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[1] [2] A biologist might argue that this has the function of signalling to predators, helping the springbok to survive and allowing it to reproduce. [1] Teleology in biology is the use of the language of goal-directedness in accounts of evolutionary adaptation, which some biologists and philosophers of science find problematic.
A prominent question in the philosophy of biology is whether biology can be reduced to lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. Materialism is the view that every biological system including organisms consists of nothing except the interactions of molecules; it is opposed to vitalism.
The history of scientific method considers changes in the methodology of scientific inquiry, not the history of science itself. The development of rules for scientific reasoning has not been straightforward; scientific method has been the subject of intense and recurring debate throughout the history of science, and eminent natural philosophers and scientists have argued for the primacy of ...
The Process Specification Language (PSL) is a process ontology developed for the formal description and modeling of basic manufacturing, engineering and business processes. This ontology provides a vocabulary of classes and relations for concepts at the ground level of event-instances, object-instances, and timepoints.
Experimentalism is the philosophical belief that the way to truth is through experiments and empiricism. [1] It is also associated with instrumentalism, [2] the belief that truth should be evaluated based upon its demonstrated usefulness. Experimentalism is considered a theory of knowledge that emphasizes direct action and scientific control as ...
Some scientists have proposed in the last few decades that a general theory of living systems is required to explain the nature of life. [1] Such a general theory would arise out of the ecological and biological sciences and attempt to map general principles for how all living systems work. Instead of examining phenomena by attempting to break ...
Biologists or philosophers of biology use Occam's razor in either of two contexts both in evolutionary biology: the units of selection controversy and systematics. George C. Williams in his book Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) argues that the best way to explain altruism among animals is based on low-level (i.e., individual) selection ...
The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to Ayurveda, ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world.