The Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anya Plutynski
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Biology ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Genetics ◽  
Philosophy Of Biology ◽  
Positive Influence ◽  
Levels Of Selection ◽  
Values In Science ◽  
Selection Mechanisms ◽  
Conceptual Foundations

Philosophy of evolutionary biology is a major subfield of philosophy of biology concerned with the methods, conceptual foundations, and implications of evolutionary biology. It also concerns relationships between evolutionary biology and neighboring fields, such as biochemistry, genetics, cell and molecular biology, developmental biology, and ecology. Initially, many of the questions of central concern to philosophy of biology grew out of general philosophy of science. For instance, one long-standing debate in philosophy of science concerns the matter of what is distinctive of scientific inquiry. Various criteria have been proposed, and much of the early work in philosophy of biology concerned whether evolutionary biology meets these criteria. Another long-standing debate in philosophy of science concerns whether there is any legitimate role for values in science. The study of the evolution of human behavior and cognition has been scrutinized as an instance of both potentially pernicious and positive influence of values in science. More recently, philosophers of biology both collaborate with and draw upon evolutionary biology to either address broader philosophical concerns, such as the nature of consciousness, or engage directly with debates internal to evolutionary biology. For example, philosophers have engaged in conceptual and methodological debates within evolutionary biology over the appropriate conditions for testing hypotheses about adaptation, the units, targets, or levels of selection, mechanisms and measures of inheritance, modes of phylogenetic inference, and classification and systematics. In this category, the line between science and philosophy blurs; participants in many of these debates include both philosophers and biologists. This entry will focus on philosophers’ contributions. To be sure, evolutionary biologists have contributed far more. Please see the Oxford Bibliographies on these topics for scientific contributions to all of these topics. I also urge readers to review the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on topics including but not limited to “Evolution,” “Natural Selection,” “Teleological Notions in Biology,” “Units and Levels of Selection,” “Adaptationism,” “Evolutionary Genetics,” “Evolutionary Psychology,” and “Developmental Biology.”

scholarly journals Disciplinary Fields in the Life Sciences: Evolving Divides and Anchor Concepts

Philosophies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Minelli
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Biological Diversity ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Comparative Morphology ◽  
Philosophy Of Biology ◽  
Individual Species ◽  
Key Concepts

Recent and ongoing debates in biology and in the philosophy of biology reveal widespread dissatisfaction with the current definitions or circumscriptions, which are often vague or controversial, of key concepts such as the gene, individual, species, and homology, and even of whole disciplinary fields within the life sciences. To some extent, the long growing awareness of these conceptual issues and the contrasting views defended in their regard can be construed as a symptom of the need to revisit traditional unchallenged partitions between the specialist disciplines within the life sciences. I argue here that the current relationships between anchor disciplines (e.g., developmental biology, evolutionary biology, biology of reproduction) and nomadic concepts wandering between them is worth being explored from a reciprocal perspective, by selecting suitable anchor concepts around which disciplinary fields can flexibly move. Three examples are offered, focusing on generalized anchor concepts of generation (redefined in a way that suggests new perspectives on development and reproduction), organizational module (with a wide-ranging domain of application in comparative morphology, developmental biology, and evolutionary biology) and species as unit of representation of biological diversity (suggesting a taxonomic pluralism that must be managed with suitable adjustments of current nomenclature rules).

Challenging the Modern Synthesis

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Modern Synthesis ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Original Essays ◽  
New Biology ◽  
Conceptual Foundations ◽  
Orthodox View

Since its origin in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis theory of evolution has grown to represent the orthodox view on the process of organic evolution. It is a powerful and successful theory. Its defining features include the prominence it accords to genes in the explanation of development and inheritance, and the role of natural selection as the cause of adaptation. Since the advent of the 21st century, however, the modern synthesis has been subject to repeated and sustained challenges. In the last two decades, evolutionary biology has witnessed unprecedented growth in the understanding of those processes that underwrite the development of organisms and the inheritance of characters. The empirical advances usher in challenges to the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory. Many current commentators charge that the new biology of the 21st century calls for a revision, extension, or wholesale rejection of the modern synthesis theory of evolution. Defenders of the modern synthesis maintain that the theory can accommodate the exciting new advances in biology, without forfeiting its central precepts. The original essays collected in this volume—by evolutionary biologists, philosophers of science, and historians of biology—survey and assess the various challenges to the modern synthesis arising from the new biology of the 21st century. Taken together, the essays cover a spectrum of views, from those that contend that the modern synthesis can rise to the challenges of the new biology, with little or no revision required, to those that call for the abandonment of the modern synthesis.

The Intellectual Challenge of Morphological Evolution: A Case for Variational Structuralism

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Günter P. Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Morphological Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Developmental Biology ◽  
Phenotypic Evolution ◽  
Developmental Variation ◽  
Core Idea ◽  
Intellectual Challenge

This chapter explores variational structuralism, whose core idea is that organisms and their parts play causal roles in shaping the patterns of phenotypic evolution. Drawing on the work of pioneers such as Ron Amundson, it discusses the conceptual incompatibilities between two styles of thinking in evolutionary biology: functionalism and structuralism. It proceeds by explaining the meaning of developmental types and structuralist concepts arising from macromolecular studies. It also examines facts and ideas about bodies, Rupert Riedl's theory of the “immitatory epigenotype,” and Neil Shubin and Pere Alberch's developmental interpretation of tetrapod limbs. Finally, it looks at the emergence of molecular structuralism and the enigma of developmental variation. The chapter argues that typology naturally emerged from the facts of evolutionary developmental biology and that it would be seriously problematic to try to avoid it.

