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Leonardo Bich

@leonardobich.bsky.social

460 followers 490 following 46 posts

Associate Research Professor at the IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind and Society of the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Spain. https://leonardobich.wordpress.com/ https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Leonardo-Bich

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Dec 5

My Element on "BIological Organization" is finally out!
And it is open access!
@dialecticalsys.bsky.social #philbio

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Biological Organization

Cambridge Core - Philosophy: General Interest - Biological Organization

www.cambridge.org

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Dialectical Systems @dialecticalsys.bsky.social · 1d

How did regulation and agency arise before genes?

Shirt-Ediss et al. model evolving protocell ecologies with the Araudia platform—showing how simple metabolic systems can “learn” to adapt to changing environments

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

New Paper (2025): Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies - Dialectical Systems

How could the first living systems learn to regulate themselves before the emergence of genes? In their new paper, Ben Shirt-Ediss, Arián Ferrero-Fernández, Daniele De Martino, Leonardo Bich, Álvaro M...

dialecticalsystems.eu

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · 1d

Instead of seeing health as maintaining stable/balanced states, it proposes viewing it as adaptive change - the organism's ability to modify itself in relation to varying internal and external conditions.

Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · 1d

The paper challenges the traditional "stability-focused" view of homeostasis in medicine and the idea of health as balance.
It reframes the notion of homeostasis from cybernetic feedback models to dynamic regulation and apply it to rethink health beyond balance.

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · 1d

Happy to announce our new paper co-authored with @lauramenatti.bsky.social on the relationship between homeostasis and health just published open access in
Biological Theory!

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Homeostasis and Health: From Balance to Change - Biological Theory

All living systems need to regulate themselves and coordinate the activities of their parts to maintain themselves under changing conditions. Historically, homeostasis is one of the central ideas that...

link.springer.com

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Dialectical Systems @dialecticalsys.bsky.social · 13d

📖 New Book Out

Alvaro Moreno & Juli Peretó explore the major transitions in biological agency—from origins of life to metazoans—showing how agency drives the evolution of biological complexity

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · 14d

the paper is part of a special issue on "Origins of life: the possible and the actual" with many interesting contributions
royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/202...

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences: Vol 380, No 1936

royalsocietypublishing.org

Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · 14d

The first author Ben Shirt-Ediss wrote an interesting blog post discussing the main points of this research
shirt-ediss.me/blog/araudia/

Simulating the Origins of Purposeful Behaviour in Evolving Protocell Ecologies | Blog

shirt-ediss.me

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · 14d

Exploring the origin of regulation in prebiotic evolution, with implications for the emergence of adaptive agency, plasticity and evolvability

Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · 14d

New paper: "Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies"
Happy to have participated in this work!

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...

Modelling the prebiotic origins of regulation and agency in evolving protocell ecologies | Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

How and why did natural systems develop the first mechanisms of regulation? How could they turn into adaptive agents in a minimal (though deeply meaningful) biological sense? A novel simulation platform, Araudia, has been implemented to address these ...

royalsocietypublishing.org

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Dialectical Systems @dialecticalsys.bsky.social · 20d

Dialectical Biology Today: Legacies of Richard Lewontin

A hybrid conference bringing together voices old and new to revisit how The Dialectical Biologist still resonates, and reinvigorates, contemporary biology

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/events/diale...

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

ISHPSSB2025 @ishpssb2025.bsky.social · Jul 17

#ISHPSSB2925 program booklet is out! Check it out here ishpssb2025.icbas.up.pt/wp-content/u...
#hpbio #philsci #histstm #histsci #philbio #hbio #sts

Cover of the program booklet for ISHPSSB 2025.

