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38Emergent group traits, reproduction, and levels of selectionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 37 (3): 268-269. 2014.
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76Philosophical theories of probability (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 53 (1): 151-156. 2002.
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153Modeling in biology and economicsBiology and Philosophy 26 (5): 613-615. 2011.Much of biological and economic theorizing takes place by modeling, the indirect study of real-world phenomena by the construction and examination of models. Books and articles about biological and economic theory are often books and articles about models, many of which are highly idealized and chosen for their explanatory power and analytical convenience rather than for their fit with known data sets. Philosophers of science have recognized these facts and have developed literatures about the n…Read more
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65Does the concept of “clade selection” make sense?Philosophy of Science 70 (4): 739-751. 2003.The idea that clades might be units of selection, defended by a number of biologists and philosophers of biology, is critically examined. I argue that only entities which reproduce, i.e. leave offspring, can be units of selection, and that a necessary condition of reproduction is that the offspring entity be able, in principle, to outlive its parental entity. Given that clades are monophlyetic by definition, it follows that clades do not reproduce, so it makes no sense to talk about a clade's fi…Read more
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90Optimal Choice in the Face of Risk: Decision Theory Meets EvolutionPhilosophy of Science 78 (1): 83-104. 2011.The problem of how to make optimal choices in the face of risk arises in both economics/decision theory and also evolutionary biology; in the former, ‘optimal’ means utility maximizing, while in the latter it means fitness maximizing. This article explores the links, thematic and formal, between the economic and evolutionary theories of optimal choice in risky situations, with particular reference to the relationship between utility and fitness. It is argued that the link is strongest between ev…Read more
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230Bayesianism and the Traditional Problem of InductionCroatian Journal of Philosophy 5 (2): 181-194. 2005.Many philosophers argue that Bayesian epistemology cannot help us with the traditional Humean problem of induction. I argue that this view is partially but not wholly correct. It is true that Bayesianism does not solve Hume’s problem, in the way that the classical and logical theories of probability aimed to do. However I argue that in one important respect, Hume’s sceptical challenge cannot simply be transposed to a probabilistic context, where beliefs come in degrees, rather than being a yes/n…Read more
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64The origins of human cooperation: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis: A cooperative species. Princeton University Press, 2011, ISBN: 978-0-691-15125-0Biology and Philosophy 28 (5): 873-878. 2013.Bowles and Gintis argue that recent work in behavioural economics shows that humans have other-regarding preferences, i.e., are not purely self-interested. They seek to explain how these preferences may have evolved using a multi-level version of gene-culture coevolutionary theory. In this review essay I critically examine their main arguments
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150Fodor on cognition, modularity, and adaptationismPhilosophy of Science 70 (1): 68-88. 2003.This paper critically examines Jerry Fodor's latest attacks on evolutionary psychology. Contra Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Fodor argues (i) there is no reason to think that human cognition is a Darwinian adaptation in the first place, and (ii) there is no valid inference from adaptationism about the mind to massive modularity. However, Fodor maintains (iii) that there is a valid inference in the converse direction, from modularity to adaptationism, but (iv) that the language module is an excep…Read more
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84Review. Genetics and reductionism. S SarkarBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 51 (1): 181-185. 2000.
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163Evolution and the levels of selectionOxford University Press. 2006.Does natural selection act primarily on individual organisms, on groups, on genes, or on whole species? The question of levels of selection - on which biologists and philosophers have long disagreed - is central to evolutionary theory and to the philosophy of biology. Samir Okasha's comprehensive analysis gives a clear account of the philosophical issues at stake in the current debate.
