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  1. The Intentional Stance.Daniel Clement Dennett - 1981 - MIT Press.
    Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of...
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  • Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior.Elliott Sober & David Sloan Wilson - 1998 - Harvard University Press.
    The authors demonstrate that unselfish behavior is in fact an important feature of both biological and human nature. Their book provides a panoramic view of altruism throughout the animal kingdom--from self-sacrificing parasites to the human capacity for selflessness--even as it explains the evolutionary sense of such behavior.
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  • The Scientific Image.William Demopoulos & Bas C. van Fraassen - 1982 - Philosophical Review 91 (4):603.
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  • Evolution and the levels of selection.Samir Okasha - 2006 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.
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  • Homeostasis, species, and higher taxa.Richard Boyd - 1999 - In Robert Andrew Wilson (ed.), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. MIT Press. pp. 141-85.
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  • (2 other versions)Truth and Other Enigmas.Michael Dummett - 1978 - Philosophical Quarterly 31 (122):47-67.
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  • (1 other version)Species.Philip Kitcher - 1984 - Philosophy of Science 51 (2):308-333.
    I defend a view of the species category, pluralistic realism, which is designed to do justice to the insights of many different groups of systematists. After arguing that species are sets and not individuals, I proceed to outline briefly some defects of the biological species concept. I draw the general moral that similar shortcomings arise for other popular views of the nature of species. These shortcomings arise because the legitimate interests of biology are diverse, and these diverse interests are reflected (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Truth and Other Enigmas.Michael Dummett - 1978 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 32 (4):419-425.
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  • The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus.Elliott Sober - 1987 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (3):397-399.
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  • (1 other version)Natural kinds and biological taxa.John Dupré - 1981 - Philosophical Review 90 (1):66-90.
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  • The Return of the Gene.Kim Sterelny & Philip Kitcher - 1988 - Journal of Philosophy 85 (7):339.
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  • Genes and the Agents of Life: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences Biology.Robert A. Wilson - 2004 - New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    Genes and the Agents of Life undertakes to rethink the place of the individual in the biological sciences, drawing parallels with the cognitive and social sciences. Genes, organisms, and species are all agents of life but how are each of these conceptualized within genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary biology, and systematics? The 2005 book includes highly accessible discussions of genetic encoding, species and natural kinds, and pluralism above the levels of selection, drawing on work from across the biological sciences. The book (...)
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  • (1 other version)Natural Kinds and Biological Taxa.John Dupré - 1981 - The Philosophical Review 90 (1):66-90.
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  • The status of content.Paul A. Boghossian - 1990 - Philosophical Review 99 (2):157-84.
    An irrealist conception of a given region of discourse is the view that no real properties answer to the central predicates of the region in question. Any such conception emerges, invariably, as the result of the interaction of two forces. An account of the meaning of the central predicates, along with a conception of the sorts of property the world may contain, conspire to show that, if the predicates of the region are taken to express properties, their extensions would have (...)
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  • Alternative formulations of multilevel selection.John Damuth & I. Lorraine Heisler - 1988 - Biology and Philosophy 3 (4):407-430.
    Hierarchical expansions of the theory of natural selection exist in two distinct bodies of thought in evolutionary biology, the group selection and the species selection traditions. Both traditions share the point of view that the principles of natural selection apply at levels of biological organization above the level of the individual organism. This leads them both to considermultilevel selection situations, where selection is occurring simultaneously at more than one level. Impeding unification of the theoretical approaches of the multilevel selection traditions (...)
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  • What Realism Implies and What it Does Not.Richard Boyd - 1989 - Dialectica 43 (1‐2):5-29.
    SummaryThis paper addresses the question of what scientific realism implies and what it does not when it is articulated so as to provide the best defense against plausible philosophical alternatives. A summary is presented of “abductive” arguments for scientific realism, and of the epistemological and semantic conceptions upon which they depend. Taking these arguments to be the best current defense of realism, it is inquired what, in the sense just mentioned, realism implies and what it does not. It is concluded (...)
