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Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology

The Mit Press. Bradford Books (1994)

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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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  • Functions and mechanisms: a perspectivalist view.Carl F. Craver - 2013 - In Philippe Huneman (ed.), Functions: selection and mechanisms. Springer. pp. 133--158.
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  • In defense of exaptation.Wendy Wilkins & Jennie Dumford - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):763-764.
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  • Adaptive complexity in sound patterns.Björn Lindblom - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):743-744.
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  • The genome might as well store the entire language in the environment.Anat Ninio - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):746-747.
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  • Arbitrariness no argument against adaption.Mark Ridley - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):756-756.
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  • ¿Qué son realmente las especies? La búsqueda de clases naturales en biología.Santiago Ginnobili - 2005 - Análisis Filosófico 25 (1):45-61.
    En What Emotions Really Are y en otros artículos, Griffiths afirma que las clases naturales de los organismos vivos en Biología son cladistas. La afirmación está inmersa en una nueva teoría acerca de las clases naturales. En este trabajo examinaré los argumentos esgrimidos por Griffiths para sostener el estatus privilegiado de las clasificaciones cladistas frente a otras clasificaciones. No se discutirá la teoría de las clases naturales ofrecida, de cuyos méritos no dudo, sino su capacidad para ofrecer una solución en (...)
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  • Evolution and special creation.Ernan Mc Mullin - 1993 - Zygon 28 (3):299-335.
    The logical relationships between the ideas of evolution and of special creation are explored here in the context of a recent paper by Alvin Plantinga claiming that from the perspective of biblical religion it is more likely than not that God acted in a “special” way at certain crucial moments in the long process whereby life developed on earth. I argue against this thesis, asking first under what circumstances the Bible might be thought relevant to an issue of broadly scientific (...)
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  • Three kinds of adaptationism.Peter Godfrey-Smith - unknown
    Debate about adaptationism in biology continues, in part because within “the” problem of assessing adaptationism, three distinct problems are mixed together. The three problems concern the assessment of three distinct adaptationist positions, each of which asserts the central importance of adaptation and natural selection to the study of evolution, but conceives this importance in a different way. As there are three kinds of adaptationism, there are three distinct "anti-adaptationist" positions as well. Or putting it more formally, there are three different (...)
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  • Darwinism.James Lennox - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    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 (...)
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  • How Do Natural Selection and Random Drift Interact?Marshall Abrams - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (5):666-679.
    One controversy about the existence of so called evolutionary forces such as natural selection and random genetic drift concerns the sense in which such “forces” can be said to interact. In this paper I explain how natural selection and random drift can interact. In particular, I show how population-level probabilities can be derived from individual-level probabilities, and explain the sense in which natural selection and drift are embodied in these population-level probabilities. I argue that whatever causal character the individual-level probabilities (...)
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  • Theory structure, reduction, and disciplinary integration in biology.Kenneth F. Schaffner - 1993 - Biology and Philosophy 8 (3):319-347.
    This paper examines the nature of theory structure in biology and considers the implications of those theoretical structures for theory reduction. An account of biological theories as interlevel prototypes embodying causal sequences, and related to each other by strong analogies, is presented, and examples from the neurosciences are provided to illustrate these middle-range theories. I then go on to discuss several modifications of Nagel''s classical model of theory reduction, and indicate at what stages in the development of reductions these models (...)
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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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  • Again, what the philosophy of biology is not.Werner Callebaut - 2005 - Acta Biotheoretica 53 (2):93-122.
    There are many things that philosophy of biology might be. But, given the existence of a professional philosophy of biology that is arguably a progressive research program and, as such, unrivaled, it makes sense to define philosophy of biology more narrowly than the totality of intersecting concerns biologists and philosophers (let alone other scholars) might have. The reasons for the success of the “new” philosophy of biology remain poorly understood. I reflect on what Dutch and Flemish, and, more generally, European (...)
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  • Kuhnian values and cladistic parsimony.Richard Richards - 2002 - Perspectives on Science 10 (1):1-27.
    : According to Kuhn, theory choice is not governed by algorithms, but by values, which influence yet do not determine theory choice. Cladistic hypotheses, however, seem to be evaluated relative to a parsimony algorithm, which asserts that the best phylogenetic hypothesis is the one that requires the fewest character changes. While this seems to be an unequivocal evaluative rule, it is not. The application of the parsimony principle is ultimately indeterminate because the choice and individuation of characters that figure in (...)
