The Leveled World: The Role of Levels of Organization in Biological Thought

• Applicant: Daniel Brooks, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 453040431

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

This project encompassed a systematic analysis, from a history and philosophy of biology perspective, of the concept of levels of organization in biological thought. The primary motivation of this project was to address basic questions concerning the concept’s nature, significance, character, and history. Applications of the term are typically developed for narrow applications within embedding philosophical debates concerning, e.g., interlevel constitution, downward causation, multilevel explanation, and whether the constituents of the world reduce to a fundamental level. The primary motivation of this project was thus especially justified in that scientific sources rarely clarify why exactly they appeal to levels of organization, relying instead on the concept’s already widespread appeal and ubiquitous application across the scientific enterprise. The lacuna in the philosophical and biological literature concerning the concept’s origins, its meanings, and uses in science were addressed by my efforts over a period of three years spanning 2021-2024. The work produced during this project furnishes a thorough grounding of the levels concept from historical and contemporary scientific sources, thus providing answers to basic questions surrounding the levels concept in biology and its philosophy. First, I attended to conceptual issues concerning the concept’s character, i.e. how it is used, in science. Second, I attended to the history of the concept, especially in 20th century biology. Finally, I attended to the nature of levels of organization in biology. These three contributions, which comprise the contents of two emerging monographs, provide a sustained and thorough analysis that addresses the lacuna surrounding the levels concept in the scientific and philosophical literature. Ultimately, the research generated by this project reveals a deeper appeal of the concept of levels. As I conclude in one article: “The concept systematically secures as legitimate the status of non-fundamental structures and processes in nature by threading a material continuity between increasingly basic and more complicated forms of matter. This continuity is purchased through a core insight provided by the idea of levels, namely that as physical matter aggregates across certain scale thresholds, it manifests new behaviors, new configurations, and new identities that require different scientific approaches to investigate it. That is, matter becomes organized. Moreover, this vision of nature is not privileged to any one discipline, science, or perspective; rather, the levels concept accommodates, and even requires, a wide division of labor as necessary for living up to its potential. It is an apparatus not unlike cell theory or the germ theory of disease, but for the whole of biology. Uncovering the workings of living matter at all scales is a widely open-ended project, but a grand vision for this work finds shelter under the levels concept”.

Publications

• Adaptive Design, Contingency, and Ontological Principles for Limited Beings. Philosophy of Science, 88(5), 871-881.
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “Adaptive Design, Contingency, and Ontological Principles for Limited Beings”; Philosophy of Science Association (PSA) Biennial Meeting; Baltimore, Maryland, USA November 2021
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “The Organicist Roots of the Levels Concept, 1910-1937”; History of Science Society (HSS) Biennial Meeting; New Orleans, Louisiana, USA November 2021
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “Leveling the World: The Stratified Image of Nature’s Organization”; Return of the Organism (ROTO) Colloquium Series; Ruhr University Bochum, January 2022
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “Levels of What? Busting the Shell Game Surrounding the Levels Concept”; Deep South Philosophy of Neuroscience Meeting V; Pensacola, Florida, USA September 2022
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “Open-ended Problems, Content Acquisition, and Ambiguity in Scientific Reasoning”; Berlin Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin); Berlin, Germany October 2022
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “The Heuristic Road to Robustness”; Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice; Ghent, Belgium July 2022
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “The Organism as Metaphor: Negotiations of Standards and Adequacy in Conceptualizing Scientific Phenomena”; ROTO Workshop “The Place of the Organism in Biology & Medicine”; Bochum, Germany November 2022
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• Themes of Consolidation in Eugene P. Odum’s Publicization of the Levels Concept in Ecology Textbooks, 1953–1975. Perspectives on Science, 31(4), 437-464.
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “Biological Agency without Levels.” Spontaneous Generations, 11(1)
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen & Baedke, Jan
  
• “Levels of Organization in Biology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  Eronen, Markus I. & Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “Levels of What?: Disambiguating the Levels Concept”; International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB); Toronto, Canada 2023
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen
  
• “Respectful Denunciation, Peaceful Incitement, and Productive Frustration”: the Wonderfully Subversive Project of Hasok Chang’s Realism for Realistic People. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 56(1), 143-147.
  Brooks, Daniel Stephen