Desmond and Moore point out that the key to understanding Darwin’s The Descent of Man is his abolitionist motivation and his advocacy that races constitute subspecies. Roberta Millstein raises some doubts about the importance of this motivation. She points out that the inclusion of the extensive section devoted to non-human animals is not justified by Darwin’s treatment of humans per se, because his explanation of the origin of races is peculiar. In this sense, she argues that Darwin’s specific explanation of (...) the origin of races does not confirm the central importance that Desmond and Moore give to Darwin’s abolitionism. In this paper I have two different aims. On the one hand, to show that the human case actually is based on the treatment of nonhuman animals, and consequently, Darwin’s argument is not as poor as Millstein believes. My second goal, taking Millstein’s challenge seriously, is to show that Darwin’s explanation of the origin of races does confirm the Desmond and Moore thesis in a deeper sense than the one they propose themselves. For the anti-slavery motivation could not only explain the fact that Darwin sees all humans as forming the same species, but the specific explanation he gives for the origin of races. (shrink)

An examination of the post-Darwinian history of biological taxonomy reveals an implicit assumption that the definitions of taxon names consist of lists of organismal traits. That assumption represents a failure to grant the concept of evolution a central role in taxonomy, and it causes conflicts between traditional methods of defining taxon names and evolutionary concepts of taxa. Phylogenetic definitions of taxon names (de Queiroz and Gauthier 1990) grant the concept of common ancestry a central role in the definitions of taxon (...) names and thus constitute an important step in the development of phylogenetic taxonomy. By treating phylogenetic relationships rather than organismal traits as necessary and sufficient properties, phylogenetic definitions remove conflicts between the definitions of taxon names and evolutionary concepts of taxa. The general method of definition represented by phylogenetic definitions of clade names can be applied to the names of other kinds of composite wholes, including populations and biological species. That the names of individuals (composite wholes) can be defined in terms of necessary and sufficient properties provides the foundation for a synthesis of seemingly incompatible positions held by contemporary individualists and essentialists concerning the nature of taxa and the definitions of taxon names. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr's typological/population distinction is a conceptual thread that runs throughout much of his work in systematics, evolutionary biology, and the history and philosophy of biology. Mayr himself claims that typological thinking originated in the philosophy of Plato and that population thinking was first introduced by Charles Darwin and field naturalists. A more proximate origin of the typological/population thinking, however, is found in Mayr's own work on species. This paper traces the antecedents of the typological/population distinction by detailing Mayr's changing (...) views of species between 1942 and 1955. During this period, Mayr struggles to refine the biological species concept in the face of tensions that exist between studying species locally and studying them as geographically distributed collections of variable populations. The typological/population distinction is first formulated in 1955, when Mayr generalizes from the type concept versus the population concept in taxonomy to typological versus population thinking in biology more generally. Mayr's appeal to the more general distinction between typological and population thinking coincides with the waning status of natural history and evolutionary biology that occurs in the early 1950s and the distinction plays an important role in Mayr's efforts to legitimate the natural historical sciences. (shrink)

This essay examines the relation of Darwin's orchids book to a central persuasive flaw in theOrigin: Its inability to give variation sufficient “presence” to break the hold of “design” in the mind of the reader. Darwin characterized the orchids book as “a flank movement on the enemy”; this essay identifies the “enemy” as Paley's natural theology and the “flank” as thetopoi, maxims, and habits of perception that led Darwin's colleagues and contemporaries to see design in nature. Moreover, this essay examines (...) three aspects of rhetorical timing pertinent toOrchids - time askairos, time as adequate duration, and time as transformation - and then relates those features to Robert Cox's Heideggerian logic of repetition, disavowal, and transcendence. The essay concludes with implications of the tactical and temporal aspects of Darwin's reasoning for understanding both the logic of science and of Darwin as a rhetorical artist. (shrink)

