The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory
Concepts, Inferences, and Probabilities

A philosophical analysis of concepts and arguments used by Darwin and in contemporary evolutionary biology, sometimes using probability theory as a tool.

Elliott Sober (Author)

9781009376051, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 February 2024

308 pages
25 x 17.6 x 2.3 cm, 0.7 kg

'The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory is a welcome new textbook that promises to be an exceptional resource for those wanting to learn about philosophical issues focused on evolution. The text will be equally valuable to those who teach philosophy of biology classes with an emphasis on aspects of evolution. The formal aspects will certainly challenge some readers, but the benefits of this efficient (at just 257 pages) guide to thinking about evolution can be gained by almost any reader who has an interest in investigating a range of philosophical issues that evolutionary theory presents.' Christopher H. Pearson, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

Natural selection, mutation, and adaptation are well-known and central topics in Darwin's theory of evolution and in the 20th - and 21st -century theories which grew out of it, but many other important topics are used in evolutionary biology that raise interesting philosophical questions. In this book, Elliott Sober  analyses a much larger range of topics, including fitness, altruism, common ancestry, chance, taxonomy, phylogenetic inference, operationalism, reductionism, conventionalism, null hypotheses and default reasoning, instrumentalism versus realism, hypothetico-deductivism, essentialism, falsifiability, the principle of parsimony, the principle of the common cause, causality, determinism versus indeterminism, sensitivity to initial conditions, and the knowability of the past. Sober's clear philosophical analyses of these key concepts, arguments, and methods of inference will be valuable for all readers who want to understand evolutionary biology in both its Darwinian and its contemporary forms.

1. A Darwinian introduction
2. Fitness and natural selection
3. Units of selection
4. Common ancestry
5. Drift
6. Mutation
7. Taxa and genealogy
8. Adaptationism
9. Big-picture questions.

Subject Areas: Philosophy of science [PDA]