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Evolution - both the fact that it occurred and the theory describing the mechanisms by which it occurred - is an intrinsic and central component in modernbiology. Theodosius Dobzhansky captures this well in the much-quoted title of his 1973 paper 'Nothing inbiology makes sense except in the light of evolution'. The correctness of this assertion is even more obvious today: philosophers ofbiology and biologists agree that the fact of evolution is undeniable and that the (...) theory of evolution explains that fact. Such a theory has far-reaching implications. In this volume, eleven distinguished scholars address the conceptual, metaphysical and epistemological richness of the theory and its ethical and religious impact, exploring topics including DNA barcoding, three grand challenges of human evolution, functionalism, historicity, design, evolution and development, and religion and secular humanism. The volume will be of great interest to those studying philosophy ofbiology andevolutionarybiology. (shrink)

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Evolutionarybiology and feminism share a variety of philosophical and practical concerns. I have tried to describe how a perspective from bothevolutionarybiology and feminism can accelerate the achievement of goals for both feminists andevolutionary biologists. In an early section of this paper I discuss the importance of variation to the disciplines ofevolutionarybiology and feminism. In the section entitled “Control of Female Reproduction” I demonstrate how insight provided by participation (...) in life as woman and also as a feminist suggests testable hypotheses about the evolution of social behavior—hypotheses that are applicable to our investigations of the evolution of social behavior in nonhuman animals. In the section on “Deceit, Self-deception, and Patriarchal Reversals” I have overtly conceded thatevolutionarybiology, a scientific discipline, also represents a human cultural practice that, like other human cultural practices, may in parts and at times be characterized by deceit and self-deception. In the section on “Femininity” I have indicated how questions cast and answered and hypotheses tested from anevolutionary perspective can serve women and men struggling with sexist oppression. (shrink)

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This article investigates whether there is an underlying morality in the ways that human beings seek to obtain economic security within our imperfect economy, which can be illuminated throughevolutionarybiology research. Two research questions are the focus of the analysis: (1) What is the transaction cognitive machinery that is specialized for the entrepreneurial task of exchange-based security-seeking? and, (2) What are the moral implications of the acquisition and use of such transaction cognitions?Evolutionarybiology research suggests (...) within concepts that are more Darwin- v. Huxley-based, an underlying morality supportive of algorithm-governed economizing arising from the behaviors that are most worthy of long-term reproduction. Evolutionarily stable algorithm-enhanced security-seeking is argued to be a new view of entrepreneurship, but one that, somewhat ironically, is grounded in a primordially-based entrepreneurial morality that is at the core of economic security. (shrink)

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The present study asks the question whether Karl Rahner’s treatment of biological evolution holds merit for the dialogue between Catholic theology on the one hand andevolutionarybiology on the other. Central to this evaluation will be an emphasis on two core tenets of modernevolutionarybiology, namely emergence and the continuity of theevolutionary process. While the former bears relevance for our understanding of how life and anthropologically important phenomena such as “mind” and “consciousness” (...) came to be, the latter plays a crucial role in how we view our existence within the earth’s fluid and changing biosphere. It comes to the conclusion that Rahner’s concept of active self-transcendence recovers the notion of biological evolution as an on-going process where indeed something new emerges, and therefore offers an extremely helpful tool in the interdisciplinary conversation. However, this essay challenges Rahner’s understanding of the directedness of theevolutionary process toward the human being as well as his view that in us nature comes to self-consciousness for the first time and suggests alternatives. (shrink)

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How doesevolutionarybiology fit with Thomas Kuhn's famous distinction between puzzle solving and paradigm shifts in science?

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The increasing place ofevolutionary scenarios in functionalbiology is one of the major indicators of the present encounter betweenevolutionarybiology and functionalbiology (such as physiology, biochemistry and molecularbiology), the two branches ofbiology which remained separated throughout the twentieth century.Evolutionary scenarios were not absent from functionalbiology, but their places were limited, and they did not generate research programs. I compare two examples of these past scenarios (...) with two present-day ones. At least three characteristics distinguish present and past efforts: An excellent description of the systems under study, a rigorous use of theevolutionary models, and the possibility to experimentally test theevolutionary scenarios. These three criteria allow us to distinguish the domains in which the encounter is likely to be fruitful, and those where the obstacles to be overcome are high and in which the proposed scenarios have to be considered with considerable circumspection. (shrink)

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This chapter argues that the phenomenon of fraud and dishonesty in science is more akin to a perversion than a straight sin. Examples from the history ofevolutionarybiology are used to show how scientists employ supposed examples of fraud to discredit their opponents. Examples are drawn from the history ofevolutionarybiology involving Darwin, the Piltdown hoax, Edward O. Wilson, and Stephen Jay Gould.

