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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 it suggests a deity's intentions, but others note that adaptation is necessarily purposeful.
Teleology, from Greek τέλος, telos "end, purpose" [3] and -λογία, logia, "a branch of learning", was coined by the philosopher Christian von Wolff in 1728. [4] The concept derives from the ancient Greek philosophy of Aristotle, where the final cause (the purpose) of a thing is its function. [5] However, Aristotle's biology does not ...
"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme", also known as the "Spandrels paper", [1] is a paper by evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, originally published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences in 1979. [2]
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. A trait is an adaptation if it fulfils the following criteria: The trait is a variation of an ...
The Extended Phenotype. The Selfish Gene is a 1976 book on evolution by ethologist Richard Dawkins, in which the author builds upon the principal theory of George C. Williams 's Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966). Dawkins uses the term "selfish gene" as a way of expressing the gene-centred view of evolution (as opposed to the views focused ...
Lamarckism. Lamarck argued, as part of his theory of heredity, that a blacksmith 's sons inherit the strong muscles he acquires from his work. [1] Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, [2] is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through ...
Biological or process structuralism is a school of biological thought that objects to an exclusively Darwinian or adaptationist explanation of natural selection such as is described in the 20th century's modern synthesis. It proposes instead that evolution is guided differently, by physical forces which shape the development of an animal's body ...
The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology (e.g., Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant), philosophy of biology only ...