Evolution and Philosophy: Acknowledgements and Bibliography

Acknowledgements

hanks to Peter Lamb, Tom Scharle, Loren Haarsma and Larry Moran for criticism, comments and suggestions on an earlier FAQ. This version has benefitted greatly from further comments and references from Peter Lamb, Chris Nedin, Richard Harter, Tom Scharle, John Stockwell, Gavin Wheeler, Mark Isaak, Sverker Johansson and James Franklin, not all of whom agree with me, I need hardly add.

Bibliography

This is intended to be a reading list. Introductory and review items are marked with an asterisk. The bibliographies in these will get you into the meat of the modern debate very quickly. Access to the journal Biology and Philosophy will help, too.

Axelrod, R: 1984. The Evolution of Cooperation, Basic Books.

*Berry, RJ: 1988. God and Evolution: Creation, Evolution and the Bible, Hodder and Stoughton.

By far the best discussion I know (from an orthodox Protestant perspective) of the development of creationism, its heretical nature, its antiscientific bent, and it includes a pretty good discussion of evolution, and the history of the science. Berry is a professor of genetics.

Bonner, JT: 1988. The Evolution of Complexity by Means of Natural Selection, Princeton University Press.

Bowler, PJ: 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Antievolutionary Theories in the Decades Around 1900, Johns Hopkins.

Dawkins, R: 1976. The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, 2nd edn 1989.

Dawkins, R: 1995. River Out of Eden, Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

*Dawkins, R: 1996. Climbing Mount Improbable, Viking Press.

An excellent treatment of the 'orthodox' synthetic view of the evolution of adaptation.

Dawkins, R and Krebs, JR: 1979. Arms Races Within and Between Species. Proc. R Soc Lond B 205: 480-512.

Dennett, D: 1995. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Allen Lane Press.

*Depew, DJ and Weber, BH: 1995. Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection, Bradford Books/MIT Press.

A comprehensive history of Darwinism, philosophical and biological, and an introduction to the new systems dynamics and complexity theory views of evolution. The bibliography alone is worth the purchase.

Dray, WH: 1957. Laws and Explanation in History, Oxford University Press.

*Dray, WH, ed: 1966. Philosophical Analyisis and History, Harper and Row.

A collection of the seminal essays on the application of Hempel's nomological-deductive model to history, which, by extension, is also relevant to the historical sciences like evolution and geology.

Duhem, P: 1914. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Princeton University Press (English trans. 1954).

Ereshefsky, M: 1991. The Semantic Approach to Evolutionary Theory. Biology and Philosophy 6: 59-80.

Feyerabend, PK: 1970a. Consolations for the Specialist. In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds I Lakatos and A Musgrave, Cambridge University Press.

Feyerabend, PK: 1970b. Against Method. In Minnesota Studies in Philosophy, Vol 4

Feyerabend, PK: 1975. Against Method, Verso Editions.

Flew, A and MacIntyre, A eds: 1955. New Essays in Philosophical Theology, SCM Press.

Franklin, J: 1997. Stove's Anti-Darwinism. Philosophy 72: 133-136

Gayon, J: 1996. The Individuality of the Species: A Darwinian Theory? - from Buffon to Ghiselin, and back to Darwin. Biology and Philosophy 11: 215-244.

Gould, SJ: 1989. Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History, Norton.

Gould, SJ: 1992. Kropotkin was No Crackpot. Essay 13 in Bully for Brontosaurus, Penguin, p325.

Gould, SJ: 1996. Full House, Harmony, published outside the US as Life's Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, Random House.

Gould, SJ, and Lewontin R: 1979. The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Program. Proc. R Soc Lond B 205:581-598.

Ghiselin MT: 1975. A Radical Solution to the Species Problem. Systematic Zoology 23: 536-544.

Griffiths, PE: 1996. The Historical Turn in the Study of Adaptation. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47:511-532.

Hull, D: 1974. The Philosophy of Biological Science, Prentice-Hall.

Hull, D: 1976. Are Species Really Individuals? Systematic Zoology 25: 174-191.

Hull, D: 1988. Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science, University of Chicago Press.

Hull, D.: 1989. The Metaphysics of Evolution, State University of New York Press.

Kuhn, TS: 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second edition 1970, University of Chicago Press.

Kuhn, TS: 1970. Reflections on my Critics. In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds I Lakatos and A Musgrave, Cambridge University Press.