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A common worry about the genetic engineering of human beings is that it will reduce human genetic diversity, creating a biological monoculture that could not only increase our susceptibility to disease but also hasten the extinction of our species. Thus far, however, theevolutionary implications of human genetic modification remain largely unexplored. In this paper, I consider whether the widespread use of genetic engineering technology is likely to narrow the present range of genetic variation, and if so, whether this (...) would in fact lead to theevolutionary harms that some authors envision. By examining the nature of biological variation and its relation to population immunity and evolvability, I show that not only will genetic engineering have a negligible impact on human genetic diversity, but also that it will be more likely to ensure rather than undermine the health and longevity of the human species. (shrink)

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The idea of integratingevolutionarybiology and psychology has great promise, but one that will be compromised if psychological functions are conceived too abstractly and neuroscience is not allowed to play a contructive role. We argue that the proper integration of neuroscience, psychology, andevolutionarybiology requires a telelogical as opposed to a merely componential analysis of function. A teleological analysis is required in neuroscience itself; we point to traditional and curent research methods in neuroscience, which (...) make critical use of distinctly teleological functional considerations in brain cartography. Only by invoking teleological criteria can researchers distinguish the fruitful ways of identifying brain components from the myriad of possible ways. One likely reason for reluctance to turn to neuroscience is fear of reduction, but we argue that, in the context of a teleological perspective on function, this concern is misplaced. Adducing such theoretical considerations as top-down and bottom-up constraints on neuroscientific and psychological models, as well as existing cases of productive, multidisciplinary cooperation, we argue that integration of neuroscience into psychology andevolutionarybiology is likely to be mutually beneficial. We also show how it can be accommodated methodologically within the framework of an interfield theory. (shrink)

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In recent years, an increasing number of medical books and papers attempting to analyse the concepts of health and disease from the perspective ofevolutionarybiology have been published.This paper introduces theevolutionary approach to health and disease in an attempt to illuminate the premisses and the framework of Darwinian medicine. My primary aim is to analyse to what extentevolutionary theory provides for a biological definition of the concept of disease. This analysis reveals some important (...) differences between functional explanations in the field ofevolutionarybiology and functional explanations in the field of medicine. Moreover, I shall argue that the biological functions relevant to the health of an organism cannot be determined on the basis ofevolutionary theory. Accordingly, it seems that Darwinian medicine does not provide for the definition of a biological concept of disease. Still,Darwinian medicine may suggest why we are susceptible to certain diseases; it might also prove a suggestive heuristic on the basis of which new hypotheses concerning relevant treatments of various diseases might be advanced. (shrink)

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Natural language is one of the most enigmatic and sophisticated human capabilities with regard to both itsevolutionary history and the level of complexity. The diversity of positions and debates on this subject clearly demonstrates that it is not yet a part of a science but rather an amalgam of different issues capable of being analyzed philosophically. The scarcity of evidence, restrictions of the comparative method and continuous discussions on the adaptive status of language are only a handful of (...) current issues. The main aim of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of crucial current approaches to the problem of the reconstruction of language evolution and pinpoint the most important methodological and philosophical arguments in the discussion. The paper also supports the view that only the multi-level approach to the problem, which encompasses both the genetic and cladistic levels, can offer a satisfactory explanation. (shrink)

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Evolutionary theory is undergoing an intense period of discussion and reevaluation. This, contrary to the misleading claims of creationists and other pseudoscientists, is no harbinger of a crisis but rather the opposite: the field is expanding dramatically in terms of both empirical discoveries and new ideas. In this essay I briefly trace the conceptual history ofevolutionary theory from Darwinism to neo-Darwinism, and from the Modern Synthesis to what I refer to as the Extended Synthesis, a more inclusive (...) conceptual framework containing among others evo–devo, an expanded theory of heredity, elements of complexity theory, ideas about evolvability, and a reevaluation of levels of selection. I argue thatevolutionarybiology has never seen a paradigm shift, in the philosophical sense of the term, except when it moved from natural theology to empirical science in the middle of the 19th century. The Extended Synthesis, accordingly, is an expansion of the Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s, and one that—like its predecessor—will probably take decades to complete. (shrink)

