Evolution and Philosophy of Science
These pages form an overview of some prominent topics that I have read into, and have come to hold as fundamental to understand the nature of evolution, and quintessential to guide research into historical complexity. Articles published on Natural History and Collections interface tightly with much of the material in this section, especially as they are founded on the Individuality Thesis.
Sir Ronald Fisher on the the History of Science:
“More attention to the history of science is needed, as much as scientists as by historians, and especially by biologists, and this means a deliberate attempt to understand the thoughts of the great masters of the past, to see in what circumstances or intellectual mileau their ideas were formed, where they took the wrong turning or stopped short on the right track”
Fisher, R. A. (1959) Natural selection from the genetical standpoint. Australian Journal of Science 22: 444-449. PDF
Sir Peter Medawar on the Scientific Method:
"Ask a scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed: solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion; shifty-eyed, because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare."
Medawar, P. 1969. Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought. London. (p. 11)
This synopsis includes links to www resources that provide useful information about Metaphysics and Epistemology, and notably to sources about the palaetiological sciences that include evolutionary biology. These include articles and books that I have come to appreciate as indispensable to understand the critical subtleties evolutionary theory. So much of the on going debate in the life sciences and philosophy journals devolves down to a recurring failure to first of all read into the ideas in what have become classics.
In a similar vein, dismissals and criticism (devolving into ridicule) of the likes of S.J. Gould (and other 'naturalists' as Eldredge terms them) invariably reside in misunderstandings. This situation reinforces the importance of understanding precisely what it is that one is criticizing [and obviously such criticisms target the subject, and not an ad hominein attack if we are talking academia here....]. Many criticisms of key contributions by Gould and Ghiselin exemplify this problem. This a dominant lesson embedded in Warren A. Allmon's Structure of Gould. (An allied misrepresentation of evolutionary theory is the widespread, uncritical subscription to Pop Sociobiology - as it has been termed by Ghiselin.)
This problem of talking past one another - and worse - is represented in the dismissal of Ghiselin's Individuality Thesis by Michael Ruse (1998) and the dismissals of Gould (along with a very great deal of macroevolutionary theory and data) by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Overall, these symptomize a widespread shortfall in too many neontologists (and others). They testify to a disturbing failure to read - and above all understand - the messages of the paleobiologists. If one can be forgiven for mixing an aetiological metaphor, with one of a stance on terra firma, these criticisms reveal the epistemic poverty of a major failure afflicting neonotology; too many perceive the earth as a dynamic landscape of inexorable, causal monotony. If there are other causes of biotic diversification and complexification, which hold any role in evolution, well then too bad - for any such causal agents (e.g. abiotic) are dismissed as peripheral, if they are at all relevant to the pervasive role of natural selection.
Here's a succinct route to understanding the Individuality Thesis - consider the apparently rhetorical question 'Is the Pope a Catholic?'
These dismissals of what the paleobiologists have revealed (in both data and theory) exemplifies how we are challenged to understand that the history of life has been structured within a hierarchy of causal events. Gould's masterful essay, in Paleobiology, in 1985, can be singled out as a classic in the development of an encompassing theory of macroevolution, and one founded on these principles of hierarchy theory. I never fail to point out Niles Eldredge's Reinventing Darwin for students as a most readable must-read, if one wishes to understand the nuggets of hierarchy theory and core concepts of macroevolution. The Paleobiological Revolution is a more recent product in this stable, one that no serious biologist can afford not to read with due care.
Another recent, and pithy, synthesis that equally deserves wide readership is the essay by Lieberman, Miller and Eldredge (2007)
It is routine for what is passed of as contemporary scholarship in biogeography (e.g. Ricklefs 2004) to overlook seminal papers by Joel Cracraft in 1985 and 1992 - see here
Michael Ghiselin
I have come to rate Michael Ghiselin's Metaphysics and the Origin of Species as a benchmark thesis; not least because Ghiselin "...brings a cobweb-clearing scythe to the philosophy of biology and a welcome freshness to metaphysics". Metaphysics is the most fundamental science. Its explanations of reality undergird all the sciences, both nomothetic and idiographic. This distinction between the Idiographic and Nomothetic credentials of the sciences was first articulated by Windelband (1894), and see further Cotterill and Foissner (2010) and recent papers (Jenner and Wills 2007; Jenner 2008)
Although Ghilselin's conclusions (see also David Hull's treatments of the philosophy of the historical sciences, especialy evolutionary biology) are not entirely unique. This philosophy clarifies unequivocally how natural laws relate to individuals and idiographic facts, which is a relationship that the received view of the purported "scientific method" has yet to accommodate. This relationship between nomothetic and idiographic science has fundamental beraing on all activities and outcomes of truth-seeking operations in any science. And it also means a very great deal for the contemporary role of Natural History in the sciences. "What science knows about the natural world is governed by an inherent function of idiographic discovery...Idiographic shortcuts to general (nomothetic) insights simply do not exist." (Cotterill and Foissner 2010: 291 PDF).
Ghiselin's earlier classic - The Triumph of the Darwinian Method - remains the singular source if you seek to understand what Charles Darwin was really up to [see a pithy review, a recent review, and GG Simpson's review]. Why did Darwin spend so many years working out his barnacles, and why did he research such a range of subjects, not least the behaviour of earthworms?
Steve Jones' Darwin's Island does indeed provide an entertaining overview of the same subject. Unfortunately, one is lead to conclude that only an affliction of crass arrogance could have produced a book that fails so utterly to exercise even the courtesy of mentioning the existence of just a few intellectual predecessors! Hopefully, only the most naive reader will fail to believe that Jones, alone, tumbled to all these conclusions. The Darwinian Industry is indeed a rich one, and one in which Ghiselin's scholarship has yet to be matched, although some come close. Janet Browne's biographies of Darwin are a case in point; these are Voyaging and Power of Place
Stephen Jay Gould -
"....This paper is a small tribute to the memory of Stephen Jay Gould (10.09.1941–20.05.2002). It may take decades
to fully realize the magnitude of his loss...." (Brosius 2003: 112)
Gould's voluminous body of writings certainly attracted its share of controversy and increasing condemnation. One has to read Gould to pick out the nuggets. His contributions to the growth of paleobiology cannot be denied. His magnus opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory exemplifies how one needs to read his works with care. Nevertheless, I single out Chapter 2 of 'Structure' as a must read. Another intriguing idiosyncrasy of this vast book pertains to the way Gould founded his macroevolutionary theories on the Individuality Thesis; yet he failed to acknowledge Ghiselin's key work to this end (Ghiselin 2002).
A lesser known paper of Gould's also deserves wide readership, published in PNAS in 1992, with Jurgen Brosius. In rubbishing the idea that junk DNA exists, it introduced the concept of the nuon [follow link to Retronuons] to the science that has come to be called genomics This essay remains a critical, under appreciated resource in biology and philosophy. The continuing struggles to adapt the concept of the gene to cope with genomic discoveries constitutes evidence that this publication reached an uncomprehending science community well over a decade too early to gain deserved appreciation. So much the worse for the life sciences, especially the fields of genetics, genomics and molecular biology. See Brosius (2003, 2005, 2009) for more recent updates on how nuons underpin "genome-nomenclature" and above all provide the ontological foundations for a palaetiological reconstruction of genome evolution.
Biographical Profile of William Whewell
Stephen Jay Gould on William Whewell and Consilience PDF1 PDF2
William Whewell