From its inception Darwinian evolutionary biology has been seen as having a problematic relationship of fact and theory. While the forging of the modern evolutionary synthesis resolved most of these issues for biologists, critics continue to argue that natural selection and common descent are “only theories.” Much of the confusion engendered by the “evolution wars” can be clarified by applying the concept of phenomena, inferred from fact, and explained by theories, thus locating where legitimate dissent may still exist. By setting (...) such analysis in the context of research traditions, it is possible to gain further insight into the complex interplay of facts, phenomena, and theories. Two case studies are explored to assess the value of such approaches, one from within evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect, and one from outside, intelligent design. (shrink)

The prevailing view among historians of science holds that Charles Darwin became a convinced transmutationist only in the early spring of 1837, after his Beagle collections had been examined by expert British naturalists. With respect to the fossil vertebrate evidence, some historians believe that Darwin was incapable of seeing or understanding the transmutationist implications of his specimens without the help of Richard Owen. There is ample evidence, however, that he clearly recognized the similarities between several of the fossil vertebrates he (...) collected and some of the extant fauna of South America before he returned to Britain. These comparisons, recorded in his correspondence, his diary and his notebooks during the voyage, were instances of a phenomenon that he later called the "law of the succession of types." Moreover, on the Beagle, he was following a geological research agenda outlined in the second volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which implies that paleontological data alone could provide an insight into the laws which govern the appearance of new species. Since Darwin claims in On the Origin of Species that fossil vertebrate succession was one of the key lines of evidence that led him to question the fixity of species, it seems certain that he was seriously contemplating transmutation during the Beagle voyage. If so, historians of science need to reconsider both the role of Britain's expert naturalists and the importance of the fossil vertebrate evidence in the development of Darwin's ideas on transmutation. (shrink)

List of Illustrations Introduction 1 The Didactic and the Elegant: Some Thoughts on Scientific and Technological Illustrations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 3 2 Temples of the Body and Temples of the Cosmos: Vision and Visualization in the Vesalian and Copernican Revolutions 40 3 Descartes’s Scientific Illustrations and ’la grande mecanique de la nature’ 86 4 Illustrating Chemistry 135 5 Representations of the Natural System in the Nineteenth Century 164 6 Visual Representation in Archaeology: Depicting the Missing-Link in Human (...) Origins 184 7 Towards an Epistemology of Scientific Illustration 215 8 Illustration and Inference 250 9 Visual Models and Scientific Judgment 269 10 Are Pictures Really Necessary? The Case of Sewall Wright’s ’Adaptive Landscapes’ 303 Bibliography 339 Notes on Contributors 373 Index 377. (shrink)

Recent historiography of 19th century biology supports the revision of two traditional doctrines about the history of biology. First, the most important and widespread biological debate around the time of Darwin was not evolution versus creation, but biological functionalism versus structuralism. Second, the idealist and typological structuralist theories of the time were not particularly anti-evolutionary. Typological theories provided argumentation and evidence that was crucial to the refutation of Natural Theological creationism. The contrast between functionalist and structuralist approaches to biology continues (...) today, and the historical misunderstanding of 19th century typological biology may be one of its effects. This historical case can shed light on current controversies regarding the relevance of developmental biology to evolution. (shrink)

We describe an error type that we call the naturalizing error: an appeal to nature as a self-justified description dictating or limiting our choices in moral, economic, political, and other social contexts. Normative cultural perspectives may be subtly and subconsciously inscribed into purportedly objective descriptions of nature, often with the apparent warrant and authority of science, yet not be fully warranted by a systematic or complete consideration of the evidence. Cognitive processes may contribute further to a failure to notice the (...) lapses in scientific reasoning and justificatory warrant. By articulating this error type at a general level, we hope to raise awareness of this pervasive error type and to facilitate critiques of claims that appeal to what is “natural” as inevitable or unchangeable. (shrink)

The evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s integrated the study of biological microevolution and biological macroevolution into the theoretically consistent and hugely productive field of evolutionary biology. A similar synthesis has yet to occur for the study of culture, and the social sciences remain fragmented and theoretically incompatible. Here, it is suggested that a Darwinian theory of cultural evolution can promote such a synthesis. Earlier non-Darwinian theories of cultural evolution, such as progress theories, lacked key elements of a Darwinian (...) theory of cultural evolution that are necessary to promote a synthesis, while other contemporary theories of cultural evolution, such as memetics, make too stringent neo-Darwinian assumptions that are inconsistent with evidence regarding cultural transmission. Several examples are given which indicate the beginnings of an evolutionary synthesis for culture, where patterns of cultural macroevolution have been explained in terms of underlying cultural microevolutionary forces. Finally, it is argued that experimental simulations of cultural evolution can play an important role in this emerging synthesis. (shrink)

These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2018.