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Evolutionary epistemologists aim to explain the evolution of cognitive capacities underlying human knowledge and also the processes that generate knowledge, for example in science. There can be no doubt that our cognitive capacities are due in part to ourevolutionary heritage. But this is an uninformative thesis. All features of organism have indeed been shaped by evolution. A substantiveevolutionary explanation of cognition would have to provide details about theevolutionary processes involved.Evolutionary epistemology has (...) not provided any details. Considering progress of theorizing in science,evolutionary epistemologists have proposed many different analogies between natural selection and selection in science. As yet, the analogies have not been fruitful. The entire program ofevolutionary epistemology is programmatic.Evolutionary epistemologists have also moved beyond explanation to justification, the primary issue in traditional epistemology. It turns out that their program presupposes that we can justify knowledge claims in traditional ways.Evolutionarybiology is not a proper tool for the justification of beliefs. (shrink)

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In recent years, philosophers have come to realize that the relationship between science and values raises questions which are both important and not readily answered. It is true that the major figures in that tradition known as ‘logical empiricism’ appreciated that science always exceeds its empirical grasp and that it is necessary for scientists to be guided and constrained by so-called ‘epistemic values,’ these being values (in the words of one supporter) ‘presumed to promote the truth-like character of science, its (...) character as the most secure knowledge available to us of the world we seek to understand.’ However, these values — such things as internal and external consistency, simplicity, predictive accuracy and fertility, unificatory power (consilience) — were considered special. Inasmuch as they could not be reduced to basic principles of logic — and there were attempts to do this — they were still thought of, in some sense, as beyond the vagaries of human emotion. Their importance was not a function of the individual’s personal inclinations, nor of those of the group, whether this group be understood as a closely knit band of researchers or even up to a complete society. (shrink)

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The natural evolution of ethics is commonly understood in terms of the development from the selfish struggle to survive, via prudent cooperation, to altruism. However, cooperation that is prudent in the sense of serving basically selfish interests is not really altruistic. Besides, Christian ethics should not identify morality with absolutely disinterested altruism. Self-interest is only selfish when it is disproportionate or unfair; otherwise it is morally legitimate. Therefore the natural evolution of ethics is better understood as the gradual diversification of (...) the goods in which human beings have an interest. And evidently, whatever their origins, humans do have an interest in a range of goods, not just the preservation of their genes or their kin or themselves. Therefore the reductionist, Hobbesian assumptions about human motivation that game theory makes are empirically untrue of human behaviour in general, and so the range of cases to which it applies is accordingly narrow. Rather than usingbiology to interpret human motivation reductionistically, we should use zoology and anthropology to track the evolution of interest in diverse goods. The fact that eudaimonistic Christian ethics, as represented by Thomas Aquinas and Joseph Butler, has long recognised this diversity of human goods is one sign of its continuing explanatory power, and counts towards its truth. (shrink)

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Research in ecology andevolutionarybiology (evo-eco) often tries to emulate the “hard” sciences such as physics and chemistry, but to many of its practitioners feels more like the “soft” sciences of psychology and sociology. I argue that this schizophrenic attitude is the result of lack of appreciation of the full consequences of the peculiarity of the evo-eco sciences as lying in between a-historical disciplines such as physics and completely historical ones as like paleontology. Furthermore, evo-eco researchers have (...) gotten stuck on mathematically appealing but philosophi- cally simplistic concepts such as null hypotheses and p-values defined according to the frequentist approach in statistics, with the consequence of having been unable to fully embrace the complexity and subtlety of the problems with which ecologists andevolutionary biologists deal with. I review and discuss some literature in ecology, philosophy of science and psychology to show that a more critical methodological attitude can be liberating for the evo-eco scientist and can lead to a more fecund and enjoyable practice of ecology andevolutionarybiology. With this aim, I briefly cover concepts such as the method of multiple hypotheses, Bayesian analysis, and strong inference. (shrink)

