OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The median citation count of Biology & Philosophy is 1. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2021-06-01 to 2025-06-01.)

Article	Citations
Pandemic and infodemic: the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 from a cultural evolutionary perspective	56
Epistemic enhancement, pastism, and fossil anomalies in paleontology and ichnology	39
Cognitive science meets the mark of the cognitive: putting the horse before the cart	34
The math is not the territory: navigating the free energy principle	33
Molecular-biological machines: a defense	31
Natural artificiality, niche construction, and the content-open mediation of human behavior	26
When can cultural selection explain adaptation?	25
Biological functions and dysfunctions: a selected dispositions approach	22
The selectionist rationale for evolutionary progress	15
What basic emotions really are: modularity, motivation, and behavioral variability	15
On geometric mean fitness: a reply to Takacs and Bourrat	13
Empirical adaptationism revisited: is it testable and is it worth testing?	11
Exploration and perspectival modelling with model organisms: developmental biology as a case study	11
What is the nature of stem cells? A unified dispositional framework	10
The integrative approach to inferring homology: morphology and development combined	10
The foundations of bet hedging	10
Justifying nature-based solutions	10
An even better ape? Comments on a better ape	9
Making sense of ‘genetic programs’: biomolecular Post–Newell production systems	9
Darwin and the golden rule: how to distinguish differences of degree from differences of kind using mechanisms	7
Proper functions: etiology without typehood	7
Putting races on the ontological map: a close look at Spencer’s ‘new biologism’ of race	7
What is foraging?	7
An argument for global realism about the units of selection	6
Populations, individuals, and biological race	6

Not functional yet a difference maker: junk DNA as a case study	6
Causes with material continuity	6
Teaching and the origin of the normativity	6
Niche construction and teleology: organisms as agents and contributors in ecology, development, and evolution	5
A co-constitutive analysis of individuation: three case studies from the biological sciences	5
What could cognition be, if not human cognition?: Individuating cognitive abilities in the light of evolution	5
A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms	5
Logical fallacies persist in invasion biology and blaming the messengers will not improve accountability in this field: a response to Frank et al.	5
All about levels: transposable elements as selfish DNAs and drivers of evolution	5
What are ecological mechanisms? Suggestions for a fine-grained description of causal mechanisms in invasion ecology	5
Positive Wild Animal Welfare	5
Developing the structure of laws in biology	5
Science and values in the biodiversity-ecosystem function debate	5
Is co-management a double-edged sword in the protected areas of Sundarbans mangrove?	5
Unknotting reciprocal causation between organism and environment	5
The problem of opportunity	4
The arithmetic mean of what? A Cautionary Tale about the Use of the Geometric Mean as a Measure of Fitness	4
An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems	4
Philosophy of science in practice in ecological model building	4
The ‘niche’ in niche-based theorizing: much ado about nothing	4
Cleaning, sculpting or preparing? Scientific knowledge in Caitlin Wylie’s preparing dinosaurs	4
Cultural evolution beyond the individual: what human collective knowledge adds to high fidelity copying	4
Neutral and niche theory in community ecology: a framework for comparing model realism	4
Beyond reduction and emergence: a framework for tailoring multiscale modeling techniques to specific contexts	4
Teleosemantics and the free energy principle	4
Correction to: Cultural intelligence, shared intentionality and human cognitive uniquenes	4
A personal tribute to Frans De Waal (1948–2024), who inspired the philosophy of animal minds	4
Assessing measures of animal welfare	4
The gradational nature of biological functions: lessons from genome biology	4
Against the generalised theory of function	4
Unifying statistically autonomous and mathematical explanations	4
Not by demography alone: Neanderthal extinction and null hypotheses in paleoanthropological explanation	3
DNA barcoding and the changing ontological commitments of taxonomy	3
Living systems are targeted: a challenge to the teleology of field theory	3
Response to critics	3
The argument from Evel (Knievel): daredevils and the free energy principle	3
Unlimited associative learning and the origins of consciousness: the missing point of view	3
Ecosystem health and malfunctions: an organisational perspective	3
Caring animals and care ethics	3
Demographic explanations of neanderthal extinction: a reply to Currie and Meneganzin	3
Commitment: From Hunting to Promising	3
An account of conserved functions and how biologists use them to integrate cell and evolutionary biology	2
Everything in moderation or moderating everything? Nutrient balancing in the context of evolution and cancer metabolism	2
Phylogenetically distant animals sleep: why do sleep researchers care?	2
Minimal residual disease: premises before promises	2
Dosis sola facit venenum: reconceptualising biological realism	2
A relic of design: against proper functions in biology	2
Iconic origins of language? An essay review of Steven Mithen’s The Language Puzzle (2024)	2
In praise of animals	2
Is there a need for consensus in aging biology?	2

A coarse-graining account of individuality: how the emergence of individuals represents a summary of lower-level evolutionary processes	2
Hypothesis-driven science in large-scale studies: the case of GWAS	2
Precis of A Better Ape	2
Sex by design: a new account of the animal sexes	2
The coordination dilemma for epidemiological modelers	2
The two faces of risk	2
From philosophy to anaesthesiology and back: an interdisciplinary reflection on the neural correlates of state consciousness	2
The learning-consciousness connection	2
Delineating dingoes: framing the domestication process as a landscape	2
The epistemological and conservation value of biological specimens	2
Cultural intelligence, shared intentionality and human cognitive uniquenes	2
Mechanism, autonomy and biological explanation	2
From depressed mice to depressed patients: a less “standardized” approach to improving translation	2
Humans, the Norm-Breakers	1
(Cat)egory mistake: the invalidity of animal shelter behavior assessments	1
Likeness-making and the evolution of cognition	1
Defending the importance of lineage-forming reproduction in evolution by natural selection	1
Correction to: Philosophy of science in practice in ecological model building	1
Epistemology and anomaly detection in astrobiology	1
An oak is an oak, or not? Understanding and dealing with confusion and disagreement in biological classification	1
Does the study of facilitation require a revision of the Hutchinsonian niche concept?	1
Gradualism, natural selection, and the randomness of mutation–fisher, Kimura, and Orr, connecting the dots	1
A more thought-ful ape?	1
Has social constructionism about race outlived its usefulness? Perspectives from a race skeptic	1
Epistemic commitments have no “Off” button: on the embodiment of commitments by way of model formulation	1
What is cognitive about ‘plant cognition’?	1
Emergentism in the biological framework: the case of fitness	1
Different kinds of data: samples and the relational framework	1
On conserving or remaking the natural world	1
The evolution of communication and language in the voices of nature	1
Rage against the what? The machine metaphor in biology	1
Sex eliminativism	1
Exo-autopoietic bodies: the quest for the theoretical identity of living beings	1
Two kinds of historical explanation in Evolutionary Biology	1
The evolution of reproductive characters: an organismal-relational approach	1
Social norms and superorganisms	1
Does nature learn? Information integration and rare events in systems of increasing complexity	1
The minimal role of the higher categories in biology	1
The role of social reinforcement in norm transmission and cultural evolution	1
The evolution of multispecies populations: a multilevel selection perspective	1
A critical review of plant sentience: moving beyond traditional approaches	1
Darwin’s empirical claim and the janiform character of fitness proxies	1
Evolvability: filling the explanatory gap between adaptedness and the long-term mathematical conception of fitness	1
Higher level constructive neutral evolution	1
Defining the niche for niche construction: evolutionary and ecological niches	1
Animal sentience and the Capabilities Approach to justice	1