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[Review of the book Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives, by P.K. Stanford]
Download2007
Introduction: What makes Kyle Stanford’s book on scientific realism so valuable to philosophers of science is that it both presents new philosophical ideas and bases its argument on a detailed study of the history of science. While scientific realism—the idea that our most well‐confirmed theories...
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[Review of the book In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries across the Life Sciences, by C.Fraver, & Larden]
Download2014
Introduction: A characteristic feature of contemporary practice in the life sciences is the study of mechanisms; consequently, mechanisms have become one of the major issues currently discussed by philosophers of biology. Lindley Darden and Carl Craver have been at the forefront of creating this...
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Accounting for vertebrate limbs: from Owen’s homology to novelty in evo-devo [Review of the book Richard Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs: A Discourse, by ed. R. Amundson]
Download2009
Introduction: This article reviews the recent reissuing of Richard Owen’s On the Nature of Limbs and its three novel, introductory essays. These essays make Owen’s 1849 text very accessible by discussing the historical context of his work and explaining how Owen’s ideas relate to his larger...
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Beyond reduction and pluralism: toward an epistemology of explanatory integration in biology
Download2010
The paper works towards an account of explanatory integration in biology, using as a case study explanations of the evolutionary origin of novelties—a problem requiring the integration of several biological fields and approaches. In contrast to the idea that fields studying lower level phenomena...
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2012
Love, Alan C. , Brigandt, Ingo
According to many biologists, explaining the evolution of morphological novelty and behavioral innovation are central endeavors in contemporary evolutionary biology. These endeavors are inherently multidisciplinary but also have involved a high degree of controversy. One key source of controversy...
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2006
The evolutionary embryologist Gavin Rylands de Beer can be viewed as one of the forerunners of modern evolutionary developmental biology in that he posed crucial questions and proposed relevant answers about the causal relationship between ontogeny and phylogeny. In his developmental approach to...
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2003
Marc Ereshefsky argues that pluralism about species suggests that the species concept is not theoretically useful. It is to be abandoned in favor of several concrete species concepts that denote real categories. While accepting species pluralism, the present paper rejects eliminativism about the...
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2016
Contributing to the recent debate on whether or not explanations ought to be differentiated from arguments, this article argues that the distinction matters to science education. I articulate the distinction in terms of explanations and arguments having to meet different standards of adequacy....