Phylo-linguistics: Enacting Darwin’s Linguistic Image (original) (raw)
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This volume addresses the question of time from the perspective of the time of nature. Its aim is to provide some insights about the nature of time on the basis of the scientific uses of the concept of time in such natural sciences as physics, geology, paleontology, and biology. Presenting a dialogue between philosophy and science, it features a collection of papers that examine the central question of whether or not the notions of time in the various natural sciences are identical and reducible to the same physical time. The book first explores the experience of time and its relation to time in nature with a set of chapters that bring together what human experience, metaphysical questioning and physics enable philosophers to say about time. Next, it studies time in physics, including some puzzling paradoxes about time raised by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The book then goes on to examine the distinctive problems and conceptions of time in the life sciences. It explores the concept of deep time in paleontology and geology, time in the epistemology of evolutionary biology, and time in functional biology or biology of proximate mechanisms. Each scientific discipline has a specific approach to time and distinctive methodologies for implementing time in their models. This book seeks to define a common language to the way the different scientific disciplines view time. In the process, it offers a new approach to the issue of time in the natural sciences that will appeal to a wide range of readers: philosophers and historians of science, metaphysicians and natural scientists, as well as scholars, students and the interested general reader.
Meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), Montpellier, France, July 7-11, 2013.
Contra la concepción estadística de la Teoría de la Selección Natural
The statistical conception of natural selection theory relies on a weft of mistakes that a have a common key: an inadequate understanding of the notion os selective pressure, and the failure to perceive that Populations Genetics develops only a perticular aspect of evolutionary theory: the non causal side of the theory.
This chapter surveys the philosophical problems raised by two Darwinian claims: the existence of a "tree of life" and the explanatory power of natural selection. The first part explores philosophical issues concerning the process of evolution by natural selection. After laying out the nature of selectionist explanations, their conditions, and some of their correlated properties such as fitness, we present the epistemic issues raised by such explanations. These include the role of optimality considerations and dynamical modeling, as well as the respective contributions of analytical explanation and historical narratives to evolutionary understanding. Then the metaphysical aspects of natural selection are examined: whether it is a law or supports natural laws; whether it is a cause, and if so, the cause of what. The consequences of the answers to these questions for scientific practice, and especially for current controversies about a possible extension or revision of the Modern Synthesis, are highlighted. The chapter then presents two classical controversies regarding the target and the limits of selective explanations -units of selection, -in both cases pointing out the adaptationism promises of explanatory pluralism. The third section considers issues raised by evolutionary patterns: first, the interpretation of the nodes in the , where the notion of species is controversial; then, the question of the relationship between tree of life macro-and , and, relatedly, the connection between putative processes and plausible patterns. microevolution Consequences for the current controversy about the fate of the Modern Synthesis are also explained. We further explicate issues raised by general features of large-scale phylogenetic patterns, such as increases in complexity, and the question of evolutionary contingency, and discuss the chances of an empirical solution to these longstanding puzzles. The last section considers some consequences of evolutionary theory for philosophical questions about human nature, given the rise of hypotheses on the universality of selectionist explanations; it is mostly concerned with and epistemology psychology.
"Evolution Society, and Ethics: Social Darwinism versus Evolutionary Ethics
Evolutionary ethics (EE) is a branch of philosophy that arouses both fascination and deep suspicion. It claims that Darwinian mechanisms and evolutionary data on animal sociality are relevant to ethical reflection. This field of study is often misunderstood and rarely fails to conjure up images of Social Darwinism as a vector for nasty ideologies and policies. However, it is worth resisting the temptation to reduce EE to Social Darwinism and developing an objective analysis of whether it is appropriate to adopt an evolutionary approach in ethics. The purpose of this article is to ‘dedemonise’ EE while exploring its limits. I shall begin by presenting two ways of integrating a Darwinian way of thinking into the context of social and political sciences1: Social Darwinism and what one could label ‘Prosocial Darwinism’. Next I will point out some of the fundamental errors on which Social Darwinism is grounded; this will help in understanding why contemporary evolutionary ethicists cannot possibly hold the views defended by this theory (unless they are inclined to intellectual dishonesty). On the contrary, EE seems more akin to a Pro-social Darwinian approach, except for the fact that it restricts its reflections to theoretical ethics. The second part of the paper (sections 3 to 7) provides a clear and detailed picture of EE as well as an analysis of its relevance at the different levels of ethics (descriptive, meta-, normative and practical). Special focus will be given to questions relating to the genesis of morals and the delicate shift from facts to norms.
Heams T Huneman P Lecointre G Silberstein M Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014
One of Darwin’s major contributions to our understanding of evolution, namely natural selection, seems a very simple idea. However natural selection is a very subtle concept and biologists and philosophers have been struggling for decades to make sense of it and justify its explanatory power. In this chapter, first I present the most general formulations of natural selection in terms of necessary conditions, and I argue that none of them capture all the aspects of the concept. Second, I question the explanatory status of selection, asking what exactly it is supposed to explain, and considering its relationship with stochastic factors (i.e. genetic drift). Second, I investigate its metaphysical status, asking whether it can be seen as a law, and to what extent it would deprive evolution of any contingency. The last section presents controversies about the units and levels of selection, and, after exposing the philosophical assumptions proper to various positions, sketches a pluralist conception.
Formalizing Darwinism, Naturalizing Mathematics
Paradigmi. Rivista di critica filosofica, 2015
In the last decades two different and apparently unrelated lines of research have increasingly connected mathematics and evolutionism. Indeed, on the one hand different attempts to formalize darwinism have been made, while, on the other hand, different attempts to naturalize logic and mathematics have been put forward. Those researches may appear either to be completely distinct or at least in some way convergent. They may in fact both be seen as supporting a naturalistic stance. Evolutionism is indeed crucial for a naturalistic perspective, and formalizing it seems to be a way to strengthen its scientificity. On the contrary, it will be underlined how those lines of research may be seen as conflicting, since the conception of knowledge on which they rest may be undermined by the consequences of accepting an evolutionary perspective.
Introduction: Time Between Metaphysics and Natural Sciences: From Physics to Biology
Although each scientific discipline has a specific approach to time and distinctive methodologies for implementing time in their models, pervasive issues about time still arise in all sciences, like the reality of time, the measurement of time, the definition of irreversibility and reversibility (time's arrow), the status of the past, the notion of timescale, etc. In this introductive chapter, we claim that a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to time as it is used and represented in the natural sciences would be the most appropriate way to deal with these issues in order to provide a philosophical understanding of the time of nature. In the natural sciences, time is a crucial dimension of physics. However, we stress that "time in physics" is something of an abstraction, since "the physics" itself is nowadays a set of different disciplines working with heterogeneous models, assumptions, and experimental settings. Because of this disparity, several perspectives on time and time paradoxes emerge from various fields in physics. In addition to the controversies about the time in physics, we argue that geology, paleontology and biology should be included in the philosophical assessment of the nature of time: within these sciences, time indeed displays different properties, is investigated using very different methods and tools, and raise specific problems, many of them due to the fact that evolutionary theory is the current framework for much of biological investigation. Finally, this interdisciplinary approach leads to the question of the univocal or pluralist nature of the concept of time, which is raised in the conclusion of the chapter.
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The Cambridge History of 19th century philosophy. A. Wood, S. Hahn (eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 201-240
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Handbook of Evolutionary Thinking in the Sciences, edited by Heams, T., Huneman, P., Lecointre G., and Silberstein, M. , 2014