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Transdisciplinary research knits together knowledge from diverse epistemic communities in addressing social-environmental challenges, such as biodiversity loss, climate crises, food insecurity, and public health. This article reflects on the roles of philosophy of science in transdisciplinary research while focusing on Indigenous and other subjugated forms of knowledge. We offer a critical assessment of demarcationist approaches in philosophy of science and outline a constructive alternative of transdisciplinary philosophy of science. While a focus on demarcation obscures the complex relations between epistemic communities, transdisciplinary philosophy of science provides resources for meeting epistemic and political challenges of collaborative knowledge production.

In this paper, we discuss elements of a theoretical framework for intercultural education as dialogue between knowledge systems, both in general terms and in the specific domain of science education. This framework synthesizes outcomes of theoretical and philosophical studies with contributions from practical experiences in artisanal fishing communities, also involving collaborative work with primary education teachers for developing and investigating educational innovations within a community of practice.

Transdisciplinary approaches combining technical perspectives with qualitative insights from the social sciences and non-academic stakeholders have emerged as a promising way to address the complexity of current socioenvironmental crises. However, transdisciplinary incorporation of diverse interests, knowledge, and worldviews requires acknowledging and addressing inherent inequities. Our case study combines two complementary transdisciplinary studies, the first conducted by a biologist/ecologist being trained in inter- and transdisciplinary methods at the time of the study, applying a quick participatory diagnosis in a fishing community, while the second is conducted by a social scientist studying the research group itself. Our results allow an exploration of the challenges and possibilities of navigating from transdisciplinary ideals to practical implementation. Our findings highlight the importance of nurturing relationships built on care, reciprocity, and openness to address the power imbalances inherent in university-community participatory practices. We suggest that the community’s autonomy and agency can be preserved while actively engaging its members in the transdisciplinary process, alleviating power differences and fostering a collaborative and equitable transdisciplinary framework. Overall, we emphasize the significance of integrating participatory methods, critical reflexivity, and attention to power dynamics in realizing the potential of transdisciplinary approaches for addressing complex conservation challenges and fostering meaningful community engagement.

This article explores ways to promote symmetrical dialogue among knowledge-practices of artisanal fishing communities, primary education teachers, and academic researchers in the state of Bahia, Brazil. We describe multiple engagements in an inter- and transdisciplinary project that integrates research, educational, and conservation activities in two communities living in an estuarine ecosystem. Most community members dedicate their efforts to fishing activities, harboring wide knowledge about local biocultural diversity. The project promotes collaborative inclusion of local expertise and knowledge in school activities, while also striving for the inhabitants’ inclusion in the planning of protected areas. The collaboration aims at symmetrical dialogues between researchers and communities that support self-determination in local school education and biodiversity conservation. Challenges to such symmetrization, including disagreements and tensions among diverse actors, not only appear in encounters of local and academic knowledge, but also within the interdisciplinary project involving natural sciences, social sciences, and philosophy.

No Brasil, o estabelecimento da política de defeso não tem levado em conta os conhecimentos de pescadoresartesanais, que são, comumente, marginalizados e não reconhecidos perante às políticas públicas que os atingem.Em nossos estudos, encontramos uma marcada incompatibilidade entre o conhecimento de pescadores artesanaisdo estuário do rio Itapicuru, litoral norte da Bahia, sobre o período reprodutivo de algumas espécies marinhasutilizadas como recursos pesqueiros e os períodos de defeso estabelecidos em lei. Os conhecimentos dos pesca-dores sugerem que duas espécies de robalo bem como quatro espécies de camarão estão sendo protegidas emperíodos do ano dissonantes da época reprodutiva percebida pelos pescadores. Propomos, assim, uma mudançanos procedimentos de tomada de decisão subjacentes às legislações de defeso, assim como a revisão da legislaçãoespecífica para robalos e camarões, levando-se em conta o conhecimento de especialistas tradicionais. Especial-mente na formulação de novas políticas de defeso, consideramos fundamental a participação destes últimos. Paraalcançar uma compreensão mais robusta e precisa da situação, propomos colocar em diálogo o conhecimentocientífico acadêmico e os conhecimentos de pescadores artesanais, em uma abordagem de pesquisa participativa.Processos participativos como os que propomos aqui e, eventualmente, de coprodução do conhecimento, não sópermitem melhorar as práticas de gestão e conservação ambiental e formulação de políticas públicas, mas tam-bém podem desempenhar um papel de empoderamento para comunidades pesqueiras, assim como para outrospovos do campo e povos indígenas.

