Ellen Clarke

Origins of evolutionary transitions

An ‘evolutionary transition in individuality’ or ‘major transition’ is a transformation in the hierarchical level at which natural selection operates on a population. In this article I give an abstract (i.e. level-neutral and substrate-neutral) articulation of the transition process in order to precisely understand how such processes can happen, especially how they can get started.

JOHN DUPRÉ Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology

Processes of Life collects sixteen diverse essays that represent the fruits of Dupré’s directorship of Egenis, the ESRC centre for genomics in society, which has operated in Exeter since 2002. The collection is organized into four subsections, covering Dupré’s insights on science, biology, microbes, and humans. Although the specific topic of genomics is tackled more directly in another of Dupré’s recent works, Genomes and What to Make of Them (Barnes and Dupré [2008]), there are two central pleas tying these essays together. One is to overthrow the long-standing macrobial hegemony in philosophy of biology. The other is to let go of our commitment to reality as a collection of static objects, in favour of a picture that treats objects as ‘temporarily stable nexuses in the flow of upward and downward causal interaction’ (p. 202). The result is a dense and enjoyable read, imbued throughout with Dupré’s playful and engaging literary style, and pulled together as an applied manifesto for his well-known, and self-confessedly heterodox, pluralistic stance. Dupré is original and persuasive on a number of important topics. It cannot be stressed enough that philosophers and biologists who persist in selecting their examples from a hackneyed collection of spined and warm-blooded creatures are sabotaging their own arguments, retarding scientific progress, and depriving themselves of acquaintance with many rich and fascinating areas of living splendour. Dupré fights the good fight not only in his many calls for greater attention to bacteria but also in his inclusion of other ‘marginal’ specimen types in the discussion, such as viruses, prions, plasmids, and so forth. Also to be applauded is his unwavering refusal to avoid the more technical aspects of current biological science. Topics, such as the choice of different Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 65 (2014), 173–177