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  1. In defence of generalized Darwinism.Howard E. Aldrich, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, David L. Hull, Thorbjørn Knudsen, Joel Mokyr & Viktor J. Vanberg - 2008 - Journal of Evolutionary Economics 18:577-596.
    Darwin himself suggested the idea of generalizing the core Darwinian principles to cover the evolution of social entities. Also in the nineteenth century, influential social scientists proposed their extension to political society and economic institutions. Nevertheless, misunderstanding and misrepresentation have hindered the realization of the powerful potential in this longstanding idea. Some critics confuse generalization with analogy. Others mistakenly presume that generalizing Darwinism necessarily involves biological reductionism. This essay outlines the types of phenomena to which a generalized Darwinism applies, and (...)
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  • Conditions for Evolution by Natural Selection.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2007 - Journal of Philosophy 104 (10):489-516.
    Both biologists and philosophers often make use of simple verbal formulations of necessary and sufficient conditions for evolution by natural selection (ENS). Such summaries go back to Darwin's Origin of Species (especially the "Recapitulation"), but recent ones are more compact.1 Perhaps the most commonly cited formulation is due to Lewontin.2 These summaries tend to have three or four conditions, where the core requirement is a combination of variation, heredity, and fitness differences. The summaries are employed in several ways. First, they (...)
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  • Population Pluralism and Natural Selection.Jacob Stegenga - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (1):1-29.
    I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...)
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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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  • “Population” Is Not a Natural Kind of Kinds.Jacob Stegenga - 2010 - Biological Theory 5 (2):154-160.
    Millstein argues against conceptual pluralism with respect to the definition of “population,” and proposes her own definition of the term. I challenge both Millstein’s negative arguments against conceptual pluralism and her positive proposal for a singular definition of population. The concept of population, I argue, does not refer to a natural kind; popula tions are constructs of biologists variably defined by contexts of inquiry.
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  • Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science.David L. Hull - 1988 - University of Chicago Press.
    "Legend is overdue for replacement, and an adequate replacement must attend to the process of science as carefully as Hull has done. I share his vision of a serious account of the social and intellectual dynamics of science that will avoid both the rosy blur of Legend and the facile charms of relativism.... Because of [Hull's] deep concern with the ways in which research is actually done, Science as a Process begins an important project in the study of science. It (...)
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  • Introduction: Evolutionary psychology and conceptual integration.Leda Cosmides, John Tooby & Jerome H. Barkow - 1992 - In Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Oxford University Press. pp. 3--15.
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  • (1 other version)Typological versus population thinking.Ernst Mayr - 1994 - In Elliott Sober (ed.), Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology. The Mit Press. Bradford Books. pp. 157--160.
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  • (1 other version)Evolution – the Extended Synthesis.Massimo Pigliucci & Gerd B. Muller (eds.) - 2010 - MIT Press.
    In the six decades since the publication of Julian Huxley's Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, spectacular empirical advances in the biological sciences have been accompanied by equally significant developments within the core theoretical framework of the discipline. As a result, evolutionary theory today includes concepts and even entire new fields that were not part of the foundational structure of the Modern Synthesis. In this volume, sixteen leading evolutionary biologists and philosophers of science survey the conceptual changes that have emerged since Huxley's (...)
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  • Why organizational ecology is not a Darwinian research program.Thomas A. C. Reydon & Markus Scholz - 2009 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 39 (3):408-439.
    Organizational ecology is commonly seen as a Darwinian research program that seeks to explain the diversity of organizational structures, properties and behaviors as the product of selection in past social environments in a similar manner as evolutionary biology seeks to explain the forms, properties and behaviors of organisms as consequences of selection in past natural environments. We argue that this explanatory strategy does not succeed because organizational ecology theory lacks an evolutionary mechanism that could be identified as the principal cause (...)
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  • Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.Peter Godfrey-Smith - 2009 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    The book presents a new way of understanding Darwinism and evolution by natural selection, combining work in biology, philosophy, and other fields.
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  • (5 other versions)On the Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.Charles Darwin - 1859 - San Diego: Sterling. Edited by David Quammen.
