The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory

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

Fitness, natural selection, common ancestry, mutation, chance, taxonomy, and adaptation are central concepts in Darwin's theory of evolution, and in the 20th and 21st century theories that grew out of it. This book uses ideas about probability to discuss philosophical questions that these concepts raise.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.