By Brian Garvey
This significant new sequence within the philosophy of technology goals to supply a brand new new release of textbooks for the topic. The sequence won't in simple terms provide clean remedies of center issues within the thought and method of clinical wisdom, but additionally introductions to more moderen components of the self-discipline. moreover, the sequence will disguise subject matters in present technology that increase major foundational concerns either for medical idea and for philosophy extra often. Biology increases specified questions of its personal not just for philosophy of technological know-how, yet for metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. This finished new textbook for a quickly starting to be box of analysis presents scholars new to the topic with an up to date presentation of the most important philosophical concerns. Care is taken all through to maintain the technicalities available to the non-biologist yet with out sacrificing the philosophical subtleties. the 1st a part of the e-book covers the philosophical demanding situations posed by way of evolution and evolutionary biology, starting with Darwin's relevant argument within the starting place of the Species. person chapters disguise typical choice, the egocentric gene, substitute devices of choice, developmental platforms concept, adaptionism and concerns in macroevolution. the second one a part of the ebook examines philosophical questions coming up in reference to organic characteristics, functionality, nature and nurture, and organic varieties. The 3rd a part of the e-book examines metaphysical questions, biology's relation with the conventional issues of philosophy of technological know-how, and the way evolution has been brought into epistemological debates. the ultimate half considers the relevance of biology to questions on ethics, faith and human nature.
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Example text
But it is not just that something must be very faithfully passed down in order to be successful in natural selection; it is precisely in virtue of being faithfully passed down that that something is successfully naturally selected. This means that whatever that is, it must be fecund and capable of withstanding the vicissitudes of life, but crucially it also means that it must have this high copying fidelity. Only entities that have this high copying fidelity, then, can truly be said to evolve by natural selection.
The issue of what these entities are is called the units of selection question. Darwin’s perspective, and others like it, is called organism selectionism; Dawkins’s perspective, and others like it, is called gene selectionism. This chapter will deal with three other entities that have been claimed as possible units of selection: individual organisms, groups of organisms and memes. 1 Genes versus individual organisms Most things that promote the survival and/or reproductive prospects of an organism also promote the replicative prospects of that organism’s genes, and vice versa.
On the gene-selectionist view, genes are the primary beneficiaries of adaptation. That is, even if an adaptation happens to benefit an organism or a group, the reason it is there is that it benefits the genes. So we should not expect to find traits that benefit an organism or group at the genes’ expense. If no trait that could be found that favoured either over the other – that is, if every trait that we found promoted both gene replication and the organism’s survival and reproduction at the same time, if it promoted either – then there would be nothing to choose between the two views.