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Evolutionarybiology – or, more precisely, two (purported) applications of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, namely,evolutionary psychology and what has been called human behavioralbiology – is on the cusp of becoming the new rage among legal scholars looking for interdisciplinary insights into the law. We argue that as the actual science stands today,evolutionarybiology offers nothing to help with questions about legal regulation of behavior. Only systematic misrepresentations or lack (...) of understanding of the relevantbiology, together with far-reaching analytical and philosophical confusions, have led anyone to think otherwise.Evolutionary accounts are etiological accounts of how a trait evolved. We argue that an account of causal etiology could be relevant to law if (1) the account of causal etiology is scientifically well-confirmed, and (2) there is an explanation of how the well-confirmed etiology bears on questions of development (what we call the Environmental Gap Objection). We then show that the accounts of causal etiology that might be relevant are not remotely well-confirmed by scientific standards. We argue, in particular, that (a)evolutionary psychology is not entitled to assume selectionist accounts of human behaviors, (b) the assumptions necessary for the selectionist accounts to be true are not warranted by standard criteria for theory choice, and (c) only confusions about levels of explanation of human behavior create the appearance that understanding thebiology of behavior is important. We also note that no response to the Environmental Gap Objection has been proffered. In the concluding section of the article, we turn directly to the work of Owen Jones, a leading proponent of the relevance ofevolutionarybiology to law, and show that he does not come to terms with any of the fundamental problems identified in this article. (shrink)

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In this article our aim is to present some of the coordinates of the debate around common good. Starting by recognizing the importance of common good for the Christian worldview after the presence of it in St. Paul’s “the manifestation of Spirit is given for the common good”, we will present two ways of interpreting the development of our moral and emotional tendencies that have to do with two differentevolutionary approaches. By the end of the article, we hope (...) to have established the argumental advantage of the cooperativist in front of the social Darwinist, opening the possibility for a possible interpretation of evolution as guided towards common good. (shrink)

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Human propensities that are the products of Darwinian evolution may combine to generate a form of social behavior that is not itself a direct result of such pressure. This possibility may provide a satisfying explanation for the origin of socially transmitted rules such as the incest taboo. Similarly, the regulatory processes of development that generated adaptations to the environment in the circumstances in which they evolved can produce surprising and sometimes maladaptive consequences for the individual in modern conditions. These combinatorial (...) aspects of social and developmental dynamics leave a subtle but not wholly uninteresting role forevolutionarybiology in explaining the origins of human morality. (shrink)

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Traces scholarly thought from the nineteenth-century birth ofevolutionarybiology to the mapping of the human genome through forty-eight essays, arranged in chronological order, each preceded by a one-page essay that explains the significance of the chosen work.

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This chapter contains sections titled: Theism andEvolutionary Theory Evolution and Divine Purpose Evolution and the “Objectivity of Nature” Evolution as Cruel and Wasteful Evolution as Random and Contingent Evolution and Human Nature Evolution, Physicalism, and Purpose Works cited.

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John Reiss is a practicingevolutionary biologist (herpetology) who by his own account happened to be in the right place (Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology) at the right time (the 1980s) to hear echoes of the debate about sociobiology that had been raging there between E. O. Wilson and, on the other side, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin (xiv). Reiss is not concerned with sociobiology, at least in this book, but with the adaptationism that Gould and Lewontin saw (...) in the sociobiologists’ approach to cooperative behavior. At Harvard, Reiss was guided by Pere Alberch, in whose laboratory Gould’s stress on developmental constraints was being transformed into a now influential version of the Evo-devo movement (xiv, 327). On Alberch’s view, which Reiss accepts, variation in the rate, timing, placement, and intensity of gene products during the ontogenetic process, rather than mutation in structural genes, constitutes the proximate source of the phenotypic variation on which natural election works (327-29). Reiss does not think that Evo-devo, at least as he construes it, does away with natural selection. Rather, he seeks to identify the role played by selection in retaining or eliminating the variation generated in the developmental process. Selection, he argues, enables organisms, populations, species, and other lineages to maintain the presumptively adapted conditions of existence to which their very persistence already testifies. “Adaptedness,” Reiss writes, “is not a product of evolution; it is a condition for evolution” (22). He thinks that this fact, as he takes it to be, belies the adaptationist assumption that organisms are collections of independently optimal adaptations that arise by way of concerted spurts of directional selection. “It is a mistake,” he writes, “to atomize organisms and to explain each part as the solution of a problem raised by the environment” (295). (shrink)

