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 2021-03-01 to 2025-03-01.)

Article	Citations
Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the free energy principle in biology	53
Humans, the Norm-Breakers	31
Epistemic enhancement, pastism, and fossil anomalies in paleontology and ichnology	31
Commitment: From Hunting to Promising	29
A more thought-ful ape?	27
Science and values in the biodiversity-ecosystem function debate	22
Unlimited plasticity of embodied, cognitive subjects: a new playground for the UAL framework	21
Broadening the problem agenda of biological individuality: individual differences, uniqueness and temporality	20
The math is not the territory: navigating the free energy principle	18
Is free-energy minimisation the mark of the cognitive?	16
Out of our skull, in our skin: the Microbiota-Gut-Brain axis and the Extended Cognition Thesis	15
Higher level constructive neutral evolution	14
Roles of mitonuclear ecology and sex in conceptualizing evolutionary fitness	14
Niche construction and teleology: organisms as agents and contributors in ecology, development, and evolution	14
Cognitive functions are not reducible to biological ones: the case of minimal visual perception	11
Defining the niche for niche construction: evolutionary and ecological niches	11
The gay gene(s)? Rethinking the concept of sexual orientation in the context of science	11
Unlimited associative learning and the origins of consciousness: the missing point of view	10
A pluralistic framework for the psychology of norms	10
Ecosystem health and malfunctions: an organisational perspective	10
Unlimited associative learning and consciousness: further support and some caveats about a link to stress	10
Caring animals and care ethics	8
Introduction to niches and mechanisms in ecology and evolution	7
Is co-management a double-edged sword in the protected areas of Sundarbans mangrove?	7
Living systems are targeted: a challenge to the teleology of field theory	6

The evolution of reproductive characters: an organismal-relational approach	6
All about levels: transposable elements as selfish DNAs and drivers of evolution	6
A co-constitutive analysis of individuation: three case studies from the biological sciences	6
Pandemic and infodemic: the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 from a cultural evolutionary perspective	6
Behavioural ecology of sexual autonomy and the case of protection against risky courtship	6
Cognitive science meets the mark of the cognitive: putting the horse before the cart	6
Skepticism, the critical standpoint, and the origin of birds: a partial critique of Havstad and Smith (2019)	5
Two kinds of historical explanation in Evolutionary Biology	5
Emotionshaping: a situated perspective on emotionreading	5
What are ecological mechanisms? Suggestions for a fine-grained description of causal mechanisms in invasion ecology	5
Positive Wild Animal Welfare	5
Not by demography alone: Neanderthal extinction and null hypotheses in paleoanthropological explanation	5
Response to critics	5
What basic emotions really are: modularity, motivation, and behavioral variability	5
When can cultural selection explain adaptation?	4
Phylogenetically distant animals sleep: why do sleep researchers care?	4
Has social constructionism about race outlived its usefulness? Perspectives from a race skeptic	4
Neutral and niche theory in community ecology: a framework for comparing model realism	4
Gradualism, natural selection, and the randomness of mutation–fisher, Kimura, and Orr, connecting the dots	4
Darwin’s empirical claim and the janiform character of fitness proxies	4
Rage against the what? The machine metaphor in biology	4
A coarse-graining account of individuality: how the emergence of individuals represents a summary of lower-level evolutionary processes	4
Unknotting reciprocal causation between organism and environment	4
An oak is an oak, or not? Understanding and dealing with confusion and disagreement in biological classification	4
Evolvability: filling the explanatory gap between adaptedness and the long-term mathematical conception of fitness	4
Molecular-biological machines: a defense	4
The evolution of complex multicellularity in animals	4
What could cognition be, if not human cognition?: Individuating cognitive abilities in the light of evolution	4
Bacterial communication	3
Minimal residual disease: premises before promises	3
The learning-consciousness connection	3
Biological functions and dysfunctions: a selected dispositions approach	3
Perceptual awareness or phenomenal consciousness?A dilemma	3
How to do things with nonwords: pragmatics, biosemantics, and origins of language in animal communication	3
Sex eliminativism	3
Natural artificiality, niche construction, and the content-open mediation of human behavior	3
Frogs recognize prey: a causal-behavioral teleosemantics	3
Hypothesis-driven science in large-scale studies: the case of GWAS	3
Interventionism as a dangerously anthropocentric concept	3
Social norms and superorganisms	3
The arithmetic mean of what? A Cautionary Tale about the Use of the Geometric Mean as a Measure of Fitness	3
The selectionist rationale for evolutionary progress	3
When should researchers cite study differences in response to a failure to replicate?	3
Exo-autopoietic bodies: the quest for the theoretical identity of living beings	3
Correction to: A co-constitutive analysis of individuation: three case studies from the biological sciences	3
(Cat)egory mistake: the invalidity of animal shelter behavior assessments	3
Adaptive immunity or evolutionary adaptation? Transgenerational immune systems at the crossroads	3
Does the study of facilitation require a revision of the Hutchinsonian niche concept?	3
What is the nature of stem cells? A unified dispositional framework	2
Explanatory gaps in evolutionary theory	2

