40 found
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  1. A New Foundation for the Propensity Interpretation of Fitness.Charles H. Pence & Grant Ramsey - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (4):851-881.
    The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that (...)
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  2. How to Do Digital Philosophy of Science.Charles H. Pence & Grant Ramsey - 2018 - Philosophy of Science 85 (5):930-941.
    Philosophy of science is expanding via the introduction of new digital data and tools for their analysis. The data comprise digitized published books and journal articles, as well as heretofore unpublished material such as images, archival text, notebooks, meeting notes, and programs. The growth in available data is matched by the extensive development of automated analysis tools. The variety of data sources and tools can be overwhelming. In this article, we survey the state of digital work in the philosophy of (...)
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  3.  36
    The Causal Structure of Natural Selection.Charles H. Pence - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Recent arguments concerning the nature of causation in evolutionary theory, now often known as the debate between the 'causalist' and 'statisticalist' positions, have involved answers to a variety of independent questions – definitions of key evolutionary concepts like natural selection, fitness, and genetic drift; causation in multi-level systems; or the nature of evolutionary explanations, among others. This Element offers a way to disentangle one set of these questions surrounding the causal structure of natural selection. Doing so allows us to clearly (...)
  4. Digital Literature Analysis for Empirical Philosophy of Science.Oliver M. Lean, Luca Rivelli & Charles H. Pence - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (4):875-898.
    Empirical philosophers of science aim to base their philosophical theories on observations of scientific practice. But since there is far too much science to observe it all, how can we form and test hypotheses about science that are sufficiently rigorous and broad in scope, while avoiding the pitfalls of bias and subjectivity in our methods? Part of the answer, we claim, lies in the computational tools of the digital humanities, which allow us to analyze large volumes of scientific literature. Here (...)
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  5. Challenges for ‘Community’ in Science and Values: Cases from Robotics Research.Charles H. Pence & Daniel J. Hicks - 2023 - Humana.Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies 16 (44):1-32.
    Philosophers of science often make reference — whether tacitly or explicitly — to the notion of a scientific community. Sometimes, such references are useful to make our object of analysis tractable in the philosophy of science. For others, tracking or understanding particular features of the development of science proves to be tied to notions of a scientific community either as a target of theoretical or social intervention. We argue that the structure of contemporary scientific research poses two unappreciated, or at (...)
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  6.  46
    The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic.Charles H. Pence - 2021 - London: Academic Press.
    The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic explores a pivotal conceptual moment in the history of evolutionary theory: the development of its extensive reliance on a wide array of concepts of chance. It tells the history of a methodological and conceptual development that reshaped our approach to natural selection over a century, ranging from Darwin’s earliest notebooks in the 1830s to the early years of the Modern Synthesis in the 1930s. Far from being a “pompous (...)
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  7. Whatever Happened to Reversion?Charles H. Pence - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 (C):97-108.
    The idea of ‘reversion’ or ‘atavism’ has a peculiar history. For many authors in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries – including Darwin, Galton, Pearson, Weismann, and Spencer, among others – reversion was one of the central phenomena which a theory of heredity ought to explain. By only a few decades later, however, Fisher and others could look back upon reversion as a historical curiosity, a non-problem, or even an impediment to clear theorizing. I explore various reasons that reversion might have (...)
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  8. evoText: A new tool for analyzing the biological sciences.Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:83-87.
    We introduce here evoText, a new tool for automated analysis of the literature in the biological sciences. evoText contains a database of hundreds of thousands of journal articles and an array of analysis tools for generating quantitative data on the nature and history of life science, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. This article describes the features of evoText, presents a variety of examples of the kinds of analyses that evoText can run, and offers a brief tutorial describing how to use (...)
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  9. ‘‘Describing our whole experience’’: The statistical philosophies of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson.Charles H. Pence - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (4):475-485.
    There are two motivations commonly ascribed to historical actors for taking up statistics: to reduce complicated data to a mean value (e.g., Quetelet), and to take account of diversity (e.g., Galton). Different motivations will, it is assumed, lead to different methodological decisions in the practice of the statistical sciences. Karl Pearson and W. F. R. Weldon are generally seen as following directly in Galton’s footsteps. I argue for two related theses in light of this standard interpretation, based on a reading (...)