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  • Adaptive complexity and phenomenal consciousness.Shaun Nichols & Todd Grantham - 2000 - Philosophy of Science 67 (4):648-670.
    Arguments about the evolutionary function of phenomenal consciousness are beset by the problem of epiphenomenalism. For if it is not clear whether phenomenal consciousness has a causal role, then it is difficult to begin an argument for the evolutionary role of phenomenal consciousness. We argue that complexity arguments offer a way around this problem. According to evolutionary biology, the structural complexity of a given organ can provide evidence that the organ is an adaptation, even if nothing is known about the (...)
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  • Animals and humans, thinking and nature.David Morris - 2005 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (1):49-72.
    Studies that compare human and animal behaviour suspend prejudices about mind, body and their relation, by approaching thinking in terms of behaviour. Yet comparative approaches typically engage another prejudice, motivated by human social and bodily experience: taking the lone animal as the unit of comparison. This prejudice informs Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s comparative studies, and conceals something important: that animals moving as a group in an environment can develop new sorts of “sense.” The study of animal group-life suggests a new way (...)
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  • Natural language and natural selection.Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):707-27.
    Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers (...)
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  • Teleosemantics without natural selection.Marshall Abrams - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):97-116.
    Ruth Millikan and others advocate theories which attempt to naturalize wide mental content (e.g. beliefs.
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  • Agential Teleosemantics.Tiago Rama - 2022 - Dissertation, Autonomous University of Barcelona
    The field of the philosophy of biology is flourishing in its aim to evaluate and rethink the view inherited from the previous century ---the Modern Synthesis. Different research areas and theories have come to the fore in the last decades in order to account for different biological phenomena that, in the first instance, fall beyond the explanatory scope of the Modern Synthesis. This thesis is anchored and motivated by this revolt in the philosophy of biology. -/- The central target in (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Scientonomy and the sociotechnical domain.Paul E. Patton (ed.) - 2021 - Willmington, Delaware: Vernon Press.
    The sociotechnical domain is the realm of scientists, the communities and institutions they form, and the tools and instruments they use to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge. This paper reviews current scientonomic theory concerning this domain. A core scientonomic concept is that of an epistemic agent. Generally, an agent is an entity capable of intentional action—action that has content or meaning due to its purposeful direction towards a goal. An epistemic agent is one whose actions are the taking of epistemic (...)
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  • What determines biological fitness? The problem of the reference environment.Marshall Abrams - 2009 - Synthese 166 (1):21-40.
    Organisms' environments are thought to play a fundamental role in determining their fitness and hence in natural selection. Existing intuitive conceptions of environment are sufficient for biological practice. I argue, however, that attempts to produce a general characterization of fitness and natural selection are incomplete without the help of general conceptions of what conditions are included in the environment. Thus there is a "problem of the reference environment"—more particularly, problems of specifying principles which pick out those environmental conditions which determine (...)
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  • Middle position on language, cognition, and evolution.Michael Maratsos - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):744-745.
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  • Complexity and adaptation.David Pesetsky & Ned Block - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):750-752.
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  • Welcome to functionalism.Elizabeth Bates & Brian MacWhinney - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):727-728.
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  • Debates in Philosophy of Biology: One Long Argument, or Many?Catherine Kendig - 2011 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 25 (1):73 - 81.
    Philosophy of biology, perhaps more than any other philosophy of science, is a discipline in flux. What counts as consensus and key arguments in certain areas changes rapidly.The publication of Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology (2010 Wiley-Blackwell) is reviewed and is used as a catalyst to a discussion of the recent expansion of subjects and perspectives in the philosophy of biology as well as their diverse epistemological and methodological commitments.
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  • Untangling the Conceptual Issues Raised in Reydon and Scholz’s Critique of Organizational Ecology and Darwinian Populations.Denise E. Dollimore - 2014 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (3):282-315.
    Reydon and Scholz raise doubts about the Darwinian status of organizational ecology by arguing that Darwinian principles are not applicable to organizational populations. Although their critique of organizational ecology’s typological essentialism is correct, they go on to reject the Darwinian status of organizational populations. This paper claims that the replicator-interactor distinction raised in modern philosophy of biology but overlooked for discussion by Reydon and Scholz provides a way forward. It is possible to conceptualize evolving Darwinian populations providing that the inheritance (...)
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  • Gould on laws in biological science.Lee Mcintyre - 1997 - Biology and Philosophy 12 (3):357-367.