Justifying nature-based solutions	2
Empirical adaptationism revisited: is it testable and is it worth testing?	2
Standard aberration: cancer biology and the modeling account of normal function	2
Reliability models in cultural phylogenetics	2
Is there a need for consensus in aging biology?	2
Assessing measures of animal welfare	2
Everything in moderation or moderating everything? Nutrient balancing in the context of evolution and cancer metabolism	2
Attention explains the transition to unlimited associative learning better than consciousness	2
Beyond congruence: evidential integration and inferring the best evolutionary scenario	2
Epistemology and anomaly detection in astrobiology	2
On geometric mean fitness: a reply to Takacs and Bourrat	2
Epistemic commitments have no “Off” button: on the embodiment of commitments by way of model formulation	2
Tools of the trade: the bio-cultural evolution of the human propensity to trade	2
Natural information, factivity and nomicity	2
The integrative approach to inferring homology: morphology and development combined	2
An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems	1
The proximate-ultimate distinction and the active role of the organism in evolution	1
Cooperation, correlation and the evolutionary dominance of tag-based strategies	1
Beyond reduction and emergence: a framework for tailoring multiscale modeling techniques to specific contexts	1
Cleaning, sculpting or preparing? Scientific knowledge in Caitlin Wylie’s preparing dinosaurs	1
Learning and the biology of consciousness: a commentary on Birch, Ginsburg, and Jablonka	1
Assessing unlimited associative learning as a transition marker	1
Circadian clocks signal future states of affairs	1
Scaffolds and scaffolding: an explanatory strategy in evolutionary biology	1
Darwin and the golden rule: how to distinguish differences of degree from differences of kind using mechanisms	1
The value of and in novel ecosystem(s)	1
Reciprocal causation and biological practice	1
The extra ingredient	1
The living fossil concept: reply to Turner	1
An operational definition of biological development	1
From philosophy to anaesthesiology and back: an interdisciplinary reflection on the neural correlates of state consciousness	1
An account of conserved functions and how biologists use them to integrate cell and evolutionary biology	1
On conserving or remaking the natural world	1
Natural selection requires no teleology in addition to heritable variation in fitness	1
The foundations of bet hedging	1
What if worms were sentient? Insights into subjective experience from the Caenorhabditis elegans connectome	1
Causal-role myopia and the functional investigation of junk DNA	1
Caring animals and the ways we wrong them	1
Understanding immunity: an alternative framework beyond defense and strength	1
The problem of opportunity	1
Biolinguistics and biological systems: a complex systems analysis of language	1
Delineating dingoes: framing the domestication process as a landscape	1
An even better ape? Comments on a better ape	1
A critical review of plant sentience: moving beyond traditional approaches	1
Exploration and perspectival modelling with model organisms: developmental biology as a case study	1
A personal tribute to Frans De Waal (1948–2024), who inspired the philosophy of animal minds	1
Affordances and organizational functions	1
Animal sentience and the Capabilities Approach to justice	1
The case of poor postpartum mental health: a consequence of an evolutionary mismatch – not of an evolutionary trade-off	1
Putting races on the ontological map: a close look at Spencer’s ‘new biologism’ of race	1