Sustainable fishing is one of the most pressing challenges for mankind and requires insightful knowledge of the drivers that may foster or hinder predatory exploitation. It has been widely recognized that Indigenous and local knowledge can contribute to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use of resources, such as fisheries, worldwide. Nevertheless such knowledge continues to be marginalized and unacknowledged by a range of academic scientists and policy makers. In the present paper, we tackle this issue by discussing laws regarding closed fishing seasons, which are part of the Brazilian environmental policies for protecting marine fauna, from the perspective of artisanal fishers’ knowledge. In Brazil, these laws are typically based on governmental decisions (i.e., by administrative organizations and researchers acting as consultants) without taking fishers’ knowledge into account. Through semi-structured interviews with traditional experts of fishing villages situated along the northeast coast of Brazil, we aimed to investigate their knowledge of fish reproductive periods and analyze how it is related to the closed seasons at work in their region. We found an exact agreement between fishers’ knowledge and closed season regulations on the reproductive period of the mangrove crab (Ucides cordatus), but a conflict regarding the reproductive period of two snook species and four species of shrimps. We highlight the potential of fishers’ knowledge contributions to environmental regulations and we also explore three challenges of incorporating epistemic diversity in environmental policy. We conclude by advocating for a reflexive transdisciplinarity that highlights the potential of Indigenous and local knowledge while critically reflecting on the methodological and political challenges of transdisciplinary practices.

Ethnobiology has become increasingly concerned with applied and normative issues, such as climate change adaptation, forest management, and sustainable agriculture. Applied ethnobiology emphasizes the practical importance of local and traditional knowledge in tackling these issues but thereby also raises complex theoretical questions about the integration of heterogeneous knowledge systems. The aim of this article is to develop a framework for addressing questions of integration through four core domains of philosophy - epistemology, ontology, value theory, and political theory. In each of these dimensions, we argue for a model of "partial overlaps" that acknowledges both substantial similarities and differences between knowledge systems. While overlaps can ground successful collaboration, their partiality requires reflectivity about the limitations of collaboration and co-creation. By outlining such a general and programmatic framework, the article aims to contribute to developing "philosophy of ethnobiology" as a field of interdisciplinary exchange that provides new resources for addressing foundational issues in ethnobiology and also expands the agenda of philosophy of biology.

Genetic determinism can be described as the attribution of the formation of traits to genes, where genes are ascribed more causal power than what scientific consensus suggests. Belief in genetic determinism is an educational problem because it contradicts scientific knowledge, and is a societal problem because it has the potential to foster intolerant attitudes such as racism and prejudice against sexual orientation. In this article, we begin by investigating the very nature of belief in genetic determinism. Then, we investigate whether knowledge of genetics and genomics is associated with beliefs in genetic determinism. Finally, we explore the extent to which social factors such as gender, education, and religiosity are associated with genetic determinism. Methodologically, we gathered and analyzed data on beliefs in genetic determinism, knowledge of genetics and genomics, and social variables using the "Public Understanding and Attitudes towards Genetics and Genomics" (PUGGS) instrument. Our analyses of PUGGS responses from a sample of Brazilian university freshmen undergraduates indicated that (1) belief in genetic determinism was best characterized as a construct built up by two dimensions or belief systems: beliefs concerning social traits and beliefs concerning biological traits; (2) levels of belief in genetic determination of social traits were low, which contradicts prior work; (3) associations between knowledge of genetics and genomics and levels of belief in genetic determinism were low; and (4) social factors such as age and religiosity had stronger associations with beliefs in genetic determinism than knowledge. Although our study design precludes causal inferences, our results raise questions about whether enhancing genetic literacy will decrease or prevent beliefs in genetic determinism.

