How not to argue for the indeterminism of evolution: A look at two recent attempts to settle the issue

In Andreas Hüttemann (ed.), Determinism in Physics and Biology. Mentis (2002)
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Abstract

I examine recent debates in the philosophy of biology over the determinism or indeterminism of the evolutionary process, focusing on two papers in particular: Glymour 2001 and Stamos 2001. I argue that neither of these papers succeeds in making the case for the indeterminism of the evolutionary process, and suggest that what is needed is a detailed analysis of the causal processes at every level from the quantum mechanical to the evolutionary.

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2009-01-28

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Roberta L. Millstein
University of California, Davis

Citations of this work

Thinking about evolutionary mechanisms: Natural selection.Robert Skipper & Roberta Millstein - 2004 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 36 (2):327-347.
Probability in Biology: The Case of Fitness.Roberta L. Millstein - 2016 - In Alan Hájek & Christopher Hitchcock (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 601-622.

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References found in this work

Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science.Alexander Rosenberg - 1994 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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.
Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History.Stephen Jay Gould - 1991 - Journal of the History of Biology 24 (1):163-165.

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