Enter your login details for Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences below. If you do not already have an account you will need to register here.
Check submitted paper
Track accepted paper
Once your article has been accepted you will receive an email from Author Services. This email contains a link to check the status of your article. Track your accepted paper
Recent Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences Articles
Recently published articles available on ScienceDirect.
Not just “a clever way to detect whether DNA really made RNA”1: The invention of DNA–RNA hybridization and its outcome1Judson (1979, p. 440).
The invention of DNA–RNA hybridization in 1960 by Ben Hall and Sol Spiegelman had a powerful impact on the theory and discourse of molecular biology. Yet, despite its importance, the story of this invention...
Roger J. Wood
The British biologist A.D. Darbishire (1879–1915) responded to the rediscovery in 1900 of Mendel's theory of heredity by testing it experimentally, first in Oxford, then in Manchester and London. He...
Nathan Crowe | Michael R. Dietrich | Beverly S. Alomepe | Amelia F. Antrim | Bay Lauris ByrneSim | Yi He
In the 1960s, “developmental biology” became the dominant term to describe some of the research that had previously been included under the rubrics of embryology, growth, morphology, and physiology....
In this paper, I respond to four common semantic and metaphysical objections that philosophers of race have launched at scholars who interpret recent human genetic clustering results in population genetics...
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther | Roberta L. Millstein | Rasmus Nielsen
Ludovica Lorusso | Fabio Bacchini
A considerable number of studies in epidemiology and biomedicine investigate the etiology of complex diseases by considering (self-identified) race as a relevant variable and focusing on the differences...
Roberta L. Millstein
Biologists and philosophers have offered differing concepts of biological race. That is, they have offered different candidates for what a biological correlate of race might be; for example, races might...
Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther | Ryan Giordano | Michael D. Edge | Rasmus Nielsen
Scientists use models to understand the natural world, and it is important not to conflate model and nature. As an illustration, we distinguish three different kinds of populations in studies of ecology...
Brian M. Donovan
In this paper, I draw upon debates about race in biology and philosophy as well as the concepts of ineliminable pluralism and psychological essentialism to outline the necessary subject matter knowledge...
Implications of the apportionment of human genetic diversity for the apportionment of human phenotypic diversity
Michael D. Edge | Noah A. Rosenberg
Researchers in many fields have considered the meaning of two results about genetic variation for concepts of “race.” First, at most genetic loci, apportionments of human genetic diversity find that...
Jonathan Michael Kaplan | Massimo Pigliucci | Joshua Alexander Banta
Lewis et al. (2011) attempted to restore the reputation of Samuel George Morton, a 19th century physician who reported on the skull sizes of different folk-races. Whereas Gould (1978) claimed that Morton's...
Available online 29 July 2015
Jonathan Fuller | Alex Broadbent | Luis J. Flores
Available online 26 July 2015
Jonathan Fuller | Luis J. Flores
With the ascent of modern epidemiology in the Twentieth Century came a new standard model of prediction in public health and clinical medicine. In this article, we describe the structure of the model....
Available online 22 July 2015
To be effective, a medical intervention must improve one's health by targeting a disease. The concept of disease, though, is controversial. Among the leading accounts of disease—naturalism, normativism,...
Available online 18 July 2015
Measuring the effectiveness of medical interventions faces three epistemological challenges: the choice of good measuring instruments, the use of appropriate analytic measures, and the use of a reliable...
Available online 10 July 2015
There is an ongoing “methodological revolution” in epidemiology, according to some commentators. The revolution is prompted by the development of a conceptual framework for thinking about causation...
Available online 29 June 2015
Available online 2 June 2015
John van Wyhe | Peter C. Kjærgaard
This article surveys the European discovery and early ideas about orangutans followed by the contrasting experiences with these animals of the co-founders of evolution by natural selection, Charles...
María González-Moreno | Cristian Saborido | David Teira
Our goal in this paper is to articulate a precise concept of at least a certain kind of disease-mongering, showing how pharmaceutical marketing can commercially exploit certain diseases when their best...
Peter J. Taylor
Why is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders so hard to revise? Path-dependence and “lock-in” in classification
The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the D.S.M.-5, was published in May 2013. In the lead up to publication, radical changes to the classification were anticipated;...
The problematic construction of ‘Palaeolithic Man’: The Old Stone Age and the difficulties of the comparative method, 1859–1914
The growth of a prehistoric timescale was one of the most dramatic developments in nineteenth-century ideas of humanity, massively extending the assumed course of human development and placing it within...
The historicisation of humans was a major endeavour in nineteenth-century Britain, and one that led to wide-ranging debates involving a variety of disciplinary approaches, new and old. Within the context...
Arctic observers: Richard King, monogenism and the historicisation of Inuit through travel narratives
In 1848 the ethnologist, surgeon and Arctic explorer Richard King (1810–1876) published a three-part series on Inuit in the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London. This series provided a detailed...
In 1871 the travel writer and anthropologist W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875) was inspired by his correspondence with Darwin to turn his narrow ethnological research on West African tribes into the broadest...
Available online 29 May 2015
Ronald J. Planer
Available online 11 May 2015
This paper considers two objections to explanations that appeal to mechanisms to explain biological phenomena. Marom argues that the time-scale on which many phenomena occur is scale-free. There is...
Available online 20 April 2015
Available online 19 April 2015
Concerns with the use of engineering approaches in biology have recently been raised. I examine two related challenges to biological research that I call the synchronic and diachronic underdetermination...
Available online 19 April 2015
Erez Braun | Shimon Marom
The phenomenon of biology provides a prime example for a naturally occurring complex system. The approach to this complexity reflects the tension between a reductionist, reverse-engineering stance,...
Available online 17 April 2015
Philosophers of biology disagree about an adequate explication of the concept of function. Instead of perpetuating the debate on the level of in principle-arguments, this paper aims first at reconstructing...
Armin W. Schulz
Scott H. Podolsky
James P. Collins
As ecology and evolutionary biology developed during the 20th century one thing that frustrated an integration of research programs in these areas was the assumption that ecological and evolutionary...
Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki
Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in sixteenth-century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany
The phytotronist and the phenotype: Plant physiology, Big Science, and a Cold War biology of the whole plant
David P.D. Munns
This paper describes how, from the early twentieth century, and especially in the early Cold War era, the plant physiologists considered their discipline ideally suited among all the plant sciences...
Wide adaptation of Green Revolution wheat: International roots and the Indian context of a new plant breeding ideal, 1960–1970
Marci R. Baranski
Indian wheat cultivation changed radically in the 1960s due to new technologies and policy reforms introduced during the Green Revolution, and farmers' adoption of ‘packages’ of modern seeds, fertilizer,...
Marci Baranski | B. R. Erick Peirson
Nowhere is the problem of understanding the complex linkages between organisms and their environments more apparent than in the science of plants. Today, efforts by scientists to predict and manage...
Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis
Plasticity, stability, and yield: The origins of Anthony David Bradshaw's model of adaptive phenotypic plasticity
B.R. Erick Peirson
Plant ecologist Anthony David Bradshaw's account of the evolution of adaptive phenotypic plasticity remains central to contemporary research aimed at understanding how organisms persist in heterogeneous...
The paper describes the context and the origin of a particular debate that concerns the evolution of phenotypic plasticity. In 1965, British biologist A. D. Bradshaw proposed a widely cited model intended...