How should the concept of evidence be understood? And how does the concept of evidence apply to the controversy about creationism as well as to work in evolutionary biology about natural selection ...and common ancestry? In this rich and wide-ranging book, Elliott Sober investigates general questions about probability and evidence and shows how the answers he develops to those questions apply to the specifics of evolutionary biology. Drawing on a set of fascinating examples, he analyzes whether claims about intelligent design are untestable; whether they are discredited by the fact that many adaptations are imperfect; how evidence bears on whether present species trace back to common ancestors; how hypotheses about natural selection can be tested, and many other issues. His book will interest all readers who want to understand philosophical questions about evidence and evolution, as they arise both in Darwin's work and in contemporary biological research.
The disjunction problem and the distality problem each presents a challenge that any theory of mental content must address. Here we consider their bearing on purely probabilistic causal (ppc) ...theories. In addition to considering these problems separately, we consider a third challenge—that a theory must solve both. We call this “the hard problem.” We consider 8 basic ppc theories along with 240 hybrids of them, and show that some can handle the disjunction problem and some can handle the distality problem, but none can handle the hard problem. This is our main result. We then discuss three possible responses to that result, and argue that though the first two fail, the third has some promise.
Carl Hempel (
1965
) argued that probabilistic hypotheses are limited in what they can explain. He contended that a hypothesis cannot explain why E is true if the hypothesis says that E has a ...probability less than 0.5. Wesley Salmon (
1971
,
1984
,
1990
,
1998
) and Richard Jeffrey (
1969
) argued to the contrary, contending that P can explain why E is true even when P says that E’s probability is very low. This debate concerned noncontrastive
explananda
. Here, a view of contrastive causal explanation is described and defended. It provides a new limit on what probabilistic hypotheses can explain; the limitation is that P cannot explain why E is true rather than A if P assign E a probability that is less than or equal to the probability that P assigns to A. The view entails that a true deterministic theory and a true probabilistic theory that apply to the same
explanandum
partition are such that the deterministic theory explains all the true contrastive propositions constructable from that partition, whereas the probabilistic theory often fails to do so.
Fitness and the Twins Sober, Elliott
Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology,
03/2020, Letnik:
12, Številka:
20220112
Journal Article, Web Resource
Did Darwin write the Origin backwards? Sober, Elliott
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS,
06/2009, Letnik:
106, Številka:
Supplement 1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
After clarifying how Darwin understood natural selection and common ancestry, I consider how the two concepts are related in his theory. I argue that common ancestry has evidential priority. ...Arguments about natural selection often make use of the assumption of common ancestry, whereas arguments for common ancestry do not require the assumption that natural selection has been at work. In fact, Darwin held that the key evidence for common ancestry comes from characters whose evolution is not caused by natural selection. This raises the question of why Darwin puts natural selection first and foremost in the Origin.
To evaluate Hume's thesis that causal claims are always empirical, I consider three kinds of causal statement: 'e
1
caused e
2
', 'e
1
promoted e
2
', and 'e
1
would promote e
2
'. Restricting my ...attention to cases in which 'e
1
occurred' and 'e
2
occurred' are both empirical, I argue that Hume was right about the first two, but wrong about the third. Standard causal models of natural selection that have this third form are a priori mathematical truths. Some are obvious, others less so. Empirical work on natural selection takes the form of defending causal claims of the first two types. I provide biological examples that illustrate differences among these three kinds of causal claim.
The philosophy of biology has recently seen some of the most dramatic activity among the philosophies of the "special" sciences. In the second edition of this textbook, Elliott Sober introduces the ...reader to the most important of these developments. Sober engages both the higher level of theory and the implications for such controversial issues as creationism, teleology, nature versus nurture, and sociobiology. Above all, the reader will gain from this book a firm grasp of the structure of evolutionary theory, the evidence for it, and the scope of its explanatory significance.
Abstract
The task of
Philosophy in Science
(
PinS
) is to use philosophical tools to help solve scientific problems. This article describes how I stumbled into this line of work and then addressed ...several topics in philosophy of biology—units of selection, cladistic parsimony, robustness and trade-offs in model building, adaptationism, and evidence for common ancestry—often in collaboration with scientists. I conclude by offering advice for would-be PinS practitioners.
A putative male advantage in wayfinding ability is the most widely documented sex difference in human cognition and has also been observed in other animals. The common interpretation, the ...sex-specific adaptation hypothesis, posits that this male advantage evolved as an adaptive response to sex differences in home range size. A previous study a decade ago tested this hypothesis by comparing sex differences in home range size and spatial ability among 11 species and found no relationship. However, the study was limited by the small sample size, the lack of species with a larger female home range and the lack of non-Western human data. The present study represents an update that addresses all of these limitations, including data from 10 more species and from human subsistence cultures. Consistent with the previous result, we found little evidence that sex differences in spatial navigation and home range size are related. We conclude that sex differences in spatial ability are more likely due to experiential factors and/or unselected biological side effects, rather than functional outcomes of natural selection.
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
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