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55Précis of Unto OthersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 681-684. 2002.It is a challenge to explain how evolutionary altruism can evolve by the process of natural selection, since altruists in a group will be less fit than the selfish individuals in the same group who receive benefits but do not make donations of their own. Darwin proposed a theory of group selection to solve this puzzle. Very simply, even though altruists are less fit than selfish individuals within any single group, groups of altruists are more fit than groups of selfish individuals. If a populat…Read more
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44Revisability, a priori truth, and evolutionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (1). 1981.The positivists suggest that some truths may be immune from empirical refutation and yet lacking in rational justification. Quine holds that every proposition is in principle empirically refutable so there are no a priori truths. I’ll provide a working characterization of the idea of “rational revisability” and argue it’s impossible for us to take a chain of rational revision and end up revising everything which we now believe. Quine's position on revisability is also in tension with certain the…Read more
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95Is entropy relevant to the asymmetry between retrodiction and prediction?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 43 (2): 141-160. 1992.The idea that the changing entropy of a system is relevant to explaining why we know more about the system's past than about its future has been criticized on several fronts. This paper assesses the criticisms and clarifies the epistemology of the inference problem. It deploys a Markov process model to investigate the relationship between entropy and temporally asymmetric inference
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60Time and Knowability in Evolutionary ProcessesPhilosophy of Science 81 (4): 558-579. 2014.Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. Markov chain theory entails that the passage of time reduces the amount of information that the present provides about the past. Here we use a Moran process framework to show that some evolutionary processes destroy information faster than others. Our results connect with Darwin’s principle that adaptive similarities provide scant evidence of common ancestry wher…Read more
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373Instrumentalism RevisitedCritica 31 (91): 3-39. 1999.The logical empiricists said some good things about epistemology and scientific method. However, they associated those epistemological ideas with some rather less good ideas about philosophy of language. There is something epistemologically suspect about statements that cannot be tested. But to say that those statements are meaningless is to go too far. And there is something impossible about trying to figure out which of two empirically equivalent theories is true. But to say that those theorie…Read more
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420A critical review of philosophical work on the units of selection problemPhilosophy of Science 61 (4): 534-555. 1994.The evolutionary problem of the units of selection has elicited a good deal of conceptual work from philosophers. We review this work to determine where the issues now stand
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158Testing for treeness: lateral gene transfer, phylogenetic inference, and model selectionBiology and Philosophy 25 (4): 675-687. 2010.A phylogeny that allows for lateral gene transfer (LGT) can be thought of as a strictly branching tree (all of whose branches are vertical) to which lateral branches have been added. Given that the goal of phylogenetics is to depict evolutionary history, we should look for the best supported phylogenetic network and not restrict ourselves to considering trees. However, the obvious extensions of popular tree-based methods such as maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood face a serious problem—if …Read more
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82Explanation and causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2): 243-257. 1987.
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