Jonathan Birch

About

I'm an Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, specializing in the philosophy of the biological and behavioural sciences. My work mainly concerns the evolution of social behaviour, though I have also written on innateness, teleology, signalling and the “major evolutionary transitions”.

3rd-Person Bio / CV / ”Meet the Faculty” Video

Jonathan Birch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science, specializing in the philosophy of the biological and behavioural sciences.

He joined the LSE in 2014. Before moving to London, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, Cambridge. He completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2013, with a dissertation entitled Kin Selection: A Philosophical Analysis.

His recent work mainly concerns the evolution and psychology of social behaviour, and he has a particular interest in the conceptual foundations of inclusive fitness theory. He has also published articles on innateness, signalling, teleology, self-locating belief and the “major evolutionary transitions”. He is currently working on his first monograph, The Philosophy of Social Evolution.

In 2014, he was one of four UK philosophers honoured with a Philip Leverhulme Prize, which recognize “the achievement of outstanding researchers whose work has already attracted international recognition and whose future career is exceptionally promising”.

Blog posts, etc.

2016. There Is No Such Thing as a Truly Selfless Act. A BBC Earth article for which I was interviewed.

2015. The Evolution of Cultures, Human and Microbial. LSE Philosophy Blog.

2015. Where Does Altruism Come From? LSE Philosophy Blog.

2015. Darwinian Conundrums. Interview with 3am Magazine.

2014. The “Cell State” Revived? Auxiliary Hypotheses Blog.

Other activities

1. I’m the treasurer of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science. To see what we do and, more importantly, what we fund, visit us at thebsps.org.

2. I’m a Fellow of the Forum for European Philosophy. The Forum is an educational charity which runs public philosophy events in London, and I organize some of these events. To see what’s coming up soon, and to access our huge archive of free audio recordings of past events, visit the Forum’s website. See below for direct links to recordings of some of my recent events.

Recent Forum events

2016. Hive Minds: Collective Intelligence in Humans and Other Animals, with Elli Leadbeater, Larissa Conradt and Christian List.

2016. Evolution and Moral Progress, with Allen Buchanan, Catherine Wilson and Jason McKenzie Alexander.

2015. Will Machines Rule the World?, with Huw Price, Mateja Jamnik, Kate Devlin and Mark Sprevak.

2015. Gender and the Brain, with Gina Rippon and John Dupré.

Acknowledgement

Thanks to Bryan Roberts, who designed the template for this website.

Research

Find my articles on PhilPapers and Google Scholar.

Journal articles

Forthcoming. Hamilton's Two Conceptions of Social Fitness. Philosophy of Science. 1-Line Summary

Inclusive fitness has distinctive advantages over neighbour-modulated fitness for understanding social adaptation.

2016. Natural Selection and the Maximization of Fitness. Biological Reviews 91:712-727. 1-Line Summary

I distinguish four varieties of the idea that fitness is “maximized” by natural selection and argue that none is theoretically supported.

2015 (with Samir Okasha). Kin Selection and Its Critics. BioScience 65:22-32 (Open Access). 1-Line Summary

An overview of recent controversies surrounding the idea of “kin selection” and its relationship to “multi-level selection”.

2014. Gene Mobility and the Concept of Relatedness. Biology and Philosophy 29:445-476. 1-Line Summary

Recent developments in microbiology should cause us to rethink the concept of "genetic relatedness" in microbes.

2014. Hamilton’s Rule and Its Discontents. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65:381-411 (Open Access). 1-Line Summary

An analysis of the philosophical assumptions underlying a recent dispute about the status of kin selection.

2014. Propositional Content in Signalling Systems. Philosophical Studies 171:493-512. 1-Line Summary

I argue for an amendment to Skyrms’s account of propositional content in signalling systems, in order to make room for the possibility of false propositional content.

2014 (with James A. R. Marshall). Queller’s Separation Condition Explained and Defended. American Naturalist 184:531-540. 1-Line Summary

We argue for the “formal equivalence” of phenotypic formulations of inclusive fitness theory and multi-level selection theory, exposing some errors in a recent challenge to this equivalence.

2013. On the ‘Simulation Argument’ and Selective Scepticism. Erkenntnis 78:95-107. 1-Line Summary

Bostrom’s notorious “simulation argument” does not constrain one’s rational degree of belief in the proposition that one is simulated, unless one already accepts an implausible form of selective scepticism.

2012. Collective Action in the Fraternal Transitions. Biology and Philosophy 27:363-380. 1-Line Summary

Considerations concerning the task-structure of cooperation can shed light on the evolution of both multicellular organisms and eusocial insect colonies.

2012. Robust Processes and Teleological Language. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3:299-312. 1-Line Summary

Teleological language occurs in physical as well as biological sciences, and it provides a convenient way of describing the robust convergence of population-level processes on particular end-points.

2012. The Negative View of Natural Selection. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43:569-573. 1-Line Summary

On Michael Strevens’s account of explanatory relevance, natural selection is relevant to explaining the traits of individual organisms, at least in some contexts.

2009. Irretrievably Confused? Innateness in Explanatory Context. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40:296-301. 1-Line Summary

I argue for a contrastive account of innateness, on which innateness ascriptions imply that environmental mechanisms did not make the difference between the actual developmental outcome and a class of relevant alternatives.

Commentaries

2014. Has Grafen Formalized Darwin? (Commentary on A. Grafen, “The Formal Darwinism Project in Outline”). Biology and Philosophy 29:175-180.

Book reviews

2014. How Cooperation Became the Norm (Essay review of Cooperation and Its Evolution, ed. K. Sterelny et al.). Biology and Philosophy 29:433-444.

2013. Review of Evolution and Rationality, ed. S. Okasha and K. Binmore. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64:669-673.

2013. Explaining the Human Syndrome (Review of K. Sterelny: The Evolved Apprentice). Metascience 22:347-350.

2012. Social Revolution (Essay review of A. F. G. Bourke: Principles of Social Evolution). Biology and Philosophy 27:571-581.