Forber, Patrick (Author)
Sober, Elliott R.
Stanford University
Edition Details: Advisor: Sober, Elliott
Physical Details: 220 pp.
Language: English
I offer an account of confirmation for evolutionary biology that aims to capture the evidential relations articulated in scientific practice. Relying on canonical examples from evolutionary science, this project identifies the in-principle differences between alternative evolutionary hypotheses, such as natural selection, random drift and constraint, and investigates how biologists, in practice, construct tests to detect the traces of evolutionary change. The exemplary studies contrast only a few precise rivals and find clear discriminating evidence. Formal confirmation theory lacks the resources to explicate this because it does not account for how biologists constrain the space of relevant possibilities in order to evaluate data, something a normative theory of evidence should do. The negative argument raises an important question that any positive account must answer: _what counts as a genuine rival?_ The status of a genuine rival rests both on systematic theoretical exploration and on concrete application of evolutionary models to actual biological systems. The neutral theory of molecular evolution, for example, proposed and defended a new evolutionary rival by providing novel theoretical models of drift capable of explaining evolutionary phenomena and applying the models to molecular data. In this way the rich tradition of mathematical modeling in biology helps constrain possibility space by exploring the capabilities of evolutionary processes. Biologists then apply these abstract models to concrete biological populations by deploying various methodological strategies. Such a strategy, a specific package of idealizations, assumptions and methods, restricts focus to only some factors, such as genetic structure or ecological interactions with the environment, to understand evolution in real populations. Applying models in this way helps biologists further constrain which evolutionary rivals should figure in the precise contrastive tests applied to a specific biological system. Evaluating the practical evidential problems that face evolutionary inquiry, and the methodological solutions proposed, provides a deeper understanding of confirmation in actual scientific practice.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 67/05 (2006): 1757. UMI pub. no. 3219270.
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