Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?

by Sober, Elliott

• ISBN13: 9781616142308
• ISBN10: 1616142308
• Format: Trade Paper
• Copyright: 2010-12-01
• Publisher: Prometheus Books

Summary

Sensitive to the ways in which Darwin's outlook differed from that of many biologists today, the main topics that are the focus of this book-common ancestry, group selection, sex ratio, and naturalism-have rarely been discussed in such penetrating detail.

Author Biography

Elliott Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and winner of the 2008 Prometheus Prize for his lifetime contribution to expanding the frontiers of research in philosophy and science. He is the author of nine other books, including Evidence and Evolution: The Logic behind the Science and Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference, winch won the prestigious Lakatos Prize in the Philosophy of Science.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 9
Acknowledgments	p. 13
Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?	p. 15
What Is Darwin's Theory?	p. 15
Common Ancestry	p. 21
Darwin's Principle	p. 25
Exceptions to Darwin's Principle	p. 28
Causal and Evidential Orderings	p. 32
Using Common Ancestry to Think about Natural Selection	p. 36
Tree Thinking	p. 42
Darwin and Group Selection	p. 45
Back to the 60s	p. 46
Human Morality	p. 57
The Honeybee's Barbed Stinger	p. 62
The Risk of Anachronism	p. 63
More on Darwin on Morality	p. 66
Sterile Workers in the Social Insects	p. 69
Darwin's Disagreement with Wallace about Hybrid Sterility	p. 76
Darwin's General View of Group Selection	p. 82
Sex Ratio Theory-Darwin, Before, and After	p. 87
Arbuthnot on ôthe exact balance that is maintained between the numbers of men and women…that the Species may never fail, nor perishö	p. 88
Bernoulli on 18/35	p. 96
DeMoivre-ôif we blind not ourselves with metaphysical dustö	p. 98
Darwin's Argument from Monogamy, and His Retraction	p. 101
Düsing's Model-Monogamy Drops Out	p. 106
Fisher and Parental Expenditure	p. 109
Hamilton-Group and Individual Selection	p. 113
Sex Ratio as a Test Case	p. 115
Appendix: An Example of Hamiltonian Sex Ratio Evolution in Group with Two Foundresses	p. 119
Darwin and Naturalism	p. 121
Darwin's Discussions of God	p. 121
Refining Methodological Naturalism	p. 128
Why Evolutionary Theory Does Not Rule Out an Intervening God	p. 134
Should Scientific Theories Talk Only about What Exists in Nature?	p. 139
Are All Claims about the Supernatural Untestable?	p. 142
Is Violating Methodological Naturalism a Science-Stopper?	p. 146
If Numbers, Why Not God?	p. 147
Concluding Comments	p. 151
Postscript	p. 153
Second Thoughts about Cladistic Parsimony and the Test of Adaptive Hypotheses	p. 153
More on Units of Selection	p. 162
Evolutionary Theory and the Reality of Macroprobabilities	p. 177
Notes	p. 189
References	p. 211
Index	p. 225
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