    Are there laws in evolutionary biology? Stephen J. Gould has argued that there are factors unique to biological theorizing which prevent the formulation of laws in biology, in contradistinction to the case in physics and chemistry. Gould offers the problem of complexity as just such a fundamental barrier to biological laws in general, and to Dollos Law in particular. But I argue that Gould fails to demonstrate: (1) that Dollos Law is not law-like, (2) that the alleged failure of Dollos (...)
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  • Forty years of 'the strategy': Levins on model building and idealization.Michael Weisberg - 2006 - Biology and Philosophy 21 (5):623-645.
    This paper is an interpretation and defense of Richard Levins’ “The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology,” which has been extremely influential among biologists since its publication 40 years ago. In this article, Levins confronted some of the deepest philosophical issues surrounding modeling and theory construction. By way of interpretation, I discuss each of Levins’ major philosophical themes: the problem of complexity, the brute-force approach, the existence and consequence of tradeoffs, and robustness analysis. I argue that Levins’ article is (...)
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  • John Dewey and american psychology.Peter T. Manicas - 2002 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 32 (3):267–294.
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  • Variations in Variation and Selection: The Ubiquity of the Variation-and-Selective-Retention Ratchet in Emergent Organizational Complexity. [REVIEW]Mark H. Bickhard & Donald T. Campbell - 2003 - Foundations of Science 8 (3):215-282.
    The variation and selection form of explanationcan be prescinded from the evolutionary biologyhome ground in which it was discovered and forwhich it has been most developed. When this isdone, variation and selection explanations arefound to have potential application to a widerange of phenomena, far beyond the classicalbiological ground and the contemporaryextensions into epistemological domains. Itappears as the form of explanation most suitedto phenomena of fit. It is also found toparticipate in multiple interestingrelationships with other forms of explanation. We proceed with (...)
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  • Functional analysis and etiology.Ron McClamrock - 1993 - Erkenntnis 38 (2):249-260.
    Cummins (1982) argues that etiological considerations are not onlyinsufficient butirrelevant for the determination offunction. I argue that his claim of irrelevance rests on a misrepresentation of the use of functions in evolutionary explanations. I go on to suggest how accepting anetiological constraint on functional analysis might help resolve some problems involving the use of functional explanations.
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  • Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology.Ned Block - 1986 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (1):615-678.
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  • Adaptationism, Deflationism, and Anti-Individualism.Tomas Hribek - 2011 - In Tomas Hribek & Juraj Hvorecky (eds.), Knowledge, Value, Evolution. Londýn, Velká Británie: College Publications. pp. 167-187.
    An examination of the externalist theories of Tyler Burge, Daniel Dennett and Ruth Millikan.
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  • A Potential Tension in DSM-5: The General Definition of Mental Disorder versus Some Specific Diagnostic Criteria.M. Cristina Amoretti & Elisabetta Lalumera - 2019 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 44 (1):85-108.
    The general concept of mental disorder specified in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is definitional in character: a mental disorder might be identified with a harmful dysfunction. The manual also contains the explicit claim that each individual mental disorder should meet the requirements posed by the definition. The aim of this article is two-fold. First, we shall analyze the definition of the superordinate concept of mental disorder to better understand what necessary criteria actually (...)
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  • The Current Status of the Philosophy of Biology.Peter Takacs & Michael Ruse - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (1):5-48.
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  • Toward a propensity interpretation of stochastic mechanism for the life sciences.Lane DesAutels - 2015 - Synthese 192 (9):2921-2953.
    In what follows, I suggest that it makes good sense to think of the truth of the probabilistic generalizations made in the life sciences as metaphysically grounded in stochastic mechanisms in the world. To further understand these stochastic mechanisms, I take the general characterization of mechanism offered by MDC :1–25, 2000) and explore how it fits with several of the going philosophical accounts of chance: subjectivism, frequentism, Lewisian best-systems, and propensity. I argue that neither subjectivism, frequentism, nor a best-system-style interpretation (...)
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  • Issues in the evolution of the human language faculty.Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):765-784.
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  • Anatomizing the rhinoceros.Elliott Sober - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):764-765.
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  • The view of language.Michael Studdert-Kennedy - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):758-759.
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  • Un retournement dans la philosophie de la biologie de K.R. Popper.François Tournier - 1991 - Philosophiques 18 (1):61-94.
