Evolutionary theory in philosophical focus
Mayr E (1959) The emergence of evolutionary novelties. In: Mayr E (ed.) (1976) Evolution and the diversity of life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp 88-113
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- Michod R (1981) Positive heuristics in evolutionary biology. British journal for philosophy of science 32: 1-36
- Neander K (1995) Pruning the Tree of Life. British journal for philosophy of science 46: 59-80
- Nitecki MH (ed.) (1988) Evolutionary progress. Chicago. University of Chicago Press
- Oyama S (1985) The ontogeny of information. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA
Mayr E (1959) The emergence of evolutionary novelties. In: Mayr E (ed.) (1976) Evolution and the diversity of life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp 88-113Mayr E (1959b) Typological versus population thinking. In: Mayr E (ed.) (1976) Evolution and the diversity of life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp 26-29Mayr E (1965a) Sexual selection and natural selection In: Mayr E (ed.) (1976) Evolution and the diversity of life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp73-87Mayr E (1965b) Selection and directional evolution. In: Mayr E (ed.) (1976) Evolution and the diversity of life. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp 44-52Mayr E, Provine W (1980) The evolutionary synthesis. Perspectives on the unification of biology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MAMichod R (1981) Positive heuristics in evolutionary biology. British journal for philosophy of science 32: 1-36Michod R (1999) Darwinian Dynamics. Evolutionary Transitions in Fitness and Individuality. Princeton. Princeton University Press, 1999Millstein R (2002) Are Random Drift and Natural Selection Conceptually Distinct? Biology and Philosophy 17(1):33-53. Neander K (1995) Pruning the Tree of Life. British journal for philosophy of science 46: 59-80Neumann-Held, Eva M. (2001) Let's Talk about Genes: The Process Molecular Gene Concept and its Context. In: Oyama S, Griffiths PE, Gray RD (eds.) Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 69-84 Nitecki MH (ed.) (1988) Evolutionary progress. Chicago. University of Chicago PressNunney L (1999) Lineage selection: natural selection for long-term benefit. In: Keller L (ed.) Levels of selection in Evolution. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, pp 238-252 Ospovat D (1981) The development of Darwin’s theory: Natural history, natural theology and natural selection, 1839-1859. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Oyama S (1985) The ontogeny of information. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MAOyama S (2000) Causal Democracy and Causal Contributions in DST. Philosophy of Science 67 (Proceedings) S332-347 Pinker S, Bloom A (1992) Language and natural selection. In: Barkow J, Cosmides L, Tooby J (eds) (1992) The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Provine M (1986) Sewall Wright and evolutionary biology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Raff R (1996) The shape of life. University of Chicago press, Chicago Reeve HK, Sherman P (1993) Adaptation and the goals of evolutionary research. Quarterly review of biology 68:1-32 Reeve HK, Sherman P (2001) Optimality and phylogeny. In: Orzack SH, Sober E. Adaptationism and optimality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 64-113. Richards R (1988) The moral foundations of the idea of evolutionary progess: Darwin, Spencer and the Neo-Darwinians. In: Nitecki MH (1988) Evolutionary progress. Chicago. University of Chicago Press, pp129-147Richards R (1992) The Structure of Narrative Explanation in History and Science. In: Nitecki M, Nitecki D (eds). History and Evolution. State University of New York Press, New-York, pp 19-54. Rose MR, Lauder G (1996) Adaptation. Academic Press, San Diego Rosenberg A (1978) The supervenience of biological concepts. Philosophy of science 45, 3: 368-386 Rosenberg A (1982) On the propensity definition of fitness. Philosophy of science 49, 2: 268-273 Rosenberg A (1983) Coefficients, effects and genic selection. Philosophy of science 50, 2: 332-338 Rosenberg A (1985) The structure of biological science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA Rosenberg A (1995) Instrumental biology, or the disunity of science. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Rosenberg A (2001) How is biological explanation possible. British journal for philosophy of science 52: 735-760 Rosenberg A (2003) Darwinism in moral philosophy and social theory. In: : Jon Hodges and Greg Raddick (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp 310-332 Ruse M (1986) Taking Darwin seriously. Blackwell, Oxford Shapere D (1980) Interpretative issues in the evolutionary synthesis. In: Mayr E, Provine W (1980) The evolutionary synthesis. Perspectives on the unification of biology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA pp387-398 Simpson GG (1944) Tempo and mode in evolution. Columbia University Press, New-York Smart JJC (1963) Philosophy and scientific realism. Routledge, London Sober E (1980) Evolution, population thinking and essentialism. Philosophy of science, 3 (47): 350-383 Sober E (1981) The principle of parsimony. British journal for philosophy of science 32: 145-56 Sober E (1984) The nature of selection. MIT Press, Cambridge MA Sober E (1986) Explanatory presupposition. Australasian journal of philosophy. 