•  1
    Darwin begins his “one long argument” not in the natural world of the deep past but – surprisingly and, for some readers, disappointingly – on the present-day world of the farm, providing a detailed look at domesticated plants and animals as well as the humans who breed them. Darwin’s opening chapter divides roughly into two halves. In the first half, Darwin surveys the amazing variability of plants and animals under domestication and some of the main causes of that variability. In the second ha…Read more
  •  10
    Historiographic Evidence and Confirmation
    with Mark Day
    In Aviezer Tucker (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, Wiley‐blackwell. 2008.
    This chapter contains sections titled: What Is Historiographic Evidence? Bayesianism Bayesianism as a Model of Historiographic Reasoning Explanationism Towards an Explanationist Bayesianism Applications: Skepticism Applications: Underdetermination References Further Reading.
  •  5
    This paper draws upon the history of scientific studies of inheritance in Mendel’s best-remembered model organism, the garden pea, as a source of two parables – one pessimistic, the other optimistic – on the challenges of data linkage in plants. The moral of the pessimistic parable, from the era of the biometrician-Mendelian controversy, is that the problem of theory-ladenness in data sets can be a major stumbling block to making new uses of old data. The moral of the optimistic parable, from th…Read more
  •  122
    Replies to the Critics
    with Roger M. White and Jonathan Hodge
    Metascience 31 (2): 163-169. 2022.
    As part of a review symposium on DARWIN'S ARGUMENT BY ANALOGY: FROM ARTIFICIAL TO NATURAL SELECTION (2021), the journal METASCIENCE invited Roger White, Jon Hodge and me to submit a response to the thoughtful commentaries on our book by Andrea Sullivan-Clarke, David Depew and Andrew Inkpen.
  •  19
    Mendel the fraud? A social history of truth in genetics
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93 (C): 39-46. 2022.
  •  1
    Darwin's Argument by Analogy: From Artificial to Natural Selection
    with Roger M. White and M. J. S. Hodge
    Cambridge University Press. 2021.
    In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well…Read more
  •  9
    Darwin and the Argument by Analogy: From Artificial to Natural Selection in the ‘Origin of Species'
    with Jonathan Hodge and Roger M. White
    Cambridge University Press. 2020.
    In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well…Read more
  • Darwin in Ilkley
    with Mike Dixon
    The History Press. 2009.
    When the Origins of Species was published on 24 November 1859, its author, Charles Darwin, was near the end of a nine-week stay in the remote Yorkshire village of Ilkley. He had come for the 'water cure' - a regime of cold baths and wet sheets - and for relaxation. But he used his time in Ilkley to shore up support, through extensive correspondence, for the extraordinary theory that the Origin would put before the world: evolution by natural selection. In Darwin in Ilkley, Mike Dixon and Gregory…Read more
  •  11
    In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the …Read more
  •  75
    Space: in science, art, and society (edited book)
    with François Penz and Robert Howell
    Cambridge University Press. 2004.
    This collection of essays explores different perceptions of space, taking the reader on a journey from the inner space of the mind to the vacuum beyond Earth. Eight leading researchers span a broad range of fields, from the arts and humanities to the natural sciences. They consider topics ranging from human consciousness to virtual reality, architecture and politics. The essays are written in an accessible style for a general audience.
  •  51
    Worries about fraudulent data should give way to broader critiques of Mendel's legacy
  •  49
    Genetic Determinism in the Genetics Curriculum
    with Annie Jamieson
    Science & Education 26 (10): 1261-1290. 2017.
    Twenty-first-century biology rejects genetic determinism, yet an exaggerated view of the power of genes in the making of bodies and minds remains a problem. What accounts for such tenacity? This article reports an exploratory study suggesting that the common reliance on Mendelian examples and concepts at the start of teaching in basic genetics is an eliminable source of support for determinism. Undergraduate students who attended a standard ‘Mendelian approach’ university course in introductory …Read more
  •  35
    Intellectual property, plant breeding and the making of Mendelian genetics
    with Berris Charnley
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (2): 222-233. 2013.
    Advocates of “Mendelism” early on stressed the usefulness of Mendelian principles for breeders. Ever since, that usefulness—and the favourable opinion of Mendelism it supposedly engendered among breeders—has featured in explanations of the rapid rise of Mendelian genetics. An important counter-tradition of commentary, however, has emphasized the ways in which early Mendelian theory in fact fell short of breeders’ needs. Attention to intellectual property, narrowly and broadly construed, makes po…Read more
  • Fielding the question-primatological research in historical perspective: Introduction
    with Amanda Jayne Rees
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. forthcoming.
  •  14
    The Social Construction of What? (review)
    British Journal for the History of Science 35 (1): 97-123. 2002.
  •  40
    A familiar story about mid-twentieth-century American psychology tells of the replacement of behaviorism by cognitive science. Between these two, however, lay a borderland, muddy and much trespassed-upon. This paper relocates the origins of the Chomskyan program in linguistics there. Following his introduction of transformational generative grammar, Chomsky mounted a highly publicized attack on behaviorist psychology. Yet when he first developed that approach to grammar, he was a defender of beh…Read more
  •  25
    The professor and the pea: Lives and afterlives of William Bateson’s campaign for the utility of Mendelism
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (2): 280-291. 2013.
    As a defender of the fundamental importance of Mendel’s experiments for understanding heredity, the English biologist William Bateson did much to publicize the usefulness of Mendelian science for practical breeders. In the course of his campaigning, he not only secured a reputation among breeders as a scientific expert worth listening to but articulated a vision of the ideal relations between pure and applied science in the modern state. Yet historical writing about Bateson has tended to underpl…Read more
  •  9
  •  90
    Two explanations of evolutionary progress
    Biology and Philosophy 15 (4): 475-491. 2000.
    Natural selection explains how living forms are fitted to theirconditions of life. Darwin argued that selection also explains what hecalled the gradual advancement of the organisation, i.e.evolutionary progress. Present-day selectionists disagree. In theirview, it is happenstance that sustains conditions favorable to progress,and therefore happenstance, not selection, that explains progress. Iargue that the disagreement here turns not on whether there exists aselection-based condition bias – a b…Read more
  •  2
    Essay Review: The Ethologist’s World (review)
    Journal of the History of Biology 40 (3). 2007.
  •  20
    In 1894, William Bateson objected to the terms “heredity” and “inheritance” in biology, on grounds of contamination with misleading notions from the everyday world. Yet after the rediscovery of Mendel's work in the spring of 1900, Bateson promoted that work as disclosing the “principles of heredity.” For historians of science, Bateson's change of mind provides a new angle on these terms at a crucial moment in their history. For philosophers of science, the case can serve as a reminder of the pot…Read more
  •  15
    Race and language in the Darwinian tradition (and what Darwin’s language–species parallels have to do with it)
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (3): 359-370. 2008.