    La littérature épistémologique actuelle véhicule une image caricaturale de la philosophie popperienne de la biologie. En effet, on suppose sa position suffisamment claire et univoque pour pouvoir se résumer succinctement en quelques lignes. De plus, on la suppose toujours la même tout au long de l'évolution intellectuelle de son auteur. Dans le présent article, nous voudrions contester ces deux suppositions car sa pensée est non seulement vague et ambiguë mais encore elle est loin d'être constante et homogène. De ce fait, (...)
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  • Values in evolutionary biology: a comparison between the contemporary debate on organic progress and Canguilhem’s biological philosophy.Silvia De Cesare - 2022 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 44 (2):1-20.
    The aim of this paper is to make a comparison and build up a dialogue between two different philosophical approaches to values in evolutionary biology. First, I present the approach proposed by Alexander Rosenberg and Daniel McShea in their contribution to the contemporary debate on organic progress. i.e. the idea that there has been some kind of improvement concerning organisms over the history of life. Discussing organic progress raises the question of what “better” exactly means. This requires an explicit clarification (...)
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  • El papel del pensamiento poblacional en la teoría de la doble herencia.Lorenzo Baravalle - 2017 - Scientiae Studia 15 (2):283.
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  • A levels-of-selection approach to evolutionary individuality.Ellen Clarke - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):893-911.
    What changes when an evolutionary transition in individuality takes place? Many different answers have been given, in respect of different cases of actual transition, but some have suggested a general answer: that a major transition is a change in the extent to which selection acts at one hierarchical level rather than another. The current paper evaluates some different ways to develop this general answer as a way to characterise the property ‘evolutionary individuality’; and offers a justification of the option taken (...)
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  • The unity of fitness.Marshall Abrams - 2009 - Philosophy of Science 76 (5):750-761.
    It has been argued that biological fitness cannot be defined as expected number of offspring in all contexts. Some authors argue that fitness therefore merely satisfies a common schema or that no unified mathematical characterization of fitness is possible. I argue that comparative fitness must be relativized to an evolutionary effect; thus relativized, fitness can be given a unitary mathematical characterization in terms of probabilities of producing offspring and other effects. Such fitnesses will sometimes be defined in terms of probabilities (...)
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  • The non-existence of a principle of natural selection.Abner Shimony - 1989 - Biology and Philosophy 4 (3):255-273.
    The theory of natural selection is a rich systematization of biological knowledge without a first principle. When formulations of a proposed principle of natural selection are examined carefully, each is seen to be exhaustively analyzable into a proposition about sources of fitness and a proposition about consequences of fitness. But whenever the fitness of an organic variety is well defined in a given biological situation, its sources are local contingencies together with the background of laws from disciplines other than the (...)
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  • Methodological individualism considered as a constitutive principle of scientific inquiry.Ron McClamrock - 1991 - Philosophical Psychology 4 (3):343-54.
    The issue of methodological solipsism in the philosophy of mind and psychology has received enormous attention and discussion in the decade since the appearance Jerry Fodor's "Methodological Solipsism" [Fodor 1980]. But most of this discussion has focused on the consideration of the now infamous "Twin Earth" type examples and the problems they present for Fodor's notion of "narrow content". I think there is deeper and more general moral to be found in this issue, particularly in light of Fodor's more recent (...)
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  • The Nature of Programmed Cell Death.Pierre M. Durand & Grant Ramsey - 2019 - Biological Theory 14 (1):30-41.
    In multicellular organisms, cells are frequently programmed to die. This makes good sense: cells that fail to, or are no longer playing important roles are eliminated. From the cell’s perspective, this also makes sense, since somatic cells in multicellular organisms require the cooperation of clonal relatives. In unicellular organisms, however, programmed cell death poses a difficult and unresolved evolutionary problem. The empirical evidence for PCD in diverse microbial taxa has spurred debates about what precisely PCD means in the case of (...)
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  • Supervenience and Reduction in Biological Hierarchies.John Collier - 1988 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 14:209-234.
    Supervenience is a relationship which has been used recently to explain the physical determination of biological phenomena despite resistance to reduction. Supervenience, however, is plagued by ambiguities which weaken its explanatory value and obscure some interesting aspects of reduction in biology. Although I suspect that similar considerations affect the use of supervenience in ethics and the philosophy of mind, I don’t intend anything I have to say here to apply outside of the physical and biological cases I consider.The main point (...)
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  • Causal stories.David Magnus - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):744-744.
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