Pence, Charles H. (Author)
Discussions of the foundations of evolutionary theory - especially natural selection, fitness, and genetic drift - are saturated with terms referring to various kinds of chance, stochasticity, randomness, unpredictability, and so forth. This dissertation examines these uses of chance in philosophical and historical perspective. I begin by arguing that, both in the contemporary and historical arenas, the current state of the literature on chance is deeply troubling. Work in the philosophy of biology (i) often conflates various clearly distinct notions of chance, and (ii) often approaches the analysis of chance from the perspective of a debate (on the causal potency of natural selection and genetic drift) that does not in fact profitability engage evolutionary theory. Historically, as well, the most common way of analyzing the development of the use of chance in evolutionary theory does not engage the actual research of historical actors, a point I make by exploring the work of Karl Pearson and W.F.R.Weldon at the turn of the twentieth century. I thus propose a new guiding question for research into the role of chance in evolutionary theory: what is the relationship between our statistical biological theories and the processes in the world those theories aim to describe? I then offer a novel framework for determining the answer to this question, derived from a deeply biologically-informed understanding of fitness, selection, and drift. This view combines core insights from work in philosophy on the propensity interpretation of fitness with cutting-edge biological treatments of population modeling. Chance enters this model at only a single point - the distribution over the various possible lives that an organism might live - and this single source can explain the influence of chance throughout fitness, natural selection, and genetic drift. This framework, I claim, constitutes a fruitful way to understand both the foundations of evolutionary theory and the role of chance in those foundations.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/09(E), Mar 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1547351149.
Article
Pence, Charles H.;
(2011)
“Describing Our Whole Experience”: The Statistical Philosophies of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson
(/isis/citation/CBB001221537/)
Article
Nicholas W. Gillham;
(2015)
The Battle Between the Biometricians and the Mendelians: How Sir Francis Galton’s Work Caused his Disciples to Reach Conflicting Conclusions About the Hereditary Mechanism
(/isis/citation/CBB738872407/)
Article
Charles H. Pence;
(2015)
The Early History of Chance in Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB068013192/)
Article
Magnello, M. Eileen;
(2009)
Karl Pearson and the Establishment of Mathematical Statistics
(/isis/citation/CBB001033897/)
Article
Magnello, M. Eileen;
(1996)
Karl Pearson's Gresham lectures: W.F.R. Weldon, speciation, and the origins of Pearsonian statistics
(/isis/citation/CBB000067054/)
Book
Achinstein, Peter;
(2005)
Scientific Evidence: Philosophical Theories and Applications
(/isis/citation/CBB000550211/)
Article
Radick, Gregory;
(2011)
Physics in the Galtonian Sciences of Heredity
(/isis/citation/CBB001023997/)
Book
Rushton, Alan R.;
(2009)
Genetics in Medicine in Great Britain 1600 to 1939
(/isis/citation/CBB001020882/)
Article
Farrall, Lyndsay A.;
(1975)
Controversy and conflict in science: A case study--The English biometric school and Mendel's laws
(/isis/citation/CBB000017895/)
Thesis
Wynn, James;
(2005)
Life's Rich Pattern: The Role of Statistics and Probability in NineteenthCentury Argumentation for Theories of Evolution, Variation, and Heredity
(/isis/citation/CBB001561634/)
Article
Teicher, Amir;
(2014)
Mendel's Use of Mathematical Modelling: Ratios, Predictions and the Appeal to Tradition
(/isis/citation/CBB001510272/)
Article
Delisle, Richard G.;
(2008)
Expanding the Framework of the Holism/Reductionism Debate in Neo-Darwinism: The Case of Theodosius Dobzhansky and Bernhard Rensch
(/isis/citation/CBB000931570/)
Article
Ernesto Schwartz-Marín;
Peter Wade;
(2015)
Explaining the visible and the invisible: Public knowledge of genetics, ancestry, physical appearance and race in Colombia
(/isis/citation/CBB461617867/)
Article
Philippe Huneman;
(2019)
Revisiting Darwinian teleology: A case for inclusive fitness as design explanation
(/isis/citation/CBB392966411/)
Article
Tarquin Holmes;
(2017)
The wild type as concept and in experimental practice: A history of its role in classical genetics and evolutionary theory
(/isis/citation/CBB016897194/)
Article
Churchill, Frederick B.;
(2010)
August Weismann Embraces the Protozoa
(/isis/citation/CBB001022396/)
Book
Groeben, Christiane;
Kaasch, Joachim;
Kaasch, Michael;
(2005)
Stätten biologischer Forschung: Beiträge zur 12. Jahrestagung der DGGTB in Neapel 2003
(/isis/citation/CBB000770191/)
Book
Brzezinski Prestes, Maria Elice;
Martins, Lilian Al-Chueyr Pereira;
Stefano, Waldir;
(2006)
Filosofia e História da Biologia 1
(/isis/citation/CBB000820181/)
Article
Ruse, Michael;
(2005)
Was There a Darwinian Revolution?
(/isis/citation/CBB000933662/)
Book
Engels, Eve-Marie;
Glick, Thomas F.;
(2008)
The Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe
(/isis/citation/CBB001022466/)
Be the first to comment!