So Long, and Thanks for All the Submissions

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

A little more than ten years ago I assumed the editorship of Biological Theory after the untimely death of its founding editor, my friend and colleague Werner Callebaut.^{Footnote 1} It was supposed to be a temporary stopgap, and being a biologist, not a philosopher, I anticipated a bumpy ride in presiding over a journal of conceptual issues in the life sciences. However, with the help of experienced advisors at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research (KLI; Biological Theory’s sponsoring institution)—Gerd Müller and Isabella Sarto-Jackson—and an exceptionally capable managing editor, Deborah Klosky, I found myself learning on the job and gladly stuck with it for a decade.

During this period, Biological Theory went from strength to strength, attracting papers by an increasing number of innovative scholars. Beyond its designated mission (shared with the KLI) of promoting explorations of the theoretical foundations of evolution and cognition research, the journal’s scope expanded to include subjects such as developmental and cancer biology, ecology and biodiversity, and even astrobiology. Under the rubrics of Classics, and Critical Concepts, in Biological Theory (features proposed by two early career researchers who became the respective section editors) our conception of biological theory came to include subjects as historically remote as Leonardo da Vinci’s foray into the mechanics of muscles, and as contemporary as the enigma of chromatin’s role in cell differentiation. Contributions to the journal have been at the forefront of the recent theoretical turns toward the material bases of biological agency and consciousness, and departures from purely adaptationist and selectionist models in evolutionary theory. The commitment of Biological Theory’s founding editor to resisting genetic determinism as the favored explanatory mode for living processes (including human social existence) has remained an abiding principle.

These intellectual activities do not occur in a social vacuum, however, and it is regrettable that the past decade has also witnessed a broad decline in public understanding of the biological sciences and the rise of inapt biotechnological applications. Policies based on scientifically flawed or unresolved concepts in these areas are typically driven by political and entrepreneurial ambitions. These have included dehumanization; forced expulsions and even exterminationist efforts based, in part, on unscientific notions of race and bloodline; the use of "low IQ" as a racial slur; and the punitive treatment of gender nonconforming individuals grounded in a naïve biopsychological essentialism. The targets of these policies are inevitably those who are already society’s most vulnerable.

Deceptive ideas have also been advanced, knowingly, by scientists promoting their professional prerogatives and commercial interests. This has included, for instance, sidelining by an influential (and interest-conflicted) group of virologists and allied governmental officials and journal editors of a proposal for the origin of the recent pandemic: namely that it may have resulted from a laboratory accident (some of the same scientists having credited this possibility privately while they were composing their public dismissals). Other examples are scientist-led business models that distort tenets of evolutionary and developmental biology. One is portraying the introduction of inferred ancestral gene sequences into members of extant species as "de-extinction." (One company’s principal scientist acknowledged it was no such thing in a July television interview, but said the claim helped them enlist investors.) Another is the representation of chemically manipulated tissue-derived human stem cells as "in vitro gametes," suitable for constructing gestation-ready embryos, a technology that seems to invite iatrogenic errors in the production of designer babies.

There is ample material in the pages of the last decade’s Biological Theory to contest the ideologies underlying these and related fraught activities and enterprises, not that, by any means, would our contributors be of one mind about them. But while the function of philosophers and theorists is, famously, to interpret the world, even if the challenge ultimately is to change it, the capacity of an informed public to mobilize well-posed, subtle arguments in attempts to do so is not helped by the suppression of education at all levels, and research, as is happening, for example, in the United States. My location in this influential venue inevitably colors my sense of a clouded near-future, but the optimism and wisdom implicit in the journal’s contributions provide hope of moving beyond it.

As the editorship of this journal passes to the esteemed evolutionary and behavioral theorist Kevin Lala, I have every confidence that he will keep Biological Theory shining brightly as our understanding of living systems grows ever more profound, and the world increasingly complex, over the coming years.