Expanding the Reflex Beyond Nervous Systems: animal preparations, tropism, and the presumption of stimulus-response sufficiency – Matthew Sims – Macquarie University
Abstract: Contemporary biologists and philosophers often explain unicellular behaviour in terms of simple stimulus-response mechanisms, even where it appears to involve memory, learning, or context-sensitive evaluation. This talk traces one historical route by which exhaustive explanations in terms of reflex-like behaviour became presumptively available for organisms lacking nervous systems: the animal preparation experiments of eighteenth- and […]