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Elliott Sober: Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin’s Theory

Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2011, 230 pp, ISBN 978-1-61614-230-8

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Notes

  1. This is letter 4153 in the Darwin Correspondence Project, dated May 11, 1863.

  2. An overview of this literature is given by Waters (2003).

  3. Barlow (1958), pp. 118–119.

  4. Of course, many of Darwin’s readers embraced common descent but rejected natural selection. Did Darwin underestimate the independent strength of his arguments for common descent? Perhaps. But it would be wrong to think that those who rejected natural selection did not have mechanistic convictions of their own. For instance, the inheritance of acquired characters and orthogenetic evolution were live alternatives (Bowler 1988).

  5. The electronic version was downloaded from Amazon.com in December 2011.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. History and Philosophy of Science, Institute of Philosophy, University of Bern, Länggassstr. 49a, 3012, Bern, Switzerland

    Raphael Scholl

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  1. Raphael Scholl
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Correspondence to Raphael Scholl.

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Scholl, R. Elliott Sober: Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin’s Theory. Acta Biotheor 60, 323–328 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-012-9151-7

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