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  1. A conceptual taxonomy of adaptation in evolutionary biology.Emanuele Serrelli & Francesca Micol Rossi - manuscript
    The concept of adaptation is employed in many fields such as biology, psychology, cognitive sciences, robotics, social sciences, even literacy and art,1 and its meaning varies quite evidently according to the particular research context in which it is applied. We expect to find a particularly rich catalogue of meanings within evolutionary biology, where adaptation has held a particularly central role since Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) throughout important epistemological shifts and scientific findings that enriched and diversified the concept. Accordingly, (...)
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  • Aspects of Human Historiographic Explanation: A View from the Philosophy of Science.Stuart Glennan - unknown
    While some philosophers of history have argued that explanations in human history are of a fundamentally different kind than explanations in the natural sciences, I shall argue that this is not the case. Human beings are part of nature, human history is part of natural history, and human historical explanation is a species of natural historical explanation. In this paper I shall use a case study from the history of the American Civil War to show the variety of close parallels (...)
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  • The ecological imperative and its application to ethical issues in human genetic technology.W. Malcolm Byrnes - 2003 - Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics 2003:63-65.
    As a species, we are on the cusp of being able to alter that which makes us uniquely human, our genome. Two new genetic technologies, embryo selection and germline engineering, are either in use today or may be developed in the future. Embryo selection acts to alter the human gene pool, reducing genetic diversity, while germline engineering will have the ability to alter directly the genomes of engineered individuals. Our genome has come to be what it is through an evolutionary (...)
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  • Cronenberg, Greenaway and the Ideologies of Twinship.Elana Gomel & Stephen Weninger - 2003 - Body and Society 9 (3):19-35.
    This article deals with the representation of identical twins in the films Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway and Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg. It situates the films in a cultural and political context of the 20th-century controversies surrounding the issues of evolution, reproduction and cloning. The article claims that twinship represents the corporeal economy of the Same, whose ideological meanings have been shaped by the history of eugenics and social Darwinism. Identical twinship inscribes a utopia of the perfect, (...)
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  • 10 The evolution of strategic thinking.Adam Morton - 2000 - In Peter Carruthers & Andrew Chamberlain (eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition. Cambridge University Press. pp. 218.
    I discuss ways in which innate human psychology facilitates the quasi-game-theoretical reasoning required for group life.
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  • Creative thinking presupposes the capacity for thought.James H. Fetzer - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (3):539-540.
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  • Précis of The creative mind: Myths and mechanisms.Margaret A. Boden - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (3):519-531.
    What is creativity? One new idea may be creative, whereas another is merely new: What's the difference? And how is creativity possible? These questions about human creativity can be answered, at least in outline, using computational concepts. There are two broad types of creativity, improbabilist and impossibilist. Improbabilist creativity involves novel combinations of familiar ideas. A deeper type involves METCS: the mapping, exploration, and transformation of conceptual spaces. It is impossibilist, in that ideas may be generated which – with respect (...)
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  • Group selection: The theory replaces the bogey man.David Sloan Wilson & Elliott Sober - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):639-654.
    In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...)
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  • Putting the cart back behind the horse: Group selection does not require that groups be “organisms”.Todd A. Grantham - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):622-623.
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  • Driving both ways: Wilson & Sober's conflicting criteria for the identification of groups as vehicles of selection.John Alroy & Alexander Levine - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):608-610.
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  • Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences.David Sloan Wilson & Elliott Sober - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (4):585-608.
    In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began to (...)
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  • Aspects of visual argument: A study of the March of Progress.Cameron Shelley - 2001 - Informal Logic 21 (2).
    The so-called March of Progress depicts human evolution as a linear progression from mohkey to man. Shelley (1996) analyzed this image as a visual argument proceeding through "rhetorical" and "demonstrative" modes of visual logic. In this paper, I confirm and extend this view of visual logic by examining variations of the original March image. These variations show that each mode of visual logic can be altered or isolated in support of new conclusions. Furthermore, the March can be included in a (...)
