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2002
Introduction: Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould are both dedicated Darwinians. Despite this, for the last few decades these two scientists have argued fiercely about how evolutionary history and mechanisms are to be viewed. The debate has been fought out before a general, rather than...
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1994
Individualists claim that wide explanations in psychology are problematic. I argue that wide psychological explanations sometimes have greater explanatory power than individualistic explanations. The aspects of explanatory power I focus on are causal depth and theoretical appropriateness....
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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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2002
Homology is a natural kind term and a precise account of what homologyis has to come out of theories about the role of homologues in evolution anddevelopment. Definitions of homology are discussed with respect to the questionas to whether they are able to give a non-circular account of...
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2003
This paper distinguishes and critiques several forms of pluralism about the levels of selection, and introduces a novel way of thinking about the biological properties and processes typically conceptualized in terms of distinct levels. In particular, “levels” should be thought of as being...
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Roger Saylor and Michel Ferrari (eds): Epistemology and Science Education: Understanding the Evolution vsntelligent Design Controversy
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Introduction: For decades the creationist movement has threatened the teaching of evolution in the United States, even in public schools. Similar worrisome trends have started in other Western countries. Beyond the major importance of reacting to attempts to undermine the proper teaching of...
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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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2004
The evolution of the myxoma virus in Australia has been presented for many years as a test case for the hypothesis that group selection can function effectively ‘in the wild.’ This paper critically examines the myxoma case, and argues that its failure as a test case for this hypothesis has...
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2012
Introduction: The philosophy of science that grew out of logical positivism tended to construe scientific knowledge in terms of a set of interconnected beliefs about the world, such as theories and observation statements. Confirmation was understood as a logical relation between observation...
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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....