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505The Extended (Evolutionary) Synthesis Debate: Where Science Meets PhilosophyBioScience 64 (6): 511-516. 2015.Recent debates between proponents of the modern evolutionary synthesis (the standard model in evolutionary biology) and those of a possible extended synthesis are a good example of the fascinating tangle among empirical, theoretical, and conceptual or philosophical matters that is the practice of evolutionary biology. In this essay, we briefly discuss two case studies from this debate, highlighting the relevance of philosophical thinking to evolutionary biologists in the hope of spurring further…Read more
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1014Is knowledge of science associated with higher skepticism of pseudoscientific claims?American Biology Teacher 66 (8): 536-548. 2004.We live in a world that is increasingly shaped by and bathed in science, with most scientific progress occurring in the past century, and much of it in the past few decades. Yet, several authors have puz- zled over the observation that modern societies are also characterized by a high degree of belief in a variety of pseudoscientific claims that have been thoroughly debunked or otherwise discarded by scientists (Anonymous, 2001; Ede, 2000).
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527The mismeasure of machine: Synthetic biology and the trouble with engineering metaphorsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4): 660-668. 2013.The scientific study of living organisms is permeated by machine and design metaphors. Genes are thought of as the ‘‘blueprint’’ of an organism, organisms are ‘‘reverse engineered’’ to discover their functionality, and living cells are compared to biochemical factories, complete with assembly lines, transport systems, messenger circuits, etc. Although the notion of design is indispensable to think about adaptations, and engineering analogies have considerable heuristic value (e.g., optimality as…Read more
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790Dennis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers : Biology and Ideology: From Descartes to DawkinsScience & Education 22 (2): 405-409. 2013.Science has always strived for objectivity, for a ‘‘view from nowhere’’ that is not marred by ideology or personal preferences. That is a lofty ideal toward which perhaps it makes sense to strive, but it is hardly the reality. This collection of thirteen essays assembled by Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers ought to give much pause to scientists and the public at large, though historians, sociologists and philosophers of science will hardly be surprised by the material covered here.
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30Questions traditionally answered by philosophers are now being tackled by prominent scientists. As the cultural influence of science and technology continues to grow, what room, if any, is left for philosophy? Three philosophers—Dr. Jonathan Kaplan, Dr. Massimo Pigliucci, and Dr. Leonard Finkelman —explore issues related to the philosophy of science, including how philosophy has contributed to scientific progress, why philosophy continues to be important to science, and why there remain question…Read more
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85Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary TheoryUniversity of Chicago Press. 2006.Making Sense of Evolution explores contemporary evolutionary biology, focusing on the elements of theories—selection, adaptation, and species—that are complex and open to multiple possible interpretations, many of which are incompatible with one another and with other accepted practices in the discipline. Particular experimental methods, for example, may demand one understanding of “selection,” while the application of the same concept to another area of evolutionary biology could necessitate a …Read more
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622On the limits of quantitative genetics for the study of phenotypic evolutionActa Biotheoretica 45 (2): 143-160. 1997.During the last two decades the role of quantitative genetics in evolutionary theory has expanded considerably. Quantitative genetic-based models addressing long term phenotypic evolution, evolution in multiple environments (phenotypic plasticity) and evolution of ontogenies (developmental trajectories) have been proposed. Yet, the mathematical foundations of quantitative genetics were laid with a very different set of problems in mind (mostly the prediction of short term responses to artificial…Read more
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2640Do we need an extended evolutionary synthesis?Evolution 61 (12): 2743-2749. 2007.The Modern Synthesis (MS) is the current paradigm in evolutionary biology. It was actually built by expanding on the conceptual foundations laid out by its predecessors, Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. For sometime now there has been talk of a new Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES), and this article begins to outline why we may need such an extension, and how it may come about. As philosopher Karl Popper has noticed, the current evolutionary theory is a theory of genes, and we still lack a theor…Read more
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115Why Do Irrational Beliefs Mimic Science? The Cultural Evolution of PseudoscienceTheoria 83 (1): 78-97. 2016.Why do irrational beliefs adopt the trappings of science, to become what is known as “pseudoscience”? Here, we develop and extend an epidemiological framework to map the factors that explain the form and the popularity of irrational beliefs in scientific garb. These factors include the exploitation of epistemic vigilance, the misunderstanding of the authority of science, the use of the honorific title of “science” as an explicit argument for belief, and the phenomenon of epistemic negligence. We…Read more
