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Tales of Tools and Trees: Phylogenetic analysis and explanation in evolutionary archaeology

In Henk W. De Regt, Stephan Hartmann & Samir Okasha (eds.), EPSA Philosophy of Science: Amsterdam 2009. Springer. pp. 89--100 (2011)

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  1. Not a sure thing: Fitness, probability, and causation.Denis M. Walsh - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (2):147-171.
    In evolutionary biology changes in population structure are explained by citing trait fitness distribution. I distinguish three interpretations of fitness explanations—the Two‐Factor Model, the Single‐Factor Model, and the Statistical Interpretation—and argue for the last of these. These interpretations differ in their degrees of causal commitment. The first two hold that trait fitness distribution causes population change. Trait fitness explanations, according to these interpretations, are causal explanations. The last maintains that trait fitness distribution correlates with population change but does not cause (...)
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  • Natural selection as a population-level causal process.Roberta L. Millstein - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (4):627-653.
    Recent discussions in the philosophy of biology have brought into question some fundamental assumptions regarding evolutionary processes, natural selection in particular. Some authors argue that natural selection is nothing but a population-level, statistical consequence of lower-level events (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; Walsh et al. [2002]). On this view, natural selection itself does not involve forces. Other authors reject this purely statistical, population-level account for an individual-level, causal account of natural selection (Bouchard and Rosenberg [2004]). I argue that each of these (...)
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  • The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance.Ernst Mayr - 1982 - Harvard University Press.
    Explores the development of the ideas of evolutionary biology, particularly as affected by the increasing understanding of genetics and of the chemical basis of inheritance.
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  • Reconstructing The Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference.Elliott Sober - 1988 - MIT Press.
    Reconstructing the Past seeks to clarify and help resolve the vexing methodological issues that arise when biologists try to answer such questions as whether human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas. It explores the case for considering the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony as a useful principle for evaluating taxonomic theories of evolutionary relationships. For the past two decades, evolutionists have been vigorously debating the appropriate methods that should be used in systematics, the field that (...)
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  • Organisms and Artifacts: Design in Nature and Elsewhere.Tim Lewens - 2004 - MIT Press.
    Preface ix 1 Meaning and the Means to an Understanding of Ends 2 Why Is an Eye? 21 3 Adaptationism and Engineering 39 4 On Five "-Isms" 67 5 Function, Selection, and Explanation 87 6 Deflating Function 119 7 Artifacts and Organisms 139 References 167 Index 177.
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  • Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour.Kevin N. Laland & Gillian R. Brown - 2002 - Oxford University Press. Edited by Kevin N. Laland & Gillian R. Brown.
    This book asks whether evolution can help us to understand human behaviour and explores diverse evolutionary methods and arguments. It provides a short, readable introduction to the science behind the works of Dawkins, Dennett, Wilson and Pinker. It is widely used in undergraduate courses around the world.
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  • Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science.Elliott Sober - 2008 - Cambridge University Press.
    How should the concept of evidence be understood? And how does the concept of evidence apply to the controversy about creationism as well as to work in evolutionary biology about natural selection and common ancestry? In this rich and wide-ranging book, Elliott Sober investigates general questions about probability and evidence and shows how the answers he develops to those questions apply to the specifics of evolutionary biology. Drawing on a set of fascinating examples, he analyzes whether claims about intelligent design (...)
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  • The Evolution of Technology.George Basalla - 1988 - Cambridge University Press.
    Three emerging themes challenge the popular notion that technology advances through the efforts of a few who produce a series of revolutionary inventions that owe little or nothing to the technological past.
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  • Memes revisited.Kim Sterelny - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (1):145-165.
    In this paper, I argue that the adaptive fit between human cultures and their environment is persuasive evidence that some form of evolutionary mechanism has been important in driving human cultural change. I distinguish three mechanisms of cultural evolution: niche construction leading to cultural group selection; the vertical flow of cultural information from parents to their children, and the replication and spread of memes. I further argue that both cultural group selection and the vertical flow of cultural information have been (...)
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  • Common ancestry and natural selection.Elliott Sober & Steven Hecht Orzack - 2003 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (3):423-437.
    We explore the evidential relationships that connect two standard claims of modern evolutionary biology. The hypothesis of common ancestry (which says that all organisms now on earth trace back to a single progenitor) and the hypothesis of natural selection (which says that natural selection has been an important influence on the traits exhibited by organisms) are logically independent; however, this leaves open whether testing one requires assumptions about the status of the other. Darwin noted that an extreme version of adaptationism (...)
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