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  • New presbyter or old priest? Reconsidering zoological taxonomy in Britain, 1750—1840.Harriet Ritvo - 1990 - History of the Human Sciences 3 (2):259-276.
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  • Does constructive neutral evolution play an important role in the origin of cellular complexity?Dave Speijer - 2011 - Bioessays 33 (5):344-349.
    Recently, constructive neutral evolution has been touted as an important concept for the understanding of the emergence of cellular complexity. It has been invoked to help explain the development and retention of, amongst others, RNA splicing, RNA editing and ribosomal and mitochondrial respiratory chain complexity. The theory originated as a welcome explanation of isolated small scale cellular idiosyncrasies and as a reaction to ‘overselectionism’. Here I contend, that in its extended form, it has major conceptual problems, can not explain observed (...)
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  • Critical Human Ecology: Historical Materialism and Natural Laws.Richard York & Philip Mancus - 2009 - Sociological Theory 27 (2):122-149.
    We lay the foundations for a critical human ecology that combines the strengths of the biophysical human ecology tradition in environmental sociology with those of historical materialism. We show the strengths of a critically informed human ecology by addressing four key meta-theoretical issues: materialist versus idealist approaches in the social sciences, dialectical versus reductionist analyses, the respective importance of historical and ahistorical causal explanations, and the difference between structural and functional interpretations of phenomena. CHE breaks with the idealism of Western (...)
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  • Naturalism and Environmentalism: A Reply to Hinchman.Brian H. Baxter - 2006 - Environmental Values 15 (1):51 - 68.
    The values which are definitive of the humanist project, such as freedom and self-determination, are of central concern to environmentalism. This means, according to Lewis P. Hinchman, that environmentalists should seek a rapprochement with humanism, rather than rejecting it for its apparent anthropocentrism. He argues that this requires in turn the acceptance of those approaches to human self-understanding which are central to the hermeneutic traditions and the rejection of naturalist approaches, such as sociobiology, which is accused of producing deterministic, reifying, (...)
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  • Venomous Dinosaurs and Rear-Fanged Snakes: Homology and Homoplasy Characterized. [REVIEW]Adrian Mitchell Currie - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):701-727.
    I develop an account of homology and homoplasy drawing on their use in biological inference and explanation. Biologists call on homology and homoplasy to infer character states, support adaptationist explanations, identify evolutionary novelties and hypothesize phylogenetic relationships. In these contexts, the concepts must be understood phylogenetically and kept separate: as they play divergent roles, overlap between the two ought to be avoided. I use these considerations to criticize an otherwise attractive view defended by Gould, Hall, and Ramsey & Peterson. By (...)
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  • Fundamental laws and laws of biology.Pablo Lorenzano - 2006 - In Gerhard Ernst & Karl-Georg Niebergall (eds.), Philosophie der Wissenschaft – Wissenschaft der Philosophie. Festschrift für C.Ulises Moulines zum 60. Geburstag. Mentis. pp. 129-155.
    In this paper, I discuss the problem of scientific laws in general and laws of biology in particular. After reviewing the debate around the existence of laws in biology, I examine the subject in the light of the structuralist notion of a fundamental law and argue for the law of matching as the fundamental law of genetics.
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  • Exemplars, models and principles in classical genetics.Pablo Lorenzano - 2005 - In José Luis Falguera, Concha Martínez & José Miguel Sagüillo (eds.), Current Topics in Logic and Analytic Philosophy/Temas actuales de Lógica y Filosofía Analítica. University of Santiago de Compostela. pp. 89-102.
    Taking as starting point Kuhn’s analysis of science textbooks and its application to Sinnott and Dunn’s (1925), it will be discussed the problem of the existence of laws in biology. In particular, it will be showed, in accordance with the proposals of Darden (1991) and Schaffner (1980, 1986, 1993), the relevance of the exemplars, diagrammatically or graphically represented, in the way in which is carried out the teaching and learning process of classical genetics, inasmuch as the information contained in them, (...)
