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The Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-875213-4. Sober, Elliott (1993). Philosophy of Biology. Dimensions of Philosophy Series. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-8133-0785-5. LCCN 92037484. OCLC 26974492. Williams, George C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current ...
Adaptation is a major topic in the philosophy of biology, as it concerns function and purpose . Some biologists try to avoid terms which imply purpose in adaptation, not least because they suggest a deity's intentions, but others note that adaptation is necessarily purposeful.
The presence of real or apparent teleology in explanations of natural selection is a controversial aspect of the philosophy of biology, not least for its echoes of natural theology. [ 1 ] [ 7 ] The English natural theologian John Ray , and later William Derham , used teleological arguments to illustrate the glory of God from nature.
The paper criticizes the adaptationist school of thought that was prevalent in evolutionary biology at the time using two metaphors: that of the spandrels in St Mark's Basilica, a cathedral in Venice, Italy, and that of the fictional character "Pangloss" in Voltaire's novella Candide.
A prominent question in the philosophy of biology is whether biology can be reduced to lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. Materialism is the view that every biological system including organisms consists of nothing except the interactions of molecules; it is opposed to vitalism.
Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (published by Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1988) is a book by Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr. [ 1 ]
Evolutionary biology is the subfield of biology that studies the evolutionary processes (natural selection, common descent, speciation) that produced the diversity of life on Earth. It is also defined as the study of the history of life forms on Earth.
Evolutionary epistemology refers to three distinct topics: (1) the biological evolution of cognitive mechanisms in animals and humans, (2) a theory that knowledge itself evolves by natural selection, and (3) the study of the historical discovery of new abstract entities such as abstract number or abstract value that necessarily precede the individual acquisition and usage of such abstractions.