The Role of Starting Points to Order Investigation: Why and How to Enrich the...
What methodological approaches do research programs use to investigate the world? Elisabeth Lloyd's Logic of Research Questions (LRQ) characterizes such approaches in terms of the questions that the...
View ArticlePhyloreferences: Tree-Native, Reproducible, and Machine-Interpretable Taxon...
Evolutionary and organismal biology have become inundated with data. At the same rate, we are experiencing a surge in broader evolutionary and ecological syntheses for which tree-thinking is the staple...
View ArticleWhen Virtues are Vices: 'Anti-Science' Epistemic Values in Environmental...
Since at least the mid-2000s, political commentators, environmental advocates, and scientists have raised concerns about an “anti-science” approach to environmental policymaking in conservative...
View ArticleCrick's Adaptor Hypothesis and the Discovery of Transfer RNA: Experiment...
Historically, hypotheses failed in most cases to correctly forecast the workings of complex biological systems. Francis Crick’s adaptor hypothesis, however, stands out as an exceptional case of a...
View ArticleThe Perils of Polysemy: Racial Realism in the Real World
This paper critiques the biological race realism of Quayshawn Spencer. Spencer's recent embrace of “radical race pluralism” (RRP) is welcome but incomplete, because it needs methods that distinguish...
View ArticleScientific Pluralism in Practice: Responses to Anomaly in the Sciences
Scientific pluralism has become a household position within the philosophy of science literature. There are numerous accounts of plurality within various research fields. Most scientific pluralists,...
View ArticleProcess-Sensitive Naming: Trait Descriptors and the Shifting Semantics of...
This paper examines classification practices in the domain of plant data semantics, and particularly methods used to label plant traits to foster the collection, management, linkage and analysis of...
View ArticleEthical Publishing: How Do We Get There?
The academic journal publishing model is deeply unethical: today, a few major, for-profit conglomerates control more than 50% of all articles in the natural sciences and social sciences, driving...
View ArticleChasing Biodiversity Off the Scientific and Conservation Tracks
The idea of conserving biodiversity has become central to the very meaning of biological conservation---in the public imagination and for conservation organizations worldwide. Identification of...
View ArticleCooperative Breeding and the Evolutionary Origins of Shared Intentionality
It has seemed to many theorists that our nature as a cooperatively breeding species is crucial to understanding how we became fully human. This article examines a particular strand within this...
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