Recently, biologist and philosophers have been much attracted by an evolutionary view of knowledge, so-called evolutionary epistemology. Developing this insight, the present paper argues that our cognitive abilities are the outcome of organic evolution, and that, conversely, evolution itself may be described as a cognition process. Furthermore, it is argued that the key to an adequate evolutionary epistemology lies in a system-theoretical approach to evolution which grows from, but goes beyond, Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Darwin's ideas on variation, heredity, and development differ significantly from twentieth-century views. First, Darwin held that environmental changes, acting either on the reproductive organs or the body, were necessary to generate variation. Second, heredity was a developmental, not a transmissional, process; variation was a change in the developmental process of change. An analysis of Darwin's elaboration and modification of these two positions from his early notebooks (1836-1844) to the last edition of the /Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication/ (1875) (...) complements previous Darwin scholarship on these issues. Included in this analysis is a description of the way Darwin employed the distinction between transmission and development, as well as the conceptual relationship he saw between heredity and variation. This paper is part of a larger project comparing commitments regarding variation during the latter half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

David Hull's (1988c) model of science as a selection process suffers from a two-fold inability: (a) to ascertain when a lineage of theories has been established; i.e., when theories are descendants of older theories or are novelties, and what counts as a distinct lineage; and (b) to specify what the scientific analogue is of genotype and phenotype. This paper seeks to clarify these issues and to propose an abstract model of theories analogous to particulate genetic structure, in order to reconstruct (...) relationships of descent and identity. (shrink)

In response to Quinn we identify cladistics to be about natural classifications and their discovery and thereby propose to add an eighth cladistic definition to Quinn’s list, namely the systematist who seeks to discover natural classifications, regardless of their affiliation, theoretical or methodological justifications.