4. Levels of selection

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-62
Author(s):  
Samir Okasha
Keyword(s):  
Kin Selection ◽  
Group Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Levels Of Selection ◽  
Major Transitions ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Or Groups ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Major Transitions In Evolution

‘Levels of selection’ examines the levels-of-selection question, which asks whether natural selection acts on individuals, genes, or groups. This question is one of the most fundamental in evolutionary biology, and the subject of much controversy. Traditionally, biologists have mostly been concerned with selection and adaptation at the individual level. But, in theory, there are other possibilities, including selection on sub-individual units such as genes and cells, and on supra-individual units such as groups and colonies. Group selection, altruistic behaviour, kin selection, the gene-centric view of evolution, and the major transitions in evolution are all discussed.

Units and levels of selection

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samir Okasha
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Kin Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Levels Of Selection ◽  
Evolutionary Transitions ◽  
Individual Organism ◽  
Selection Processes ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
The Individual

In a standard Darwinian explanation, natural selection takes place at the level of the individual organism, i.e. some organisms enjoy a survival or reproduction advantage over others, which results in evolutionary change. In principle however, natural selection could operate at other hierarchical levels too, above and below that of the organism, for example the level of genes, cells, groups, colonies or even whole species. This possibility gives rise to the ‘levels of selection’ question in evolutionary biology. Group and colony-level selection have been proposed, originally by Darwin, as a means by which altruism can evolve. (In biology, ‘altruism’ refers to behaviour which entails a fitness cost to the individual so behaving, but benefits others.) Though this idea is still alive today, many theorists regard kin selection as a superior explanation for the existence of altruism. Kin selection arises from the fact that relatives share genes, so if an organism behaves altruistically towards its relatives, there is a greater than random chance that the beneficiary of the altruistic action will itself be an altruist. Kin selection is closely bound up with the ‘gene’s eye view’ of evolution, which holds that genes, not organisms, are the true beneficiaries of the evolutionary process. The gene’s eye approach to evolution, though heuristically valuable, does not in itself resolve the levels of selection question, because selection processes that occur at many hierarchical levels can all be seen from a gene’s eye viewpoint. In recent years, the levels of selection discussion has been re-invigorated, and subtly transformed, by the important new work on the ‘major evolutionary transitions’. These transitions occur when a number of free-living biological units, originally capable of surviving and reproducing alone, become integrated into a larger whole, giving rise to a new biological unit at a higher level of organization. Evolutionary transitions are intimately bound up with the levels of selection issue, because during a transition the potential exists for selection to operate simultaneously at two different hierarchical levels.

The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology as Emancipatory Discourse in the Late Soviet Union

Slavic Review ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 356-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yvonne Howell
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Broad Spectrum ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Genetics ◽  
Evolutionary Ethics ◽  
Intellectual Freedom ◽  
The West ◽  
Soviet Culture ◽  
Individual Self

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

Evolution Makes More Sense in the Light of Development

2014 ◽  
Vol 76 (8) ◽  
pp. 493-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostas Kampourakis ◽  
Alessandro Minelli
Keyword(s):  
Developmental Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Evolutionary Developmental Biology ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Common Ancestry ◽  
Development Research ◽  
The Public ◽  
Psychological Essentialism ◽  
Evo Devo

We highlight some important conceptual issues that biologists should take into account when teaching evolutionary biology or communicating it to the public. We first present conclusions from conceptual development research on how particular human intuitions, namely design teleology and psychological essentialism, influence the understanding of evolution. We argue that these two intuitions form important conceptual obstacles to understanding evolution that should be explicitly addressed during instruction and public communication. Given that a major issue in evolution is understanding how very different forms may share common ancestry – antievolutionists have argued that this is inconceivable – we suggest that evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), which provides concepts and evidence that large morphological change is possible, could be used to address the intuitions that organisms have fixed essences (psychological essentialism) and that their structure indicates some kind of intentional design (design teleology).

Evolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Economics

1997 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 221-244 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias L. Khalil
Keyword(s):  
Economic Theory ◽  
Developmental Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Evolutionary Economics ◽  
Learning By Doing ◽  
Evolutionary Change ◽  
The Other ◽  
Evolutionary Economic ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Evolutionary And Developmental Biology

The paper identifies two major conceptual challenges facing evolutionary economics and shows how they parallel similar challenges facing evolutionary and developmental biology. One issue is the differentiation between learning-by-doing, on one hand, and habit formation, on the other. Another issue is the distinction between the cause or origin of evolutionary mutation/innovation, on one side, and the relevant unit which is the subject of evolutionary change, on the other. The failure to identify these two sets of distinction may hinder the articulation of an apropos evolutionary economic theory.

The Medical Model-Why Psychiatry is a Branch of Medicine

1980 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 269-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter R. Joyce
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Biological Aspect ◽  
The Core ◽  
Satisfactory Model

With a perspective from evolutionary biology and a view of the philosophy of science as described by Popper, various models of psychiatry are discussed. It is concluded that any satisfactory model must be a synthesis of the biological, psychological and social. It is argued that the concept of diagnosis is the core of the medical model, and that psychiatry is a branch of medicine, and not a social science, because the biological aspect is very important.

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