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185The contest between parsimony and likelihoodSystematic Biology 53 (4): 644-653. 2004.Maximum Parsimony (MP) and Maximum Likelihood (ML) are two methods for evaluating which phlogenetic tree is best supported by data on the characteristics of leaf objects (which may be species, populations, or individual organisms). MP has been criticized for assuming that evolution proceeds parsimoniously -- that if a lineage begins in state i and ends in state j, the way it got from i to j is by the smallest number of changes. MP has been criticized for needing to assume some model or other …Read more
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13Book reviews : Sociobiology and the preemption of social science. By Alexander Rosenberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university press, 1980; oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. Pp. XI + 227. $20.00 (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (1): 89-93. 1985.
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872What is wrong with intelligent design?Quarterly Review of Biology 82 (1): 3-8. 2007.This article reviews two standard criticisms of creationism/intelligent design (ID): it is unfalsifiable, and it is refuted by the many imperfect adaptations found in nature. Problems with both criticisms are discussed. A conception of testability is described that avoids the defects in Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion. Although ID comes in multiple forms, which call for different criticisms, it emerges that ID fails to constitute a serious alternative to evolutionary theory.
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325Parsimony and models of animal mindsIn Robert W. Lurz (ed.), The Philosophy of Animal Minds, Cambridge University Press. pp. 237. 2009.The chapter discusses the principle of conservatism and traces how the general principle is related to the specific one. This tracing suggests that the principle of conservatism needs to be refined. Connecting the principle in cognitive science to more general questions about scientific inference also allows us to revisit the question of realism versus instrumentalism. The framework deployed in model selection theory is very general; it is not specific to the subject matter of science. The chapt…Read more
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81Contrastive empiricismIn C. Wade Savage (ed.), Scientific Theories, University of Minnesota Press. pp. 392--410. 1990.Realism and empiricism have always been contradictory tendencies in the philosophy of science. The view I will sketch is a synthesis, which I call Contrastive Empiricism. Realism and empiricism are incompatible, so a synthesis that merely conjoined them would be a contradiction. Rather, I propose to isolate important elements in each and show that they combine harmoniously. I will leave behind what I regard as confusions and excesses. The result, I hope, will be neither contradiction nor mishmas…Read more
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48Reply to Rosenberg on genic selectionismPhilosophy of Science 50 (4): 648-650. 1983.Rosenberg (1983), in his comments on our article (Sober and Lewontin 1982) concerning the units of selection controversy, has matters precisely backwards. We suggest Rosenberg alludes to a quite different view of the units of selection controversy, one that he never shows to have mattered to any biologists engaged in the dispute. We also reject Rosenberg's remark that the hypothesis of genic selection is currently predictively vacuous.
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1Force and disposition in evolutionary theoryIn Christopher Hookway (ed.), Minds, Machines, and Evolution: Philosophical Studies, Cambridge University Press. 1984.
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44Old problems for a new theory: Mayo on Giere's theory of causationPhilosophical Studies 52 (3). 1987.
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119Two Uses of UnificationVienna Circle Institute Yearbook 10 205-216. 2003.Carl Hempel1 set the tone for subsequent philosophical work on scientific explanation by resolutely locating the problem he wanted to address outside of epistemology. “Hempel’s problem,” as I will call it, was not to say what counts as evidence that X is the explanation of Y. Rather, the question was what it means for X to explain Y. Hempel’s theory of explanation and its successors don’t tell you what to believe; instead, they tell you which of your beliefs (if any) can be said to explain a giv…Read more
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93Modus DarwinBiology and Philosophy 14 (2): 253-278. 1999.Modus Darwin is a principle of inference that licenses the conclusion that two species have a common ancestor, based on the observation that they are similar. The present paper investigates the principle's probabilistic foundations.
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316Black box inference: When should intervening variables be postulated?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (3): 469-498. 1998.An empirical procedure is suggested for testing a model that postulates variables that intervene between observed causes and abserved effects against a model that includes no such postulate. The procedure is applied to two experiments in psychology. One involves a conditioning regimen that leads to response generalization; the other concerns the question of whether chimpanzees have a theory of mind.
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15Review of E xplanation and Causation (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 38 (2). 1987.
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40Explanatory presuppositionAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (2). 1986.This Article does not have an abstract
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101Temporally oriented lawsSynthese 94 (2). 1993.A system whose expected state changes with time cannot have both a forward-directed translationally invariant probabilistic law and a backward-directed translationally invariant law. When faced with this choice, science seems to favor the former. An asymmetry between cause and effect may help to explain why temporally oriented laws are usually forward-directed.