It should be evident from the foregoing discussion that one man's natural selection is not necessarily the same as another man's. Why should this be so? How can two theories, which both Matthew and Darwin believed to be nearly identical, be so dissimilar? Apparently, neither Matthew nor Darwin understood the other's theory. Each man's viewpoint was colored by his own intellectual background and philosophical assumptions, and each read these into the other's ideas. The words sounded the same, so they assumed (...) the concepts must als be the same.123As Ghiselin has pointed out, historians attempting to evaluate Darwin's predecessors have been similarly blinded by a preoccupation with words, without regard to their proper context.124 In the case of Matthew, the practice of quoting only brief passages from the appendix to Naval Timber and Arboriculture, without relating them to the rest of his work, has suggested a greater resemblance to Darwin's theory than actually exists.It is clear, both from the use which Matthew made of his ideas and from the philosophical roots of his natural world view, that he could not have arrived at the concept of natural selection by the same thought process which Darwin employed. His discussion of natural selection is presented not as an argument, but as an axiom. No theory is proposed, no evidence marshaled to support it. Natural selection is stated as a fact, a Law of Nature, unquestioned, and presumably, unquestionable.Despite his clamor for recognition as the discoverer of natural selection, Matthew recognized and acknowledged this very fundamental difference between Darwin and himself. In a letter to the Gardener's Chronicle of May 12, 1860, he wrote:To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr. Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had—to me it did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognisable fact—an axiom, requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.125In the same letter, Matthew maintained that his ideas had not been accepted because “the age was not ripe for such ideas.”126 Nor, he said, was the present age. He considered the inability of most of Darwin's critics to grasp his theory to be “incurable.” Yet he did not argue that natural selection should be accepted because of the evidence, but rather, that it should be accepted on faith:Belief here requires a certain grasp of mind. No direct proof of phenomena embracing so long a period of time is within the compass of short-lived man. To attempt to satisfy a school of ultra skeptics, who have a wonderfully limited power of perception of means to ends... would be labour in vain.... They could not be brought to conceive the purpose of a handsaw though they saw its action, if the whole individual building it assisted to construct were not presented complete before their eyes... Like a child looking upon the motion of a wheel in an engine they would only perceive and admire... without noticing its agency in... affecting the purposed end.127Here, then, is the final irony. In a passage urging acceptance of Darwin's theory, a theory which was to banish design and purpose from the natural world, we find echoes of Paley and of Providence.Loren Eiseley has lamented the fact that Matthew “did not bring his views into the open, because the amount of ground he was able to cover in a few paragraphs suggests that he might have been able to sustain a longer treatise.”128 Now that the intellectual and historical context of Matthew's ideas are known, this statement is no longer tenable. Matthew was not a scientist, and his books were not written as biological treatises. His discussions of natural selection were not attempts to “cover ground” in advancing a particular scientific theory, but were simply reflections of his own assumptions about the natural world.Furthermore, despite Matthew's acceptance of evolution and natural selection, his biological thought was basically conservative on points where Darwin's was radical. Where Matthew saw a series of stable worlds interrupted by violent upheavals, Darwin saw a continuous process of change in an ever-fluctuating world. Where Matthew conceived of species in terms of Aristotelian classes and essences, Darwin revolutionized our concept of species by treating them as populations. Where Matthew saw a world of design and beauty functioning according to natural laws laid down by benevolent Providence, Darwin abolished design and Providence from nature and ushered in a world which cycles ever onward according to laws of chance and probability.It is not even particularly useful to point to Matthew as evidence that evolution was “in the air” prior to 1859.129 His ideas did not represent the first wave of a coming revolution, but were the product of his own personal philosophical outlook, as expressed in the context of the biological thought of the 1830's. Matthew is important in the history of ideas, not simply because he accepted the concept of evolution or thought of something resembling natural selection, but because he did so without overthrowing, in his own mind, any of the basic philosophical assumptions which had underlain biological science since Aristotle. In recognizing Matthew's failure to do so, we are in a position to appreciate more fully the significance of the Darwinian Revolution. (shrink)

Many standard philosophical accounts of scientific practice fail to distinguish between modeling and other types of theory construction. This failure is unfortunate because there are important contrasts among the goals, procedures, and representations employed by modelers and other kinds of theorists. We can see some of these differences intuitively when we reflect on the methods of theorists such as Vito Volterra and Linus Pauling on the one hand, and Charles Darwin and Dimitri Mendeleev on the other. Much of Volterra's and (...) Pauling's work involved modeling; much of Darwin's and Mendeleev's did not. In order to capture this distinction, I consider two examples of theory construction in detail: Volterra's treatment of post-WWI fishery dynamics and Mendeleev's construction of the periodic system. I argue that modeling can be distinguished from other forms of theorizing by the procedures modelers use to represent and to study real-world phenomena: indirect representation and analysis. This differentiation between modelers and non-modelers is one component of the larger project of understanding the practice of modeling, its distinctive features, and the strategies of abstraction and idealization it employs. (shrink)

We present a logically detailed case-study of Darwinian evolutionary explanation. Special features of Darwin’s explanatory schema made it an unusual theoretical breakthrough, from the point of view of the philosophy of science. The schema employs no theoretical terms, and puts forward no theoretical hypotheses. Instead, it uses three observational generalizations—Variability, Heritability and Differential Reproduction—along with an innocuous assumption of Causal Efficacy, to derive Adaptive Evolution as a necessary consequence. Adaptive Evolution in turn, with one assumption of scale (‘Deep Time’), implies (...) the observational generalization of Adaptation. It is a fascinating methodological task to regiment the premises and make the reasoning both rigorous and clear. Doing so reveals how surprisingly small an amount of mathematics is needed in order to carry out the argument. The investigation also reveals the crucial role played by heritability, and how heritability itself admits of Darwinian explanation. (shrink)

