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  1. Species, Variety, Race: Vocabularies of Difference from Buffon to Kant.Jennifer Mensch - 2024 - Dianoia: Rivista di filosofia 39 (3):156-179.
    Eighteenth-century German writers with broad interests in natural history, and in particular, in the kind of ethnographic reports typically included in travel and expedition narratives, had to be able to access and read the original reports or they had to work with translations. The translators of these reports were, moreover, typically forced more than usual into the role of interpreter. This was especially the case when it came to accounts wherein vocabulary did not exist or was at least not settled, (...)
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  2. The realist and selectionist explanations for the success of science.Seungbae Park - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-12.
    According to realists, theories are successful because they are true, but according to selectionists, theories are successful because they have gone through a rigorous selection process. Wray claims that the realist and selectionist explanations are rivals to each other. Lee objects that they are instead complementary to each other. In my view, Lee’s objection presupposes that the realist explanation is true, and thus it begs the question against selectionists. By contrast, the selectionist explanation invokes a scientific theory, and thus it (...)
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  3. The arrival of the smartest: In favour of a pluralistic account of the evolution of cognition.Giorgio Airoldi - 2021 - Aufklärung 8.
    The great advances of the last decades both in cognitive theories and in evolutionary biology have not yet fully merged. Most evolutionary hypotheses around the mind still rely on classical cognitivism, while most theories of cognition still look for adaptive explanations. We believe that the merging of novel cognitive theories into a pluralistic account can greatly improve our understanding of both what cognition is and how it evolved.
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  4. Anthropocene: The philosophy of Biotechnology.Valentin Cheshko, Glazko Valery & Ivanitskaya Lida - 2018 - Moscow, Russia: Kurs INFRA-M.
    The theory of evolution of complex, including the humans system and algorithm for its constructing are a synthesis of evolutionary epistemology, philosophical anthropology and concrete scientific empirical basis in modern science,. In other words, natural philosophy is regaining the status bar element theoretical science in the era of technology-driven evolution. The co-evolutionary concept of 3-modal stable evolutionary strategy of Homo sapiens is developed. The concept based on the principle of evolutionary complementarity of anthropogenesis: value of evolutionary risk and evolutionary path (...)
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  5. Kamikazes and cultural evolution.Sean Allen-Hermanson - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Biological and Biomedical Sciences 61:11-19.
    Is cultural evolution needed to explain altruistic selfsacrifice? Some contend that cultural traits (e.g. beliefs, behaviors, and for some “memes”) replicate according to selection processes that have “floated free” from biology. One test case is the example of suicide kamikaze attacks in wartime Japan. Standard biological mechanisms—such as reciprocal altruism and kin selection—might not seem to apply here: The suicide pilots did not act on the expectation that others would reciprocate, and they were supposedly sacrificing themselves for country and emperor, (...)
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  6. Evolving to Generalize: Trading Precision for Speed.Cailin O’Connor - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (2).
    Biologists and philosophers of biology have argued that learning rules that do not lead organisms to play evolutionarily stable strategies (ESSes) in games will not be stable and thus not evolutionarily successful. This claim, however, stands at odds with the fact that learning generalization---a behavior that cannot lead to ESSes when modeled in games---is observed throughout the animal kingdom. In this paper, I use learning generalization to illustrate how previous analyses of the evolution of learning have gone wrong. It has (...)
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  7. Propositional Content in Signalling Systems.Jonathan Birch - 2014 - Philosophical Studies 171 (3):493-512.
    Skyrms, building on the work of Dretske, has recently developed a novel information-theoretic account of propositional content in simple signalling systems. Information-theoretic accounts of content traditionally struggle to accommodate the possibility of misrepresentation, and I show that Skyrms’s account is no exception. I proceed to argue, however, that a modified version of Skyrms’s account can overcome this problem. On my proposed account, the propositional content of a signal is determined not by the information that it actually carries, but by the (...)
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  8. Evolving Perceptual Categories.Cailin O’Connor - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (5):110-121.
    This article uses sim-max games to model perceptual categorization with the goal of answering the following question: To what degree should we expect the perceptual categories of biological actors to track properties of the world around them? I argue that an analysis of these games suggests that the relationship between real-world structure and evolved perceptual categories is mediated by successful action in the sense that organisms evolve to categorize together states of nature for which similar actions lead to similar results. (...)
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  9. Subversive Explanations.Charles Pigden - 2013 - In Gregory W. Dawes & James Maclaurin (eds.), A new science of religion. New York: Routledge. pp. 147-161..
    Can an explanation of a set of beliefs cast doubt on the things believed? In particular, can an evolutionary explanation of religious beliefs call the contents of those beliefs into question? Yes - under certain circumstances. I distinguish between natural histories of beliefs and genealogies. A natural history of a set of beliefs is an explanation that puts them down to naturalistic causes. (I try to give an account of natural explanations which favors a certain kind of ‘methodological atheism’ without (...)
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  10. Sometimes an Orgasm is Just an Orgasm.Erika Lorraine Milam, Gillian R. Brown, Stefan Linquist, Steve Fuller & Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 2006 - Metascience 15 (3):399-435.
    I should like to offer my greatest thanks to Paul Griffiths for providing the opportunity for this exchange, and to commentators Gillian Brown, Steven Fuller, Stefan Linquist, and Erika Milam for their generous and thought-provoking comments. I shall do my best in this space to respond to some of their concerns.
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  11. Mutationism and the Dual Causation of Evolutionary Change.Arlin Stoltzfus - 2006 - Evolution and Development 8 (3):304-317.
    The rediscovery of Mendel's laws a century ago launched the science that William Bateson called "genetics," and led to a new view of evolution combining selection, particulate inheritance, and the newly characterized phenomenon of "mutation." This "mutationist" view clashed with the earlier view of Darwin, and the later "Modern Synthesis," by allowing discontinuity, and by recognizing mutation (or more properly, mutation-and-altered-development) as a source of creativity, direction, and initiative. By the mid-20th century, the opposing Modern Synthesis view was a prevailing (...)
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  12. Matter Cycles, Energy Flows, Entropy Ensures Complexity Grows. [REVIEW]Blaine Snow - manuscript
    A review of Eric Schneider and Dorion Sagan's 2006, "Into the Cool: Energy Flows, Thermodynamics, and Life.".
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