Historicity and experimental evolution

Biology and Philosophy 26 (3):339-364 (2011)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Biologists in the last 50 years have increasingly emphasized the role of historical contingency in explaining the distribution and dynamics of biological systems. However, recent work in philosophy of biology has shown that historical contingency carries various interpretations and that we are still lacking a general understanding of historicity, i.e., a framework from which to interpret why and to what extent history matters in biological processes. Building from examples and analyses of the long-term experimental evolution (LTEE) project, this paper argues that historicity possess three essential conditions: (1) multiple possible pasts, (2) multiple possible outcomes at a given instant, and (3) a relationship of causal dependence between these two sets. These criteria can be further specified in two general forms of historicity: dependence on initial conditions and path dependence. More attention is devoted to developing a rigorous account of the latter, which captures the type of historicity displayed by stochastic processes. This paper also highlights that it is often more productive to adopt an instant-relative approach and think in terms of degree of historicity instead of trying to maintain a rigid and absolute dichotomy between historical and ahistorical (completely convergent) processes

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Husserl, History, and Consciousness.Eva-Maria Engelen - 2010 - In David Hyder & Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds.), Science and the Life-World. Stanford University Press.
Millikan's Historical Kinds.Mohan Matthen - 2012 - In Dan Ryder, Justine Kingsbury & Kenneth Williford (eds.), Millikan and Her Critics. Hoboken, NJ, USA: Wiley. pp. 135-154.
Heidegger and the appropriation of metaphysics.Todd S. Mei - 2009 - Heythrop Journal 50 (2):257-270.
Love and history.Christopher Grau - 2010 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (3):246-271.
Historicity and the politics of predication.Joseph Margolis - 2007 - Journal of the Philosophy of History 1 (1):79-100.
Universality and Historicity: On the Sources of Religion.Owen Ware - 2006 - Research in Phenomenology 36 (1):238-254.
Living out of the past: Dilthey and Heidegger on life and history.Theodore R. Schatzki - 2003 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (3):301 – 323.
The Unreflected Historicity of Historical Materialism.Michael Eldred - 1987 - Science and Society 51 (4):475 - 477.

Analytics

Added to PP
2011-03-16

Downloads
107 (#150,928)

6 months
7 (#174,778)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Eric Desjardins
University of Western Ontario

Citations of this work

Wild Animal Suffering is Intractable.Nicolas Delon & Duncan Purves - 2018 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 31 (2):239-260.
What are narratives good for?John Beatty - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 58:33-40.
Homology thinking.Marc Ereshefsky - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (3):381-400.
Hot-Blooded Gluttons: Dependency, Coherence, and Method in the Historical Sciences.Adrian Currie - 2017 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 68 (4):929-952.

View all 36 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

Facing the future: agents and choices in our indeterminist world.Nuel D. Belnap - 2001 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Michael Perloff & Ming Xu.
Wonderful Life; The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.Stephen Jay Gould - 1992 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 23 (2):359-360.
Path dependence in historical sociology.James Mahoney - 2000 - Theory and Society 29 (4):507-548.

View all 16 references / Add more references