Historians tend to speak of the problem of the origin of species or the species question, as if it were a monolithic problem. In reality, the phrase refers to a, historically, surprisingly fluid and pluriform scientific issue. It has, in the course of the past five centuries, been used in no less than ten different ways or contexts. A clear taxonomy of these separate problems is useful or relevant in two ways. It certainly helps to disentangle confusions that have inevitably (...) emerged in the literature in its absence. It may, secondly, also help us to gain a more thorough understanding, or sharper view, of the history of evolutionary thought. A consequent problem-centric look at that history through the lens of various origin of species problems certainly yields intriguing results, including and particularly for our understanding of the genesis of the Wallace–Darwin theory of evolution through natural selection. (shrink)

In addition to the distinction between species as a category and speciesas a taxon, the word species is ambiguous in a very different butequally important way, namely the temporal distinction between horizontal andvertical species. Although often found in the relevant literature, thisdistinction has thus far remained vague and undefined. In this paper the use ofthe distinction is explored, an attempt is made to clarify and define it, andthen the relation between the two dimensions and the implications of thatrelation are examined. (...) Using Darwin's analogy of language evolution forspeciesevolution, and by appealing to a major change in the conception of languagebetween 19th- and 20th-century linguistics, it is argued that the horizontaldimension has priority (pragmatic, epistemological, logical, and ontological)over the vertical dimension. This has immense ramifications for the modernspecies problem. Fundamentally, it favors horizontal species concepts oververtical ones. In so doing it places species realism on a much more securefoundation and largely undercuts species pluralism. In addition it raises aserious problem for the increasingly popular family of phylogenetic speciesconcepts, which generally suffer from a dimensionality confusion. However,thereis a recent trend within this family that attempts to restore the priority ofthe horizontal dimension. It is concluded that this trend should be affirmedandthat the species-as-individuals view should be abandoned. (shrink)

This paper attempts a critical examination of scholarly understanding of the historical event referred to as "the Darwinian Revolution." In particular, it concentrates on some of the major scholarly works that have appeared since the publication in 1979 of Michael Ruse's "The Darwinian Revolution: Nature Red in Tooth and Claw." The paper closes by arguing that fruitful critical perspectives on what counts as this event can be gained by locating it in a range of historiographic and disciplinary contexts that include (...) the emergence of the discipline of evolutionary biology (following the "evolutionary synthesis"), the 1959 Darwin centenary, and the maturation of the discipline of the history of science. Broader perspectives on something called the "Darwinian Revolution" are called for that include recognizing that it does not map a one-to-one correspondence with the history of evolution, broadly construed. (shrink)

The paper sketches an account of explanatory practice in which explanations are viewed as answers to explanation-requiring questions. To avoid difficulties in previous proposals, the paper uses the structuralist account of theory structure, arguing that theories are complex and evolving entities formed around a conceptual core and a set of intended applications. The argument is that this view does better justice to theories which involve a number of different kinds of theory-elements to give narrative explanations. Theories are, among other things, (...) devices which can be used to turn explanation-requiring questions into a form which allows assessment of potential answers. Evolutionary theory, both in Darwin's and the modern synthetic forms, are used as examples. The view advanced is that modern evolutionary theory need not have a unique core to which other theories serve as subcontractors. (shrink)