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  10. Sir John F. W. Herschel and Charles Darwin: Nineteenth-Century Science and Its Methodology.Charles H. Pence - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1):108-140.
    There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner that one (...)
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  11. Testing and discovery: Responding to challenges to digital philosophy of science.Charles H. Pence - 2022 - Metaphilosophy 53 (2-3):238-253.
    -/- For all that digital methods—including network visualization, text analysis, and others—have begun to show extensive promise in philosophical contexts, a tension remains between two uses of those tools that have often been taken to be incompatible, or at least to engage in a kind of trade-off: the discovery of new hypotheses and the testing of already-formulated positions. This paper presents this basic distinction, then explores ways to resolve this tension with the help of two interdisciplinary case studies, taken from (...)
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  12. Is Organismic Fitness at the Basis of Evolutionary Theory?Charles H. Pence & Grant Ramsey - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (5):1081-1091.
    Fitness is a central theoretical concept in evolutionary theory. Despite its importance, much debate has occurred over how to conceptualize and formalize fitness. One point of debate concerns the roles of organismic and trait fitness. In a recent addition to this debate, Elliott Sober argues that trait fitness is the central fitness concept, and that organismic fitness is of little value. In this paper, by contrast, we argue that it is organismic fitness that lies at the bases of both the (...)
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  13. Is Genetic Drift a Force?Charles H. Pence - manuscript
    One hotly debated philosophical question in the analysis of evolutionary theory concerns whether or not evolution and the various factors which constitute it may profitably be considered as analogous to “forces” in the traditional, Newtonian sense. Several compelling arguments assert that the force picture is incoherent, due to the peculiar nature of genetic drift. I consider two of those arguments here – that drift lacks a predictable direction, and that drift is constitutive of evolutionary systems – and show that they (...)
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  14.  66
    Measuring and Explaining Disagreement in Bird Taxonomy.Stijn Conix, Vincent Cuypers & Charles H. Pence - 2024 - European Journal of Taxonomy 943 (1):288-307.
    -/- Species lists play an important role in biology and practical domains like conservation, legislation, biosecurity and trade regulation. However, their effective use by non-specialist scientific and societal users is sometimes hindered by disagreements between competing lists. While it is well-known that such disagreements exist, it remains unclear how prevalent they are, what their nature is, and what causes them. In this study, we argue that these questions should be investigated using methods based on taxon concept rather than methods based (...)
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  15.  88
    Chance in Evolution.Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence (eds.) - 2016 - Chicago: University of Chicago.
    Evolutionary biology since Darwin has seen a dramatic entrenchment and elaboration of the role of chance in evolution. It is nearly impossible to discuss contemporary evolutionary theory in any depth at all without making reference to at least some concept of “chance” or “randomness.” Many processes are described as chancy, outcomes are characterized as random, and many evolutionary phenomena are thought to be best described by stochastic or probabilistic models. Chance is taken by various authors to be central to the (...)
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  16. The Early History of Chance in Evolution.Charles H. Pence - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 50:48-58.
    Work throughout the history and philosophy of biology frequently employs ‘chance’, ‘unpredictability’, ‘probability’, and many similar terms. One common way of understanding how these concepts were introduced in evolution focuses on two central issues: the first use of statistical methods in evolution (Galton), and the first use of the concept of “objective chance” in evolution (Wright). I argue that while this approach has merit, it fails to fully capture interesting philosophical reflections on the role of chance expounded by two of (...)
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  17. Mapping Controversy: A Cartography of Taxonomy and Biodiversity for the Philosophy of Biology.Charles H. Pence & Stijn Conix - manuscript
    One potentially extremely fruitful use of the tools of corpus analysis in the philosophy of science is to help us understand disputed terrains within the sciences that we study. For philosophers of biology, for instance, few controversies are as heated as those over the concepts we use in taxonomy to classify the living world, with the definition of ‘species’ perhaps most fundamental among them. As many understandings of biodiversity, in turn, involve counting the number of species present in a given (...)
