The naturalist and geologist Charles Darwin ranks as one of the most influential scientific thinkers of all time. In the nineteenth century his ideas about the history and diversity of life - including the evolutionary origin of humankind - contributed to major changes in the sciences, philosophy, social thought and religious belief. This volume provides the reader with clear, lively and balanced introductions to the most recent scholarship on Darwin and his intellectual legacies. A distinguished team of contributors examines Darwin's (...) main scientific ideas and their development; Darwin's science in the context of its times; the influence of Darwinian thought in recent philosophical, social and religious debate; and the importance of Darwinian thought for the future of naturalist philosophy. New readers will find this a most convenient and accessible guide to Darwin. Advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Darwin. (shrink)

Historians of science have long been agreeing: what many textbooks of evolutionary biology say, about the histories of Darwinism and the New Synthesis, is just too simple to do justice to the complexities revealed to critical scholarship and historiography. There is no current consensus, however, on what grand narratives should replace those textbook histories. The present paper does not offer to contribute directly to any grand, consensual, narrational goals; but it does seek to do so indirectly by showing how, in (...) just one individual case, details of intellectual biography connect with big picture issues. To this end, I examine here how very diverse scientific and metaphysical commitments were integrated in Sewall Wright’s own personal synthesis of biology and philosophy. Taking as the decisive text the short final section of Wright’s long 1931 paper on ‘Evolution in Mendelian populations,’ I examine how his shifting balance theory related to his optimum breeding strategy research, his physiological genetics, his general theory of homogenising and heterogenesing causation and his panpsychist view of mind and matter; and I discuss how understanding these relations can clarify Wright’s place in the longue durée of evolutionary thought. (shrink)

Those standard historiographic themes of "evolution" and "revolution" need replacing. They perpetuate mid-Victorian scientists' history of science. Historians' history of science does well to take in the long run from the Greek and Hebrew heritages on, and to work at avoiding misleading anachronism and teleology. As an alternative to the usual "evo-revo" themes, a historiography of origins and species, of cosmologies (including microcosmogonies and macrocosmogonies) and ontologies, is developed here. The advantages of such a historiography are illustrated by looking briefly (...) at a number of transitions: the transition from Greek and Hebrew doctrines to their integrations by medieval authors; the transition from the Platonist, Aristotelian, Christian Aquinas to the Newtonian Buffon and to the no less Newtonian Lamarck; the departures the early Darwin made away from Lamarck's and from Lyell's views. Issues concerning historical thinking about nature, concerning essentialism and concerning classification are addressed in an attempt to challenge customary stereotypes. Questions about originality and influence are raised, especially concerning Darwin's "tree of life" scheme. The broader historiography of Darwinian science as a social ideology, and as a "worldview," is examined and the scope for revisions emphasised. Throughout, graduate students are encouraged to see this topic area not as worked out, but as full of opportunities for fresh contributions. (shrink)

Those standard historiographic themes of "evolution" and "revolution" need replacing. They perpetuate mid-Victorian scientists' history of science. Historians' history of science does well to take in the long run from the Greek and Hebrew heritages on, and to work at avoiding misleading anachronism and teleology. As an alternative to the usual "evo-revo" themes, a historiography of origins and species, of cosmologies and ontologies, is developed here. The advantages of such a historiography are illustrated by looking briefly at a number of (...) transitions: the transition from Greek and Hebrew doctrines to their integrations by medieval authors; the transition from the Platonist, Aristotelian, Christian Aquinas to the Newtonian Buffon and to the no less Newtonian Lamarck; the departures the early Darwin made away from Lamarck's and from Lyell's views. Issues concerning historical thinking about nature, concerning essentialism and concerning classification are addressed in an attempt to challenge customary stereotypes. Questions about originality and influence are raised, especially concerning Darwin's "tree of life" scheme. The broader historiography of Darwinian science as a social ideology, and as a "worldview," is examined and the scope for revisions emphasised. Throughout, graduate students are encouraged to see this topic area not as worked out, but as full of opportunities for fresh contributions. (shrink)

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.

Recent research has shown that in referendum elections, the presence of interdependence within voter preferences can lead to election outcomes that are undesirable and even paradoxical. However, most of the examples leading to these undesirable outcomes involve contrived voting situations that would be unlikely to occur in actual elections. In this paper, we use computer simulations to investigate the desirability of referendum election outcomes. We show that highly undesirable election outcomes occur not only in contrived examples, but also in randomly (...) generated elections. Our data suggest that the presence of interdependent preferences significantly increases the likelihood of such undesirable outcomes, and that certain alternative voting methods, such as sequential voting and setwise aggregation, hold the potential to produce outcomes that more accurately reflect the will of the electorate. (shrink)

In referendum elections, voters are often required to register simultaneous votes on multiple proposals. The separability problem occurs when a voter’s preferred outcome on one proposal depends on the outcomes of other proposals. This type of interdependence can lead to unsatisfactory or even paradoxical election outcomes, such as a winning outcome that is the last choice of every voter. Here we propose an iterative voting scheme that allows voters to revise their voting strategies based on the outcomes of previous iterations. (...) Using a robust computer simulation, we investigate the potential of this approach to solve the separability problem. (shrink)

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 as on (...) in-depth studies of Darwin's public and private writings, this book offers an original perspective on Darwin's argument, restoring to view the intellectual traditions which Darwin took for granted in arguing as he did. From this perspective come new appreciations not only of Darwin's argument but of the metaphors based on it, the range of wider traditions the argument touched upon, and its legacies for science after the Origin. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Pittsburgh Workshop in History and Philosophy of Biology, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, March 23-24 2001 Session 3: Natural Selection as a Causal Theory.