Stephen M. Downes

Debates about human nature inform every philosophical tradition from their inception (see Stevenson 2000 for many examples). Evolutionarily based criticisms of human nature are of much more recent origin. Ironically, most evolutionarily based criticisms of human nature are directed at work whose avowed goal is to biologicize human nature and even to place human nature within an evolutionary frame. Here I will focus on accounts of human nature that begin with and come after E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology. I will also focus on criticisms of human nature that arose first as responses to sociobiology. There are some more recent approaches to human nature that have much in common with the sociobiological approach and I will show that critical arguments developed to target sociobiology have purchase on related recent approaches to human nature. In what follows I will briefly outline some well-known accounts of human nature. Next I will briefly outline some key evolutionarily based arguments against such accounts of human nature. I conclude by summarizing the evolutionary case against biological accounts of human nature and endorsing it.

I respond to Vladas Griskevicius and Douglas T. Kendrick (G&K) and Gad Saad's (S) defenses of the view that Consumer Studies would benefit from the appeal to evolution in all work aimed at understanding consumer behavior. I argue that G&K and S's reliance on one theoretical perspective, that of evolutionary psychology, limits their options. Further, I point out some specific problems with the theoretical perspective of evolutionary psychology. Finally, I introduce some alternative evolutionary approaches to studying human behavior that could profitably be adopted in consumer research.

I propose an approach to naturalized philosophy of science that takes the social nature of scientific practice seriously. I criticize several prominent naturalistic approaches for adopting "cognitive individualism", which limits the study of science to an examination of the internal psychological mechanisms of scientists. I argue that this limits the explanatory capacity of these approaches. I then propose a three-level model of the social nature of scientific practice, and use the model to defend the claim that scientific knowledge is socially produced.

Alternative splicing allows for the production of many gene products from a single coding sequence. I introduce the concept of alternative splicing via some examples. I then discuss some current hypotheses about the explanatory role of alternative splicing, including the claim that splicing is a significant contributor to the difference in complexity between the human genome and proteosome. Hypotheses such as these bring into question our working concepts of the gene. I examine several gene concepts introduced to cope with processes such as alternative splicing. Next I introduce some hypotheses about the evolution of mechanisms alternative splicing in higher organisms. I conclude that attention to alternative splicing reveals that we adopt an attitude that developmental theorizing must inform evolutionary theorizing and vice versa

In this paper I examine various ways in whichphilosophers have made connections between truth andnatural selection. I introduce several versions ofthe view that mechanisms of true belief generationarise as a result of natural selection and argue thatthey fail to establish a connection between truth andnatural selection. I then turn to scientific truthsand argue that evolutionary accounts of the origin ofscientific truth generation mechanisms also fail. Iintroduce David Hull's selectionist model ofscientific development and argue that his account ofscientific success does not rely on connecting truthand natural selection. I argue that Hull's model,which severs the connection between truth andselection, can account for some aspects of scientificchange, but it still leaves us plenty of questionsabout what aspects of our individual cognitive make-upcontribute to scientific change and how they do so. I introduce an evolutionary approach to scientificcognition that shows how some of these questions canbe answered without making an explanatory appeal toselection for true belief generating mechanisms.

I critically examine the semantic view of theories to reveal the following results. First, models in science are not the same as models in mathematics, as holders of the semantic view claim. Second, when several examples of the semantic approach are examined in detail no common thread is found between them, except their close attention to the details of model building in each particular science. These results lead me to propose a deflationary semantic view, which is simply that model construction is an important component of theorizing in science. This deflationary view is consistent with a naturalized approach to the philosophy of science.

Several prominent philosophers of science, most notably Ron Giere, propose that scientific theories are collections of models and that models represent the objects of scientific study. Some, including Giere, argue that models represent in the same way that pictures represent. Aestheticians have brought the picturing relation under intense scrutiny and presented important arguments against the tenability of particular accounts of picturing. Many of these arguments from aesthetics can be used against accounts of representation in philosophy of science. I rely on Dominic Lopes' recent summary of arguments against various views of picturing and reformulate some of them to fit the philosophy of science context. My specific targets here are Giere and Steven French. I go on to argue that assuming all scientific models and images represent in the same way is not the best guide to understanding scientific practice.