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  18. Origin’s Chapter IX and X: From Old Objections to Novel Explanations: Darwin on the Fossil Record.Charles H. Pence - 2023 - In Maria Elice Brzezinski Prestes (ed.), Understanding Evolution in Darwin's “Origin”: The Emerging Context of Evolutionary Thinking. Springer. pp. 321-331.
    The ninth and tenth chapters of the Origin mark a profound, if perhaps difficult to detect, shift in the book’s argumentative structure. In the previous few chapters and in the ninth, Darwin has been exploring a variety of objections to natural selection, some more obvious (where are all the fossils of transitional forms?) and some showing careful attention to challenging consequences of evolution (could selection really produce instincts?). Starting in the tenth, however, Darwin turns to showing us what kinds of (...)
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  19.  81
    The economy of nature: the structure of evolution in Linnaeus, Darwin, and the modern synthesis.Charles H. Pence & Daniel G. Swaim - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):435-454.
    We argue that the economy of nature constitutes an invocation of structure in the biological sciences, one largely missed by philosophers of biology despite the turn in recent years toward structural explanations throughout the philosophy of science. We trace a portion of the history of this concept, beginning with the theologically and economically grounded work of Linnaeus, moving through Darwin’s adaptation of the economy of nature and its reconstitution in genetic terms during the first decades of the Modern Synthesis. What (...)
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  20. Nietzsche’s Aesthetic Critique of Darwin.Charles H. Pence - 2011 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 33 (2):165-190.
    Despite his position as one of the first philosophers to write in the “post- Darwinian” world, the critique of Darwin by Friedrich Nietzsche is often ignored for a host of unsatisfactory reasons. I argue that Nietzsche’s critique of Darwin is important to the study of both Nietzsche’s and Darwin’s impact on philosophy. Further, I show that the central claims of Nietzsche’s critique have been broadly misunderstood. I then present a new reading of Nietzsche’s core criticism of Darwin. An important part (...)
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  21. Editorial introduction to “Digital Studies of Digital Science”.Charles H. Pence & Luca Rivelli - 2022 - Synthese 200:328.
    (Editorial introduction to a special issue of Synthese.).
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  22. Of stirps and chromosomes: Generality through detail.Charles H. Pence - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 94 (C):177-190.
    One claim found in the received historiography of the biometrical school (comprised primarily of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and W. F. R. Weldon) is that one of the biometricians' great flaws was their inability to look past their population-focused, statistical, gradualist understanding of evolutionary change – which led, in part, to their ignoring developments in cellular biology around 1900. I will argue, on the contrary, that the work of the biometricians was, from its earliest days, fundamentally concerned with connections between (...)
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  23. Oyun: A New, Free Program for Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments in the Classroom.Charles H. Pence & Lara Buchak - 2012 - Evolution Education and Outreach 5 (3):467-476.
    Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given “generation” directly determine contribution (...)
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  24. Locating uncertainty in stochastic evolutionary models: divergence time estimation.Charles H. Pence - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (2):21.
    Philosophers of biology have worked extensively on how we ought best to interpret the probabilities which arise throughout evolutionary theory. In spite of this substantial work, however, much of the debate has remained persistently intractable. I offer the example of Bayesian models of divergence time estimation as a case study in how we might bring further resources from the biological literature to bear on these debates. These models offer us an example in which a number of different sources of uncertainty (...)
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  25.  33
    Gain-of-function research and model organisms in biology.Nicholas G. Evans & Charles H. Pence - 2024 - Journal of Medical Ethics 50 (3):201-206.
    So-called ‘gain-of-function’ (GOF) research is virological research that results in a virus substantially more virulent or transmissible than its wild antecedent. GOF research has been subject to ethical analysis in the past, but the methods of GOF research have to date been underexamined by philosophers in these analyses. Here, we examine the typical animal used in influenza GOF experiments, the ferret, and show how despite its longstanding use, it does not easily satisfy the desirable criteria for ananimal model. We then (...)