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1916The proximate–ultimate distinction and evolutionary developmental biology: causal irrelevance versus explanatory abstractionBiology and Philosophy 30 (5): 653-670. 2015.Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction has received renewed interest in recent years. Here we discuss its role in arguments about the relevance of developmental to evolutionary biology. We show that two recent critiques of the proximate–ultimate distinction fail to explain why developmental processes in particular should be of interest to evolutionary biologists. We trace these failures to a common problem: both critiques take the proximate–ultimate distinction to neglect specific causal interact…Read more
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5388An Extended Synthesis for Evolutionary BiologyAnnals of the New York Academy of Science 1168 218-228. 2009.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 of evolutionary theory from Darwinism to neo-Darwinism, and from the Modern Synthesis to what I refer to as the Extended Synthesis, a mo…Read more
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1010The Nature of Evolutionary Biology: At the Borderlands Between Historical and Experimental ScienceIn Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators, Springer. 2013.The scientific status of evolutionary theory seems to be more or less perennially under question. I am not referring here (just) to the silliness of young Earth creation- ism (Pigliucci 2002; Boudry and Braeckman 2010), or even of the barely more intel- lectually sophisticated so-called Intelligent Design theory (Recker 2010; Brigandt this volume), but rather to discussions among scientists and philosophers of science concerning the epistemic status of evolutionary theory (Sober 2010). As we sha…Read more
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100Phenotypic Integration: Studying the Ecology and Evolution of Complex Phenotypes (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2004.A new voice in the nature-nurture debate can be heard at the interface between evolution and development. Phenotypic integration is a major growth area in research.
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926Primates, philosophers and the biological basis of morality: A review of primates and philosophers by Frans de waal, princeton university press, 2006, 200 pp (review)Biology and Philosophy 22 (4): 611-618. 2007.Philosophical inquiries into morality are as old as philosophy, but it may turn out that morality itself is much, much older than that. At least, that is the main thesis of prima- tologist Frans De Waal, who in this short book based on his Tanner Lectures at Princeton, elaborates on what biologists have been hinting at since Darwin’s (1871) book The Descent of Man and Hamilton’s (1963) studies on the evolution of altruism: morality is yet another allegedly human characteristic that turns out to …Read more
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456Foreword to Julian Huxley's "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis"In Massimo Pigliucci & Gerd Müller (eds.), Evolution: The Modern Synthesis The Definitive Edition Edition, Mit Press. pp. 1-8. 2010.A new conceptual essay introducing one of the classics of the evolutionary biological literature.
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5120Mind uploading: a philosophical counter-analysisIn Russell Blackford & Damien Broderick (eds.), Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds, Wiley. pp. 119-130. 2014.A counter analysis of David Chalmers' claims about the possibility of mind uploading within the context of the Singularity event
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23What are we to make of the concept of race?: Thoughts of a philosopher–scientistStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (3): 272-277. 2013.Discussions about the biological bases of the concept of race in the human species seem to be never ending. One of the latest rounds is represented by a paper by Neven Sesardic, which attempts to build a strong scientific case for the existence of human races, based on genetic, morphometric and behavioral characteristics, as well as on a thorough critique of opposing positions. In this paper I show that Sesardic’s critique falls far short of the goal, and that his positive case is exceedingly th…Read more
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614Characters and EnvironmentsIn G. P. Wagner (ed.), The Character Concept in Evolutionary Biology, Academic Press. 2001.The concepts of reaction norms and phenotypic plasticity help us better understand what a biological trait is.
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3029Why the Demarcation Problem MattersIn Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, . 2013.Ever since Socrates, philosophers have been in the business of asking ques- tions of the type “What is X?” The point has not always been to actually find out what X is, but rather to explore how we think about X, to bring up to the surface wrong ways of thinking about it, and hopefully in the process to achieve an increasingly better understanding of the matter at hand. In the early part of the twentieth century one of the most ambitious philosophers of sci- ence, Karl Popper, asked that very qu…Read more