•  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.
  •  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
  •  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.
  •  74
    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.
    What should human languages be like if humans are the products of Darwinian evolution? Between Darwin’s day & like the peoples speaking them are higher or lower in an evolutionarily generated scale This paper charts some of the changes in the Darwinian tradition that transformed the notion of human linguistic equality from creationist heresy., our own, expectations about evolution’s imprint on language have changed dramaticallyIt is now a commonplace that, for good Darwinian reasons, no language…Read more
  •  65
  •  54
    Other Histories, Other Biologies
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 56 3-. 2005.
    Concentrating on genetics, this paper examines the strength of the links between our biological science -- our biology -- and the particular history which brought that science into being. Would quite different histories have produced roughly the same science? Or, on the contrary, would different histories have produced other, quite different biologies? One emphasis throughout is on the kinds of evidence that might be brought to bear from the actual past in order to assess claims about what mi…Read more
  •  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
  •  48
    Presidential address: Experimenting with the scientific past
    British Journal for the History of Science 49 (2): 153-172. 2016.
    When it comes to knowing about the scientific pasts that might have been – the so-called ‘counterfactual’ history of science – historians can either debate its possibility or get on with the job. The latter course offers opportunities for engaging with some of the most general questions about the nature of science, history and knowledge. It can also yield fresh insights into why particular episodes in the history of science unfolded as they did and not otherwise. Drawing on recent research into …Read more
  •  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
  •  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
  •  35
    Claiming ownership in the technosciences: Patents, priority and productivity
    with Christine MacLeod
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (2): 188-201. 2013.
  •  33
    Is the theory of natural selection independent of its history
    In J. Hodges & Gregory Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, Cambridge University Press. pp. 143--167. 2003.
  •  31
    Physics in the Galtonian sciences of heredity
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (2): 129-138. 2011.
    Physics matters less than we once thought to the making of Mendel. But it matters more than we tend to recognize to the making of Mendelism. This paper charts the variety of ways in which diverse kinds of physics impinged upon the Galtonian tradition which formed Mendelism’s matrix. The work of three Galtonians in particular is considered: Francis Galton himself, W. F. R. Weldon and William Bateson. One aim is to suggest that tracking influence from physics can bring into focus important but now…Read more
  •  30
    A critique of Kitcher on eugenic reasoning
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (4): 741-751. 2001.
    Pre-natal genetic tests prompt questions about when, if ever, it is legitimate to choose against a potential life. Philip Kitcher has argued that test-based decisions should turn not on whether a potential life would have a disease (understood as dysfunction), but whether that life would be of low quality. I draw attention to difficulties with both parts of this argument, showing, first, that Kitcher ignores distinctions upon which the case for disease as dysfunction depends; and, second, that h…Read more
  •  29
    Language, brain function, and human origins in the Victorian debates on evolution
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31 (1): 55-75. 2000.
  •  29
    Morgan's canon, Garner's phonograph, and the evolutionary origins of language and reason
    British Journal for the History of Science 33 (1): 3-23. 2000.
    ‘Morgan's canon’ is a rule for making inferences from animal behaviour about animal minds, proposed in 1892 by the Bristol geologist and zoologist C. Lloyd Morgan, and celebrated for promoting scepticism about the reasoning powers of animals. Here I offer a new account of the origins and early career of the canon. Built into the canon, I argue, is the doctrine of the Oxford philologist F. Max Müller that animals, lacking language, necessarily lack reason. Restoring the Müllerian origins of the c…Read more
  •  25
    What’s in a name? The vervet predator calls and the limits of the Washburnian synthesis
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2): 334-362. 2006.
    After the Second World War, a renaissance in field primatology took place in the United States under the aegis of the ‘new physical anthropology’. Its leader, Sherwood Washburn, envisioned a science uniting studies of hominid fossils with Darwinian population genetics, experimental functional anatomy, and field observation of non-human primates and human hunter–gatherers. Thanks to Washburn’s stimulus, his colleague at Berkeley, the bird ethologist Peter Marler, took up the study of the natural …Read more
  •  25
    Primate Language and the Playback Experiment, in 1890 and 1980
    Journal of the History of Biology 38 (3): 461-493. 2005.
    The playback experiment -- the playing back of recorded animal sounds to the animals in order to observe their responses -- has twice become central to celebrated researches on non-human primates. First, in the years around 1890, Richard Garner, an amateur scientist and evolutionary enthusiast, used the new wax cylinder phonograph to record and reproduce monkey utterances with the aim of translating them. Second, in the years around 1980, the ethologists Peter Marler, Robert Seyfarth, and Doroth…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
  •  20
    Introduction: Why What If?
    Isis 99 (3): 547-551. 2008.
  •  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