Stephen Inkpen (Brandon University), Ford Doolittle (Dalhousie University)
Concepts of function and dysfunction are central to naturalistic accounts of health and disease, according to which an organism is in a diseased state when the normal functioning of one or more of its parts is impaired. We extend such an account to clinical microbiomics: diseases inflicting the gut, for example, are said to arise when normal microbial community functions localized in that region are impaired. We argue that these functional ascriptions can be understood as selected effects: the function of a microbial community is that community-level effect which explains the persistence of community interactions under "host" selection.