Abstract One of the most important things that the Darwinian revolution affected is the previous teleological thinking. In particular, the attribution of functions to various entities of the natural world with explanatory pretensions. In this change, his theory of natural selection played an important role. We all agree on that, but the diversity and heterogeneity of the answers that try to explain what Darwin did exactly with functional biology are overwhelming. In this paper I will try to show how Darwin (...) modified previous functional biology. Pre-Darwinian naturalists did not hesitate to attribute functions in which, for example, the traits of one species were in the service of other species. I will try to show that this has consequences on the discussion regarding the nature of functional language, since the main approaches, the systemic and the etiological, do not adequately account for these changes and therefore do not account for the way functional biology regulates the kind of legitimate functions. I will outline a possible new solution to this problem: appropriate functional attributions in Darwinian functional biology could be regulated by a theory or a set of laws that provide the criteria for determining its fundamental concepts. -/- Resumen: Una de las cosas más importantes a las que la revolución darwiniana afectó es el pensamiento teleológico previo. En particular, la atribución de funciones a diversas entidades del mundo natural con pretensiones explicativas. En este cambio, su teoría de la selección natural desempeñó un papel importante. Todos estamos de acuerdo en ello, pero la diversidad y heterogeneidad de las respuestas que tratan de explicar lo que Darwin hizo exactamente con la biología funcional son abrumadoras. En este artículo intentaré mostrar cómo Darwin modificó la biología funcional anterior. Los naturalistas predarwinianos no dudaban en atribuir funciones en las que, por ejemplo, los rasgos de una especie estaban al servicio de otras especies. Intentaré mostrar que esto tiene consecuencias en la discusión sobre la naturaleza del lenguaje funcional, pues los principales enfoques, el sistémico y el etiológico, no dan cuenta adecuadamente de estos cambios y, por tanto, no dan cuenta de la forma en que la biología funcional regula el tipo de funciones legítimas. Esbozaré una posible nueva solución a este problema: las atribuciones funcionales apropiadas en la biología funcional darwiniana podrían estar reguladas por una teoría o un conjunto de leyes que proporcionen los criterios para determinar sus conceptos fundamentales. -/- . (shrink)

Current Perspectives in Philosophy of Biology.

David Hull: a memoir Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s10539-010-9236-0 Authors Michael Ruse, Department of Philosophy, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA Journal Biology and Philosophy Online ISSN 1572-8404 Print ISSN 0169-3867.

Universals are usually considered to be universal properties. Since tropes are particular properties, if there are only tropes, there are no universals. However, universals might be thought of not only as common properties, but also as common aspects (“determinable universals”) and common wholes (“concrete universals”). The existence of these two latter concepts of universals is fully compatible with the assumption that all properties are particular. This observation makes possible three different trope theories, which accept tropes and no universals, tropes and (...) determinable universals and tropes and concrete universals. (shrink)

It is proposed that the Darwinian theoretical approach and account of living systems has not yet been clearly given. A first approximation to this is attempted, focussing on behavior in evolving environments. A theoretical terminology is defined emphasizing the mutuality of organism and environment and the existence of biologically theoretical entities.

The philosophical or metaphysical architecture of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is analyzed and diflussed. It is argued that natural selection was for Darwin a paradigmatic case of a natural law of change — an exemplar of what Ghiselin (1969) has called selective retention laws. These selective retention laws lie at the basis of Darwin's revolutionary world view. In this essay special attention is paid to the consequences for Darwin's concept of species of his selective retention laws. Although (...) Darwin himself explicity supported a variety of nominalism, implicit in the theory of natural selection is a solution to the dispute between nominalism and realism. It is argued that, although implicit, this view plays a very important role in Darwin's theory of natural selection as the means for the origin of species. It is in the context of these selective retention laws and their philosophical implications that Darwin's method is appraised in the light of recent criticisms, and the conclusion drawn that he successfully treated some philosophical problems by approaching them through natural history. Following this an outline of natural selection theory is presented in which all these philosophical issues are highlighted. (shrink)

La constatación de que nuestro universo está constituido de unos y los mismos elementos materiales en cualquier lugar en que podamos observarlo nos lleva directamente a la postulación de un único principio y causa del único proceso universal al que se debe cuanto existe. Y en ese trance parece inevitable preguntar: ¿cómo ha surgido Todo? Todo, aquí, significa cuanto hay; sin excepción alguna. Esta visión puramente física del Universo puede denominarse naturalismo universal, entendiendo el término naturalismo como traducción del término (...) aristotélico physis en su célebre definición. (shrink)