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A fundamental philosophical question that arises in connection withevolutionary theory is whether the fittest patterns of behavior are always the most rational. Are fitness and rationality fully compatible? When behavioral rationality is characterized formally as in classical decision theory, the question becomes mathematically meaningful and can be explored systematically by investigating whether the optimally fit behavior predicted byevolutionary process models is decision-theoretically coherent. Upon investigation, it appears that in nontrivialevolutionary models the expected behavior is (...) not always in accord with the norms of the standard theory of decision as ordinarily applied. Many classically irrational acts, e.g. betting on the occurrence of one event in the knowledge that the probabilities favor another, can under certain circumstances constitute adaptive behavior.One interesting interpretation of this clash is that the criterion of rationality offered by classical decision theory is simply incorrect (or at least incomplete) as it stands, and thatevolutionary theory should be called upon to provide a more generally applicable theory of rationality. Such a program, should it prove feasible, would amount to the logical reduction of the theory of rational choice toevolutionary theory. (shrink)

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It is usually maintained by biologists and philosophers alike that essentialism is incompatible withevolutionarybiology, and that abandoning essentialism was a precondition of progress being made in the biological sciences. These claims pose a problem for anyone familiar with bothevolutionarybiology and current metaphysics. Very few current scientific theories enjoy the prestige ofevolutionarybiology. But essentialism – long in the bad books amongst both biologists and philosophers – has been enjoying a (...) strong resurgence of late amongst analytical philosophers with a taste for metaphysics. Indeed, to impartial observers it is likely to appear that bothevolutionarybiology and essentialism are as well supported in their respective domains as could reasonably be expected. There is thus at least a prima facie tension here betweenevolutionarybiology, metaphysics and, as we shall see, pre-theoretical common sense. (shrink)

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The impact of philosophy of science onbiology is slight.Evolutionarybiology, however, is nowadays an exception. The status of the neo-Darwinian (synthetic) theory of evolution is seriously challenged from a methodological perspective. However, the methodology used in the relevant discussions is plainly defective. A correct application of methodology toevolutionary theory leads to the following conclusions. (a) The theory of natural selection (the core of neo-Darwinism) is unfalsifiable in a strict sense of the term. This, (...) however, does not militate against the theory, because no scientific theory whatever is testable in this way. Under a more liberal testability criterion, the theory is surely testable. None the less, certain (not all) research programs may tend to make the theory untestable in practice. (b) It has often been argued that the tautologous character of the principle of natural selection, allegedly the focus ofevolutionary theory, makes the theory untestable through circular reasoning. Actually, the principle is only a tautology if fitness is wrongly defined in terms of actual survival. But even then circular reasoning need not ensue. (c)Evolutionary principles do not permit, without additional information, the derivation of statements aboutevolutionary events concerning particular species or populations. If this were a reason to criticize the theory (as has been argued in the literature), any other scientific theory would be inadequate by the same token. (shrink)

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There have been periodic claims thatevolutionarybiology needs urgent reform, and this article tries to account for the volume and persistence of this discontent. It is argued that a few inescapable properties of the field make it prone to criticisms of predictable kinds, whether or not the criticisms have any merit. For example, the variety of living things and the complexity of evolution make it easy to generate data that seem revolutionary, and lead to disappointment with existing (...) explanatory frameworks. It is then argued that special discontent stems from misunderstandings and dislike of one well-known but atypical research programme: the study of adaptive function, in the tradition of behavioural ecology. To achieve its goals, this research needs distinct tools, often including imaginary agency, and a partial description of theevolutionary process. This invites mistaken charges of narrowness and oversimplification, and these chime with anxieties about human agency and overall purpose. The article ends by discussing several ways in which calls to reformevolutionarybiology actively hinder progress in the field. (shrink)

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Abstract. This paper examines the impact of two formalizations ofevolutionarybiology on the antiselectionist critiques of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement. It looks first at attempts to apply the syntactic framework of the physical sciences tobiology in the twentieth century, and to their effect upon the ID movement. It then examines the more heuristic account of biological-theory structure, namely, the semantic model. Finally, it concludes by advocating the semantic conception and emphasizing the problems that the (...) semantic model creates for ID's negative and positive theses. (shrink)

