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - June 28, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

American Palaeontology and the reception of Darwinism
Publication date: Available online 13 June 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Author(s): Peter J. Bowler (Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - June 13, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

The “Kantian Principle” for natural history and its historical significance
Publication date: August 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 64 Author(s): Andrea Gambarotto (Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - June 5, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Biotechnology and the transformation of vaccine innovation: The case of the hepatitis B vaccines 1968 –2000
Publication date: August 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 64 Author(s): Farah Huzair, Steve Sturdy The approval, from 1986, of a series of recombinant hepatitis B vaccines was a landmark both in the growth of biotechnology and in the development of the vaccine innovation system. In this paper, we show how the early development of the hepatitis B vaccines was shaped by a political and economic context that newly favoured commercialisation of academic research, including the appropriation and management of inte...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - May 14, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Transitions, traditions: From colonial to global health
Publication date: Available online 9 May 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Author(s): Christoph Gradmann (Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - May 11, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Practicing Race and Photography
Publication date: Available online 9 May 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Author(s): Ageliki Lefkaditou (Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - May 11, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

First get it right, then get it written
Publication date: Available online 11 May 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Author(s): Mott T. Greene (Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences)
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - May 11, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Brain networks, structural realism, and local approaches to the scientific realism debate
Publication date: August 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 64 Author(s): Karen Yan, Jonathon Hricko We examine recent work in cognitive neuroscience that investigates brain networks. Brain networks are characterized by the ways in which brain regions are functionally and anatomically connected to one another. Cognitive neuroscientists use various noninvasive techniques (e.g., fMRI) to investigate these networks. They represent them formally as graphs. And they use various graph theoretic techniques to analyze ...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - May 11, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Framing causal questions about the past: The Cambrian explosion as case study
Publication date: June 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 63 Author(s): Greg Priest About 540 million years ago, a rapid radiation of animal phyla radically changed the Earth's biota in a geological eye-blink. What caused this “Cambrian explosion”? Over the years, paleontologists have pointed to a wide array of different physical mechanisms as the causal “trigger” for the explosion. More recently, some paleontologists have proposed complex causal pathways to which multiple physical mechanisms are said to...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - April 21, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Schr ödinger's code-script: not a genetic cipher but a code of development
Publication date: June 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 63 Author(s): A.E. Walsby, M.J.S. Hodge In his book What is Life? Erwin Schrödinger coined the term ‘code-script’, thought by some to be the first published suggestion of a hereditary code and perhaps a forerunner of the genetic code. The etymology of ‘code’ suggests three meanings relevant to ‘code-script which we distinguish as ‘cipher-code’, ‘word-code’ and ‘rule-code’. Cipher-codes and word-codes entail translation of one set o...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - April 18, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Communicating with scientific graphics: A descriptive inquiry into non-ideal normativity
Publication date: June 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 63 Author(s): Benjamin Sheredos Scientists’ graphical practices have recently become a target of inquiry in the philosophy of science, and in the cognitive sciences. Here I supplement our understanding of graphical practices via a case study of how researchers crafted the graphics for scientific publication in the field of circadian biology. The case highlights social aspects of graphical production which have gone understudied – especially concerning...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - April 14, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research

Cancer is a propagandist
Publication date: June 2017 Source:Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Volume 63 Author(s): Giamila Fantuzzi Communication among cells (also known as cross-talk) plays a prominent role in the current knowledge of the pathophysiology of cancer and of cancer-associated conditions such as paraneoplastic syndromes and cachexia that are responsible for much of cancer's morbidity and mortality. Yet, biomedical scientists lack an explicit unifying frame that places this exchange of molecular information at the core of their understanding ...
Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences - April 12, 2017 Category: History of Medicine Source Type: research