64: 143-149 Reprinted in: Sober E (1994) From a biological point of view: essays in evolutionary philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA Sober E (1988a) What is evolutionary altruism ? Canadian Journal of philosophy, Suppl. 14: 75-99 Sober E (1988b) Reconstructing the past: Parsimony, evolution and inference. MIT Press, Cambridge MA Sober E (1990) The poverty of pluralism: A reply to Sterelny and Kitcher. Philosophy of science 87, 3: 151-158 Sober E (1992) Screening-off and the units of selection. Philosophy of science 59, 1: 142-152 Sober E (1993) Philosophy of biology. Westview Press, Boulder Sober E (1994a) From a biological point of view: essays in evolutionary philosophy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA Sober E (ed) (1994b) Conceptual issues in evolutionary biology. MIT Press, Cambridge MA Sober E (1994c) Six sayings about adaptationism. In: Hull D, Ruse M (eds) Philosophy of biology. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 71-85 Sober E (2001) The two faces of fitness. In: Singh R, Krimbas K, Paul D, Beatty J (eds) Thinking about Evolution: Historical, Philosophical and Political Perspectives. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp 309-321 Sober E (2003) Metaphysical and epistemological issues in modern Darwinian theory. In: Jon Hodges and Greg Radick (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press pp 267-287 Sober E, Lewontin R (1982) Artifact, cause and genic selection. Philosophy of science 44: 157-180 Sober E (1997) Two outbreaks of lawlessness in recent philosophy of biology. Philosophy of science 64: S458-S467 Sober E, Orzack SH (1994) How (not) to test an optimality model. Trends in Eco and Evo, 9 Sober E, Orzack SH (2001) Adaptation, phylogenetic inertia and the method of controlled comparisons. In: Sober E, Orzack SH (2001) Adaptationism and optimality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge MA, pp 45-63 Sober E, Wilson DS (1994) A critical review of philosophical works on units of selection. Philosophy of science 61: 534-55 Sober E, Wilson DS (1998) Unto others: the evolution of altruism. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA Sperber D, Girotto V (2003) Does the Selection Task Detect Cheater-detection? In: Sterelny K, Fitness J (eds) From mating to mentality. Psychology Press, Macquarie Sterelny K (1995) Understanding life: recent works in philosophy of biology. British Journal for philosophy of science 64: 155-183 Sterelny K (1996) The return of the group. Philosophy of science 63: 562-584 Sterelny K (2000) Development, Evolution and Adaptation. Philosophy of Science, (Supplementary Volume), 67 (Proceedings) 2000: S369-S387 Sterelny K (2003) Darwinian Concepts in the Philosophy of Mind. In: Jon Hodges and Greg Radick (eds) The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp 288-309 Sterelny K (2004) Symbiosis, evolvability and modularity. In: Wagner G, Schlosser G (eds) Modularity in development and evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago Sterelny K, Kitcher P (1988) The return of the gene. Journal of philosophy 85: 339-60 Tattersall I (1998) Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness. Harcourt Brace, New York Trivers R. 1971. The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The quarterly review of biology. 46: 35-57 Wagner G (1995) The biological role of homologues. A building block hypothesis. Neue Jahrbuch Geologie und Paleontologie 195: 279-288 Wake D (1991) Homoplasy: The result of natural selection, or evidence of design limitations? American naturalist 138: 543-567. Willliams GC (1966) Adaptation and natural selection. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ Williams GC (1975) Sex and evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ Williams GC (1992) Natural selection: domains, levels and challenges. Oxford Unversity Press, Oxford Wilson DS (1992) On the relationships between evolutionary and psychological definitions of altruism and selfishness. Biology and philosophy, 7: 61-68 Wilson DS, Dietrich E, Clark A (2003) On the inappropriate use of the naturalistic fallacy in evolutionary psychology. Biology and philosophy 18: 669-682 Wimsatt WC, Schank JC (1988) Two constraints on the evolution of complex adaptations and the means for their avoidance. In: M. Nitecki (ed) Progress in Evolution. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 213-273 Woodward J (2001) Laws and explanation in biology: Invariance is the kind of stability that matters. Philosophy of science 68: 1-20 Wright S (1932) The roles of mutation, inbreeding, crossbreeding and selection in evolution. Proceedings of the sixth annual congress of genetics 1: 356-366 Wynne-Edwards VC (1962) Animal dispersion in relation to social behaviour. Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh To be published in Handbook of paleoanthropology, Tattersall I., Henke W., Rothe H. (eds), Spinger, 2006 1 In the usual vocabulary of the philosophy of science, explanandum means what is to be explained whereas explanans means what explains the explanandum. 2 For an account of the conceptual transformations which led from Darwin to the Neo-Darwinism through the successful synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian hypothesis, see Gayon (1998). 3 On the progressive extension of Darwin’s theory, and all the slight nuances that made it very different from what we use now and the sharp picture here drawn, see Ospovat (1981), Ghiselin (1969) and Bowler (1989). Ospovat emphasizes the conditions for Darwinism in the work of morphologists like Geoffroy and Owen. 4 Here, there is no direct reference to the embryological development. 5 Critique is made in Rosenberg (1982); other recent critiques led to precise the propensity definitions (Ariew (2004); Sober (2001)). 6 I leave apart, here, the difference between empirical and a priori laws. 7 Taking a famous example from Goodman, what predictions could I infer from “all the men in this room are third sons” (unless I have some additive information on those men, like: “they are all attending to a third sons’ meeting”, etc.) ? 8 Rosenberg (1994) also denies that biology has laws in the sense of physical laws since it supervenes on all the physical laws and hence can only pick out disjunctions of laws applied in limited contexts. 9 By changing the definition of what counts as law, and, more precisely, weakening the DN requisites on laws of nature, one can imagine that there is continuum of kinds of laws instead of a sharp boundary between accidental and nomological generalization. For example, relying on the supporting counterfactual requisite, Woodward (2001) defines laws as statements invariant through a sort of change in the explanandum. This enables him to count several laws, like Mendel’s laws, in biology, and then account for the predictive and explanatory role of an accidentally general statement such as the universality of the genetic code. My point is that characterizing the status of the principle of natural selection within such a continuum is still at stake. 10 A similar position is upheld in Brandon (1996) and Michod (1981) 11 For example, colour of moths is a fitness parameter in industrial melanism only because there are predators able of vision. 12 On phylogenetic inertia see Orzack Sober (1994, 2001) Reeve Sherman (2001), and below 1.2.2 13 A case for historical narratives in evolutionary theory is made in Richards (1992); compare with the critique by Hull in the same volume. Gayon (1993) addressed the dual character of evolutionary theory. 14 Sober (1984) followed by some writers calls it « adaptedness » in order to distinguish it with « adaptation ». 15 In fact, Williams (1992) elaborated and defended the concept of clade selection, added to gene selection. 17 A screens off B as a cause of C iff Pr (C/A&B) = Pr (C/A) Pr (C/B). Sober contested that « screening off » can yield a rebuttal of genic selectionism, since the argument is open to an almost infinite regress within which sometimes the most important explanatory cause is not the one which screens off all others. 18 Dawkins coined “replicators” but opposed it to “vehicles”; this word is too bound to the intuitive organism-genes difference. 19 For a general abstract account of theories using the concept of selection such as immunology or evolutionary theory (“selection type theories”), see Darden and Cain (1988). For a theory of selection forged to address both evolution, immunology, and operant behaviour, see Hull, Langmann, Glenn (2001) 20 The gene’s eye view defence has been the notion of information, in order to qualify the specificity of the genes’ role against other factors. Information should be intentionally defined, it is not a simple usual correlation (fire-smoke) that is always reversible. Maynard-Smith (2000) elaborated this option, but difficulties raised by Godfrey-Smith (2000b) are numerous and go against a univocal notion of biological information. 21 Clear formulations of the DST program are Gray (2001) and Oyama (in Oyama, Gray, Griffith, 2001). On the developmentalist challenge and its integration into evolutionary theories, see below. 22 Gray (2001) provides a critique of the distinction. 23 Williams’ argument is that only a set of gene pools can behave in the same way as a gene pool when it comes to natural selection. Hence, there is only clade selection above the level of gene selection. 24 Lewontin and Godfrey-Smith (1993) showed that even if an allelic descriptive and predictive model is always possible in cases classically opposed to genic selectionism, provided that one in some case enriches the model with conditional probabilities of alleles, however those formal questions of adequate models do not decide the point of what is the causally relevant level. 