The evolutionary contingency thesis and evolutionary idiosyncrasies

Wong, T. Y. William

doi:10.1007/s10539-019-9684-0

Cited by 10 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…In biology, there are at least three possible ways how natural evolution fails to explore design space exhaustively. These three sources of unactualized possibilities are weak natural selection, lack of environmental variation and historicity (Wong, 2019). 4 If natural selection is weak, then it is unable to explore the space of possibilities efficiently.…”

Section: Sources Of Unactualized Possibilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Exploring biological possibility through synthetic biology

Ijäs

Koskinen

2021

Euro Jnl Phil Sci

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This paper analyzes the notion of possibility in biology and demonstrates how synthetic biology can provide understanding on the modal dimension of biological systems. Among modal concepts, biological possibility has received surprisingly little explicit treatment in the philosophy of science. The aim of this paper is to argue for the importance of the notion of biological possibility by showing how it provides both a philosophically and biologically fruitful category as well as introducing a new practically grounded way for its assessment. More precisely, we argue that synthetic biology can provide tools to scientifically anchor reasoning about biological possibilities. Two prominent strategies for this are identified and analyzed: the design of functionally new-to-nature systems and the redesign of naturally occurring systems and their parts. These approaches allow synthetic biologists to explore systems that are not normally evolutionarily accessible and draw modal inferences that extend in scope beyond their token realizations. Subsequently, these results in synthetic biology can also be relevant for discussions on evolutionary contingency, providing new methods and insight to the study of various sources of unactualized possibilities in biology.

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Section: Sources Of Unactualized Possibilitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Wong (2019) explicitly discusses the sources of evolutionary idiosyncrasies, that is, cases where natural evolution fails to generate the same form (such as the platypus) more than once. We consider this analysis also applicable to several unactualized possibilities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Exploring biological possibility through synthetic biology

Ijäs

Koskinen

2021

Euro Jnl Phil Sci

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“…The elephant's proboscis is likely a novelty in that lineage, but it does not follow from this that it is unique if tapirs possess them as well. Second, philosophical discussion of novelty has focused on explicating the concept and its role in evolutionary theory (Pigliucci 2008;Brigandt & Love, 2010, Wagner 2014. By contrast, we are interested in the epistemic consequences of uniqueness attributions and how they shape research in the life sciences more generally.…”

Section: The Uniqueness Of What?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is surprising given its important role in the life sciences. There it is often claimed that events, traits, or lineages are unique; for example, that evolutionary events are contingent (McConwell 2019, Currie 2018, irreversible (Maynard-Smith & Szathmary, 1995) or idiosyncratic (Wong 2019); that human beings evolve under unique cultural circumstances (Henrich 2015); and that lineages bear unique, novel traits (Wagner 2014). The metaphysics of evolutionary kinds further suggests an important role for uniqueness.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Uniqueness in the life sciences: how did the elephant get its trunk?

Buskell

Currie

2021

Biol Philos

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Researchers in the life sciences often make uniqueness attributions; about branching events generating new species, the developmental processes generating novel traits and the distinctive cultural selection pressures faced by hominins. Yet since uniqueness implies non-recurrence, such attributions come freighted with epistemic consequences. Drawing on the work of Aviezer Tucker, we show that a common reaction to uniqueness attributions is pessimism: both about the strength of candidate explanations as well as the ability to even generate such explanations. Looking at two case studies—elephant trunks and human teaching—we develop a more optimistic account. As we argue, uniqueness attributions are revisable claims about the availability of several different kinds of comparators. Yet even as researchers investigate the availability of such comparators, they are able to mobilize complex sets of empirical and theoretical tools. Rather than hindering scientific investigation, then, we argue that uniqueness attributions often spur the generation of a range of epistemic goods.

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“…That is-although it asserts that there is a 1.0 probability of reaching homozygosity (a certain type of outcome), that there will be some homozygosity is not an outcome that contingency-theorists are ordinarily concerned with. Wong (2019Wong ( , 2020a has argued that contingency theses ought to be fully specified according to dimensions of modal range and subject (i.e. the evolutionary outcome at hand).…”

Section: Genetic Drift As Sampling Errormentioning

confidence: 99%

Sources of evolutionary contingency: chance variation and genetic drift

Wong

2020

Biol Philos

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Contingency-theorists have gestured to a series of phenomena such as random mutations or rare Armageddon-like events as that which accounts for evolutionary contingency. These phenomena constitute a class, which may be aptly called the 'sources of contingency'. In this paper, I offer a probabilistic conception of what it is to be a source of contingency and then examine two major candidates: chance variation and genetic drift, both of which have historically been taken to be 'chancy' in a number of different senses. However, contra the gesturing of contingency-theorists, chance variation and genetic drift are not always strong sources of contingency, as they can be non-chancy (and hence, directional) in at least one sense that opposes evolutionary contingency. The probabilistic conception offered herein allows for sources of contingency to appropriately vary in strength. To this end, I import Shannon's information entropy as a statistical measure for systematically assessing the strength of a source of contingency, which is part and parcel of identifying sources of contingency. In brief, the higher the entropy, the greater the strength. This is also empirically significant because molecular, mutational, and replicative studies often contain sufficient frequency or probability data to allow for entropies to be calculated. In this way, contingency-theorists can evaluate the strength of a source of contingency in real-world cases. Moreover, the probabilistic conception also makes conceptual room for the converse of sources of contingency: 'sources of directionality', which ought to be recognised, as they can interact with genuine sources of contingency in undermining evolutionary contingency.

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The evolutionary contingency thesis and evolutionary idiosyncrasies

Cited by 10 publications

References 49 publications

Exploring biological possibility through synthetic biology

Exploring biological possibility through synthetic biology

Uniqueness in the life sciences: how did the elephant get its trunk?

Sources of evolutionary contingency: chance variation and genetic drift

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