In this paper I address an important question in Aristotle’s biology, What are the causal mechanisms behind the transmission of biological form? Aristotle’s answer to this question, I argue, is found in Generation of Animals Book 4 in connection with his investigation into the phenomenon of inheritance. There we are told that an organism’s reproductive material contains a set of "movements" which are derived from the various "potentials" of its nature (the internal principle of change that initiates and controls development). (...) These movements, I suggest, function as specialized vehicles for communicating the parts of the parent’s heritable form during the act of reproduction. After exploring the details of this mechanism, I then take up Aristotle’s theory of inheritance proper. At the heart of the theory are three general principles (or 'laws') that govern the interactions between the maternal and paternal movements, the outcome of which determines the pattern of inheritance for the offspring. Although this paper is primarily aimed at providing a detailed analysis of Aristotle’s account of inheritance, the results of that analysis have implications for other areas of Aristotle’s biology. One of the most interesting of these is the question of whether Aristotle’s biology is anti-evolutionary (as traditionally assumed) or whether (as I argue) it leaves room for a theory of evolution by natural selection, even if Aristotle himself never took that step. (shrink)

Experimental results in reference to Brazilian children and adults are presented in the context of current discussions about essentialism and folkbiology. Using an adoption paradigm, we replicate the basic findings of a previous article in this journal concerning the early emergence in children of a birth-parent bias. This cognitive bias supports the claim that causal essentialism cross-culturally constrains the reasoning about the origin, development and maintenance of the characteristics and identity of living kinds. We also report some intriguing differences with (...) earlier findings that speak to theoretical and methodological issues of cultural relativity. (shrink)

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 (...) that it exemplifies a weak of form of explanatory unification. (shrink)

In his first paper on the special theory of relativity, Einstein indicated that the question of whether or not two spatially separated events were simultaneous did not necessarily have a definite answer, but instead depended on the adoption of a convention for its resolution. Some later writers have argued that Einstein's choice of a convention is, in fact, the only possible choice within the framework of special relativistic physics, while others have maintained that alternative choices, although perhaps less convenient, are (...) indeed possible. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Darwin's Life Darwin's Darwinism Philosophical Problems with Darwin's Darwinism The Core Problems and Darwinism Conclusion References Further Reading.

The United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme’s UKCP09 project makes high-resolution projections of the climate out to 2100 by post-processing the outputs of a large-scale global climate model. The aim of this paper is to describe and analyse the methodology used and then urge some caution. Given the acknowledged systematic, shared errors of all current climate models, treating model outputs as decision-relevant projections can be significantly misleading. In extrapolatory situations, such as projections of future climate change, there is little reason to (...) expect that post-processing of model outputs can correct for the consequences of such errors. This casts doubt on our ability, today, to make trustworthy probabilistic projections at high resolution out to the end of the century. (shrink)

Although explanation is widely regarded as an important concept in the study of rational inquiry, it remains largely unexplored outside the philosophy of science. This, I believe, is not due to oversight as much as to institutional resistance. In analytic philosophy it is basic that epistemic rationality is a function of justification and that justification is a function of argument. Explanation, however, is not argument nor is belief justification its function. I argue here that the task of incorporating explanation into (...) the theory of rational inquiry poses a serious challenge to our basic concept of epistemic rationality as well as the a priori method of inquiry that still lies at the heart of analytic philosophy. Specifically, it pushes us toward a much stronger form of naturalism than is generally thought necessary, one in which argument and explanation are recognized as distinct and equally fundamental cognitive processes whose dynamic relationship is one of the central issues in the theory of rationality. (shrink)

Darwinism designates a distinctive form of evolutionary explanation for the history and diversity of life on earth. Its original formulation is provided in the first edition of On the Origin of Species in 1859. This entry first formulates ‘Darwin's Darwinism’ in terms of five philosophically distinctive themes: (i) probability and chance, (ii) the nature, power and scope of selection, (iii) adaptation and teleology, (iv) nominalism vs. essentialism about species and (v) the tempo and mode of evolutionary change. Both Darwin and (...) his critics recognized that his approach to evolution was distinctive on each of these topics, and it remains true that, though Darwinism has developed in many ways unforeseen by Darwin, its proponents and critics continue to differentiate it from other approaches in evolutionary biology by focusing on these themes. This point is illustrated in the second half of the entry by looking at current debates in the philosophy of evolutionary biology on these five themes, with a special focus on Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. (shrink)

In this paper, domain-specificity is presented as an understudied problem in chemical education. This argument is unpacked by drawing from two bodies of literature: learning of science and epistemology of science, both themes that have cognitive as well as philosophical undertones. The wider context is students’ engagement in scientific inquiry, an important goal for science education and one that has not been well executed in everyday classrooms. The focus on science learning illustrates the role of domain specificity in scientific reasoning. (...) The discussion on epistemology of science presents ideas from the emerging field of philosophy of chemistry to highlight the much neglected area of epistemology in chemical education. Domain-specificity is exemplified in the context of chemical laws, in particular the Periodic Law. The applications of the discussion for chemical education are explored in relation to argumentation, itself an epistemologically grounded discourse pattern in science. The overall implications include the need for reconceptualization of the nature of teaching and learning in chemistry to include more particular epistemological aspects of chemistry. (shrink)