I develop a constructivist account of the ecosystem health concept. I argue that plausible naturalist accounts of ecosystem health are unsuccessful—they do not accurately track and explain common judgments about ecosystem health. I show that specific values pertaining to aesthetics, authenticity, and human wellbeing help explain contemporary judgments about ecosystem health. Some implications of this position are that empirical research on ecological health is importantly value-laden; that judgments about ecological health are sensitive to anthropocentric preferences; and that ecosystem health is not a nonanthropocentric management target.

Racial health disparities are a pervasive problem in the United States. While these disparities are mainly due to structural racism, genomicists have been attempting to find a genetic cause to these largely social problems. Disparities in disease rate and outcomes for asthma and diabetes present opportunities for analyzing the different techniques embodied by genomicists and population health experts. In this paper, I carve out a middle path between genomicists and their critics, highlighting drug disparities, a small subset of larger racial disparities, which might be targeted through pharmacogenomics.

There are two problems in the history and philosophy of genetics that seem to be related. One is the problem of causal selection in cellular and developmental processes. The other is the general approach of seeking genetic explanations, characterized by Ken Waters (2006) as ‘gene centrism.’ I argue that to understand this connection, we must consider the proximity of explanatory targets to DNA sequence. While the success of the genetic approach for proximate explanatory targets may be explained by the causal properties of DNA, its success for distal targets is better explained by the availability of the genetic framework itself.

Scientists engage in relative significance controversies when they investigate the importance of a cause in producing a phenomenon of interest. In order to engage in these controversies, however, a reference class must be specified. In what follows, I explore how the problem of reference class choice arises in controversies in evolutionary biology. Then, I describe different approaches to justifying choice in reference class. Finally, I explore how the problem of reference class has hindered research on the evolution of senescence and suggest some ways in which progress may be made.