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1Kindness and Cruelty in EvolutionIn Richard J. Davidson & Anne Harrington (eds.), Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, Oxford University Press. pp. 46-65. 2002.Human nature is intriguing in such that it can express both negative and positive emotions, as in kindness and cruelty. The question is whether both are a natural part of our nature as human beings, or is one produced to serve as the alternate of the other. Another question that is brought to the table in this chapter is how does one determine what is natural and what is not, being its true definition? The chapter attempts to answer these questions based on evolution theory, whether events earli…Read more
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630Absence of evidence and evidence of absence: evidential transitivity in connection with fossils, fishing, fine-tuning, and firing squadsPhilosophical Studies 143 (1): 63-90. 2009.“Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” is a slogan that is popular among scientists and nonscientists alike. This article assesses its truth by using a probabilistic tool, the Law of Likelihood. Qualitative questions (“Is E evidence about H ?”) and quantitative questions (“How much evidence does E provide about H ?”) are both considered. The article discusses the example of fossil intermediates. If finding a fossil that is phenotypically intermediate between two extant species provides …Read more
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34I_– _Elliott SoberAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 74 (1): 237-280. 2000.In ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, Quine attacks the analytic/synthetic distinction and defends a doctrine that I call epistemological holism. Now, almost fifty years after the article’s appearance, what are we to make of these ideas? I suggest that the philosophical naturalism that Quine did so much to promote should lead us to reject Quine’s brief against the analytic/synthetic distinction; I also argue that Quine misunderstood Carnap's views on analyticity. As for epistemological holism, I claim …Read more
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43Independent evidence about a common causePhilosophy of Science 56 (2): 275-287. 1989.To infer the state of a cause from the states of its effects, independent lines of evidence are preferable to dependent ones. This familiar idea is here investigated, the goal being to identify its presuppositions. Connections are drawn with Reichenbach's (1956) and Salmon's (1984) discussions of the principle of the common cause
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151The causal efficacy of contentPhilosophical Studies 63 (July): 1-30. 1991.Several philosophers have argued recently that semantic properties do play a causal role. 1 It is our view that none of these arguments are satisfactory. Our aim is to reveal some of the deficiencies of these arguments, and to reassess the question in our own way. In section 1, we shall explain in more detail what is involved in the pretheoretical idea of a causally efficacious property and so provide a fuller sense of the issue. In section 2 we shall discuss Fodor's and Kim's arguments that the…Read more
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21Précis of Unto OthersPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (3): 681-684. 2002.The substance of the commentaries, however, reveals considerable disagreement about how UO conceptualizes the idea of group selection. Dennett describes the issues as “mind-twistingly elusive and slippery” and hints that it is mere hype to say that group selection has been revived. Barrett and Godfrey-Smith discuss the problem of multiple perspectives at length and claim that we are too liberal in our definition of groups. We believe that these criticisms obscure the simplicity of the basic ques…Read more
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24Précis of Evidence and Evolution: The Logic behind the SciencePhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 83 (3): 661-665. 2011.Evidence and Evolution has four chapters: (1) Evidence, (2) Intelligent Design, (3) Natural Selection, and (4) Common Ancestry. The first chapter develops tools that are used in the rest of the book, though more ideas about evidence are added. In Chapter 1, I endorse a pluralistic outlook—Bayesianism is fine in some inference problems, likelihoodism in others, and AIC in still others. In Chapter Two, on intelligent design, I try to develop the strongest possible formulation of the design argumen…Read more
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7Does "Fitness" Fit the Facts?Journal of Philosophy 84 (4): 220-223. 1987.My critical remarks' on Alexander Rosenberg’s article on fitness have elicited a rejoinder from Mary Williams and Rosenberg himself. They charge that my criticisms are a “tissue of misunderstandings” (738); since they misunderstand my own position in fundamental ways, it may help to try to clarify the points that divide us. In the interest of brevity, I will ignore technical issues concerning the internal correctness of Williams’s axiomatization and will focus on questions of broader philosophic…Read more
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236Temporally asymmetric inference in a Markov processPhilosophy of Science 58 (3): 398-410. 1991.A model of a Markov process is presented in which observing the present state of a system is asymmetrically related to inferring the system's future and inferring its past. A likelihood inference about the system's past state, based on observing its present state, is justified no matter what the parameter values in the model happen to be. In contrast, a probability inference of the system's future state, based on observing its present state, requires further information about the parameter value…Read more
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1Three differences between deliberation and evolutionIn Peter Danielson (ed.), Modeling rationality, morality, and evolution, Oxford University Press. 1998.In this paper, I'll explore three contexts in which the heuristic of personification yields the wrong answer. They all come from game theoretic discussion of altruism and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Whether it is applied to evolution or to rational deliberation, game theory models situations that involve frequency dependence. In the evolutionary case, how fit a trait is, and whether it is more or less fit than the alternatives, depends on the composition of the population (Maynard Smith 1982). In th…Read more
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18Fact, Fiction, and FitnessJournal of Philosophy 81 (7): 372-383. 1984.Alexander Rosenberg began his recent article on the concept of fitness with the remark that “debates about the cognitive status of the Darwinian theory of natural selection should have ended long ago.” I agree that this obsession need to be overcome. But Rosenberg repeats some of the old mistakes and invents epicycles on others. In this comment I will not be able to circumscribe fully the range of the topics that an adequate treatment of this cluster of problems demands. A few critical comments …Read more
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32What would happen if everyone did it? A reply to Collier and Giere on frequency dependent causationPhilosophy of Science 52 (1): 141-150. 1985.In a recent article (Sober 1982), I criticized an account of causation proposed by Giere (1979, 1980) by describing a series of examples concerning natural selection. Collier (1983) has criticized my criticisms, saying that I misapplied Giere's proposal and misconstrued the biology. More recently, Giere (1984) has defended his theory against my criticisms. Here I argue that my criticisms still stand
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166Panglossian functionalism and the philosophy of mindSynthese 64 (August): 165-93. 1985.I want to explore what happens to two philosophical issues when we assume that the mind, a functional device, is to be understood by the same sort of functional analysis that guides biological investigation of other organismic systems and characteristics. The first problem area concerns the concept of rationality, its connection with reliability and reproductive success, and the status of rationality hypotheses in attribution of beliefs. It has been argued that ascribing beliefs to someone requi…Read more
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10Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, 3rd ed. (edited book)MIT Press. 2006.These essays by leading scientists and philosophers address conceptual issues that arise in the theory and practice of evolutionary biology. The third edition of this widely used anthology has been substantially revised and updated. Four new sections have been added: on women in the evolutionary process, evolutionary psychology, laws in evolutionary theory, and race as social construction or biological reality. Other sections treat fitness, units of selection, adaptationism, reductionism, essent…Read more
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