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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.
Adaptationism is an approach to studying the evolution of form and function. It attempts to frame the existence and persistence of traits, assuming that each of them arose independently and improved the reproductive success of the organism's ancestors.
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.
In 1966 George C. Williams approved of the term in the last chapter of his Adaptation and Natural Selection; a critique of some current evolutionary thought. [5] In 1970, Jacques Monod, in Chance and Necessity, an Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, [6] suggested teleonomy as a key feature that defines life:
In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin brought the term into biology in their 1979 paper " The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the ...
Function can be defined in a variety of ways, [6] [7] including as adaptation, [8] as contributing to evolutionary fitness, [9] in animal behaviour, [10] and, as discussed below, also as some kind of causal role or goal in the philosophy of biology. [11]
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.
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.