The Nature of Selection is a straightforward, self-contained introduction to philosophical and biological problems in evolutionary theory. It presents a powerful analysis of the evolutionary concepts of natural selection, fitness, and adaptation and clarifies controversial issues concerning altruism, group selection, and the idea that organisms are survival machines built for the good of the genes that inhabit them. "Sober's is the answering philosophical voice, the voice of a first-rate philosopher and a knowledgeable student of contemporary evolutionary theory. His book merits (...) broad attention among both communities. It should also inspire others to continue the conversation."-Philip Kitcher, Nature "Elliott Sober has made extraordinarily important contributions to our understanding of biological problems in evolutionary biology and causality. The Nature of Selection is a major contribution to understanding epistemological problems in evolutionary theory. I predict that it will have a long lasting place in the literature."-Richard C. Lewontin. (shrink)

In what follows I will discuss an example of the Duhem-Quine problem in which Pr(H A), Pr(A H), and Pr(OI +H& ?A) (where H is the hypothesis, A the auxiliary assumptions, and O the observational prediction) can be construed objectively; however, only some of those quantities are relevant to the analysis that I provide. The example involves medical diagnosis. The goal is to test the hypothesis that someone has tuberculosis; the auxiliary assumptions describe the er- ror characteristics of the test (...) procedure. Although it can make sense to talk about the objective probability that someone (randomly drawn from a given population) has tuberculosis and it also can make sense to talk about the objective probability that a test procedure has a certain set of error characteristics, neither of these quantities will enter into the analysis. The analysis proceeds entirely via likelihoods, what one needs to consider is just the probability of the observations conditional on four conjunctions of the form (?H & +A).' It is a special feature of the example that all four of these conjunctions are simple statistical hypotheses in the technical sense that each unambigu-ously confers a probability on the observations.'o After describing how the likelihood concept applies to the example concerning medical diagnosis, I will show how similar patterns can arise in the context of a second inferential framework-that of H. Akaike's criterion of model selection;" this time the example will involve phylogenetic inference. (shrink)