This article intends to show that the defense of “understanding” as one of the major goals of science education can be grounded on an anti-reductionist perspective on testimony as a source of knowledge. To do so, we critically revisit the discussion between Harvey Siegel and Alvin Goldman about the goals of science education, especially where it involves arguments based on the epistemology of testimony. Subsequently, we come back to a discussion between Charbel N. El-Hani and Eduardo Mortimer, on the one hand, and Michael Hoffmann, on the other, striving to strengthen the claim that rather than students’ belief change, understanding should have epistemic priority as a goal of science education. Based on these two lines of discussion, we conclude that the reliance on testimony as a source of knowledge is necessary to the development of a more large and comprehensive scientific understanding by science students., Brazil. National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Grant 312567/2013-8)

The aim of this paper is to investigate in a systematic and comparative way the results of independent studies on the treatment of genes and gene function in high school textbooks from six different countries. We analyze how the conceptual variation within the scientific domain of Genetics regarding gene function models and gene concepts is transformed via the didactic transposition into school science textbooks. The findings indicate that a common textbook discourse on genes and their function exists in textbooks from the different countries. The structure of science as represented by conceptual variation and the use of multiple models was present in all the textbooks. However, the phenomenon of conceptual variation and multiple models is implicit in these textbooks and this brings, as a consequence, the introduction of conceptual incoherence about the gene concept and gene function models within these resources. We conclude that within the textbook discourse on genes found in our study ontological aspects of the academic disciplines of Genetics and Molecular Biology were retained, but without their epistemological underpinnings; these are lost in the didactic transposition. Also within the textbooks explanatory models and concepts that promote a deterministic notion of the gene were found to be most frequent. These results are of interest since students might have problems reconstructing the correct scientific understanding from the transformed school science knowledge as depicted within the high school textbooks. Implications for textbook writing as well as science teaching are discussed in the paper.

This paper proposes a new method to identify communities in generally weighted complex networks and apply it to phylogenetic analysis. In this case, weights correspond to the similarity indexes among protein sequences, which can be used for network construction so that the network structure can be analyzed to recover phylogenetically useful information from its properties. The analyses discussed here are mainly based on the modular character of protein similarity networks, explored through the Newman-Girvan algorithm, with the help of the neighborhood matrix . The most relevant networks are found when the network topology changes abruptly revealing distinct modules related to the sets of organisms to which the proteins belong. Sound biological information can be retrieved by the computational routines used in the network approach, without using biological assumptions other than those incorporated by BLAST. Usually, all the main bacterial phyla and, in some cases, also some bacterial classes corresponded totally (100%) or to a great extent (>70%) to the modules. We checked for internal consistency in the obtained results, and we scored close to 84% of matches for community pertinence when comparisons between the results were performed. To illustrate how to use the network-based method, we employed data for enzymes involved in the chitin metabolic pathway that are present in more than 100 organisms from an original data set containing 1,695 organisms, downloaded from GenBank on May 19, 2007. A preliminary comparison between the outcomes of the network-based method and the results of methods based on Bayesian, distance, likelihood, and parsimony criteria suggests that the former is as reliable as these commonly used methods. We conclude that the network-based method can be used as a powerful tool for retrieving modularity information from weighted networks, which is useful for phylogenetic analysis.

Este trabajo propone el desarrollo de intervenciones didácticas que usen la historia del racismo científico —y la posterior deconstrucción del concepto biológico de raza por parte de la Genética moderna— como punto de partida para reflexionar sobre la naturaleza del conocimiento científico y la función social de las tecnociencias. Se presentan principios de diseño de intervenciones didácticas que consideren tales aspectos, para que los estudiantes desarrollen una visión más equilibrada de la naturaleza histórica de la ciencia y la complejidad de las relaciones entre ciencia, tecnología y sociedad (CTS), de forma que el reconocimiento de sus importantísimas contribuciones sociales no impida una valoración crítica de sus implicaciones prácticas en la vida social.