The next session of the IAS Seminar will take place this Friday, 17th of April at 1pm. Centro Carlos Santamaria, Room 4. The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely contact: alberto.monterde@ehu.eus
Our speaker will be David Cortés-García (Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research), who will present: The ontology of biological reproduction in evolutionary biology: a philosophical analysis
Abstract
Biological reproduction is one of the most fundamental yet philosophically underexplored phenomena in evolutionary biology. This talk argues that two distinct ontological frameworks have shaped how reproduction is theorized, each motivated by different epistemic goals.
The first ontological stance understands reproduction as a means of transmission: the mechanism by which heritable information propagates across generations. From the Modern Synthesis to more recent approaches within the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, these frameworks tend to ask what is inherited and by whom. They usually framing reproduction as a parameter within an abstract schema of evolutionary change, rather than as a biological process requiring explanation in its own right. I argue that despite their critiques of gene-centrism, and the significant conceptual expansions they have achieved, many of these frameworks remain committed to the same underlying ontology.
The second ontology of reproduction understands it as a process of individuation: the process by which a new organized individual is generated. By drawing on organizational approaches and the theory of the “reproducer”, I argue that this alternative ontology asks fundamentally different questions, investigating the material conditions of reproduction and how organized systems are produced from previous ones. I characterize and further develop this framework through the analysis of organismal and relational accounts of reproduction, which conceptualizes it as an embodied, distributed, and agential process, which is materially grounded, relationally embedded, and irreducible to informational transmission.