85: 1 January 2002
The Philosophy of Biology

Advisory Editor: Kim Sterelny, Wellington, New Zealand

Since the mid-1980’s there has been an explosion of interest in philosophy of biology. Some of this work has involved the traditional themes of philosophy of science being worked through in a new domain. For example, ideas about reduction have been revisited and revised through a consideration of the relationship between molecular and classical genetics. But much of this work has involved new philosophical problems provoked by debates within biology itself. For many of these debates seem to have both conceptual and empirical elements; they are neither simply empirical nor settled by definitional tidiness. That is true, for example, of many of the debates about the large scale history of life, and it is equally true of the different identifications of the ‘unit of selection’ and of the various ideas about the nature of species. Until recently, most of this work was focused on evolutionary biology, but it is increasingly clear that there are similar problems, problems that fuse conceptual and empirical issues, in ecology and developmental biology. What is an ecological community? Does individual development consist of the execution of a genetic program? Contributions are solicited on the conceptual aspects of questions of this kind; especially contributions which extend the range of philosophy of biology from its heartland in evolutionary theory.

Table of Contents:

Wayne Christensen and Mark Bickhard

Process Dynamics of Normative Function

John Dupre

Is 'Natural Kind' a Natural Kind Term?

Peter Godfrey-Smith

On the Evolution of Representational and Interpretive Capacities

Paul E. Griffiths

What is Innateness?

Joseph Laporte

Must Signals Handicap?

James Maclaurin

The Resurrection of Innateness

Sahotra Sarkar 

Defining "Biodiversity": Assessing Biodiversity

Elliot Sober 

Reconstructing the Character States of Ancestors: A Likelihood Perspective on Cladistic Parsimony