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  1. Tree of Life.Joel Velasco - manuscript
    Common ancestry is one of the pillars of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Today, the Tree of Life, which represents how all life is genealogically related, is often thought of as an essential component in the foundations of biological systematics and so therefore of evolutionary theory – and perhaps all of biology itself. It is an iconic representation in biology and even penetrates into popular culture.
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  2. Human Reproductive Cloning: Science, Jewish Law and Metaphysics.Barbara Pfeffer Billauer - forthcoming - ssrn.com.
    Abstract: Under traditional Jewish Law (halacha), assessment of human reproductive cloning (HRC) has been formulated along four lines of inquiry, which I discussed in Part I of this paper. Therein I also analyze five relevant doctrines of Talmudic Law, concluding that under with a risk-benefit analysis HRC fails to fulfill the obligation ‘to be fruitful and multiply’ and should be strictly prohibited. Here, I review of the topic from an exigetical Biblical and Kabbalistic perspective, beginning with exploring comments of the (...)
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  3. Taxonomy, Race Science, and Mexican Maize.Helen Anne Curry - 2021 - Isis 112 (1):1-21.
    This essay explores the intersection of race science and plant taxonomy in the creation of evolutionary taxonomies (phylogenies) of populations of Zea mays, also known as maize or corn. Following recent work in the history and sociology of race, it analyzes maize taxonomy as technology. Through an analysis of successive attempts to classify diverse maize varieties, especially those originating in Mexico, it shows that taxonomy created possibilities for researchers to intervene in commercial agriculture, state development projects, biological conservation, and domestic (...)
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  4. Multi-model approaches to phylogenetics: Implications for idealization.Aja Watkins - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90 (C):285-297.
    Phylogenetic models traditionally represent the history of life as having a strictly-branching tree structure. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the history of life is often not strictly-branching; lateral gene transfer, endosymbiosis, and hybridization, for example, can all produce lateral branching events. There is thus motivation to allow phylogenetic models to have a reticulate structure. One proposal involves the reconciliation of genealogical discordance. Briefly, this method uses patterns of disagreement – discordance – between trees of different genes to add (...)
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  5. Asexual organisms, identity and vertical gene transfer.Gunnar Babcock - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 81:101265.
    This paper poses a problem for traditional phylogenetics: The identity of organisms that reproduce through fission can be understood in several different ways. This prompts questions about how to differentiate parent organisms from their offspring, making vertical gene transfer unclear. Differentiating between parents and offspring stems from what I call the identity problem. How the problem is resolved has implications for phylogenetic groupings. If the identity of a particular asexual organism persists through fission, the vertical lineage on a phylogenetic tree (...)
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  6. El estatus fáctico de la cladística: aportes desde una reconstrucción estructuralista.Ariel Jonathan Roffé - 2020 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 11 (1):53-72.
    The present work analyzes the controversy within biological systematics regarding the status of cladistics. The use of the parsimony method for phylogenetic reconstruction has been defended by appealing to a methodological principle of simplicity, as well as to empirical principles that external to systematics. I propose new kind of approach, which consists in considering it an empirical theory, thus justifying its application by its empirical success. To defend this point, a formal structuralist reconstruction of cladistics will be provided, which will (...)
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  7. Contrastando reconstrucciones con herramientas computacionales: una aplicación a la cladística.Ariel Jonathan Roffé - 2020 - Dissertation, Universidad de Buenos Aires (Uba)
  8. Dynamic homology and circularity in cladistic analysis.Ariel Jonathan Roffé - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (1):21.
    In this article, I examine the issue of the alleged circularity in the determination of homologies within cladistic analysis. More specifically, I focus on the claims made by the proponents of the dynamic homology approach, regarding the distinction (sometimes made in the literature) between primary and secondary homology. This distinction is sometimes invoked to dissolve the circularity issue, by upholding that characters in a cladistic data matrix have to be only primarily homologous, and thus can be determined independently of phylogenetic (...)
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  9. Species in the Age of Discordance.Matthew H. Haber - 2019 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 11 (21).
    Biological lineages move through time, space, and each other. As they do, they diversify, diverge, and grade away from and into one another. One result of this is genealogical discordance; i.e., the lineages of a biological entity may have different histories. We see this on numerous levels, from microbial networks, to holobionts, to population-level lineages. This paper considers how genealogical discordance impacts our study of species. More specifically, I consider this in the context of three framing questions: (1) How, if (...)