    Familiarity with Charles Darwin's treatise on evolution is essential to every well-educated individual. One of the most important books ever published--and a continuing source of controversy, a century and a half later--this classic of science is reproduced in a facsimile of the critically acclaimed first edition.
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  • The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - 1992 - Oxford University Press. Edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby.
    Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...
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  • Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind.David M. Buss - 1999 - Allyn & Bacon.
    This text addresses the profound human questions of love and work. Beginning with a historical introduction, the author progresses through adaptive problems that humans face, and concludes by showing how evolutionary psychology encompasses all branches of psychology.
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  • Evolution and the Levels of Selection.Samir Okasha - 2009 - Critica 41 (123):162-170.
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  • Blind variation and selective retentions in creative thought as in other knowledge processes.Donald T. Campbell - 1960 - Psychological Review 67 (6):380-400.
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  • Squaring the Circle: Natural Kinds with Historical Essences.Paul E. Griffiths - 1999 - In Robert Andrew Wilson (ed.), Species: New Interdisciplinary Essays. MIT Press. pp. 209-228.
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  • (5 other versions)The origin of species.Charles Darwin - 1859 - New York: Norton. Edited by Philip Appleman.
    In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a material, not divine, origin of species, he showed that new species are achieved by "natural selection." The Origin communicates the enthusiasm of original thinking in an open, descriptive style, and Darwin's emphasis on the value of diversity speaks more strongly now than ever. As well as a stimulating introduction and detailed notes, this edition offers a register of the many (...)
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  • Darwin machines and the nature of knowledge.Henry C. Plotkin - 1994 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
    Bringing together evolutionary biology, psychology, and philosophy, Henry Plotkin presents a new science of knowledge, one that traces an unbreakable link between instinct and our ability to know.
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  • On sociocultural evolution by social selection.Theodore R. Schatzki - 2001 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 31 (4):341–364.
    The essay criticizes an alleged new paradigm for explaining sociocultural change: selectionism. Part one describes the general selectionist explanatory schema, which selectionists claim applies to realms beyond the biological, in particular, the sociocultural. Part two focuses on the way most selectionists, in focusing on cultural change alone, wrongly separate culture from society. Particular atten-tion is paid to the accounts these selectionists offer of human action. Part three fills out a conception of the sociocultural, the need for which is indicated by (...)
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  • On the origin of the typological/population distinction in Ernst Mayr’s changing views of species, 1942–1959.Carl Chung - 2003 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 (2):277-296.
    Ernst Mayr's typological/population distinction is a conceptual thread that runs throughout much of his work in systematics, evolutionary biology, and the history and philosophy of biology. Mayr himself claims that typological thinking originated in the philosophy of Plato and that population thinking was first introduced by Charles Darwin and field naturalists. A more proximate origin of the typological/population thinking, however, is found in Mayr's own work on species. This paper traces the antecedents of the typological/population distinction by detailing Mayr's changing (...)
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  • Natural selection through survival alone, and the possibility of Gaia.W. Ford Doolittle - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (3):415-423.
    Here I advance two related evolutionary propositions. (1) Natural selection is most often considered to require competition between reproducing “individuals”, sometimes quite broadly conceived, as in cases of clonal, species or multispecies-community selection. But differential survival of non-competing and non-reproducing individuals will also result in increasing frequencies of survival-promoting “adaptations” among survivors, and thus is also a kind of natural selection. (2) Darwinists have challenged the view that the Earth’s biosphere is an evolved global homeostatic system. Since there is only (...)
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  • Causal processes, fitness, and the differential persistence of lineages.Frédéric Bouchard - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (5):560-570.
    Ecological fitness has been suggested to provide a unifying definition of fitness. However, a metric for this notion of fitness was in most cases unavailable except by proxy with differential reproductive success. In this article, I show how differential persistence of lineages can be used as a way to assess ecological fitness. This view is inspired by a better understanding of the evolution of some clonal plants, colonial organisms, and ecosystems. Differential persistence shows the limitation of an ensemblist noncausal understanding (...)
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  • Universal darwinism and evolutionary social science.Richard R. Nelson - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (1):73-94.