Kuhn, TS: 1972. Second Thoughts on Paradigms. In The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. F Suppe, University of Illinois Press, second edition 1977.

Kripke, S: 1972. Naming and Necessity. In Semantics and Natural Language, ed D Davidson and G Harman, 253-355, Reidel.

Lakatos, I: 1970. Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes. In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds I Lakatos and A Musgrave, Cambridge University Press.

Laudan, L: 1977. Progress and Its Problems, University of California Press.

Lennox, JG: 1992 Teleology. In Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, eds EF Keller and EA Lloyd, Harvard University Press.

Lurie, E: 1988. Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science, Johns Hopkins University Press.

Masterman, M: 1970. The Nature of Paradigms. In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds I Lakatos and A Musgrave, Cambridge University Press.

Mayr, E: 1970. Populations, Species and Evolution, Harvard University Press.

Mayr, E: 1982. The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.

Mayr, E: 1988. Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.

Miller, K: 1982. Answers to standard Creationist arguments, Creation/Evolution 3:1-13.

Monod, J: 1972. Chance and Necessity, Collins.

Nagel, E: 1961. The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Nitecki, Matthew H., ed.: 1988. Evolutionary Progress, University of Chicago Press.

*Oldroyd, D: 1986. The Arch of Knowledge:An Introductory Study of the History of the Philosophy and Methodology of Science, Methuen.

This is a readable and comprehensive introduction to the issues of epistemology over the last 2500 years.

O'Grady, D and Brooks, D: 1988. Teleology and Biology. In Entropy, Information, and Evolution: New Perspectives on Physical and Biological Evolution, eds, BH Weber, DJ Depew, and JD Smith, MIT Press.

*Panchen, AL: 1992. Classification, Evolution, and the Nature of Biology, Cambridge University Press.

In addition to reviewing the problems of cladistics, taxonomy and classification, important in the question of species and their evolution, this has an excellent short review of the history of recent philosophy of science, relevant to evolution.

Popper, K: 1974. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 6th ed. London: Hutchinson.

Popper, K: 1976. Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography, Fontana Press.

Putnam, H: 1975. Mind, Language and Reality, Cambridge University Press.

Quine, WVO: 1969. Natural Kinds. In Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press.

Rosenberg, A: 1994. Instrumental Biology, or, the Disunity of Science. University of Chicago Press.

Ruse, M: 1979. The Darwinian Revolution: Science Red in Tooth and Claw, University of Chicago Press.

Ruse, M: 1989. The Darwinian Paradigm: Essays on its History, Philosophy and Religious Implications, Routledge.

Ruse, M: 1992. Darwinism. In E F Keller and E A Lloyd eds Keywords in Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University Press.

Ruse, M: 1997. Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University press.

Selkirk, DR and Burrows, FJ eds: 1987. Confronting Creationism: Defending Darwin, New South Wales University Press.

*Sober, E: 1984. The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in Philosophical Focus, Bradford Books/MIT Press.

The standard reference on the philosophical implications of natural selection.

Sober, E: 1988. Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference, Bradford Books/MIT Press.

*Sober, E, ed: 1994. Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn.

An anthology of the most philosophically important papers on evolution, including many otherwise inaccessible ones.

Stamos, J: 1996. Popper, Falsifiability, and Evolutionary Biology. Biology and Philosophy 11: 161-191.

*Sterelny, K: 1995. Understanding Life: Recent Work in the Philosophy of Biology. Brit J Phil Sci 46: 155-183.

The title says it all, really. A first class introduction to the state of play.

Stove, D: 1995. Darwinian Fairytales, Avebury Press.

Suppe, F, ed.: 1977. The Structure of Scientific Theories, University of Illinois Press, second edition.

Suppe, F: 1989. The Semantic Conception of Theories and Scientific Realism, University of Illinois Press.

Vermeij, GJ: 1987. Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life, Princeton University Press.

Weber, BH and Depew, DJ: 1996. Natural Selection and Self-Organization, Biology and Philosophy 11: 33-65.

Williams, GC: 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection, Princeton University Press, reissued with a new Introduction, 1996.

Williams, GC: 1985. In Defence of Reductionism. In Oxford Studies in Evolutionary Biology, eds R Dawkins and M Ridley, Oxford University Press.

Williams, GC: 1992. Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges, Oxford University Press.

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