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On the Possible, the Conceivable, and the Actual in Evolutionary Theory

Gustavo Caponi: Réquiem por el Centauro: aproximación epistemológica a la biología evolucionaria del desarrollo. Centro de Estudios Filosóficos y Sociales Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Mexico City, 2012, 197 pp., US $120.00, ISBN 978-607-466-050-4

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. The English title and further quotations from the book are my translations from the original Spanish.

  2. I will not discuss Caponi’s reinterpretation of the proximate–ultimate distinction. His redefinition of ultimate causation is very akin to what Calcott (2009) has named “lineage explanations,” viz., those referring to how changes in underlying developmental mechanisms explain the evolution of phenotypic traits. Contrary to Caponi, who thinks that ultimate causation can be reformulated in order to accommodate these kinds of explanations, in Calcott’s view, lineage explanations have a hybrid proximate–ultimate nature that doesn’t fit Mayr’s categories. I feel more sympathetic to the latter view, since if we accept such a reformulation of ultimate causation, not much is left to Mayr’s distinction than the classical distinction between historical and mechanical causation.

  3. This interpretation of pre-Darwinian biology must be taken with certain cautions. Transcendental morphologists were not committed to fixism. Rather, they were pretty neutral regarding the issue of evolution (Amundson 1998).

  4. Since the notion of function used in EvoDevo is mainly related to the problem of organizational integration, I agree with Caponi that the differences between developmental and evolutionary biology cannot be interpreted as the result of addressing the different explananda of form and function (Nuño de la Rosa 2013).

  5. If we were to understand the possible as the conceivable, the situation would be the opposite: butterflies would be physiologically viable no matter what their wing spots are like.

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  1. KLI, Klosterneuburg, Austria

    Laura Nuño de la Rosa

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  1. Laura Nuño de la Rosa
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Correspondence to Laura Nuño de la Rosa.

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Nuño de la Rosa, L. On the Possible, the Conceivable, and the Actual in Evolutionary Theory. Biol Theory 9, 221–228 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-014-0173-z

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