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  • Statistical Mechanical Imperialism.Brad Weslake - 2014 - In Alastair Wilson (ed.), Chance and Temporal Asymmetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 241-257.
    I argue against the claim, advanced by David Albert and Barry Loewer, that all non-fundamental laws can be derived from those required to underwrite the second law of thermodynamics.
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  • Convergent evolution and the limits of natural selection.Russell Powell - 2012 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 2 (3):355-373.
    Stephen Jay Gould argued that replaying the “tape of life” would result in a radically different evolutionary outcome. Some biologists and philosophers, however, have pointed to convergent evolution as evidence for robust replicability in macroevolution. These authors interpret homoplasy, or the independent origination of similar biological forms, as evidence for the power of natural selection to guide form toward certain morphological attractors, notwithstanding the diversionary tendencies of drift and the constraints of phylogenetic inertia. In this paper, I consider the implications (...)
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  • Schelling, Hegel, and Evolutionary Progress.J. M. Fritzman & Molly Gibson - 2012 - Perspectives on Science 20 (1):105-128.
    This article presents Schelling’s claim that nature has an evolutionary process and Hegel’s response that nature is the development of the concept. It then examines whether evolution is progressive. While many evolutionary biologists explicitly repudiate the suggestion that there is progress in evolution, they often implicitly presuppose this. Moreover, such a notion seems required insofar as the shape of life’s history consists in a directional trend. This article argues that, insofar as a notion of progress is indeed conceptually ineliminatable from (...)
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  • Convergence and Parallelism in Evolution: A Neo-Gouldian Account.Trevor Pearce - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (2):429-448.
    Determining whether a homoplastic trait is the result of convergence or parallelism is central to many of the most important contemporary discussions in biology and philosophy: the relation between evolution and development, the importance of constraints on variation, and the role of contingency in evolution. In this article, I show that two recent attempts to draw a black-or-white distinction between convergence and parallelism fail, albeit for different reasons. Nevertheless, I argue that we should not be afraid of gray areas: a (...)
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  • A Question of Evidence.Lynn Hankinson Nelson - 1993 - Hypatia 8 (2):172 - 189.
    I outline a pragmatic account of evidence, arguing that it allows us to underwrite two implications of feminist scholarship: that knowledge is socially constructed and constrained by evidence, and that social relations, including gender, race, and class, are epistemologically significant. What makes the account promising is that it abandons any pretense of a view from nowhere, the view of evidence as something only individuals gather or have, and the view that individual theories face experience in isolation.
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  • Trashing life’s tree.L. R. Franklin-Hall - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (4):689-709.
    The Tree of Life has traditionally been understood to represent the history of species lineages. However, recently researchers have suggested that it might be better interpreted as representing the history of cellular lineages, sometimes called the Tree of Cells. This paper examines and evaluates reasons offered against this cellular interpretation of the Tree of Life. It argues that some such reasons are bad reasons, based either on a false attribution of essentialism, on a misunderstanding of the problem of lineage identity, (...)
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  • Understanding life: Recent work in philosophy of biology.Kim Sterelny - 1995 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (2):155-183.
    This paper surveys recent philosophy of biology. It aims to introduce outsiders to the field to the recent literature (which is reviewed in the footnotes) and the main recent debates. I concentrate on three of these: recent critiques of the replicator/vehicle distinction and its application to the idea of the gene as the unit of section; the recent defences of group selection and the idea that standard alternatives to group selection are in fact no more than a disguised form of (...)
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  • What are we? The social construction of the human biological self.Lauren H. Seiler - 2007 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 37 (3):243–277.
    This essay explores how the human biological self is socially constructed, and rejects various truisms that define our character. Rather than being stand-alone entities, the human biological self forms what biologists call “superorganisms” and what I call “poly-super-organisms.” Thus, along with prokaryotes , viruses, and other entities, we are combined in an inseparable menagerie of species that is spread across multiple bodies. Biologists claim that only males and females are organisms. As described here, however, human sperm and eggs are equally (...)
