Download or read book The Philosophical Basis of Evolution written by James Croll and published by . This book was released on 1890 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophical Basis of Evolution written by James Croll and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Philosophical Basis of Evolution written by James Croll and published by Theclassics.Us. This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1890 edition. Excerpt: ... 127 CHAPTER XIV NATURAL SELECTION CANNOT EXPLAIN PRODUCTION This figurative expression, Natural Selection, is a somewhat unfortunate one, for it is apt to mislead. It has a tendency to convey the idea, and doeB so to many minds, that nature makes a selection. Nature does no such thing. Natural Selection is simply the survival of the fittest. There is nothing in the nature of selection but this. "The survival of the fittest is consequently a much better expression, but it still leaves in the background a something, the want of which is also apt to mislead. Natural Selection is better expressed by saying that it is the survival of the '" fittest resulting from the destruction of the unfit. The element left out is as important a part of the process r as the survival of the fittest, for it is by means of the/ destruction of the unfit that the fittest are preserve It follows that if Natural Selection is simply the survival of the fit from the destruction of the unfit, it is obvious that it can produce nothing. The simple destruction of that which exists would not produce that which does not exist. The conception is absurd. Natural Selection is not an efficient cause; it has no formative power, no positive efficiency. If a thing already exists, it will tend to preserve and perfect it, but it cannot possibly produce it. That things can be produced by natural selection is a view held by Darwinians in general. Darwin himself not only held that Natural Selection might produce an organ, but he endeavoured to show how one so wonderful as the eye, with all its marvellous adaptations, could be formed by this means. There is certainly in all this some fundamental misapprehension. Natural Selection may be a co/t-l dition in the formation of an organ, ...
Download or read book The Philosophical Basis of Evolution written by James Croll and published by Legare Street Press. This book was released on 2022-10-27 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Philosophical Basis of Evolution Scholar s Choice Edition written by James Croll and published by . This book was released on 2015-02-18 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Social Evolution written by Jonathan Birch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From mitochondria to meerkats, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of social behaviour. In the early 1960s Bill Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour evolves. He introduced three key innovations - now known as Hamilton's rule, kin selection, and inclusive fitness - which have been enormously influential, but which remain the subject of fierce controversy. Hamilton's pioneering work kick-started a research program now known as social evolution theory. This is a book about the philosophical foundations and future prospects of that program. Part I, "Foundations", is a careful exposition and defence of Hamilton's ideas, with a few modifications along the way. In Part II, "Extensions", Jonathan Birch shows how these ideas can be applied to phenomena including cooperation in micro-organisms, cooperation among the cells of a multicellular organism, and culturally evolved cooperation in the earliest human societies. Birch argues that real progress can be made in understanding microbial evolution, evolutionary transitions, and human evolution by viewing them through the lens of social evolution theory, provided the theory is interpreted with care and adapted where necessary. The Philosophy of Social Evolution places social evolution theory on a firm philosophical footing and sets out exciting new directions for further work.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Human Evolution written by Michael Ruse and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-01-12 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a unique discussion of human evolution from a philosophical viewpoint, covering such issues as religion, race and gender.
Download or read book The Law of Evolution written by John Scouller and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Evolution s First Philosopher written by Jerome A. Popp and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Dewey was the first philosopher to recognize that Darwin's thesis about natural selection not only required us to change how we think about ourselves and the life forms around us, but also required a markedly different approach to philosophy. Evolution's First Philosopher shows how Dewey's arguments arose from his recognition of the continuity of natural selection and mindedness, from which he developed his concept of growth. Growth, for Dewey, has no end beyond itself and forms the basis of a naturalized theory of ethics. While other philosophers gave some attention to evolutionary theory, it was Dewey alone who saw that Darwinism provides the basis for a naturalized theory of meaning. This, in turn, portends a new account of knowledge, ethics, and democracy. To clarify evolution's conception of natural selection, Jerome A. Popp looks at brain science and examines the relationship between the genome and experience in terms of the contemporary concepts of preparedness and plasticity. This research shows how comprehensive and penetrating Dewey's thought was in terms of further consequences for the philosophical method entailed by Darwin's thesis. Dewey's foresight is further legitimated when Popp places his work within the context of the current thought of Daniel Dennett.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Evolution written by Stephen H. Carpenter and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-10 with total page 41 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Philosophy of Evolution Together With a Preliminary Essay on The Metaphysical Basis of Science" are scientific papers read before The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Art and Letters by Stephen Haskins Carpenter. In this work, Stephen Haskins notes that "all knowledge is essentially one. The object-matter upon which intellect exerts itself does not affect the subjective act of knowing. Physics, when stripped of that which is merely contingent, becomes metaphysics. Physical science deals with object-matter, and discusses the signs by which nature communicates her message—that is, phenomena. Metaphysical science has to do with the subject-mind, and discusses the meaning of the message. One converts God's hieroglyphics into easily-intelligible language; the other translates this language into Ideas. If this is true, there must be a unity of method in all science, however great the diversity of the object-matter investigated. This method is subjectively determined, that is, by the constitution of the mind, and not by the particular form of matter upon which intellectual energy may be exerted. If there is an essential unity in all knowledge, it is because there is a corresponding unity of method in all mental activity."