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  • Individualist and multi-level perspectives on selection in structured populations.Benjamin Kerr & Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2002 - Biology and Philosophy 17 (4):477-517.
    Recent years have seen a renewed debate over the importance of groupselection, especially as it relates to the evolution of altruism. Onefeature of this debate has been disagreement over which kinds ofprocesses should be described in terms of selection at multiple levels,within and between groups. Adapting some earlier discussions, we presenta mathematical framework that can be used to explore the exactrelationships between evolutionary models that do, and those that donot, explicitly recognize biological groups as fitness-bearing entities.We show a fundamental set (...)
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  • Tempered realism about the force of selection.C. Kenneth Waters - 1991 - Philosophy of Science 58 (4):553-573.
    Darwinians are realists about the force of selection, but there has been surprisingly little discussion about what form this realism should take. Arguments about the units of selection in general and genic selectionism in particular reveal two realist assumptions: (1) for any selection process, there is a uniquely correct identification of the operative selective forces and the level at which each impinges; and (2) selective forces must satisfy the Pareto-style requirement of probabilistic causation. I argue that both assumptions are false; (...)
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  • The Poverty of Pluralism: A Reply to Sterelny and Kitcher.Philip Kitcher, Kim Sterelny & C. Kenneth Waters - 1990 - Journal of Philosophy 87 (3):151-158.
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  • (1 other version)Units and levels of selection.Elisabeth Lloyd - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    The theory of evolution by natural selection is, perhaps, the crowning intellectual achievement of the biological sciences. There is, however, considerable debate about which entity or entities are selected and what it is that fits them for that role. This article aims to clarify what is at issue in these debates by identifying four distinct, though often confused, concerns and then identifying how the debates on what constitute the units of selection depend to a significant degree on which of these (...)
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  • The return of the group.Kim Sterelny - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (4):562-584.
    Once upon a time in evolutionary theory, everything happened for the best. Predators killed only the old or the sick. Pecking orders and other dominance hierarchies minimized wasteful conflict within the group. Male displays ensured that only the best and the fittest had mates. In the culmination of this tradition, Wynne-Edwards argued that many species have mechanisms that ensure groups do not over-exploit their resource base. The “central function” of territoriality in birds and other higher animals is “of limiting the (...)
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  • Kin Selection and Its Critics.Jonathan Birch & Samir Okasha - 2015 - BioScience 65 (1):22-32.
    Hamilton’s theory of kin selection is the best-known framework for understanding the evolution of social behavior but has long been a source of controversy in evolutionary biology. A recent critique of the theory by Nowak, Tarnita, and Wilson sparked a new round of debate, which shows no signs of abating. In this overview, we highlight a number of conceptual issues that lie at the heart of the current debate. We begin by emphasizing that there are various alternative formulations of Hamilton’s (...)
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  • Varieties of population structure and the levels of selection.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2008 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (1):25-50.
    Group-structured populations, of the kind prominent in discussions of multilevel selection, are contrasted with ‘neighbor-structured’ populations. I argue that it is a necessary condition on multilevel description of a selection process that there should be a nonarbitrary division of the population into equivalence classes (or an approximation to this situation). The discussion is focused via comparisons between two famous problem cases involving group structure (altruism and heterozygote advantage) and two neighbor-structured cases that resemble them. Conclusions are also drawn about the (...)
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  • Realism, Conventionalism, and Causal Decomposition in Units of Selection: Reflections on Samir Okasha’s Evolution and the Levels of Selection.Elliott Sober - 2010 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1):221-231.
    I discuss two subjects in Samir Okasha’s excellent book, Evolution and the Levels of Selection. In consonance with Okasha’s critique of the conventionalist view of the units of selection problem, I argue that conventionalists have not attended to what realists mean by group, individual, and genic selection. In connection with Okasha’s discussion of the Price equation and contextual analysis, I discuss whether the existence of these two quantitative frameworks is a challenge to realism.