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  • Cladistic classification and functional explanation.P. E. Griffiths - 1994 - Philosophy of Science 61 (2):206-227.
    I adopt a cladistic view of species, and explore the possibility that there exists an equally valuable cladistic view of organismic traits. This suggestion seems to run counter to the stress on functional views of biological traits in recent work in philosophy and psychology. I show how the tension between these two views can be defused with a multilevel view of biological explanation. Despite the attractions of this compromise, I conclude that we must reject it, and adopt an essentially cladistic (...)
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  • Philosophical content and method of artificial life.Mark A. Bedau - 1998 - In Terrell Ward Bynum & James Moor (eds.), The Digital Phoenix: How Computers are Changing Philosophy. Cambridge: Blackwell. pp. 135--152.
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  • Phenomenal experience and the measure of information.Craig DeLancey - 2007 - Erkenntnis 66 (3):329-352.
    This paper defends the hypothesis that phenomenal experiences may be very complex information states. This can explain some of our most perplexing anti-physicalist intuitions about phenomenal experience. The approach is to describe some basic facts about information in such a way as to make clear the essential oversight involved, by way illustrating how various intuitive arguments against physicalism (such as Frank Jackson.
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  • The modern synthesis and “Progress” in evolution: a view from the journal literature.Charles H. Pence - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (4):39.
    The concept of “progress” in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of “Progress” in a global, normatively loaded sense of “change for the better” have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms ‘higher’ and ‘lower.’ While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a (...)
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  • Edgar Allan Poe, Eureka, and Scientific Imagination.David N. Stamos - 2017 - SUNY Press.
    Explores the science and creative process behind Poe’s cosmological treatise. Silver Winner for Philosophy, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards In 1848, almost a year and a half before Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of forty, his book Eureka was published. In it, he weaved together his scientific speculations about the universe with his own literary theory, theology, and philosophy of science. Although Poe himself considered it to be his magnum opus, Eureka has mostly been overlooked (...)
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  • God et al—World-Making as Collaborative Improvisation: New Metaphors for Open Theists.Mark Steen - 2022 - In K. J. Clark and J. Koperski (ed.), Abrahamic Reflections on Randomness and Providence. pp. 311-338.
    The Abrahamic traditions regard God as the world’s author. But what kind of author? A novelist? A playwright? Perhaps a composer of classical music? I will argue that it is best to regard God as like an improvisational play director or the leader of a jazz ensemble. Each determines the broad melodic contours or coarse-grained plot beforehand, while allowing their musicians or actors, and chance, to fill in the more fine-grained details. This analogy allows us to regard God as the (...)
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  • The selectionist rationale for evolutionary progress.Hugh Desmond - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (3):1-26.
    The dominant view today on evolutionary progress is that it has been thoroughly debunked. Even value-neutral progress concepts are seen to lack important theoretical underpinnings: natural selection provides no rationale for progress, and natural selection need not even be invoked to explain large-scale evolutionary trends. In this paper I challenge this view by analysing how natural selection acts in heterogeneous environments. This not only undermines key debunking arguments, but also provides a selectionist rationale for a pattern of “evolutionary unfolding”, where (...)
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  • Exploring biological possibility through synthetic biology.Tero Ijäs & Rami Koskinen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-17.
    This paper analyzes the notion of possibility in biology and demonstrates how synthetic biology can provide understanding on the modal dimension of biological systems. Among modal concepts, biological possibility has received surprisingly little explicit treatment in the philosophy of science. The aim of this paper is to argue for the importance of the notion of biological possibility by showing how it provides both a philosophically and biologically fruitful category as well as introducing a new practically grounded way for its assessment. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Practicing Dialectics of Technoscience during the Anthropocene.Hub Zwart - 2022 - Foundations of Science 27 (1):1-20.
    This paper develops a dialectical methodology for assessing technoscience during the Anthropocene. How to practice Hegelian dialectics of technoscience today? First of all, dialectics is developed here in close interaction with contemporary technoscientific research endeavours, which are addressed from a position of proximity and from an ‘oblique’ perspective. Contrary to empirical research, the focus is on how basic concepts of life, nature and technology are acted out in practice. Notably, this paper zooms in on a synthetic cell project called BaSyC (...)
