History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences

Research, innovation, and progress in the life sciences are increasingly contingent on access to large quantities of data. This is one of the key premises behind the "open science" movement and the global calls for fostering the sharing of personal data, datasets, and research results. This paper reports on the outcomes of discussions by the panel "Open science, data sharing and solidarity: who benefits?" held at the 2021 Biennial conference of the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), and hosted by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).

A burgeoning microbiology field, sociovirology is the study of how viruses interact with one another and the effects such interactions have on social evolution. Challenging dominant narratives that viruses are individualistic pathogens, sociovirologists explore the social interaction of viruses through the language of cooperation, altruism, and cheating, social concepts with biological definitions. Viruses cannot self-replicate-they must rely on living cells to reproduce-and thus are commonly believed to be biologically nonliving. By focusing on virus-virus interaction and evolution, sociovirologists are displacing reproduction as a chief engine of aliveness and queering biology and the concept of life. I contend that in sociovirological publications, the aliveness of viruses is indexed through sociovirologists' use of language reserved for the interactions and social behaviors of life-forms alongside viruses' ability to evolve. This paper illustrates that by attending to social behavior and evolution, sociovirologists are proffering novel approaches to both viruses and the concept of life that displaces individual organism reproduction and vertical inheritance as normative of life with species reproduction and species evolution as normative for viruses even if nonnormative for biological understandings of life. Viruses are alive because, as species, they evolve despite an individual viral particle's fate.

This paper investigates the Recollectiones in Hippocratem De natura foetus, a unique Latin commentary on the Hippocratic embryological treatise, composed in the early fourteenth century by the Florentine physician Dino del Garbo. While the original Hippocratic text is concise, Dino expands it significantly, offering a rich and systematic exploration of the analogies between plant and animal generation. His commentary stands out not only as the sole known Latin interpretation of this Hippocratic work, but also as an exceptional instance of botanical inquiry within the medical-philosophical framework connected to the Bolognese medical school. Focusing on passages that address plant embryonic development, the study highlights Dino's systematic use of analogies between animal and vegetal reproduction, particularly through his discussion of seed-based generation and vegetative propagation. Philosophical works such as the Pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis and, though not explicitly cited, Albert the Great's De vegetabilibus appear to inform the broader conceptual background of the commentary. His reflections on seed anatomy, sexual differentiation, and the distribution of the vegetative soul reveal an effort to reconcile observations in plant science with a rigorous philosophical approach. By integrating Hippocratic empiricism with Aristotelian natural philosophy, Dino del Garbo offers a rare contribution to medieval plant science-one that bridges medical theory, botanical physiology, and metaphysical inquiry.

Positional • Restraint • Asphyxia Dear Editors,We read with interest the article "Studying asphyxiation in the lab: the role of experimental evidence in cause-of-death inquiry" by Fischer and Jukola (Fischer & Jukola, 2026) recently published in the journal History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences.The authors unfortunately made a number of erroneous claims regarding the investigative studies conducted by our research group (as well as others) and we appreciate the opportunity to respond and provide a better understanding and history of the research on positional and restraint asphyxia.Fischer and Jukola attempt to argue that experimental evidence can identify "potential causes" but not "actual causes" of death (or exclude as such) in these cases citing the study by Reay in 1988 as the earliest experimental study suggesting asphyxia as a potential cause based on purported impacts on peripheral oxygenation saturation and heart rate of the prone maximal restraint position (PRMP) in test subjects (Reay et al., 1988).This study had a number of methodological issues including lack of randomization, inadequate measurement of oxygen levels, and statistical errors that led to questions regarding its validity.The authors then cite our study in 1996 in which we conducted specific respiratory measurements including pulmonary function testing as well as arterial blood oxygen and carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) measurements that did not find any impact on oxygenation and CO 2 levels-a sine qua non for asphyxiation risk (Chan et al.,

Theodore Chan and Gary Vilke criticize our arguments concerning a series of lab-based studies on asphyxiation. In this reply to their letter, we explain that Chan and Vilke's letter misrepresents our arguments in several important ways. We also clarify the notion of false advertising that we employed in our initial analysis and explain why some of the studies regarding asphyxiation represent instances of this problematic practice.

The ultimatum game (UG) and the dictator game (DG) are two of the most prominent tools in experimental and behavioural social sciences. Originally designed to study bargaining behaviour and decision-making in economics, these simple yet versatile scripts have come to be viewed by many as reliable instruments for measuring prosocial preferences, such as altruism, generosity, or sensitivity to social norms. Proponents of the measurement view have argued that the UG and DG serve as standardized "social thermometers," capable of revealing cultural and contextual differences in normative behaviour across diverse populations. For instance, the UG has been used to demonstrate the influence of institutional contexts and cultural norms on fairness expectations, while the DG has been described as a straightforward measure of altruism. In this paper, we critically examine the idea that the UG and DG function as robust measuring devices, raising key questions about their validity as tools of measurement. We argue that the constructs these games are purported to measure-ranging from prosociality to norm compliance-are often imprecisely defined and vary across studies, and this severely limits the sense in which the DG or the UG can be interpreted as measuring devices. By analysing the ontological and methodological challenges surrounding these games, we contend that the UG and DG are better understood as tools for exploratory experimentation rather than as reliable instruments for systematic measurement.

Driven by the shift towards online journal publishing, many academic journals have introduced graphical abstracts (GAs) since the 2000s to convey the primary findings of research papers. This study investigated this visual culture in life sciences by analyzing GAs with focus on content, representation, and background. In total, 333 GAs were collected from articles published in the journal Cell in 2021 and analyzed. Among these, 295 GAs (88.6%) explained the results and models and succinctly presented the key findings, and 251 GAs (75.4%) used a layout that divided the area into two or more sections. New graphics that were not present in the main text were featured in 222 GAs (66.7%), indicating substantial investment in their creation. The GAs shared commonalities with modern infographics commonly seen on the internet, which emphasize clarity. The increased used of GAs may be attributed to the need for "instant comprehension," which is an epistemic virtue reinforced by authors, readers, and journals and driven by the scientific self of "surviving researchers and journals" in a competitive scientific environment.

Rudolf Steiner's Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung (Outline of an Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview, 1886) seeks to articulate the epistemological foundations of Goethe's scientific method. Here I reconstruct the book with a particular focus on the cognition of organisms and read it in systematic relation to Kant, whose analysis of teleological judgment provides the clearest foil for Steiner's project. The guiding question is under what epistemic conditions living beings can become objects of genuine knowledge rather than merely regulative judgment. I reconstruct the argument in five steps: (1) pure experience as a structureless manifold; (2) thinking as a self-transparent and law-governed activity within experience; (3) cognition as the reunification of perception and concept under empirical constraint; (4) the contrast between inorganic and organic cognition; and (5) the claim that organisms can be understood through Goethe's concept of Typus, a developing method, and an intuitive power of judgment (anschauende Urteilskraft). Steiner's reconstruction of Goethe thus yields a position that transforms Kant's view of teleological judgment as merely regulative. A concluding section considers the relevance of this argument for current debates on organism-centred theoretical biology and the relation between subject and object in biological cognition. I suggest that Goethe's method as interpreted by Steiner deserves renewed attention as a systematic attempt to articulate the epistemological conditions of a participatory science of the organic.