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  26. Military Genomic Testing: Proportionality, Expected Benefits, and the Connection between Genotypes and Phenotypes.Charles H. Pence - 2015 - Journal of Law and the Biosciences 2 (1):85-91.
    Mehlman and Li offer a framework for approaching the bioethical issues raised by the military use of genomics that is compellingly grounded in both the contemporary civilian and military ethics of medical research, arguing that military commanders must be bound by the two principles of paternal- ism and proportionality. I agree fully. But I argue here that this is a much higher bar than we may fully realize. Just as the principle of proportionality relies upon a thorough assessment of harms (...)
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  27.  27
    Darwin, Charles.Charles H. Pence - 2022 - Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Charles Darwin (1809–1882) Charles Darwin is primarily known as the architect of the theory of evolution by natural selection. With the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, he advanced a view of the development of life on earth that profoundly shaped nearly all biological and much philosophical thought which followed. A number….
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  28.  41
    W.F.R. Weldon changes his mind.Charles H. Pence - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-20.
    A recent debate over the causal foundations of evolutionary theory pits those who believe that natural selection causally explains long-term, adaptive population change against those who do not. In this paper, I argue that this debate – far from being an invention of several articles in 2002 – dates from our very first engagements with evolution as a quantified, statistical science. Further, when we analyze that history, we see that a pivotal figure in the early use of statistical methodology in (...)
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  29.  61
    The Conflation of "Chance" in Evolution.Charles H. Pence - manuscript
    Discussions of “chance” and related concepts are found throughout philosophical work on evolutionary theory. By drawing attention to three very commonly-recognized distinctions, I separate four independent concepts falling under the broad heading of “chance”: randomness, epistemic unpredictability, causal indeterminism, and probabilistic causal processes. Far from a merely semantic distinction, however, it is demonstrated that conflation of these obviously distinct notions has an important bearing on debates at the core of evolutionary theory, particularly the debate over the interpretation of fitness, natural (...)
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  30. The proof of the pudding: Yafeng Shan: Doing integrated history and philosophy of science: a case study of the origin of genetics. Cham: Springer, 2020. ix + 197 pp, €84.79 PB, €67.40 e-book. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2022 - Metascience 31 (2):179-181.
  31. Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections. Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology edited by Tobias Uller and Kevin N. Laland. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2020 - The Quarterly Review of Biology 95 (2):150-151.
  32. Elliott Sober, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin’s Theory. Amherst, NY: Prometheus (2011), 230 pp., $21.00. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence, Hope Hollocher, Ryan Nichols, Grant Ramsey, Edwin Siu & Daniel John Sportiello - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (4):705-709.
  33. Buckets from an English Sea: 1832 and the Making of Charles Darwin by Louis B. Rosenblatt. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2018 - The Quarterly Review of Biology 93 (4):356.
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  34. Origins of Darwin’s Evolution: Solving the Species Puzzle Through Time and Place. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2018 - Quarterly Review of Biology 93 (2):128-129.
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  35.  55
    Robert J. Richards and Michael Ruse. Debating Darwin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. xvi+267. $30.00 ; $18.00. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2017 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (2):397-400.
  36.  72
    On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. [REVIEW]Hope Hollocher, Agustin Fuentes, Charles H. Pence, Grant Ramsey, Daniel John Sportiello & Michelle M. Wirth - 2011 - Quarterly Review of Biology 86 (2):137-138.
  37.  13
    David Livingstone Smith's How Biology Shapes Philosophy[REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2020 - Bjps Review of Books.
  38.  63
    Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. A Cultural History of Heredity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. xiii+218. $45.00. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2013 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (1):168-172.
  39.  26
    The many chances of Charles Darwin. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence - 2015 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 53:107-110.
    An essay review of Johnson's Darwin's Dice, examining Darwin's use of chance throughout his corpus.
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  40.  50
    Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection. [REVIEW]Grant Ramsey, Hope Hollocher, Agustin Fuentes, Charles H. Pence & Edwin Siu - 2010 - Quarterly Review of Biology 85 (4):499-500.