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  • Cumulative culture and complex cultural traditions.Andrew Buskell - 2022 - Mind and Language 37 (3):284-303.
    Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late-appearing technologies. Yet by taking these as paradigm cases, researchers unhelpfully lump together different ways that culture accumulates. This article has two aims: (a) to distinguish four types of cultural accumulation: adaptiveness, complexity, efficiency, and disparity and (b) to highlight the epistemic implications of taking complex hominin technologies as paradigmatic instances of cumulative culture. Addressing these issues both (...)
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  • The sexual selection of hominin bipedalism.Michael Dale - 2018 - Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 11 (1):47-60.
    In this article, I advance a novel hypothesis on the evolution of hominin bipedalism. I begin by arguing extensively for how the transition to bipedalism must have been problematic for hominins during the Neogene. Due to this and the fact that no other primate has made the unusual switch to bipedalism, it seems likely that the selection pressure towards bipedalism was unusually strong. With this in mind, I briefly lay out some of the most promising hypotheses on the evolutionary origin (...)
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  • Randomness Increases Order in Biological Evolution.Giuseppe Longo & Maël Montévil - 2012 - In M. Dinneen, B. Khoussainov & A. Nies (eds.), Computation, Physics and Beyond. Springer. pp. 289-308.
    n this text, we revisit part of the analysis of anti-entropy in Bailly and Longo (2009} and develop further theoretical reflections. In particular, we analyze how randomness, an essential component of biological variability, is associated to the growth of biological organization, both in ontogenesis and in evolution. This approach, in particular, focuses on the role of global entropy production and provides a tool for a mathematical understanding of some fundamental observations by Gould on the increasing phenotypic complexity along evolution. Lastly, (...)
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  • Biological Individuals.Robert A. Wilson & Matthew J. Barker - 2024 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The impressive variation amongst biological individuals generates many complexities in addressing the simple-sounding question what is a biological individual? A distinction between evolutionary and physiological individuals is useful in thinking about biological individuals, as is attention to the kinds of groups, such as superorganisms and species, that have sometimes been thought of as biological individuals. More fully understanding the conceptual space that biological individuals occupy also involves considering a range of other concepts, such as life, reproduction, and agency. There has (...)
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  • Converging Concepts of Evolutionary Epistemology and Cognitive Biology Within a Framework of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis.Isabella Sarto-Jackson - 2019 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (2):297-312.
    Evolutionary epistemology has experienced a continuous rise over the last decades. Important new theoretical considerations and novel empirical findings have been integrated into the existing framework. In this paper, I would like to suggest three lines of research that I believe will significantly contribute to further advance EE: ontogenetic considerations, key ideas from cognitive biology, and the framework of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. EE, in particular the program of the evolution of epistemological mechanisms, seeks to provide a phylogenetic account of (...)
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  • A Defense of Low-Probability Scientific Explanations.Hayley Clatterbuck - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (1):91-112.
    I evaluate the plausibility of explanatory elitism, the view that a good scientific explanation of an outcome will show that it was highly probable. I consider an argument from Michael Strevens that elitism is the only view that can account for the historical acceptance of probabilistic theories in physics. I argue that biology provides better test cases for evaluating elitism and conclude that theories in that domain were favored in virtue of conferring correct, and not necessarily high, probabilities on outcomes.
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  • The evolutionary contingency thesis and evolutionary idiosyncrasies.T. Y. William Wong - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (2):22.
    Much philosophical progress has been made in elucidating the idea of evolutionary contingency in a recent re-burgeoning of the debate. However, additional progress has been impaired on three fronts. The first relates to its characterisation: the under-specification of various contingency claims has made it difficult to conceptually pinpoint the scope to which ‘contingency’ allegedly extends, as well as which biological forms are in contention. That is—there appears to be no systematic means with which to fully specify contingency claims which has (...)