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Jul 18

Heading to #ishpssb2025 #ish2025 to present our paper coauthored with @lauramenatti.bsky.social “Homeostasis and Health: from balance to change” recently accepted for publication in Biological Theory

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Dialectical Systems @dialecticalsys.bsky.social · Jun 17

Today we celebrate the new edition of Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) from MIT Press, with a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo & Evan Thompson, reconnecting Varela's legacy in cognitive science to his theoretical biology

dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

New edition of Principles of Biological Autonomy - Dialectical Systems

Today, we celebrate the new publication of Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) by MIT Press, now accompanied by a new critical apparatus by Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson.Varela’s ideas cont...

dialecticalsystems.eu

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Laura Menatti @lauramenatti.bsky.social · Jun 12

Next week, thrilled to go back to #Paris #sciencespo to give a talk about 'Landscapes and medical spaces: psychological and philosophical perspectives' #health #natural and #built #environments #landscape #philosophy #psychology.

www.sciencespo.fr/institut-tra...

AIRE Annual Conference

This event will assemble the burgeoning environmental research community at Sciences Po, along with external partners. The agenda includes three panel sessions, a lunch, two keynote lectures and a clo...

www.sciencespo.fr

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Dialectical Systems @dialecticalsys.bsky.social · Jun 10

Embodied & enactive approaches aren’t just about individual cognition — they’re about society.

A new Mind & Society special issue brings enactivism into conversation with ethics, social theory & political philosophy.

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/publications...

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Dialectical Systems @dialecticalsys.bsky.social · Apr 10

Henry Potter and @wiringthebrain.bsky.social challenge reductive views in neuroscience by introducing richer, temporally extended notions of causality and arguing to re-center cognition and the organism as genuine causal agents in behavior

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Beyond Mechanism—Extending Our Concepts of Causation in Neuroscience

The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Dialectical Systems @dialecticalsys.bsky.social · Mar 27

Adaptivity is central to life, yet conceptually homeless. While adaptation is tied to selection, adaptivity is an ongoing organismal process—rooted in metabolism, not just evolutionary causation

www.dialecticalsystems.eu/contribution...

The Philosophy of Adaptivity - Dialectical Systems

At the core of life is adaptivity, the organismal process of adjusting to ever-changing conditions. But despite its centrality, adaptivity is a surprisingly lonely concept. Its most immediate lexical ...

www.dialecticalsystems.eu

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Mar 24

Asking for a friend: Has it ever happened to you that a manuscript had been ‘awaiting decision’ for 4 months? No replies from the editors. This is problematic especially for non-tenured scholars.

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Laura Menatti @lauramenatti.bsky.social · Mar 22

yes, it's me! Also in French #paris #philosophy #ihpst #sorbonne after two months of visiting and becoming associated here 📚✨ ihpst.pantheonsorbonne.fr/actualite/po...

Portrait de Laura Menatti - chercheuse invitée - IHPST

Laura Menatti est une chercheuse interdisciplinaire en philosophie des sciences et de la médecine, spécialisée dans la théorie et l'épistémologie du paysage et l'urbanisme. Titulaire de deux doctorats...

ihpst.pantheonsorbonne.fr

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Reposted by Leonardo Bich

Laura Menatti @lauramenatti.bsky.social · Mar 10

🥳Happy to share I've been appointed as an associate researcher at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST), Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne & CNRS. #philsci #science #philosophy #Paris ihpst.pantheonsorbonne.fr lauramenatti.weebly.com/about-me.html

IHPST | IHPST

ihpst.pantheonsorbonne.fr

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Mar 5

Thanks! You are too kind!

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Mar 4

and that Bernard and Cannon embraced a far broader understanding that can accommodate the alternatives advanced by the critics and provide an integrated theoretical framework for physiology.

Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Mar 4

We argue that the critics target a much narrower understanding of homeostasis put forward by the cyberneticists

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Mar 4

Nonetheless, critics have argued that homeostasis is too limiting and have advanced a variety of alternative concepts such as heterostasis, rheostasis, and allostasis.

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Leonardo Bich @leonardobich.bsky.social · Mar 4

Since Cannon, inspired by Bernard’s discussion of the conditions required for free and independent life, introduced the term homeostasis, many have embraced it as the main theoretical principle guiding physiology and medicine. #philbio #philmed

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