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153Ecological diversity and biodiversity as concepts for conservation planning: Comments on ricottaActa Biotheoretica 54 (2): 133-140. 2006.Ricotta argues against the existence of a unique measure of biodiversity by pointing out that no known measure of α-diversity satisfies all the adequacy conditions that have traditionally been set for it. While that technical claim is correct, it is not relevant in the context of defining biodiversity which is most usefully measured by β-diversity. The concept of complementarity provides a closely related family of measures of biodiversity which can be used for systematic conservation planning. …Read more
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10Evolution by association: A history of symbiosisStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 29 (1): 211-218. 1998.
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34Evolution by association: A history of symbiosis - Jan Sapp, (new York and oxford: Oxford university press, 1994), XVII + 255 pp. ISBN 0-19-508820-4 cloth; 0-19-508821-2 paperback £19.95 (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 29 (1): 211-218. 1998.
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128Did Malament prove the non-conventionality of simultaneity in the special theory of relativity?Philosophy of Science 66 (2): 208-220. 1999.David Malament's (1977) well-known result, which is often taken to show the uniqueness of the Poincare-Einstein convention for defining simultaneity, involves an unwarranted physical assumption: that any simultaneity relation must remain invariant under temporal reflections. Once that assumption is removed, his other criteria for defining simultaneity are also satisfied by membership in the same backward (forward) null cone of the family of such cones with vertices on an inertial path. What is t…Read more
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29Does “Information” Provide a Compelling Framework for a Theory of Natural Selection? Grounds for CautionPhilosophy of Science 81 (1): 22-30. 2014.Frank has recently argued for an information-theoretic interpretation of natural selection. This interpretation is based on the identification of a measure related to the Malthusian parameter (for population change) with the Jeffreys divergence between the present allelic distribution of the population and that distribution in the next generation. It is pointed out in this analysis that this identification only holds if the mean fitness of the population is a constant, that is, there is no selec…Read more
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8Deliberative Decisions and Formal Multicriteria Analysis: Addressing Norton’s SkepticismIn Ben A. Minteer & Sahotra Sarkar (eds.), A Sustainable Philosophy—the Work of Bryan Norton, Springer Verlag. 2018.Norton has argued for the salience of deliberative strategies for making environmental decisions which is supposed to be preferable to formal decision analysis. This paper argues that formal multicriteria decision analysis, when deployed with care, has the flexibility to absorb the advantages of deliberative decision making. It can also be used for decision support during a deliberative process. This feature of decision analysis is illustrated using a case study from Merauke in Papua province of…Read more
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273Defining “Biodiversity”; Assessing BiodiversityThe Monist 85 (1): 131-155. 2001.This paper analyzes the concept of biodiversity in conservation biology and assesses potential methods for its measurement.
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5Conceptual Foundations of Organization Theory (review)Philosophical Review 101 (2): 484-485. 1992.
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5Complementarity and the selection of nature reserves: algorithms and the origins of conservation planning, 1980–1995Archive for History of Exact Sciences 66 (4): 397-426. 2012.This paper reconstructs the history of the introduction and use of iterative algorithms in conservation biology in the 1980s and early 1990s in order to prioritize areas for protection as nature reserves. The importance of these algorithms was that they led to greater economy in spatial extent (“efficiency”) in the selection of areas to represent biological features adequately (that is, to a specified level) compared to older methods of scoring and ranking areas using criteria such as biotic “ri…Read more
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75Carnap and the compulsions of interpretation: Reining in the liberalization of empiricism (review)European Journal for Philosophy of Science 3 (3): 353-372. 2013.Carnap’s work was instrumental to the liberalization of empiricism in the 1930s that transformed the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle to what came to be known as logical empiricism. A central feature of this liberalization was the deployment of the Principle of Tolerance, originally introduced in logic, but now invoked in an epistemological context in “Testability and Meaning”. Immediately afterwards, starting with Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, Carnap embraced semantics and turned…Read more
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57Biology and Philosophy Special Issue for 2003 – Evolution and DevelopmentBiology and Philosophy 16 (4): 573-573. 2001.
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28Biology and philosophy special issue for 2003 – evolution and developmentBiology and Philosophy 16 (4): 573-573. 2001.
