My own review of @quinnslobodian.com's Hayek's Bastards, exploring the influence of neoliberalism, and its racist and nationalist strains, on evolutionary theory and the life sciences: olrsupplement.com/2025/05/19/g...

happy holidays from the Oregon coast

With the end of this year, Stuart Newman will step down from his role as Editor-in-Chief. We sincerely thank Stuart for his outstanding 10 years of service and dedication to Biological Theory! Read Stuart's Farewell Editorial: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

“You will be haunted by three spirits.”

My latest paper, The Case for Pluralism About Teleological Explanation, is now available @philscijournal.bsky.social! #philsci #HPbio #HPS

great Gould footnote on teleophobia in modern evolutionary orthodoxy

h/t @yavannakemi.bsky.social

Next Monday, we welcome @cshambaugh.bsky.social from the University of Oregon in our ROTO Lecture Series who will talk about dialectical biology. Just register via the link and join the talk and discussion at 4pm (CET): rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... #HPBio #PhilSci #HistSci

🚨new publication🚨 𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗮𝘀 𝗠𝗼𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗜𝗻𝗷𝘂𝗿𝘆 in: Understanding Social Struggles: Relating Recognition Theories and Epistemic Injustice (eds. H. Hänel and F. Schuppert), Transcript. pp. 49-64. 2025. Open Access: philpapers.org/archive/BLUC...

Organisms are not billiard balls, struck in deterministic fashion by the cue of natural selection, and rolling to optimal positions on life’s table. They influence their own destiny in interesting, complex, and comprehensible ways. | Gould

Defining non-human #ToolUse remains contested, complicating scientific generalization & inspiring the concept of “tooling.” Our new 📄 @philscijournal.bsky.social proposes a synthetic framework to advance research on 🔧 use & tooling 👇 www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #philsci #cogsci #evosky #HPbio

Just began working on organizing the blog & converting to shareable PDFs, & it’s going to be a big project! For life reasons, it’s going to be harder for me to keep going now, so any support would be crazy appreciated! & thanks for reading & sharing Substudies! open.substack.com/pub/jamescra...

Two new open-access articles from Andrea Gambarotto and collaborators: Enactivizing dialectics: from individual to social normativity and back (w/ Thomas van Es): link.springer.com/article/10.1... Habit: a Hegelian-enactive dialogue (w/ Ezequiel A. Di Paolo): link.springer.com/article/10.1...

OTD in 1880, Charles Darwin published The Power of Movement in Plants. D believed that plants are active agents in the world: “A radicle may be compared with a burrowing animal such as a mole, which wishes to penetrate perpendicularly down into the ground.” 🧪🌱🐋 #philsci #HistSTM 🦋🦫

She’s here!

To assume one basis for life and a different basis for science is as a matter of course a lie. | Marx

Marx as a philosophical biologist? Chris Shambaugh on young Marx's account of organismal agency, its relation to human life to the critique of capitalism. www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

Author’s bio in a J.B.S. Haldane children’s book: “He thinks a lot of the magicians in old days were only doing, or trying to do, what scientists and engineers do now, and that science can be more exciting than magic ever was.”

Reading a Julius Schaxel article via @jamescrane.bsky.social translation. It’s so inspiring seeing a Marxist scientist reading and integrating science and philosophy like this. Anticipated evo-devo before its formalization! It’s also interesting how he’s still ahead of time w/ some philbio topics!

It’s here! My first physical copy of my book, out next month. @uchicagopress.bsky.social have a lovely traditional of sending the first copy straight from their offices in branded wrapping paper.

ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/race... Another generous review of my book!

working on a translation of Julius Schaxel’s “Das biologische Individuum” (1930) on the natural-historical emergence of ‘the individual’ & the possibility of thinking its concept—by distinguishing it from individuality & dissolving the individual back into its constituent relations & movements!

Amazing to have Elliott Sober delivering his keynote "Richard Lewontin - Biologist, Philosopher, and Marxist" at the Dialectical Biology Today Conference! 🌱🐋 @ihpst-uoft.bsky.social

My little book on Schrödinger's famous classic 'What Is Life?' is out! Offering the most comprehensive analysis ever undertaken of the book's origins, reception, impact, and legacy, it uncovers Schrödinger's motivations in writing it, and shows how it has shaped our current understanding of the cell

I'm very much looking forward to the BPC conference tomorrow and on Friday at @ruhr-uni-bochum.de! Everyone is welcome to attend and you can also watch the stream on zoom. I will give a talk at 4pm about early 20th century concepts of plant agency (featuring Arber, Ungerer and Francé). 🌿

Recently discovered this critical glossary of key terms in evolutionary biology, which was edited by Keller and Lloyd, and inspired by Raymond Williams. Great resource

This is a terrific new paper on Marx's naturalism. I highly recommend it!

