This project intends to address some recent debates in philosophy of biology using as a toolbox some core metaphysical notions. The project centers on processes and dispositions, two notions that pervade a large number of themes in contemporary philosophy of biology. Our proposal is organised in a twofold intertwined way: firstly, by examining some features specific to biological phenomena such as their essential dynamic nature and temporality, the contingency and historicity that stems from such temporality, and the teleology of biological processes; secondly, by exploring case studies in which such features are present and to which the metaphysical toolbox can be applied: holobionts, pregnancy, birth, sex, cancer, organism-environment relations, evolution and biological pathways.

The aim of the project is to offer a categorization of the interactions between Metaphysics and Biology, paying attention, in particular, to some philosophical issues that have arisen recently in Molecular, Developmental and Evolutionary Biology. The methodological strategy is to pay attention to some crucial discussions at the intersection of metaphysics and biology to determine the different ways in which that interaction takes place. Thus, the project also has secondary aims related to the discussions and solutions of such issues to be explored as case-studies of different kinds of interactions. Examples of such issues: dispositions/powers and genes/fitness/functions/species; substance/process ontologies and development/evolution/ontology of genes; reduction/emergence and biological properties/functions in particular in development.

This project is a continuation of the work initiated by the group “Theory of science perspective on evolvability” (led by Laura Nuño de la Rosa) within the international research project “Evolvability: A New and Unifying Concept in Evolutionary Biology?” (CAS, Oslo), which hosted a number of researchers coming from different institutions around the world who have been instrumental in evolvability research within different disciplines (quantitative genetics, evo-devo and systems biology, and macroevolution). Its purpose is to characterize conceptual differences and distinct forms of inquiry, as well as connections among different approaches building on and extending the accumulating philosophical and historical research on evolvability. For doing so, we are interviewing key evolutionary biologists whose work is widely influential in evolvability in order to trace the recent history of evolutionary biology, with an emphasis on the origin and development of evolvability research, as well as to document current theoretical debates surrounding evolvability and related concepts.

In this project, we aim at achieving three major objectives concerning the modeling of variational chance in evo-devo, namely (1) advancing in our understanding of how probabilities are modeled in evo-devo, (2) offering a propensity interpretation of such probabilities, and (3) exploring how theoretical integration is achieved in practice through recent models of developmental evolvability in quantitative genetics. This research line is part of a larger project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation: Stochastic Representations in the Natural Sciences: Conceptual Foundations and Applications [PGC2018-099423-B-100].