The paper characterizes Darwin's theory, providing a synthesis of recent historical investigations in this area. Darwin's reading of Malthus led him to appreciate the importance of population pressures, and subsequently of natural selection, with the help of the wedge metaphor. But, in itself, natural selection did not furnish an adequate account of the origin of species, for which a principle of divergence was needed. Initially, Darwin attributed this to geographical isolation, but later, following his work on barnacles which underscored the (...) significance of variation, and arising from his work on botanical arithmetic, he supposed that diversity allowed more places to be occupied in a given region. So isolation was not regarded as essential. Large regions with intense competition, and with ample variation spread by blending, would facilitate speciation. The notion of place was different from niche, and it is questioned whether Darwin's views on ecology were as modern as is commonly supposed. Two notions of struggle are found in Darwin's theory; and three notions of variation. Criticisms of his theory led him to emphasize the importance of variation over a range of forms. Hence the theory was populational rather than typological. The theory required a Lamarckian notion of inheritable changes initiated by the environment as a source of variation. Also, Darwin deployed a use/habit theory; and the notion of sexual selection. Selection normally acted at the level of the individual, though kin selection was possible. Group selection was hinted at for man. Darwin's thinking (and also the exposition of his theory) was generally guided by the domestic-organism analogy, which satisfied his methodological requirement of a vera causa principle. (shrink)

"The Natural System" is the abstract notion of the order in living diversity. The richness and complexity of this notion is revealed by the diversity of representations of the Natural System drawn by ornithologists in the Nineteenth Century. These representations varied in overall form from stars, to circles, to maps, to evolutionary trees and cross-sections through trees. They differed in their depiction of affinity, analogy, continuity, directionality, symmetry, reticulation and branching, evolution, and morphological convergence and divergence. Some representations were two-dimensional, (...) and some were three-dimensional; n-dimensional representations were discussed but never illustrated. The study of diagrammatic representations of the Natural System is made difficult by the frequent failure of authors to discuss them in their texts, and by the consequent problem of distinguishing features which carried meaning from arbitrary features and printing conventions which did not. Many of the systematics controversies of the last thirty years have their roots in the conceptual problems which surrounded the Natural System in the late 1800s, problems which were left unresolved when interest in higher-level systematics declined at the turn of this century. (shrink)

Charles Darwin, in his species notebooks, engaged seriously with the quinarian system of William Sharp Macleay. Much of the attention given to this engagement has focused on Darwin’s attempt to explain, in a transmutationist framework, the intricate patterns that characterized the quinarian system. Here, I show that Darwin’s attempt to explain these quinarian patterns primarily occurred before he had read any work by Macleay. By the time Darwin began reading Macleay’s writings, he had already arrived at a skeptical view of (...) the reality of these patterns. What most interested Darwin, as he read Macleay, was not the quinarian system itself. Rather, Darwin’s notes on his reading primarily concerned certain background principles animating Macleay’s work, in particular: the non-existence of a saltus between human and animal minds, the difficulty of establishing boundaries between species and varieties, and Macleay’s method of variation. Darwin’s interest in the last of these left a mark on his discussion of taxonomic methodology in the Origin. (shrink)

What are biological species? Aristotelians and Lockeans agree that they are natural kinds; but, evolutionary theory shows that neither traditional philosophical approach is truly adequate. Recently, Michael Ghiselin and David Hull have argued that species are individuals. This claim is shown to be against the spirit of much modern biology. It is concluded that species are natural kinds of a sort, and that any 'objectivity' they possess comes from their being at the focus of a consilience of inductions.

Historians and philosophers of science agree that Darwin had an understanding of species which led to a workable theory of their origins. To Darwin species did not differ essentially from ‘varieties’ within species, but were distinguishable in that they had developed gaps in formerly continuous morphological variation. Similar ideas can be defended today after updating them with modern population genetics. Why then, in the 1930s and 1940s, did Dobzhansky, Mayr and others argue that Darwin failed to understand species and speciation? (...) Mayr and Dobzhansky argued that reproductively isolated species were more distinct and ‘real’ than Darwin had proposed. Believing species to be inherently cohesive, Mayr inferred that speciation normally required geographic isolation, an argument that he believed, incorrectly, Darwin had failed to appreciate. Also, before the sociobiology revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, biologists often argued that traits beneficial to whole populations would spread. Reproductive isolation was thus seen as an adaptive trait to prevent disintegration of species. Finally, molecular genetic markers did not exist, and so a presumed biological function of species, reproductive isolation, seemed to delimit cryptic species better than character-based criteria like Darwin’s. Today, abundant genetic markers are available and widely used to delimit species, for example using assignment tests: genetics has replaced a Darwinian reliance on morphology for detecting gaps between species. In the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Species , we appear to be returning to more Darwinian views on species, and to a fuller appreciation of what Darwin meant. (shrink)

