Abstract
Though only established as a discipline since the 1970s, philosophy of biology has already triggered investigations about its own history (e.g., Grene and Depew in The philosophy of biology: an episodic history, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819018; Hull, in: Ruse (ed) The Oxford handbook of philosophy of biology, Oxford University Press, New York, pp 11–33, 2008). When it comes to assessing the road since travelled—the research questions that have been pursued—manuals and ontologies also offer specific viewpoints, highlighting dedicated domains of inquiry and select work. In this article, we propose to approach the history of the philosophy of biology with a complementary data-driven perspective that makes use of statistical algorithms applied to the complete full-text corpus of one major journal of the field—Biology and Philosophy—from its launch in 1986 up until 2017. By running text-mining and topic-modeling algorithms, we identified 67 key research topics that span across these 32 years. We also investigated the evolution of these topics over time and their fluctuating significance in the journal articles. Our results concur with known episodes or traits of the discipline—for instance, the significance of evolution-related topics or the decrease of articles with a marked historical dimension—but also highlight a diversity of topics that is much richer than what is usually acknowledged.
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Notes
Though philosophy of biology was not established as a specific discipline in the first half of the twentieth century, a reasonable share of articles published in general philosophy of science journals at that time did concern biology-related topics (see (Byron 2007; Nicholson and Gawne 2015); see also (Malaterre et al. 2019) for a text-mining perspective). These early works are often neglected in commonly accepted narratives about the history of the discipline (e.g., Callebaut 1993; Hull 2008), likely due to a perspective stressing the rarity of individuals doing good work in the field, their lack of knowledge of the biological literature and the absence of institutional support at that time (Hull 1969; Honenberger 2018, 296 n. 28).
Discussion articles in the early years of the journal were seen as a means to introduce people to the field and get them engaged (Ruse, personal communication).
The number of yearly articles went from 20 to 30 articles per year in the first 10 years of Biology and Philosophy to some 30–50 articles per year in the most recent decade (over the 32 years we examined, the average amounts to 35.3 articles per year). Meanwhile the average number of words per article increased from 7–8000 in the second decade to 8–9000 in the last decade.
More specifically, lemmatization is the process of grouping together the inflected forms of a word based on their intended meaning so they can be analyzed as a single item, identified by the word’s lemma, or dictionary form (for instance, the lemma for “evolved” is “evolve”).
These categories are therefore not an algorithmic outcome of the topic-modeling methods, but result from our best judgement about how topics relate to one another. The reason for proposing such a grouping of topics into categories is very pragmatic: it is a means to handle the overall high number of topics. Of course, topics relate to one another in multidimensional ways, depending on the relative probabilities of the words that best express them. There are therefore multiple ways of grouping topics into categories and other choices than the ones we made are also possible. Yet, one shone should simply bear in mind that categories are made for convenience: in topic-modeling analyses, only topics ultimately matter.
For instance, topic #9 Way-Think-Make included such words as “think; make; say; good; case; just; like; need; kind; thing”, topic #42 Theory-Argument-Claim included “theory; argument; claim; question; view; term; fact; point; follow; principle; sense” (See Table S1 in the SI Appendix for more details). Though of no direct use for the purpose of the present analysis, these jargon topics could however provide interesting insights on the generic features of the philosophical discourse and style of argumentation.
We hesitated classifying topic #70 as a jargon topic, yet, when reviewing its most strongly associated articles, one finds entries that concern evolutionary aesthetics as well as the modern synthesis. Hence our decision to leave it in category I-Others.
Note that some of the bursts may be due to special issues. For instance, issue 2 of volume 29 (2014) was a special issue on formal Darwinism, while issue 5 of volume 23 (2008) was a special issue on the adaptive landscape. This shows in the diachronic evolution of the topic Fitness-population (67) which displays peaks in 2008 and 2014. Similarly, issue 1 of volume 6 (1991) included papers and invited commentaries on the notion of fitness; hence (part of) the peak of topic Fitness-organism (73) around 1990.
Several ecology-related articles appeared in the 2000 issue 16(4), though there is no apparent indication of that issue being a special issue on the topic.
It is likely that the peak observed around 1988 (partially) results from a paper by David Hull on evolutionary epistemology and invited commentaries, all published in issue 3(2) of 1988.
Though with 75 topics, we still had to deal with a few topics that would have benefited from being merged and a couple others that would have been better split. Yet we found that granularity to be the best trade-off. Note also that we found a strong robustness in the results from one value of K to another: many topics from one model can be made to correspond to topics or groups of topics from another, thereby lending confidence in the topic-model that was ultimately chosen.
If we try to stick more closely to the categories proposed by Gayon and adapted by Pradeu, and add the four topics that concern evolutionary-epistemology and evolutionary ethics from categories G-Socio-normative-issues and H-General-philosophy of science, while removing the two ecology-related topics of category C, then the share of broadly construed evolution-related topics slightly increases to 38%.
This is most apparent with the PNAS disciplinary classification that was superimposed onto Biology and Philosophy articles in Pradeu (2017). This was done with a view to contrasting the focus of philosophers of biology onto evolution-related topics compared to the broad diversity of scientific publications in all biological disciplines. Yet, while PNAS categories do capture some of the biological disciplines that philosophers of biology are interested in, they do not do justice to the diversity of research interests that philosophers pursue. Investigating this diversity of topics also shows that one cannot expect philosophy of biology articles to reflect the relative importance of scientific publications in the different biological disciplines: whereas some of the topics that we identified can reasonably be mapped onto disciplines of biology—for instance topics such as #1 Natural selection (evolutionary biology) or #12 Genes DNA (genetics)—many others resist such mapping, such as topic #46 Causation that we discussed above as well as most if not all of the topics of categories G-Socio-normative-issues, H-General philosophy of science, I-Others but also many in E-Network-Entropy-Information and F-Cognition-behavior.
One should always bear in mind that discussion- and special-issues tend to create “bumps” in the diachronic patterns of topics. As can be seen in Fig. 1, discussion issues significantly decreased from the mid 2000s. We have not specifically tracked down special issues (as this is not consistently documented in the metadata we could obtain), but a rough estimate also shows a decrease in frequency over time. This is probably a good thing—at least from our perspective—as special issues tend to artificially create interest in specific topics. Of course, others could argue that special issues foster research and make for more stimulating work. This is another argument that lays outside of our analyses.
Michael Weisberg has been nominated editor since 2017, which is the last year included in the corpus; this change in editorship is therefore unlikely to affect our findings.
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Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Springer for kindly providing access to Biology and Philosophy. The authors also thank Michael Ruse, Phillip Honenberger and Charles Pence for valuable insights on the history of the philosophy of biology as well as Jean-François Chartier for text-mining expertise. Funding from Canada Foundation for Innovation (Grant 34555), Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant 435-2014-0943) and Canada Research Chair (CRC-950-230795) is gratefully acknowledged. FL acknowledges support from the Fonds de recherche du Québec - Société et culture (Grant 276470)
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CM conceived the study, analyzed the results and wrote the manuscript. DP collected/pre-treated the corpus, ran the LDA analyses and contributed to the methodology section. FL contributed to the corpus pre-treatment.
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Malaterre, C., Pulizzotto, D. & Lareau, F. Revisiting three decades of Biology and Philosophy: a computational topic-modeling perspective. Biol Philos 35, 5 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9729-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-019-9729-4