The latter half of thetwentieth century has been marked by debates inevolutionary biology over the relativesignificance of natural selection and randomdrift: the so-called Yet John Beatty has argued that it isdifficult, if not impossible, to…
Philosophy of Biology
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2,448 papers
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Skipper and Millstein (2005) argued that existing conceptions of mechanisms failed to get at natural selection but left open the possibility that a refined conception of mechanisms could resolve the problems that they identified. I respond to…
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The central point of this essay is to demonstrate the incommensurability of 'Darwinian fitness' with the numeric values associated with reproductive rates used in population genetics. While sometimes both are called 'fitness', they are distinct…
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Biologists studying complex causal systems typically identify some factors as causes and treat other factors as background conditions. For example, when geneticists explain biological phenomena, they often foreground genes and relegate the cellular…
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To be rational is to be able to reason. Thirty years ago psychologists believed that human reasoning depended on formal rules of inference akin to those of a logical calculus. This hypothesis ran into difficulties, which led to an alternative view:…
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Making Sense of Evolution explores contemporary evolutionary biology, focusing on the elements of theoriesselection, adaptation, and speciesthat are complex and open to multiple possible interpretations, many of which are incompatible with one…
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Multicellular organisms probably originated as groups of cells formed in several ways, including cell proliferation from a group of founder cells and aggregation. Cooperation among cells benefits the group, but may be costly (altruistic) or…
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Evolutionary processes such as natural selection and random drift are commonly regarded as causes of population-level change. We respond to a recent challenge that drift and selection are best understood as statistical trends, not causes. Our reply…
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Cooperation in organisms, whether bacteria or primates, has been a difficulty for evolutionary theory since Darwin. On the assumption that interactions between pairs of individuals occur on a probabilistic basis, a model is developed based on the…
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Elliott Sober and his defenders think of selection, drift, mutation, and migration as distinct evolutionary forces. This paper exposes an ambiguity in Sober's account of the force of selection: sometimes he appears to equate the force of selection…
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(from the book) In this chapter, the authors provide a fascinating tour of the discipline's intellectual origins, showing how a series of conceptual advances, from the cognitive revolution to evolutionary game theory, led to the emergence of…
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Historians and philosophers of science have interpreted the taxonomic theory of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) as an 'essentialist', 'Aristotelian', or even 'scholastic' one. This interpretation is flatly contradicted by what Linnaeus himself had to say…
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Speciation is the origin of reproductive isolation and divergence between populations, according to the "biological species concept" of Mayr. Studies of reproductive isolation have dominated research on speciation, leaving the origin of species…
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Darwinians are realists about the force of selection, but there has been sur- prisingly little discussion about what form this realism should take. Arguments about the units of selection in general and genic selectionism in particular reveal two…
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We evaluate Sewall Wright's three-phase ''shifting balance'' theory of evolution, examining both the theoretical issues and the relevant data from nature and the laboratory. We conclude that while phases I and II of Wright's theory (the movement of…
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From an evolutionary perspective, social behaviours are those which have fitness consequences for both the individual that performs the behaviour, and another individual. Over the last 43 years, a huge theoretical and empirical literature has…
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Environments are thought to play a fundamental role in determining their fitness and hence in natural selection. Existing intuitive conceptions of environment are sufficient for biological practice. I argue, however, that attempts to produce a…
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Aristotle's central argument for teleology-though not necessarily his conclusion-is repeated in the teleological arguments of Isaac Newton, Immanuel Kant, William Paley, and Charles Darwin. To appreciate Aristotle's argument and its influence I…
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