Download or read book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul written by Simona Ginsburg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new theory about the origins of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the evolutionary transition to basic consciousness. What marked the evolutionary transition from organisms that lacked consciousness to those with consciousness—to minimal subjective experiencing, or, as Aristotle described it, “the sensitive soul”? In this book, Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka propose a new theory about the origin of consciousness that finds learning to be the driving force in the transition to basic consciousness. Using a methodology similar to that used by scientists when they identified the transition from non-life to life, Ginsburg and Jablonka suggest a set of criteria, identify a marker for the transition to minimal consciousness, and explore the far-reaching biological, psychological, and philosophical implications. After presenting the historical, neurobiological, and philosophical foundations of their analysis, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose that the evolutionary marker of basic or minimal consciousness is a complex form of associative learning, which they term unlimited associative learning (UAL). UAL enables an organism to ascribe motivational value to a novel, compound, non-reflex-inducing stimulus or action, and use it as the basis for future learning. Associative learning, Ginsburg and Jablonka argue, drove the Cambrian explosion and its massive diversification of organisms. Finally, Ginsburg and Jablonka propose symbolic language as a similar type of marker for the evolutionary transition to human rationality—to Aristotle's “rational soul.”
Download or read book The Evolution of Morality written by Richard Joyce and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-08-24 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moral thinking pervades our practical lives, but where did this way of thinking come from, and what purpose does it serve? Is it to be explained by environmental pressures on our ancestors a million years ago, or is it a cultural invention of more recent origin? In The Evolution of Morality, Richard Joyce takes up these controversial questions, finding that the evidence supports an innate basis to human morality. As a moral philosopher, Joyce is interested in whether any implications follow from this hypothesis. Might the fact that the human brain has been biologically prepared by natural selection to engage in moral judgment serve in some sense to vindicate this way of thinking—staving off the threat of moral skepticism, or even undergirding some version of moral realism? Or if morality has an adaptive explanation in genetic terms—if it is, as Joyce writes, "just something that helped our ancestors make more babies"—might such an explanation actually undermine morality's central role in our lives? He carefully examines both the evolutionary "vindication of morality" and the evolutionary "debunking of morality," considering the skeptical view more seriously than have others who have treated the subject. Interdisciplinary and combining the latest results from the empirical sciences with philosophical discussion, The Evolution of Morality is one of the few books in this area written from the perspective of moral philosophy. Concise and without technical jargon, the arguments are rigorous but accessible to readers from different academic backgrounds. Joyce discusses complex issues in plain language while advocating subtle and sometimes radical views. The Evolution of Morality lays the philosophical foundations for further research into the biological understanding of human morality.
Download or read book Making Sense of Evolution written by Massimo Pigliucci and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making Sense of Evolution explores contemporary evolutionary biology, focusing on the elements of theories—selection, adaptation, and species—that are complex and open to multiple possible interpretations, many of which are incompatible with one another and with other accepted practices in the discipline. Particular experimental methods, for example, may demand one understanding of “selection,” while the application of the same concept to another area of evolutionary biology could necessitate a very different definition. Spotlighting these conceptual difficulties and presenting alternate theoretical interpretations that alleviate this incompatibility, Massimo Pigliucci and Jonathan Kaplan intertwine scientific and philosophical analysis to produce a coherent picture of evolutionary biology. Innovative and controversial, Making Sense of Evolution encourages further development of the Modern Synthesis and outlines what might be necessary for the continued refinement of this evolving field.
Download or read book Evolution and the Humanities written by David Holbrook and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 1987 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Evolution of Darwinism written by Timothy Shanahan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other scientific theory has had as tremendous an impact on our understanding of the world as Darwin's theory as outlined in his Origin of Species, yet from the very beginning the theory has been subject to controversy. The Evolution of Darwinism, first published in 2004, focuses on three issues of debate - the nature of selection, the nature and scope of adaptation, and the question of evolutionary progress. It traces the varying interpretations to which these issues were subjected from the beginning and the fierce contemporary debates that still rage on and explores their implications for the greatest questions of all: Where we come from, who we are and where we might be heading. Written in a clear and non-technical style, this book will be of use as a textbook for students in the philosophy of science who need to become familiar with the background to the debates about evolution.
Download or read book The Theory of Evolution written by Oleg Bazaluk and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a historical-philosophical analysis of the concept of ‘evolution’, considering the degree of development of the theories of evolution in cosmology, biology, neurobiology, and philosophy. ‘Evolution’ is defined here as the continuous and nonlinear complication of the structure of matter and types of interaction and environments. The book analyses existing approaches to the research of this concept in modern science and philosophy, looking at the ways in which its factors and causes have previously been explored. Unifying such interdisciplinary approaches to evolution in cosmology, biology, neurobiology, and philosophy, the book then discusses its own model, ‘Evolving Matter’, which considers not only the regularity of transition of a space vacuum in neural ensembles, but also the universe as a complex, non-uniform organisation. In addition, the book contains systematised interdisciplinary information on the theory of evolution.
Download or read book Handbook of Paleoanthropology written by Winfried Henke and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-05-10 with total page 2057 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 3-volume handbook brings together contributions by the world ́s leading specialists that reflect the broad spectrum of modern palaeoanthropology, thus presenting an indispensable resource for professionals and students alike. Vol. 1 reviews principles, methods, and approaches, recounting recent advances and state-of-the-art knowledge in phylogenetic analysis, palaeoecology and evolutionary theory and philosophy. Vol. 2 examines primate origins, evolution, behaviour, and adaptive variety, emphasizing integration of fossil data with contemporary knowledge of the behaviour and ecology of living primates in natural environments. Vol. 3 deals with fossil and molecular evidence for the evolution of Homo sapiens and its fossil relatives.
