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  • Articles  (8)
  • information  (4)
  • reductionism  (3)
  • animal rights
  • Springer  (8)
  • Elsevier
  • 1985-1989  (8)
  • Philosophy  (8)
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  • Articles  (8)
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  • Springer  (8)
  • Elsevier
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  • 1
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    On the moral acceptability of killing animals (1988)
    Springer
    Journal of agricultural and environmental ethics 1 (1988), S. 155-162 
    Details
    ISSN: 1573-322X
    Keywords: animal rights ; moral vegetarianism ; “worse-off” principle ; Tom Regan
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering , Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract According to a “rights view” it is acceptable to kill animals if they are innocent threats or shields or are in a “lifeboat situation.” However, according to advocates of such a view, our practices of killing animals for food or scientific research may be morally unacceptable. In this paper we argue that, even if we grant the basic assumptions of a rights view, a good deal of killing of animals for food and scientific research continues to be morally acceptable.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01827032
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  • 2
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    The mind body problem and the second law of thermodynamics (1987)
    Springer
    Biology and philosophy 2 (1987), S. 271-275 
    Details
    ISSN: 1572-8404
    Keywords: Mind ; body ; entropy ; information ; dualism ; second law of thermodynamics
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Biology , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract Cartesian mind body dualism and modern versions of this viewpoint posit a mind thermodynamically unrelated to the body but informationally interactive. The relation between information and entropy developed by Leon Brillouin demonstrates that any information about the state of a system has entropic consequences. It is therefore impossible to dissociate the mind's information from the body's entropy. Knowledge of that state of the system without an energetically significant measurement would lead to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00128833
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  • 3
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Evolution, explanation, and the fact/value distinction (1988)
    Springer
    Biology and philosophy 3 (1988), S. 317-348 
    Details
    ISSN: 1572-8404
    Keywords: Ethics ; sociobiology ; Hume ; ethical naturalism ; reductionism ; naturalistic fallacy
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Biology , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract Though modern non-cognitivists in ethics characteristically believe that values are irreducible to facts, they nevertheless believe that values are determined by facts, viz., those specified in functionalist, explanatory theories of the evolutionary origin of morality. The present paper probes the consistency of this position. The conventionalist theories of Hume and Harman are examined, and are seen not to establish a tight determinative reduction of values to facts. This result is illustrated by reference to recent theories of the sociobiological mechanisms involved in moral evolution. Though explanatory theories have linguistic implications,exaggerated in Harman's linguistic form of social relativism, there is also failure to establish the semantic reductionism which non-cognitivists reject under the rubric of ethical naturalism. It is concluded that explanatory forms of naturalism, the best of which is a functionalist-utilitarian account, are compatible with the fact/value distinction.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00053658
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  • 4
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Entropy and information in evolving biological systems (1989)
    Springer
    Biology and philosophy 4 (1989), S. 407-432 
    Details
    ISSN: 1572-8404
    Keywords: evolution ; entropy ; information ; hierarchy ; ecology ; phylogeny ; natural selection
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Biology , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract Integrating concepts of maintenance and of origins is essential to explaining biological diversity. The unified theory of evolution attempts to find a common theme linking production rules inherent in biological systems, explaining the origin of biological order as a manifestation of the flow of energy and the flow of information on various spatial and temporal scales, with the recognition that natural selection is an evolutionarily relevant process. Biological systems persist in space and time by transfor ming energy from one state to another in a manner that generates structures which allows the system to continue to persist. Two classes of energetic transformations allow this; heat-generating transformations, resulting in a net loss of energy from the system, and conservative transformations, changing unusable energy into states that can be stored and used subsequently. All conservative transformations in biological systems are coupled with heat-generating transformations; hence, inherent biological production, or genealogical proesses, is positively entropic. There is a self-organizing phenomenology common to genealogical phenomena, which imparts an arrow of time to biological systems. Natural selection, which by itself is time-reversible, contributes to the organization of the self-organized genealogical trajectories. The interplay of genealogical (diversity-promoting) and selective (diversity-limiting) processes produces biological order to which the primary contribution is genealogical history. Dynamic changes occuring on times scales shorter than speciation rates are microevolutionary; those occuring on time scales longer than speciation rates are macroevolutionary. Macroevolutionary processes are neither redicible to, nor autonomous from, microevolutionary processes.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00162588
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  • 5
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    How evolutionary biology challenges the classical theory of rational choice (1989)
    Springer
    Biology and philosophy 4 (1989), S. 457-481 
    Details
    ISSN: 1572-8404
    Keywords: Evolution ; evolutionary biology ; fitness ; decision theory ; theory of choice ; rationality ; rational behavior ; reductionism