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This book is the first systematic treatment of the philosophy of science underlyingevolutionary economics. It does not advocate anevolutionary approach towards economics, but rather assesses the epistemic value of appealing toevolutionarybiology in economics more generally. The author divides work inevolutionary economics into three distinct, albeit related, forms: a structural form, an evidential form, and a heuristic form. He then analyzes five examples of work inevolutionary economics falling under these (...) three forms. For the structural form, he examines the parallelism between natural selection and economic decision making, and the parallelism between natural selection and market competition. For the evidential form, he looks at the relationship between animal and human economic decision making, and theevolutionary explanation of diversity in human economic decision making. Finally, for the heuristic form, he focuses on the plausibility of equilibrium modeling inevolutionary ecology and economics. In this way, he shows that linkingevolutionarybiology and economics can make for a powerful methodological tool that can enable progress in our understanding of various economics questions. Structure, Evidence, and Heuristic will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of science, philosophy of social science,evolutionarybiology, and economics. (shrink)

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Evolutionarybiology is striking for its ability to explain a large and diverse range of empirical phenomena on the basis of a few general theoretical principles. This article offers a philosophical perspective on the way thatevolutionarybiology has come to achieve such impressive generality, by focusing on “the strategy of endogenization”. This strategy involves devisingevolutionary explanations for biological features that were originally part of the background conditions, or scaffolding, against which such explanations take (...) place. Where successful, the strategy movesbiology a step closer to the ideal of explaining as much as possible fromevolutionary first principles. The strategy of endogenization is illustrated through a series of biological examples, historical and recent, and its philosophical implications are explored. (shrink)

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In this essay, we discuss Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul from an interdisciplinary perspective. Constituting perhaps the longest treatise on the evolution of consciousness, Ginsburg and Jablonka unite their expertise in neuroscience andbiology to develop a beautifully Darwinian account of the dawning of subjective experience. Though it would be impossible to cover all its content in a short book review, here we provide a critical evaluation of their two key ideas—the role of (...) Unlimited Associative Learning in the evolution of, and detection of, consciousness and a metaphysical claim about consciousness as a mode of being—in a manner that will hopefully overcome some of the initial resistance of potential readers to tackle a book of this length. (shrink)

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First, a brief history is provided of Popper's views on the status ofevolutionarybiology as a science. The views of some prominent biologists are then canvassed on the matter of falsifiability and its relation toevolutionarybiology. Following that, I argue that Popper's programme of falsifiability does indeed excludeevolutionarybiology from within the circumference of genuine science, that Popper's programme is fundamentally incoherent, and that the correction of this incoherence results in a (...) greatly expanded and much more realistic concept of what is empirical, resulting in the inclusion ofevolutionarybiology. Finally, this expanded concept of empirical is applied to two particular problems inevolutionarybiology — viz., the species problem and the debate over the theory of punctuated equilibria — and it is argued that both of them are still mainly metaphysical. (shrink)

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Evolutionary epistemology takes various forms. As a philosophical discipline, it may use analogies by borrowing concepts fromevolutionarybiology to establish new foundations. This is not a very successful enterprise because the analogies involved are so weak that they hardly have explanatory force. It may also veil itself with the garbs ofbiology. Proponents of this strategy have only produced irrelevant theories by transforming epistemology's concepts beyond recognition. Sensible theories about “knowledge andbiology” should presuppose (...) that various long-standing problems concerning relations between the mental and the physical are solved. Such problems are wrongly disregarded byevolutionary epistemologists. (shrink)

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In The Resurgence ofEvolutionaryBiology Terry Hoy charts the intersection between political theory and the intellectual debate over human evolution. The book deals with the contemporary interpretation of Darwinism as an apology for racism, imperialism, and capitalism. Hoy argues that this perspective underlies the contemporary debates between proponents of both genetic and environmental determinants of behavior. In response to several leading thinkers in the field—principally Edward Wilson, Stephen Gould and R. C. Lewontin—Hoy presents the neo-Darwinian synthesis of (...) Edwin Mayr as a mediation between these two schools of thought. This concise work is essential reading for scholars of political theory and philosophy, and anyone interested in seeking to understand the rise and fall—and rise again—of Darwinism and the contemporary political relevance of Aristotelian-Darwinian naturalism. (shrink)

