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704Oyun: A New, Free Program for Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments in the ClassroomEvolution Education and Outreach 5 (3): 467-476. 2012.Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tou…Read more
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22The many chances of Charles Darwin (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 53 107-110. 2015.An essay review of Johnson's Darwin's Dice, examining Darwin's use of chance throughout his corpus.
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532Fitness: Philosophical ProblemseLS. 2013.Fitness plays many roles throughout evolutionary theory, from a measure of populations in the wild to a central element in abstract theoretical presentations of natural selection. It has thus been the subject of an extensive philosophical literature, which has primarily centered on the way to understand the relationship between fitness values and reproductive outcomes. If fitness is a probabilistic or statistical quantity, how is it to be defined in general theoretical contexts? How can it be me…Read more
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1072A New Foundation for the Propensity Interpretation of FitnessBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (4): 851-881. 2013.The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that avoids these (and…Read more
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383Elliott Sober, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin’s Theory. Amherst, NY: Prometheus (2011), 230 pp., $21.00 (review)Philosophy of Science 78 (4): 705-709. 2011.
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93The Early History of Chance in EvolutionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 50 48-58. 2015.Work throughout the history and philosophy of biology frequently employs ‘chance’, ‘unpredictability’, ‘probability’, and many similar terms. One common way of understanding how these concepts were introduced in evolution focuses on two central issues: the first use of statistical methods in evolution (Galton), and the first use of the concept of “objective chance” in evolution (Wright). I argue that while this approach has merit, it fails to fully capture interesting philosophical reflections o…Read more
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69On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (review)Quarterly Review of Biology 86 (2): 137-138. 2011.
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409Military Genomic Testing: Proportionality, Expected Benefits, and the Connection between Genotypes and PhenotypesJournal of Law and the Biosciences 2 (1): 85-91. 2015.Mehlman and Li offer a framework for approaching the bioethical issues raised by the military use of genomics that is compellingly grounded in both the contemporary civilian and military ethics of medical research, arguing that military commanders must be bound by the two principles of paternal- ism and proportionality. I agree fully. But I argue here that this is a much higher bar than we may fully realize. Just as the principle of proportionality relies upon a thorough assessment of harms caus…Read more
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90Is Organismic Fitness at the Basis of Evolutionary Theory?Philosophy of Science 82 (5): 1081-1091. 2015.Fitness is a central theoretical concept in evolutionary theory. Despite its importance, much debate has occurred over how to conceptualize and formalize fitness. One point of debate concerns the roles of organismic and trait fitness. In a recent addition to this debate, Elliott Sober argues that trait fitness is the central fitness concept, and that organismic fitness is of little value. In this paper, by contrast, we argue that it is organismic fitness that lies at the bases of both the concep…Read more
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Evolutionary Biology |
Mechanisms of Evolution |
History of Biology |