    Save for Anthropologists, few social scientists have been among the participants in the discussions about the appropriate structure of a ‘Universal Darwinism’. Yet evolutionary theorizing about cultural, social, and economic phenomena has a long tradition, going back well before Darwin. And over the past quarter century significant literatures have grown up concerned with the processes of change operating on science, technology, business organization and practice, and economic change more broadly, that are explicitly evolutionary in theoretical orientation. In each of these (...)
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  • Population Pluralism and Natural Selection.Jacob Stegenga - 2014 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1):axu003.
    I defend a radical interpretation of biological populations—what I call population pluralism—which holds that there are many ways that a particular grouping of individuals can be related such that the grouping satisfies the conditions necessary for those individuals to evolve together. More constraining accounts of biological populations face empirical counter-examples and conceptual difficulties. One of the most intuitive and frequently employed conditions, causal connectivity—itself beset with numerous difficulties—is best construed by considering the relevant causal relations as ‘thick’ causal concepts. I (...)
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  • Darwinism without populations: a more inclusive understanding of the “Survival of the Fittest”.Frédéric Bouchard - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (1):106-114.
    Following Wallace’s suggestion, Darwin framed his theory using Spencer’s expression “survival of the fittest”. Since then, fitness occupies a significant place in the conventional understanding of Darwinism, even though the explicit meaning of the term ‘fitness’ is rarely stated. In this paper I examine some of the different roles that fitness has played in the development of the theory. Whereas the meaning of fitness was originally understood in ecological terms, it took a statistical turn in terms of reproductive success throughout (...)
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  • Natural selection.Robert Brandon - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection provided the first, and only, causal-mechanistic account of the existence of adaptations in nature. As such, it provided the first, and only, scientific alternative to the “argument from design”. That alone would account for its philosophical significance. But the theory also raises other philosophical questions not encountered in the study of the theories of physics. Unfortunately the concept of natural selection is intimately intertwined with the other basic concepts of evolutionary theory—such as the (...)
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  • The Concepts of Population and Metapopulation in Evolutionary Biology and Ecology.Roberta L. Millstein - 2010 - In M. A. Bell, D. J. Futuyma, W. F. Eanes & J. S. Levinton (eds.), Evolution Since Darwin: The First 150 Years. Sinauer.
    This paper aims to illustrate one of the primary goals of the philosophy of biology⎯namely, the examination of central concepts in biological theory and practice⎯through an analysis of the concepts of population and metapopulation in evolutionary biology and ecology. I will first provide a brief background for my analysis, followed by a characterization of my proposed concepts: the causal interactionist concepts of population and metapopulation. I will then illustrate how the concepts apply to six cases that differ in their population (...)
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  • Populations as individuals.Roberta L. Millstein - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (3):267-273.
    Biologists studying ecology and evolution use the term “population” in many different ways. Yet little philosophical analysis of the concept has been done, either by biologists or philosophers, in contrast to the voluminous literature on the concept of “species.” This is in spite of the fact that “population” is arguably a far more central concept in ecological and evolutionary studies than “species” is. The fact that such a central concept has been employed in so many different ways is potentially problematic (...)
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  • The concept of population in biology.L. H. M. Jonckers - 1973 - Acta Biotheoretica 22 (2):78-108.
    In view of the confusion about the use of the term ‘population’ in biology, an analysis has been made of the use of the concept of population in biology. Origin and development, logic and epistemology of the population-concept have been investigated for that purpose. It appears that several concepts of population coexist in biology. The term ‘population’ is used for all these concepts, so it is not amazing that confusion has arisen. This confusion is the more dangerous, since ‘population’ plays (...)
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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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  • Science as Process by David Hull. [REVIEW]Henry E. Kyburg & David Hull - 1993 - Noûs 27 (1):107-109.
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  • Making populations: Bounding genes in space and in time.Lisa Gannett - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (5):989-1001.
    At least below the level of species, biological populations are not mind‐independent objects that scientists discover. Rather, biological populations are pragmatically constructed as objects of investigation according to the aims, interests, and values that inform particular research contexts. The relations among organisms that are constitutive of population‐level phenomena (e.g., mating propensity, genealogy, and competition) occur as matters of degree and so give rise to statistically defined open‐ended biological systems. These systems are rendered discrete units to satisfy practical needs and theoretical (...)
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