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  • Mass extinctions as major transitions.Adrian Currie - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (2):29.
    Both paleobiology and investigations of ‘major evolutionary transitions’ are intimately concerned with the macroevolutionary shape of life. It is surprising, then, how little studies of major transitions are informed by paleontological perspectives and. I argue that this disconnect is partially justified because paleobiological investigation is typically ‘phenomena-led’, while investigations of major transitions are ‘theory-led’. The distinction turns on evidential relevance: in the former case, evidence is relevant in virtue of its relationship to some phenomena or hypotheses concerning those phenomena; in (...)
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  • How Capitalist Were the ‘Bourgeois Revolutions’?Charles Post - 2019 - Historical Materialism 27 (3):157-190.
    The canonical version of the ‘bourgeois revolutions’ has been under attack from both pro-capitalist ‘Revisionist’ historians and ‘Political Marxists’. Neil Davidson’s book How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? provides a thorough review of the intellectual history of the notion of the bourgeois revolution and attempts to rescue the concept from varied criticism. Despite distancing himself from problematic formulations of the bourgeois revolution inherited from Second-International Marxism, Davidson’s own framework reproduces many of the historical and conceptual problems of this tradition.
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  • Teaching & Researching Big History: Exploring a New Scholarly Field.Leonid Grinin, David Baker, Esther Quaedackers & Andrey Korotayev - 2014 - Volgograd: "Uchitel" Publishing House.
    According to the working definition of the International Big History Association, ‘Big History seeks to understand the integrated history of the Cosmos, Earth, Life and Humanity, using the best available empirical evidence and scholarly methods’. In recent years Big History has been developing very fast indeed. Big History courses are taught in the schools and universities of several dozen countries. Hundreds of researchers are involved in studying and teaching Big History. The unique approach of Big History, the interdisciplinary genre of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Die Architektur der Synthese. Entstehung und Philosophie der modernen Evolutionstheorie.Marcel Weber - 1996 - Dissertation, University of Konstanz
    This Ph.D. thesis provides a pilosophical account of the structure of the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 40s. The first, more historical part analyses how classical genetics came to be integrated into evolutionary thinking, highlighting in particular the importance of chromosomal mapping of Drosophila strains collected in the wild by Dobzansky, but also the work of Goldschmidt, Sumners, Timofeeff-Ressovsky and others. The second, more philosophical part attempts to answer the question wherein the unity of the synthesis consisted. I argue (...)
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  • Maria Montessori's metaphysics of life.Patrick Frierson - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (3):991-1011.
    This paper elucidates the core principles of Maria Montessori's metaphysics. Her attention to embryological, evolutionary, and educational development led to her teleological metaphysics of life. Individual organisms are governed by internally driven, perfectionist, discontinuous teleology. And this individual teleology is integrated into a holistic, ecological context whereby individuals' striving towards perfection works for the increased ordered complexity of the systems of which they are parts. Moreover, Montessori extends this metaphysics of life to include nonliving components of nature, such that atoms, (...)
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  • Contingency and Individuality: A Plurality of Evolutionary Individuality Types.Alison K. McConwell - 2017 - Philosophy of Science 84 (5):1104-1116.
    Recently, philosophers have sought to determine the nature of individuals relevant to evolution by natural selection or evolutionary individuals. The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis is a claim about evolution that emphasizes the role of contingency or dependency relations and chance-based factors in how evolution unfolds. In this article, I argue that if we take evolutionary contingency seriously, then we should be pluralists about the types of individuals in selection.
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  • History And Persons.Guy Kahane - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 99 (1):162-187.
    The non-identity problem is usually considered in the forward-looking direction but a version of it also applies to the past, due to the fact that even minor historical changes would have affected the whole subsequent sequence of births, dramatically changing who comes to exist next. This simple point is routinely overlooked by familiar attitudes and evaluative judgments about the past, even those of sophisticated historians. I shall argue, however, that it means that when we feel sadness about some historical tragedy, (...)
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