Causation in Biology
May 29, 2021

Causation is at the heart of any scientific inquiry. I am interested in characterising this phenomenon both generally and more particularly in biological contexts. In particular, I have been interested in the concept of heritability, which is used in several subfields of biology. I have also developed several information theoretic measures of causation within the interventionist account and, more recently, proposed some ways to link information theory and the interventionist account to heritability.

Pierrick Bourrat
Senior Lecturer & DECRA Fellow
My research interests include the various concepts deployed in evolutionary theory, causation, and the interplay between biological and cultural evolution.
Publications
(2022). Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 94, 87–98
Qiaoying Lu,
Pierrick Bourrat
(2021). Measuring Causal Invariance Formally. Entropy, 23(6), 690.
Pierrick Bourrat
(2020). Causation and Single Nucleotide Polymorphism Heritability. Philosophy of Science, 87(5), 1073–1083.
Pierrick Bourrat
(2019). On Calcott’s permissive and instructive cause distinction. Biology & Philosophy, 34(1), 1.
Pierrick Bourrat
(2019). Variation of information as a measure of one-to-one causal specificity. European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 9(1), 11.
Pierrick Bourrat
(2019). Evolution is about Populations, but its Causes are about Individuals. Biological Theory, 14(4), 254–266.
Pierrick Bourrat
(2018). Have Causal Claims About the Gut Microbiome Been Over-Hyped? BioEssays, 40(12), 1800178.
Pierrick Bourrat
(2018). Natural selection and drift as individual-level causes of evolution. Acta Biotheoretica, 66(3), 159–176.
Pierrick Bourrat
(2017). Why the missing heritability might not be in the DNA. BioEssays, 39(7).
Pierrick Bourrat,
Qiaoying Lu,
Eva Jablonka
(2017). Dissolving the missing heritability problem. Philosophy of Science, 84(5), 1055–1067.
Pierrick Bourrat,
Qiaoying Lu
(2017). Interpreting Heritability Causally. Philosophy of Science, 84(1), 14–34.
Kate E. Lynch,
Pierrick Bourrat