Book · March 26, 2020
In this Element, we extend our earlier treatment of biology's first law. The law says that in any evolutionary system in which there is variation and heredity, there is a tendency for diversity and complexity to increase. The law plays the same role in bio ...
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Journal ArticleEvolution; international journal of organic evolution · June 2019
The zero-force evolutionary law (ZFEL) states that in evolutionary systems, in the absence of forces or constraints, diversity and complexity tend to increase. The reason is that diversity and complexity are both variance measures, and variances tend to in ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2017
Genic selectionists (Williams 1966; Dawkins 1976) defend the view that genes are the (unique) units of selection and that all evolutionary events can be adequately represented at the genic level. Pluralistic genic selectionists (Dawkins 1982; Sterelny and ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2017
One of the most heated areas of controversy within contemporary evolutionary biology concerns adaptationism and the importance of natural selection relative to other evolutionary factors. Because these debates sometimes seem to be more ideological than sci ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2017
ET is also apparently indeterministic; certainly the best and most influential treatments of the probabilistic nature of ET have drawn this conclusion (Beatty 1984, Sober 1984, Richardson and Burian 1992). Moreover, the propensity interpretation of fitness ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in history and philosophy of biological and biomedical sciences · February 2015
There is a worry that the 'major transitions in evolution' represent an arbitrary group of events. This worry is warranted, and we show why. We argue that the transition to a new level of hierarchy necessarily involves a nonselectionist chance process. Thu ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · January 1, 2014
Clatterbuck et al. (Biol Philos 28: 577-592, 2013) argue that there is no fact of the matter whether selection dominates drift or vice versa in any particular case of evolution. Their reasons are not empirically based; rather, they are purely conceptual. W ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2013
Using examples from functional morphology and evolution, Amundson and Lauder (Biol Philos 9: 443-469, 1994) argued for functional pluralism in biology. More specifically, they argued that both causal role (CR) analyses of function and selected effects (SE) ...
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Chapter · January 1, 2013
Using examples from functional morphology and evolution, Amundson and Lauder (Biol Philos 9: 443–469, 1994) argued for functional pluralism in biology. More specifically, they argued that both causal role (CR) analyses of function and selected effects (SE) ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · September 1, 2012
Barrett et al. (Biol Philos, 2012) present four puzzles for the ZFEL-view of evolution that we present in our 2010 book, Biology's First Law: The Tendency for Diversity and Complexity to Increase in Evolutionary Systems. Our intent in writing this book was ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · May 1, 2011
Reciprocal altruism was originally formulated in terms of individual selection and most theorists continue to view it in this way. However, this interpretation of reciprocal altruism has been challenged by Sober and Wilson (1998). They argue that reciproca ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophy of Science · January 1, 2010
Recently philosophers of biology have argued over whether or not Newtonian mechanics provides a useful analogy for thinking about evolutionary theory. For philosophers, the canonical presentation of this analogy is Sober's. Matthen and Ariew and Walsh, Lew ...
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Chapter · December 1, 2006
Teleological language, talk of function and purpose, has long been associated with the appearance of order in the biological world. Indeed, the pre-Darwinian tradition of natural theology (e.g., Paley 1836) gave a clear underpinning for such teleology. The ...
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Chapter · 2006
Population-level theories of evolution—the stock and trade of population genetics—are statistical theories par excellence. But what accounts for the statistical character of population-level phenomena? One view is that the population-level statistics are a ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · January 1, 2005
Millstein [Bio. Philos. 17 (2002) 33] correctly identies a serious problem with the view that natural selection and random drift are not conceptually distinct. She offers a solution to this problem purely in terms of differences between the processes of se ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · January 1, 1999
Richard Lewontin's (1970) early work on the "units" of selection initiated the conceptual and theoretical investigations that have led to the hierarchical perspective on selection that has reached near consensus status today. This paper explores other aspe ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophy of Science · January 1, 1997
In this paper I argue that we can best make sense of the practice of experimental evolutionary biology if we see it as investigating contingent, rather than lawlike, regularities. This understanding is contrasted with the experimental practice of certain a ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · January 1, 1997
Christopher Hitchcock's discussion of my use of screening-off in analyzing the causal process of natural selection raises some interesting issues to which I am pleased to reply. The bulk of his article is devoted to some fairly general points in the theory ...
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Journal ArticlePhilosophy of Science · January 1, 1996
In this paper we first briefly review Bell's (1964, 1966) Theorem to see how it invalidates any deterministic "hidden variable" account of the apparent indeterminacy of quantum mechanics (QM). Then we show that quantum uncertainty, at the level of DNA muta ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · October 1, 1987
The concept of individuality as applied to species, an important advance in the philosophy of evolutionary biology, is nevertheless in need of refinement. Four important subparts of this concept must be recognized: spatial boundaries, temporal boundaries, ...
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Journal ArticleBiology and Philosophy · June 1, 1986
This paper is divided into three sections. In the first section we offer a retooling of some traditional concepts, namely icons and symbols, which allows us to describe an evolutionary continuum of communication systems. The second section consists of an a ...
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Journal ArticleStudies in History and Philosophy of Science · January 1, 1981
This paper gives an account of evolutionary explanations in biology. Briefly, the explanations I am primarily concerned with are explanations of adaptations. ('Adaptation' is a technical term and defining it requires a fairly lengthy digression.) These exp ...
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