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Much has been made of how Darwinian thinking destroyed proofs for the existence of God from ‘design’ in the universe. I challenge that prevailing view by looking closely at classical ‘teleological’ arguments for the existence of God. One version championed by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas stems from how chance is not a sufficient kind of ultimate explanation of the universe. In the course of constructing this argument, I argue that the classical understanding of teleology is no less necessary in modern (...) Darwinianbiology than it was in Aristotle's time. In fact, modernbiology strengthens the claims that teleological arguments make by vindicating many of their key features. As a consequence, I show how Aristotle and Aquinas' teleological argument for an intelligent First Cause remains valid. (shrink)

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The ontological dependence of one domain on another is compatible with the explanatory autonomy of the less basic domain. That autonomy results from the fact that the relationship between two domains can be very complex. In this paper I distinguish two different types of complexity, two ways the relationship between domains can fail to be transparent, both of which are relevant toevolutionarybiology. Sometimes high level explanations preserve a certain type of causal or counterfactual information which would (...) be lost at the lower level; I argue that this is central to the proper understanding of the adaptationist program. Sometimes high level kinds are multiply realised by lower level kinds: I argue that this is central to the understanding of macroevolution. (shrink)

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Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history ofevolutionarybiology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history ofevolutionarybiology but, more importantly, (...) also sheds new light on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modernevolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extendedevolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before. (shrink)

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Th. Dobzhansky played a special role in the reception and development of the “synthetic theory of evolution,” as well as in the establishment of scientific connections between Soviet and U.S. evolutionists, and first and foremost, geneticists. These connections greatly influenced the development of Soviet genetics, ofevolutionary theory andevolutionarybiology as a whole, and in particular the restoration of Soviet genetics in the late 1960s. A discussion of Dobzhansky’s correspondence and collaboration with colleagues in his native (...) country, moreover, allows for an improved understanding of the complex and dramatic history of Soviet genetics andevolutionary theory. It also provides novel insights into the interactions between scientists and authorities in the Soviet Union (USSR). (shrink)

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Biology cannot accommodate all aspects of culture. Aspects of culture that a biological approach can take into account can be covered by the biological categories of phenotype and environment. There is no need to treat culture as a separate category. Attempts to elaborate biological explanations of cultural variation will meet with success only if biologists expand theories of development, and integrate them inevolutionarybiology. The alternative — elaborating the idea of so-called cultural inheritance — makes little (...) sense from a biological point of view. (shrink)

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Taxonomists inbiology have traditionally been concerned to delimit and classify actual biological forms or kinds. But not all useful classification schemes are of actualised forms. This paper focuses on the need to delimit and classify non‐actual forms when offering contrastive explanations inevolutionarybiology. Such a classification scheme sorts actual and non‐actual forms according to their modal status. Such a sorting has been offered by theoretical morphologists, but these efforts have paid insufficient attention to the metaphysics (...) of modality. Contemporary approaches to the metaphysics and epistemology of modality are also found wanting. The paper ends by arguing that the needed intellectual resources are to be found in the imaginative use of Aristotle. (shrink)

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Throughout my university career, and since I began my Ph.D., Jean Gayon was there. Unlike many contributors to this volume, to the early or mid-career researchers who do French philosophy ofbiology today, I did not know Jean as a dissertation supervisor or a professor, but as a dissertation examiner, as expert witness to the beginning of my career and as indisputable scientific authority. For fifteen years I have been doing philosophy ofevolutionarybiology with Jean Gayon. (...) In this chapter, I do not offer an analysis of “evolutionarybiology according to Gayon” but I aim to pay tribute to a philosopher who was at once a “major contemporary”, a colleague, a friend, and an inspiration. (shrink)

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In this study the relationship between functional morpholoy andevolutionarybiology is analysed by confronting the main concepts in both disciplines.Rather than only discussing this connection theoretically, the analysis is carried out by introducing important practical and experimental studies, which use aspects from both disciplines. The mentioned investigations are methodologically analysed and the consequences for extensions of the relationship are worked out. It can be shown that both disciplines have a large domain of their own and also share (...) a large common ground. Many disagreements amongevolutionary biologists can be reduced to differences in general philosophy (idealism vs. realism), selection of phenomenona (structure vs. function), definition of concepts (natural selection) and the position of the concept theory as an explaining factor (neutralists vs. selectionists, random variation, determinate selection, etc.). (shrink)

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