The euphoria that has accompanied our ability, finally, to give a complete and unambiguous description of the allelic composition of a natural population for some arbitrarily chosen piece of the genome has hindered us from seeing that the problem of epigenesis has not been eliminated. | Lewontin

heading to Berlin next week for a fellowship at the @cpkp.bsky.social. Looking forward to connecting with other scholars working across intellectual divides in philosophy!

Why was natural selection compared to a composer by Dobzhansky; to a poet by Simpson; to a sculptor by Mayr, and to, of all people, Mr. Shakespeare by Julian Huxley? [...] To illustrate the essence of Darwinism – the creativity of natural selection. | Gould

If you missed that great Cognizing life conference in Tubingen organized by Christoph Hueck two weeks ago, here are the videos of the presentations. Talks by Denis Walsh, Joan Steigerwald, Dan Nicholson and many others.  www.clc2025.de/videos

My new article, “Marx’s Concept of Life,” is now out in EJP.

Whence came the mirage of a space between nature and nurture? How did this illusion become so deeply entrenched in our thinking, and why is it so resistant to dissolution? | Keller

I’m excited to be part of this hybrid event celebrating Richard Lewontin’s legacy from October 10-12. I’ll be presenting a talk titled “Dialectical Biology as Ideology Critique” on Saturday morning. You can register for the Zoom link and see the program here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

delighted to have finally found a clean affordable copy of this one

Writers, poets, naturalists, have often declaimed about the wonderful, prodigal, breathtaking in­ventiveness of nature. They have seldom realized that they were praising natural selection. But a creative process runs the risk of failure... Miscreation in biology is death, extinction. | Dobzhansky

An awesome hybrid conference on the legacies of Richard Lewontin is coming to Toronto. Elliott Sober is the keynote! "Dialectical Biology Today" runs from October 10-12. Learn more and register below! #philbio 🐋🌱 @ihpst-uoft.bsky.social ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

The Darwinian theory to be demonstrated as the practical proof of Hegel's account of the inner connection between necessity and chance. | Engels

I'm excited to share with you all a conference I'm planning Oct. 10-12: Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin. It will be hybrid in Toronto and on zoom, so please join us however you can! Register for zoom link here: ihpst.utoronto.ca/events/diale...

Organisms not only respond to the environments they encounter, they change the encounter itself, in many cases to one more favorable for their own function. | Sultan

New semester, new lecture series 🎉Starting next month, we welcome amazing scholars to give online talks in the history and philosophy of life sciences. Find all dates and registration links here: rotorub.wordpress.com/roto-lecture... We look forward to seeing you there 🤗 #PhilSci #HistSci #HPBio

I have a new article out on Kafka! Basically, I argue that Derrida's reading of Before the Law/The Trial recognizes an undecidability that inhabits Benjamin's and Deleuze and Guattari's readings. Let me know if you'd like a copy! doi.org/10.3366/olr....

September stack

There is no universal physical fact of nature whose effect on, or even relevance to an organism is not in part a consequence of the nature of the organism itself. | Rose, Lewontin and Kamin

✍️ Have you heard about the UO's rumored plans for significant program cuts? Swipe to learn more and visit our website strengthenuo.org/take-action to sign our petitions and write letters expressing your concern to UO leaders. #WorkersStrengthenUO

If you’re horrified about what’s happening at the University of Oregon, here are some action points

Let us beware of saying that death is opposed to life. The living is only a form of what is dead, and a very rare form. | Nietzsche

Every biological entity is unique; no two are exactly alike. Is this a trivial observation, or a profound metaphysical claim about the living world? Read my new paper & find out! It deals with Mayr's "Population Thinking"; one of the most familiar yet tragically misunderstood ideas in all of biology

Excited to discuss Julius Schaxel in my talk “What is Dialectical Biology?” at #ISHPSSB2025 this morning!