Conserving Functions across Generations: Heredity in Light of Biological Organization

Mossio, Matteo; Pontarotti, Gaëlle

doi:10.1093/bjps/axz031

Cited by 16 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…As mentioned in the previous section, organizational closure plays precisely this epistemological role at the individual scale, by contributing to explain how functional constraints stabilize each other through their reciprocal relations and interactions. As recently argued (Mossio and Pontarotti, 2019), closure can also explain the stability of functional constraints across generations by providing an organizational understanding of biological heredity. Natural selection plays a similar role at the evolutionary scale, in that it excludes some trait variants and, thus, explains the stability of other variants, as adaptations (Lecointre, 2018).…”

Section: Conceptual Tenetsmentioning

confidence: 90%

The Identity of Organisms in Scientific Practice: Integrating Historical and Relational Conceptions

Montévil

Mossio

2020

Front. Physiol.

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We address the identity of biological organisms at play in experimental and modeling practices. We first examine the central tenets of two general conceptions, and we assess their respective strengths and weaknesses. The historical conception, on the one hand, characterizes organisms' identity by looking at their past, and specifically at their genealogical connection with a common ancestor. The relational conception, on the other hand, interprets organisms' identity by referring to a set of distinctive relations between their parts, and between the organism and its environment. While the historical and relational conceptions are understood as opposed and conflicting, we submit that they are also fundamentally complementary. Accordingly, we put forward a hybrid conception, in which historical and relational (and more specifically, organizational) aspects of organisms' identity sustain and justify each other. Moreover, we argue that organisms' identity is not only hybrid but also bounded, insofar as the compliance with specific identity criteria tends to vanish as time passes, especially across generations. We spell out the core conceptual framework of this conception, and we outline an original formal representation. We contend that the hybrid and bounded conception of organisms' identity suits the epistemological needs of biological practices, particularly with regards to the generalization and reproducibility of experimental results, and the integration of mathematical models with experiments.

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Section: Conceptual Tenetsmentioning

confidence: 90%

The Identity of Organisms in Scientific Practice: Integrating Historical and Relational Conceptions

Montévil

Mossio

2020

Front. Physiol.

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“…This attitude of favoring theoretical considerations over causal explanations is not limited to the early autonomy tradition. Mossio and Pontarotti's (2019) general account of heredity through appeal to organizational closure is a recent example. The authors make explicit that their focus is on the theoretical foundations of heredity as a means of maintaining a far-from-equilibrium state in descendent organisms, not on providing an explanation of it: "Heredity, as discussed here, is a general concept designating a kind of stability.…”

Section: Challenges Confronting Autonomy Theorists On Which Mechanists Can Offer Assistancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, a functional grounding has been provided for cross-generational functions such as reproduction and for altruistic behaviors, which do not directly contribute to the maintenance of the organism. In this view, reproductive traits are functional because they are produced by the autonomous biological organization of the parents at some point in their life cycle, and they contribute to re-establishing that very organization in the offspring(Saborido et al, 2011;Mossio and Pontarotti, 2019). For a criticism and response see, respectively,Artiga and Martinez (2016) andMossio and Saborido (2016).…”

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confidence: 99%

Mechanism, autonomy and biological explanation

Bich

Bechtel

2021

Biol Philos

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The new mechanists and the autonomy approach both aim to account for how biological phenomena are explained. One identifies appeals to how components of a mechanism are organized so that their activities produce a phenomenon. The other directs attention towards the whole organism and focuses on how it achieves self-maintenance. This paper discusses challenges each confronts and how each could benefit from collaboration with the other: the new mechanistic framework can gain by taking into account what happens outside individual mechanisms, while the autonomy approach can ground itself in biological research into how the actual components constituting an autonomous system interact and contribute in different ways to realize and maintain the system. To press the case that these two traditions should be constructively integrated we describe how three recent developments in the autonomy tradition together provide a bridge between the two traditions: (1) a framework of work and constraints, (2) a conception of function grounded in the organization of an autonomous system, and (3) a focus on control.

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“…Thus, although in the end the reproducing cycle implies the production of a new, spatially distinguishable system, for reproduction to occur, the underlying organizational continuity between the producing and the produced system(s) cannot be disrupted. This continuity is a necessary condition, because otherwise, as Mossio and Pontarotti (2019) have recently argued, an adequate degree of functional similarity between the producing and the produced systems would not be achieved. And as Griesemer (2002) points out, reproduction is not only the transmission of a “form”; it also implies a material connection between the system that reproduces and that which is reproduced.…”

Section: The Paradoxical Nature Of Reproductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Origin of a Trans-Generational Organization in the Phenomenon of Biogenesis

Moreno

2019

Front. Physiol.

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One of the central issues of the whole process of biogenesis is how to understand the progressive constitution of a large (in spatial and temporal terms) system that transcends the individual sphere of proto-metabolic organizations and includes collective networks, both synchronous (i.e., proto-ecosystem webs) and asynchronous (i.e., trans-generational protocell populations). This paper analyzes the appearance of a minimal form of reproduction in the process of biogenesis from an organizational perspective. This perspective highlights the problem of how a process transcending the actual organization of the reproducing entities (i.e., protocells) could have a causal power. It is proposed that this problem may be explained if we consider that reproduction generates a kind of feedback between the actual concatenation of the processes of each reproducing cycle and the type continuity that a reliable iteration of these cycles creates. Thus, reproduction generates a new form of self-maintaining system linking “organismal” and “evolutionary” domains, since the consequence of the iteration of self-reproducing cycles is the long-term continuity of a specific type of SM compartmentalized organization, and the functional role of a particular self-reproducing organization (token) lies in its capacity to trigger a diachronic succession of similar self-reproducing organizations, i.e., a lineage.

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Conserving Functions across Generations: Heredity in Light of Biological Organization

Cited by 16 publications

References 43 publications

The Identity of Organisms in Scientific Practice: Integrating Historical and Relational Conceptions

The Identity of Organisms in Scientific Practice: Integrating Historical and Relational Conceptions

Mechanism, autonomy and biological explanation

The Origin of a Trans-Generational Organization in the Phenomenon of Biogenesis

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