Does environmental science crowd out non-epistemic values?

While no one denies that science depends on epistemic values, many philosophers of science have wrestled with the appropriate role of non-epistemic values, such as social, ethical, and political values. Recently, philosophers of science have overwhelmingly accepted that non-epistemic values should play a legitimate role in science. The recent philosophical debate has shifted from the value-free ideal in science to questions about how science should incorporate non-epistemic values. This article engages with such questions through an exploration of the environmental sciences. These sciences are a mosaic of diverse fields characterized by interdisciplinarity, problem-orientation, policy-directedness, and ubiquitous non-epistemic values. This article addresses a frequently voiced concern about many environmental science practices: that they 'crowd out' or displace significant non-epistemic values by either (1) entailing some non-epistemic values, rather than others, or by (2) obscuring discussion of non-epistemic values altogether. With three detailed case studies - monetizing nature, nature-society dualism, and ecosystem health - we show that the alleged problem of crowding out emerges from active debates within the environmental sciences. In each case, critics charge that the scientific practice in question displaces non-epistemic values in at least one of the two senses distinguished above. We show that crowding out is neither necessary nor always harmful when it occurs. However, we do see these putative objections to the application of environmental science as teaching valuable lessons about what matters for successful environmental science, all things considered. Given the significant role that many environmental scientists see for non-epistemic values in their fields, we argue that these cases motivate lessons about the importance of value-flexibility (that practices can accommodate a plurality of non-epistemic values), transparency about value-based decisions that inform practice, and environmental pragmatism.

Health, ecology and the microbiome.

Advances in microbiomics have changed the way in which many researchers think about health and disease. These changes have also raised a number of philosophical questions around these topics, such as the types of living systems to which these concepts can be applied. Here, I discuss the human microbiome from two perspectives: the first treats the microbiome as part of a larger system that includes the human; the second treats the microbiome as an independent ecosystem that provides services to humans. Drawing on the philosophy of medicine and ecology, I explore two questions: i) how can we make sense of disease and dysfunction in these two perspectives? ii) are these two perspectives complimentary or do they compete with each other?

Processes and patterns of interaction as units of selection: An introduction to ITSNTS thinking.

Many practicing biologists accept that nothing in their discipline makes sense except in the light of evolution, and that natural selection is evolution's principal sense-maker. But what natural selection actually is (a force or a statistical outcome, for example) and the levels of the biological hierarchy (genes, organisms, species, or even ecosystems) at which it operates directly are still actively disputed among philosophers and theoretical biologists. Most formulations of evolution by natural selection emphasize the differential reproduction of entities at one or the other of these levels. Some also recognize differential persistence, but in either case the focus is on lineages of material things: even species can be thought of as spatiotemporally restricted, if dispersed, physical beings. Few consider-as "units of selection" in their own right-the processes implemented by genes, cells, species, or communities. "It's the song not the singer" (ITSNTS) theory does that, also claiming that evolution by natural selection of processes is more easily understood and explained as differential persistence than as differential reproduction. ITSNTS was formulated as a response to the observation that the collective functions of microbial communities (the songs) are more stably conserved and ecologically relevant than are the taxa that implement them (the singers). It aims to serve as a useful corrective to claims that "holobionts" (microbes and their animal or plant hosts) are aggregate "units of selection," claims that often conflate meanings of that latter term. But ITSNS also seems broadly applicable, for example, to the evolution of global biogeochemical cycles and the definition of ecosystem function.

Molecular Phylogenetics and the Perennial Problem of Homology.

The concept of homology has a long history, during much of which the issue has been how to reconcile similarity and common descent when these are not coextensive. Although thinking molecular phylogeneticists have learned not to say "percent homology," the problems are deeper than that and unresolved.

Like Hercules and the Hydra: Trade-offs and strategies in ecological model-building and experimental design.

Experimental ecologists often invoke trade-offs to describe the constraints they encounter when choosing between alternative experimental designs, such as between laboratory, field, and natural experiments. In making these claims, they tend to rely on Richard Levins' analysis of trade-offs in theoretical model-building. But does Levins' framework apply to experiments? In this paper, I focus this question on one desideratum widely invoked in the modelling literature: generality. Using the case of generality, I assess whether Levins-style treatments of modelling provide workable resources for assessing trade-offs in experimental design. I argue that, of four strategies modellers employ to increase generality, only one may be unproblematically applied to experimental design. Furthermore, modelling desiderata do not have obvious correlates in experimental design, and when we define these desiderata in a way that seem consistent with ecologists' usage, the trade-off framework falls apart. I conclude that a Levins-inspired framework for modelling does not provide the content for a similar approach to experimental practice; this does not, however, mean that it cannot provide the form.

'The art itself is nature': Darwin, domestic varieties and the scientific revolution.

Common to both the scientific and Darwinian revolutions were discussions challenging the distinction between art and nature. Was art a part of nature? Could art be used as a model for nature? This intellectual congruence, however, is more than just nominal. Charles Darwin and Asa Gray, for example, were well-aware of the 17th century debates which preceded them through the works of such revered English writers as William Shakespeare and Thomas Browne. Furthermore, they used their understandings of these debates to inform and express their own thinking about the relation between artificial and natural selection.