25 Sober (1988a) 26 “I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification.” (1859, p 6). First of all, sexual selection, that is here left aside. For its complex relationship with natural selection see Mayr (1965a), and then the current research on the evolution of sex (Williams 1975; Maynard-Smith 1978) 27 Maynard-Smith 1984, Dennett 1995, profess adaptationism with some reserves; in contrast see Gould (1980), Wake (1991). Orzack, Sober (2001) contains illuminating essays on the testability and the meaning of the adaptationist program. Lauder, Rose (1996) turned to an investigation of the meaning of adaptation in various fields of evolutionary biology. Dupré (1987) provides illuminating essays with a focus on the adaptationist commitments in evolutionary anthropology. Walsh (forthcoming) tries to make sense of the fate of the spandrels paper 25 years after its publication. 28 see Raff (1996), Arthur (1997), Amundson (1994); Griffiths and Sterelny (1999) as introductory text. 29 Arthur (1997) , Raff (1996), Gehring (1998); Gilbert, Opitz, Raff (1996) 30 Wimsatt, Shrank (1988) 31 Reservations are made about the generality of entrenchment by Raff (1996); a general critique of the concept is to be found in Sterelny (2000, p 377) 32 See this volume Ch 15 by Brooks and alii . For a general philosophical account see Sober (1981, 1988b) 34 Coyne, Barton, Turelli (1997) 35 Like in Gould (1977): heterochrony, paedomorphosis, neoteny are defined and exemplified. 36 Even if genes of this sort such as Bithorax have been known since about 1915, a major stage in the emergence of Evo-Devo has been the molecular characterisation of those genes in the 1980s, mostly by Gehring (see Gehring (1998)). This revealed that homeobox genes are homologous across several phyla. 37 Gilbert, Opitz, Raff (1996) 38 For example, Hallucigenia, once viewed as a quite unique species in its phyla, if turned upside down could enter into the phylum of the echinoderms (Conway-Morris (1998)) 39 An argument against the contingency thesis would be convergence: if similar features appeared several times in different lineages, they are more likely to appear even if we change some initial conditions of evolution. (Conway-Morris, Gould (1999); Sterelny (1995)) But such an argument makes use of excessively undefined notions of necessity and identity. 40 Kitcher (in Gray, Griffiths, Oyama 2001) and Sterelny (2000) are moderate appraisals of the extent to which the developmentalist challenge needs revising evolutionary theory. Kitcher (2004) is also sympathetic with Gould’s weak challenge but defends neo-darwinism against Gould’s strong challenge. 41 Of course, the issue of explanation is correlated to the question of causation: “what does selection actually cause?”. More strongly commited than Sober to the Negative view, Walsh (followed by Lewens 2004) claims that natural selection is not even a cause of adaptations, since strictly speaking their causes have to be found in the developmental life cycles of individual and forces acting upon it. Selection is merely a sorting process that presupposes such real causes. 42 At least in the probabilistic sense of causation, meaning that a cause increases the probability of its effect. 43 Andersson, Schlechta, Roth (1998); Mc Phee, Ambrose (1996) 44 This is still the line of Sober’s reply (1990) to Sterelny and Kitcher (1988) 45 According to Waters (1991) each description is dependent on the prior decision on how to discriminate between environment and selected units. 46 The main general philosophical account of the consequencesof evolutionary theory outside biology is Dennett (1995) 47 « Naturalism » qualifies here any research program that formulates its questions and constitutes its method along the sole lines of natural science methodology, and that does not accept any entity originating and subsisting for itself above the nature studied by those sciences. 48 A severe critique is to be found in Maynard-Smith 1996. A general evaluation of the possibilities offered to selectionist theories of culture in a quite sympathetic perspective is given by Kitcher (2003 b) 49 Evolutionary epistemology was not born with Campbell; in fact philosophers like Toulmin elaborated a so-called “evolutionary epistemology”. I consider only recent theories, with their massive use of selectionist models. 50 Kenneth Waters (1990) provided a powerful critique of this Darwinian analogy concerning the growth of science, to the extent that it leaves apart intellectual powers of scientists as reflexive agents of selection of fittest contents. 51 Papers by Buss and Symons in Barkow, Cosmides, Tooby (1992); Sterelny, Fitness (2003). A powerful methodological and epistemological critique is given in Kitcher (2003b); 52 Chisholm (2003) 53 Lewens (2004) gives a critique of the inference from a reconstituted Pleistocene problem to hypothetical cognitive module. 54 Two of the most achievements of the program – the Waist-To-Hip ratio theory in the field of mating strategies and the Wason selection task in the field of social cognition – are still severely challenged (Sperber, Vicotti 2003 for the second one, with examples of equally corroborated rival theories; Gray et al. 2004 for both of them) 55 I thank Elodie Giroux, Françoise Longy, Stéphane Schmitt and Stéphane Tirard for careful reading and suggestions, as well as the editors for their patient revision. Download 185.17 Kb. Share with your friends:
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