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Biology , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract A fundamental philosophical question that arises in connection with evolutionary theory is whether the fittest patterns of behavior are always the most rational. Are fitness and rationality fully compatible? When behavioral rationality is characterized formally as in classical decision theory, the question becomes mathematically meaningful and can be explored systematically by investigating whether the optimally fit behavior predicted by evolutionary process models is decision-theoretically coherent. Upon investigation, it appears that in nontrivial evolutionary models the expected behavior is not always in accord with the norms of the standard theory of decision as ordinarily applied. Many classically irrational acts, e.g. betting on the occurrence of one event in the knowledge that the probabilities favor another, can under certain circumstances constitute adaptive behavior. One interesting interpretation of this clash is that the criterion of rationality offered by classical decision theory is simply incorrect (or at least incomplete) as it stands, and that evolutionary theory should be called upon to provide a more generally applicable theory of rationality. Such a program, should it prove feasible, would amount to the logical reduction of the theory of rational choice to evolutionary theory.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00162590
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  • 6
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Evolution in thermodynamic perspective: An ecological approach (1989)
    Springer
    Biology and philosophy 4 (1989), S. 373-405 
    Details
    ISSN: 1572-8404
    Keywords: Noneequilibrium thermodynamics ; information ; informed patters of energy flow ; ecological hierarchy ; geneological hierarchy ; succession ; development ; Darwinian tradition ; reductionism ; teleology ; natural selection
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Biology , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract Recognition that biological systems are stabilized far from equilibrium by self-organizing, informed, autocatalytic cycles and structures that dissipate unusable energy and matter has led to recent attempts to reformulate evolutionary theory. We hold that such insights are consistent with the broad development of the Darwinian Tradition and with the concept of natural selection. Biological systems are selected that re not only more efficient than competitors but also enhance the integrity of the web of energetic relations in which they are embedded. But the expansion of the informational phase space, upon which selection acts, is also guaranteed by the properties of open informational-energetic systems. This provides a directionality and irreversibility to evolutionary processes that are not reflected in current theory. For this thermodynamically-based program to progress, we believe that biological information should not be treated in isolation from energy flows, and that the ecological perspective must be given descriptive and explanatory primacy. Levels of the ecological hierarchy are relational parts of ecological systems in which there are stable, informed patterns of energy flow and entropic dissipation. Isomorphies between developmental patterns and ecological succession are revealing because they suggest that much of the encoded metabolic information in biological systems is internalized ecological information. The geneological hierarchy, to the extent that its information content reflects internalized ecological information, can therefore be redescribed as an ecological hierarchy. This thermodynamic approach to evolution frees evolutionary theory from dependence on a crypto-Newtonian language more appropriate to closed equilibrial systems than to biological systems. It grounds biology non-reductively in physical law, and drives a conceptual wedge between functions of artifacts and functions of natural systems. This countenances legitimate use of teleology grounded in natural, teleomatic laws.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00162587
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  • 7
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Entropy in evolution (1986)
    Springer
    Biology and philosophy 1 (1986), S. 5-24 
    Details
    ISSN: 1572-8404
    Keywords: Entropy ; evolution ; information ; thermodynamics
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Biology , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract Daniel R. Brooks and E. O. Wiley have proposed a theory of evolution in which fitness is merely a rate determining factor. Evolution is driven by non-equilibrium processes which increase the entropy and information content of species together. Evolution can occur without environmental selection, since increased complexity and organization result from the likely “capture” at the species level of random variations produced at the chemical level. Speciation can occur as the result of variation within the species which decreases the probability of sharing genetic information. Critics of the Brooks-Wiley theory argue that they have abused terminology from information theory and t thermodynamics. In this paper I review the essentials of the theory, and give an account of hierarchical physical information systems within which the theory can be interpreted. I then show how the major conceptual objections can be answered.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00127087
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  • 8
    Electronic Resource
    Electronic Resource
    Ethics and farm animal welfare (1988)
    Springer
    Journal of agricultural and environmental ethics 1 (1988), S. 305-318 
    Details
    ISSN: 1573-322X
    Keywords: Animal welfare ; intensive agriculture ; animal rights
    Source: Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
    Topics: Energy, Environment Protection, Nuclear Power Engineering , Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Fishery, Domestic Science, Nutrition , Philosophy
    Notes: Abstract In this paper the authors argue that ethical considerations are relevant for evaluating animal production systems and that in consequence agrologists should seriously consider the arguments of animal welfare supporters. Furthermore, the authors point out the ethical basis for some (though not all) of the conclusions proposed by supporters of animal welfare. In consequence it is necessary to determine the nature of animal welfare and methods of evaluating the welfare of animals and to recognize when production systems fail to satisfy the needs of animals.
    Type of Medium: Electronic Resource
    URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF01826794
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