Phillip Sloan has thoroughly documented the importance of Darwin's general invertebrate research program in the period from 1826 to 1836 and demonstrated how it had an impact on his conversion to transformism. Although Darwin later spent eight years of his life investigating barnacles, this period has received less treatment in studies of Darwin and the development of his thought. The most prominent question for the barnacle period that has been attended to is why Darwin "delayed" in publishing his theory of (...) evolution. A related but distinct question concerns the variety of earlier events and influences that led Darwin to the study of "Cirripedia" in 1846, apart from its role in the trajectory that led to "On the Origin of Species ". In this paper I focus on four specific episodes prior to 1846 that inform a picture of why Darwin had an antecedent interest in barnacles: the orientation to collecting strange and curious invertebrate organisms, as well as the strong affinities of Darwin's invertebrate collecting on the Beagle voyage with the work of John Vaughan Thompson; the critical role of marine invertebrate fossils in Darwin's geological reasoning aboard the Beagle and exemplified in his "Geological Observations of South America;" the strange absence of a "Zoology of the Beagle" volume on invertebrates and Darwin's original intent to publish some of the descriptions himself; and the noteworthy presence of barnacles in Darwin's transformation theorizing between 1837 and 1839. There is a wealth of support for the thesis that Darwin had a strong interest in cirripedes prior to the formal barnacle research, blunting arguments that it was psychological aversion or a feeling of inferiority about his taxonomic abilities that drove Darwin to the cirripedes. (shrink)

Abstract The ‘species problem’ in the philosophy of biology concerns the nature of species. Various solutions have been proposed, including arguments that species are sets, classes, natural kinds, individuals, and homeostatic property clusters. These proposals parallel debates in ecology as to the ontology and metaphysics of populations, communities and ecosystems. A new solution—that species are processes—is proposed and defended, based on Robert Ulanowicz’s metaphysics of process ecology. As with ecological systems, species can be understood as emergent, autocatalytic systems with propensities (...) for centripetality and mutuality in the course of dynamically balancing ascendency (order and persistence) and overhead (randomness and change). The species-as-processes perspective accords with the Ulanowicz’s postulates of process ecology and it can be accommodated by existing theories of species—particularly in a reframing of Richard Boyd’s metaphysics such that species are homeostatic process clusters. Rather than contending that process-based metaphysics is the only, best or true account of species, a pluralist-realist approach is advocated based on the pragmatic principles that are reflected in modern view of species and ecology. If species are understood to be comprised of processes and to be emergent processes themselves, there are important implications for the life sciences, including: animal models in medical and environmental studies, conservation biology, extinction, biodiversity, restoration ecology, and evolutionary biology. Content Type Journal Article Category Invited Paper Pages 1-30 DOI 10.1007/s10516-011-9169-5 Authors Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Department of Philosophy, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY 82071, USA Journal Axiomathes Online ISSN 1572-8390 Print ISSN 1122-1151. (shrink)

It is often claimed that one of Darwin''s chief accomplishments was to provide biology with a non-teleological explanation of adaptation. A number of Darwin''s closest associates, however, and Darwin himself, did not see it that way. In order to assess whether Darwin''s version of evolutionary theory does or does not employ teleological explanation, two of his botanical studies are examined. The result of this examination is that Darwin sees selection explanations of adaptations as teleological explanations. The confusion in the nineteenth (...) century about Darwin''s attitude to teleology is argued to be a result of Darwin''s teleological explanations not conforming to either of the dominant philosophical justifications of teleology at that time. Darwin''s explanatory practices conform well, however, to recent defenses of the teleological character of selection explanations. (shrink)