Popper, falsifiability, and evolutionary biology
Biology and Philosophy 11 (2):161-191 (1996)
Abstract
First, a brief history is provided of Popper's views on the status of evolutionary biology as a science. The views of some prominent biologists are then canvassed on the matter of falsifiability and its relation to evolutionary biology. Following that, I argue that Popper's programme of falsifiability does indeed exclude evolutionary biology from within the circumference of genuine science, that Popper's programme is fundamentally incoherent, and that the correction of this incoherence results in a greatly expanded and much more realistic concept of what is empirical, resulting in the inclusion of evolutionary biology. Finally, this expanded concept of empirical is applied to two particular problems in evolutionary biology — viz., the species problem and the debate over the theory of punctuated equilibria — and it is argued that both of them are still mainly metaphysical.DOI
10.1007/bf00128918
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Citations of this work
Popper’s Shifting Appraisal of Evolutionary Theory.Elliott Sober & Mehmet Elgin - 2017 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (1):31-55.
A soul of truth in things erroneous: Popper’s “amateurish” evolutionary philosophy in light of contemporary biology.Davide Vecchi & Lorenzo Baravalle - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 36 (4):525-545.
The phylogeography debate and the epistemology of model-based evolutionary biology.Alfonso Arroyo-Santos, Mark E. Olson & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (6):833-850.
Practice oriented controversies and borrowed epistemic support in current evolutionary biology. The case of phylogeography.Alfonso Arroyo-Santos, Mark E. Olson & Francisco Vergara-Silva - 2015 - Perspectives on Science 23 (3):310-334.
References found in this work
Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach.Karl Raimund Popper - 1972 - Oxford, England: Oxford, Clarendon Press.
The Logic of Scientific Discovery.K. Popper - 1959 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 10 (37):55-57.