•  111
    In S. Psillos and M. Curd (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Science, forthcoming.
  •  1
    Instrumentalism, Parsimony, and the Akaike Framework
    Philosophy of Science 69 (S3). 2002.
    Akaike's framework for thinking about model selection in terms of the goal of predictive accuracy and his criterion for model selection have important philosophical implications. Scientists often test models whose truth values they already know, and they often decline to reject models that they know full well are false. Instrumentalism helps explain this pervasive feature of scientific practice, and Akaike's framework helps provide instrumentalism with the epistemology it needs. Akaike's criteri…Read more
  •  10
    What Is Evolutionary Altruism?
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 14 (n/a): 75-99. 1988.
    In this paper I want to clarify what biologists are talking about when they talk about the evolution of altruism. I'll begin by saying something about the common sense concept. This familiar idea I'll call 'vernacular altruism.' One point of doing this is to make it devastatingly obvious that the common sense concept is very different from the concept as it's used in evolutionary theory. After that preliminary, I'll describe some features of the evolutionary concept. Then I'll conclude by brief…Read more
  •  1
    Problems for environmentalism
    In Christopher Stephens & Mohan Matthen (eds.), Elsevier Handbook in Philosophy of Biology, Elsevier. pp. 144--365. 2004.
  •  7
    Summary of: ‘Unto Others. The evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior'
    with David Sloan Wilson
    Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (1-2): 185-206. 2000.
    The hypothesis of group selection fell victim to a seemingly devastating critique in 1960s evolutionary biology. In Unto Others (1998), we argue to the contrary, that group selection is a conceptually coherent and empirically well documented cause of evolution. We suggest, in addition, that it has been especially important in human evolution. In the second part of Unto Others, we consider the issue of psychological egoism and altruism -- do human beings have ultimate motives concerning the well-…Read more
  •  129
    Holism, Individualism, and the Units of Selection
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980. 1980.
    Developing a definition of group selection, and applying that definition to the dispute in the social sciences between methodological holists and methodological individualists, are the two goals of this paper. The definition proposed distinguishes between changes in groups that are due to group selection and changes in groups that are artefacts of selection processes occurring at lower levels of organization. It also explains why the existence of group selection is not implied by the mere fact t…Read more
  •  18
    The Illusory Riches of Sober's Monism
    Journal of Philosophy 87 (3): 158-161. 1990.
    In a recent article, Kim Sterelny and Philip Kitcher5 defend a version of genic selectionism and attempt to refute the criticisms I made of that doctrine. Their defense has two components. First, they find fault with the account I gave of the units-of-selection controversy-an account which uses the idea of probabilistic causality as a tool of explication. Second, they provide a positive account of their own of what that controversy concerns, one which they think allows genic selectionism to emer…Read more
  •  10
    Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History
    with Daniel Little, Erik Olin Wright, and Andrew Levine
    Philosophical Review 103 (1): 199. 1994.