We have the pleasure to invite you to another research seminar in the ‘BIOUNCERTAINTY’ research project. This week Yafeng Shan will give a talk: "Causation in Biology". The seminar will take place on Thursday 20th October at 5:30 p.m. in the room 25 on Grodzka Street and via MS Teams.

Abstract

Mayr (1961) famously makes a distinction between proximate and ultimate causes in biology. Though he does not define them explicitly, Mayr illustrates the distinction with a case of the migration of the warbler, where proximate causes refer to “immediate causes of the migration, consisting of the physiological condition of the bird interacting with photoperiodicity and drop in temperature” and ultimate causes are what “have a history and that have been incorporated into the system through many thousands of generations of natural selection.” In the past decade, there was a renewed interest in this distinction. Some (e.g. Laland et al. 2013; Calcott 2013) questioned the legitimacy and utility of the distinction, while others (e.g. Dickins and Barton 2013; Scholl and Pigliucci 2015) attempt to defend its significance. In this talk, I revisit the proximate-ultimate distinction and argue that it is multiply ambiguous. I argue that there are at least four senses of the distinction: proximate-ultimate explanations, proximate-ultimate (conceptual) causation, proximate-ultimate (metaphysical) causation, and proximate (developmental) - ultimate (evolutionary) approach to causation. The disambiguation of proximate and ultimate causes, I argue, sheds light on the issue of causation in biology in general.

Yafeng Shan - Research Associate in Philosophy at the University of Kent and a member of the Centre for Reasoning there.

 

Link to the MS Teams meeting