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159Probabilistic Induction and Hume’s Problem: Reply to LangePhilosophical Quarterly 53 (212). 2003.Marc Lange has criticized my assertion that relative to a Bayesian conception of inductive reasoning, Hume's argument for inductive scepticism cannot be run. I reply that the way in which Lange suggests one should run the Humean argument in a Bayesian framework ignores the fact that in Bayesian models of learning from experience, the domain of an agent's probability measure is exogenously determined. I also show that Lange is incorrect to equate probability distributions which 'support inductive…Read more
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151Why won't the group selection controversy go away?British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (1): 25-50. 2001.The group selection controversy is about whether natural selection ever operates at the level of groups, rather than at the level of individual organisms. Traditionally, group selection has been invoked to explain the existence of altruistic behaviour in nature. However, most contemporary evolutionary biologists are highly sceptical of the hypothesis of group selection, which they regard as biologically implausible and not needed to explain the evolution of altruism anyway. But in their recent b…Read more
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190Could religion be a group-level adaptation of homo sapiens? - Darwin's cathedral: Evolution, religion and the nature of societydavid Sloan wilson; university of chicago press, 2002, pp. V+268, price $25 hardback, ISBN 0-226-90134- (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 (4): 699-705. 2003.
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18Underdetermination, Holism and the Theory\textfractionsolidus{}Data DistinctionPhilosophical Quarterly 52 (208): 303-319. 2002.
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89Maynard Smith on the levels of selection questionBiology and Philosophy 20 (5): 989-1010. 2005.The levels of selection problem was central to Maynard Smith’s work throughout his career. This paper traces Maynard Smith’s views on the levels of selection, from his objections to group selection in the 1960s to his concern with the major evolutionary transitions in the 1990s. The relations between Maynard Smith’s position and those of Hamilton and G.C. Williams are explored, as is Maynard Smith’s dislike of the Price equation approach to multi-level selection. Maynard Smith’s account of the ‘…Read more
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29The explanation of scientific belief: Reply to W.e. JonesInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 14 (3). 2000.This Article does not have an abstract
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100Reply to Sober and Waters (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82 (1): 241-248. 2010.Elliott Sober and Ken Waters both raise interesting and difficult challenges for various aspects of the position I set out in Evolution and the Levels of the Selection. I am grateful to them for their penetrating criticisms of my work, and find myself in agreement with many of their points
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67Darwin’s views on group and kin selection: comments on Elliott Sober’s Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?Philosophical Studies 172 (3): 823-828. 2015.My comments will focus on the second and third chapters of Sober’s book , which explore Darwin’s ideas about altruism, group selection and kin selection , and sex-ratio evolution . Sober makes a persuasive argument for his main claim: that Darwin was a subtler thinker on these topics than he is often taken to be. While there is much that I admire in Sober’s lucid discussion, I will focus on points of disagreement. Readers should note that this is not the first time that Sober and I have disagree…Read more
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107On niche construction and extended evolutionary theoryBiology and Philosophy 20 (1): 1-10. 2005.
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25Bayes, Levi, and the taxicabsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (5): 693-693. 2000.Stanovich & West (S&W) are wrong to think that all “reject-the-norm” theorists simply wish to reduce the normative/descriptive gap. They have misunderstood Issac Levi's reasons for rejecting Tversky and Kahneman's normative assumptions in the “base-rate” experiments. In their discussion of the taxicab experiment, (S&W) erroneously claim that subjects' responses indicate whether they have reasoned in accordance with Bayesian principles or not.
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80The Relation between Kin and Multilevel Selection: An Approach Using Causal GraphsBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (2): 435-470. 2016.Kin selection and multilevel selection are alternative approaches for studying the evolution of social behaviour, the relation between which has long been a source of controversy. Many recent theorists regard the two approaches as ultimately equivalent, on the grounds that gene frequency change can be correctly expressed using either. However, this shows only that the two are formally equivalent, not that they offer equally good causal representations of the evolutionary process. This article ar…Read more
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133Social justice, genomic justice and the veil of ignorance: Harsanyi meets MendelEconomics and Philosophy 28 (1): 43-71. 2012.John Harsanyi and John Rawls both used the veil of ignorance thought experiment to study the problem of choosing between alternative social arrangements. With his ‘impartial observer theorem’, Harsanyi tried to show that the veil of ignorance argument leads inevitably to utilitarianism, an argument criticized by Sen, Weymark and others. A quite different use of the veil-of-ignorance concept is found in evolutionary biology. In the cell-division process called meiosis, in which sexually reproduci…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
General Philosophy of Science |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Social Science |
Philosophy of Probability |