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78A note on frequency dependence and the levels/units of selectionBiology and Philosophy 23 (2): 217-228. 2008.On the basis of distinctions between those properties of entities that can be defined without reference to other entities and those that (in different ways) cannot, this note argues that non-trivial forms of frequency-dependent selection of entities should be interpreted as selection occurring at a level higher than that of those entities. It points out that, except in degenerately simple cases, evolutionary game-theoretic models of selection are not models of individual selection. Similarly, mo…Read more
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46A Sustainable Philosophy—the Work of Bryan Norton (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2018.This book provides a richly interdisciplinary assessment of the thought and work of Bryan Norton, one of most innovative and influential environmental philosophers of the past thirty years. In landmark works such as Toward Unity Among Environmentalists and Sustainability: A Philosophy of Adaptive Ecosystem Management, Norton charted a new and highly productive course for an applied environmental philosophy, one fully engaged with the natural and social sciences as well as the management professi…Read more
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27An Introduction: The Symposium on The Evolution of Individuality by Leo W. BussBiology and Philosophy 7 (4): 461-462. 1992.
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12Learning Material Annotation for Flexible Tutoring SystemJournal of Intelligent Systems 16 (4): 293-306. 2007.
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76How development may direct evolutionBiology and Philosophy 18 (2): 353-370. 2003.A framework is presented in which the role ofdevelopmental rules in phenotypic evolution canbe studied for some simple situations. Usingtwo different implicit models of development,characterized by different developmental mapsfrom genotypes to phenotypes, it is shown bysimulation that developmental rules and driftcan result in directional phenotypic evolutionwithout selection. For both models thesimulations show that the critical parameterthat drives the final phenotypic distributionis the cardi…Read more
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51The real objective of Mendel's paper: A response to Monaghan and Corcos (review)Biology and Philosophy 6 (4): 447-451. 1991.Mendel's work in hybridization is ipso facto a study in inheritance. He is explicit in his interest to formulate universal generalizations, and at least in the case of the independent segregation of traits, he formulated his conclusions in the form of a law. Mendel did not discern, however, the inheritance of traits from that of the potential for traits. Choosing to study discrete non-overlapping traits, this did not hamper his efforts.
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63Darwinism in philosophy, social science and public policyBiology and Philosophy 16 (5): 747-749. 2001.
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14A Theory of "Fuzzy" Edge Detection in the Light of Human Visual SystemJournal of Intelligent Systems 17 (1-3): 229-246. 2008.
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29Logical empiricism and the special sciences: Reichenbach, Feigl, and Nagel (edited book)Garland Publ.. 1996.A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical e…Read more
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120Logical empiricism at its peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath (edited book)Garland. 1996.A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical e…Read more
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23Logic, probability, and epistemology: the power of semantics (edited book)Garland Pub. Co.. 1996.A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical e…Read more
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36The legacy of the Vienna circle: modern reappraisals (edited book)Garland. 1996.A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical e…Read more
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71The emergence of logical empiricism: from 1900 to the Vienna circle (edited book)Garland Publishing. 1996.A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical e…Read more
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40Decline and obsolescence of logical empiricism: Carnap vs. Quine and the critics (edited book)Garland. 1996.A new direction in philosophy Between 1920 and 1940 logical empiricism reset the direction of philosophy of science and much of the rest of Anglo-American philosophy. It began as a relatively organized movement centered on the Vienna Circle, and like-minded philosophers elsewhere, especially in Berlin. As Europe drifted into the Nazi era, several important figures, especially Carnap and Neurath, also found common ground in their liberal politics and radical social agenda. Together, the logical e…Read more
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12The Philosophy and history of molecular biology: new perspectives (edited book)Kluwer Academic. 1996.This book is a collection of papers which reflect the recent trends in the philosophy and history of molecular biology. It brings together historians, philosophers, and molecular biologists who reflect on the discipline's emergence in the 1950's, its explosive growth, and the directions in which it is going. Questions addressed include: (i) what are the limits of molecular biology? (ii) What is the relation of molecular biology to older subdisciplines of biology, especially biochemistry? (iii) A…Read more
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Drift and the causes of evolutionIn Phyllis McKay Illari, Federica Russo & Jon Williamson (eds.), Causality in the Sciences, Oxford University Press. pp. 445. 2011.