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Ontology (2) Death Programs and Their Discontents
This chapter raises the issue of the existence of programs of aging and death. It explains why this question is important, its relations to...
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Death Is a Social Issue
In this chapter I consider the differences made by social structure and social interaction to the evolution of death or lifespan in various species,...
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The concepts and origins of cell mortality
Organismal death is foundational to the evolution of life, and many biological concepts such as natural selection and life history strategy are so...
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Ontology (3): The Case for Programs: Altruistic Suicide, Quasi-Programs and Smurfs
This chapter considers two theories that emphasize death programs, or the program-like character of aging, namely the notion of quasi-programs and...
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A Providentialist Metaphysics and the Traditional Economics of Death: Mortality and Individuality
This chapter develops a reading of the traditional theories of death within biology as part of a providentialist account of death, centered around...
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Epistemology of Death (2): Experiments, Tests and Mechanisms
In this chapter, I investigate the epistemology of the evolutionary biology of death and aging, by reviewing the variety of experimental tests that...
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The Evolutionary Synthesis’ View of Death: Peter Medawar, George C. Williams, and the Riddles of Senescence
This chapter introduces the core of the evolutionary biology of death, namely, Medawar’s mutation accumulation, and Williams’ antagonistic...
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Bioethical Decision-Making About Somatic Cell Genome Editing: Sickle-Cell Disease as a Case Study
Somatic cell genome editing (SCGE) now allows exquisitely precise and targeted non-heritable changes to be made to human DNA. While SCGE has many...
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Conclusion
In conclusion I wrap up some of the claims made in the book, and ask about the possible dialogue between the biology of death and aging and the...
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The Nature of Programmed Cell Death
In multicellular organisms, cells are frequently programmed to die. This makes good sense: cells that fail to, or are no longer playing important...
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Nietzsche’s Legacy and Constitutional Values: A Deconstructive Reading
Derrida’s recently published Life Deathseminars have again highlighted the importance of values within the ongoing philosophical conversation about...
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Two Kinds of Uncertainty
Medical uncertainty comes in two forms: natural uncertainty in the world and cognitive uncertainty in people’s minds. I explicate this distinction...
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The Coordination of Pathways in Metazoans: An Integrated Framework
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pathways in a unicellular prokaryotic organism, and all these pathways will have to be controlled,...
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Life Making
This chapter discusses the ethics of biotechnologies. It starts by discussing biomedical ethics, its origins, and the influential principlism...
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The Living Dead: Destructive Plasticity
In this chapter, we will first discuss Catherine Malabou’s negative revision of psychoanalysis and neuroscience and expand on some of the crucial...
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A Cosmotechnology for the Post-Anthropocene?
This chapter supports Mark B.N. Hansen’s thesis developed in Feed-Forward regarding twenty-first-century media. It is suggested that it is an...
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There Are No Intermediate Stages: An Organizational View on Development
Theoretical accounts of development exhibit several internal tensions and face multiple challenges. They span from the problem of the identification...
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Exploration and perspectival modelling with model organisms: developmental biology as a case study
Model organisms are at the centre of progress in biology but attributing them an excessive representational power and concentrating on a limited...
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Etio-Prognostic Explanation
Agent-based models (ABMs) are one type of simulation model used in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to equation-based models, ABMs...