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  • Carnap and the Caterpillar.Philip Kitcher - 2008 - Philosophical Topics 36 (1):111-127.
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  • Why the Gene will not return.Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (2):287-310.
    I argue that four of the fundamental claims of those calling themselves `genic pluralists'Philip Kitcher, Kim Sterelny, and Ken Watersare defective. First, they claim that once genic selectionism is recognized, the units of selection problems will be dissolved. Second, Sterelny and Kitcher claim that there are no targets of selection. Third, Sterelny, Kitcher, and Waters claim that they have a concept of genic causation that allows them to give independent genic causal accounts of all selection processes. I argue that each (...)
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  • Why Genic and Multilevel Selection Theories Are Here to Stay.C. Kenneth Waters - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (2):311-333.
    I clarify the difference between pluralist and monist interpretations of levels of selection disputes. Lloyd has challenged my claim that a plurality of models correctly accounts for situations such as maintenance of the sickle-cell trait, and I revisit this example to show that competing theories don’t disagree about the existence of ‘high-level’ or ‘lowlevel’ causes; rather, they parse these causes differently. Applying Woodward’s theory of causation, I analyze Sober’s distinction between ‘selection of’ versus ‘selection for’. My analysis shows that this (...)
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  • (1 other version)Natural kinds.A. Haddock & J. A. Dupré - 2005 - In Donald M. Borchert (ed.), Encyclopedia of Philosophy. macmillan reference. pp. 6--503.
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  • Pluralism without Genic Causes?Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Matthew Dunn, Jennifer Cianciollo & Costas Mannouris - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (2):334-341.
    Since the fundamental challenge that I laid at the doorstep of the pluralists was to defend, with nonderivative models, a strong notion of genic cause, it is fatal that Waters has failed to meet that challenge. Waters agrees with me that there is only a single cause operating in these models, but he argues for a notion of causal ‘parsing’ to sustain the viability of some form of pluralism. Waters and his colleagues have some very interesting and important ideas about (...)
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  • Evolutionary theory and the social uses of biology.Philip Kitcher - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (1):1-15.
    Stephen Jay Gould is rightly remembered for many different kinds of contributions to our intellectual life. I focus on his criticisms of uses of evolutionary ideas to defend inegalitarian doctrines and on his attempts to expand the framework of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I argue that his important successes in the former sphere are applications of the idea of local critique, grounded in careful attention to the details of the inegalitarian proposals. As he became more concerned with the second project, Gould (...)
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  • Will peace follow?Lee Alan Dugatkin - 2002 - Biology and Philosophy 17 (4):519-522.
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  • Perspectives and parameterizations commentary on Benjamin Kerr and Peter Godfrey-Smith's ``individualist and multi-level perspectives on selection in structured populations''.Elliott Sober & David Sloan Wilson - 2002 - Biology and Philosophy 17 (4):529-537.
    We have two main objections to Kerr and Godfrey-Smith's (2002) meticulous analysis. First, they misunderstand the position we took in Unto Others – we do not claim that individual-level statements about the evolution of altruism are always unexplanatory and always fail to capture causal relationships. Second, Kerr and Godfrey-Smith characterize the individual and the multi-level perspectives in terms of different sets of parameters. In particular, they do not allow the multi-level perspective to use the individual fitness parameters i and i. (...)
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  • Group fitness and multi-level selection: Replies to commentaries. [REVIEW]Peter Godfrey-Smith & Benjamin Kerr - 2002 - Biology and Philosophy 17 (4):539-549.
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  • Group Selection, Pluralism, and the Evolution of Altruism. [REVIEW]Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2002 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3):685-691.
    One version of pluralism was defended in a well-known paper by Sterelny and Kitcher. In this sense, pluralism is the view that any given selective process can be described at a variety of different levels in the biological hierarchy. On Sterelny and Kitcher’s view, one can explain giraffe necks in terms of competition among longer-necked and shorter-necked giraffes, and one can also explain them in terms of competition among the genes that lead to these differences in neck size. Although these (...)
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