Darwin's Argument by Analogy
From Artificial to Natural Selection

Sets out an original perspective on Darwin's argument for the theory of natural selection.

Roger M. White (Author), M. J. S. Hodge (Author), Gregory Radick (Author)

9781108477284, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 November 2021

260 pages
23.6 x 15.8 x 1.9 cm, 0.53 kg

'… best explains Darwin's overall argument strategy in the Origin, but they also contend that it provides insight into 'the broader historiographical, philosophical, and socio-economic themes and issues' associated with Darwin and his research.' Andrea Sullivan-Clarke, Metascience

In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin put forward his theory of natural selection. Conventionally, Darwin's argument for this theory has been understood as based on an analogy with artificial selection. But there has been no consensus on how, exactly, this analogical argument is supposed to work – and some suspicion too that analogical arguments on the whole are embarrassingly weak. Drawing on new insights into the history of analogical argumentation from the ancient Greeks onward, as well as on in-depth studies of Darwin's public and private writings, this book offers an original perspective on Darwin's argument, restoring to view the intellectual traditions which Darwin took for granted in arguing as he did. From this perspective come new appreciations not only of Darwin's argument but of the metaphors based on it, the range of wider traditions the argument touched upon, and its legacies for science after the Origin.

Introduction
1. Analogy in classical Greece
2. Analogy in the background to the Origin
3. Darwin's analogical theorising before the Origin
4. The 'one long argument' of the Origin
5. An analysis of Darwin's argument by analogy
6. Darwin's use of metaphor in the Origin
7. Rebuttals of the revisionists
8. Wider issues concerning Darwinian science.

Subject Areas: Evolution [PSAJ], History of science [PDX], Philosophy of science [PDA], Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK], Western philosophy, from c 1900 - [HPCF], Philosophy [HP]