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  10. Locating uncertainty in stochastic evolutionary models: divergence time estimation.Charles H. Pence - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (2):21.
    Philosophers of biology have worked extensively on how we ought best to interpret the probabilities which arise throughout evolutionary theory. In spite of this substantial work, however, much of the debate has remained persistently intractable. I offer the example of Bayesian models of divergence time estimation as a case study in how we might bring further resources from the biological literature to bear on these debates. These models offer us an example in which a number of different sources of uncertainty (...)
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  11. Biological Classification: A Philosophical Introduction. [REVIEW]Justin Bzovy - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (271):400-403.
    © The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Scots Philosophical Association and the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] A. Richards offers a comprehensive introduction to biological classification: ‘the comparison and grouping of organisms, the naming of these groups, the theoretical basis for grouping, and the philosophical foundations for systems of grouping’. This book functions as an introduction to philosophy for biologists, an introduction to biology for philosophers and an (...)
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  12. Modus Darwin Reconsidered.Casey Helgeson - 2018 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 69 (1):193-213.
    ABSTRACT ‘Modus Darwin’ is the name given by Elliott Sober to a form of argument that he attributes to Darwin in the Origin of Species, and to subsequent evolutionary biologists who have reasoned in the same way. In short, the argument form goes: similarity, ergo common ancestry. In this article, I review and critique Sober’s analysis of Darwin’s reasoning. I argue that modus Darwin has serious limitations that make the argument form unsuitable for supporting Darwin’s conclusions, and that Darwin did (...)
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  13. Meet the new mammoth, same as the old? Resurrecting the Mammuthus primigenius.Monika Piotrowska - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (1-2):5.
    Media reporters often announce that we are on the verge of bringing back the woolly mammoth, even while there is growing consensus among scientists that resurrecting the mammoth is unlikely. In fact, current “de-extinction” efforts are not designed to bring back a mammoth, but rather adaptations of the mammoth using close relatives. For example, Harvard scientists are working on creating an Asian elephant with the thick coat of a mammoth by merging mammoth and elephant DNA. But how should such creatures (...)
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  14. Phylogenetic Inference, Selection Theory, and History of Science: Selected Papers of A. W. F. Edwards with Commentaries.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2018 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    A. W. F. Edwards is one of the most influential mathematical geneticists in the history of the discipline. One of the last students of R. A. Fisher, Edwards pioneered the statistical analysis of phylogeny in collaboration with L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and helped establish Fisher's concept of likelihood as a standard of statistical and scientific inference. In this book, edited by philosopher of science Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Edwards's key papers are assembled alongside commentaries by leading scientists, discussing Edwards's influence on their (...)
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  15. Cladistic Parsimony, Historical Linguistics and Cultural Phylogenetics.Frank Cabrera - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (1):65-100.
    Here, I consider the recent application of phylogenetic methods in historical linguistics. After a preliminary survey of one such method, i.e. cladistic parsimony, I respond to two common criticisms of cultural phylogenies: that cultural artifacts cannot be modeled as tree-like because of borrowing across lineages, and that the mechanism of cultural change differs radically from that of biological evolution. I argue that while perhaps remains true for certain cultural artifacts, the nature of language may be such as to side-step this (...)
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  16. Pattern as Observation: Darwin’s ‘Great Facts’ of Geographical Distribution.Casey Helgeson - 2017 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 7 (2):337-351.
    Among philosophical analyses of Darwin’s Origin, a standard view says the theory presented there had no concrete observational consequences against which it might be checked. I challenge this idea with a new analysis of Darwin’s principal geographical distribution observations and how they connect to his common ancestry hypothesis.
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  17. When is a cladist not a cladist?Aleta Quinn - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (4):581-598.
    The term “cladist” has distinct meanings in distinct contexts. Communication between philosophers, historians, and biologists has been hindered by different understandings of the term in various contexts. In this paper I trace historical and conceptual connections between several broadly distinct senses of the term “cladist”. I propose seven specific definitions that capture distinct contemporary uses. This serves to disambiguate some cases where the meaning is unclear, and will help resolve apparent disagreements that in fact result from conflicting understandings of the (...)
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  18. Charles Girard: Relationships and Representation in Nineteenth Century Systematics.Aleta Quinn - 2017 - Journal of the History of Biology 50 (3):609-643.
    Early nineteenth century systematists sought to describe what they called the Natural System or the Natural Classification. In the nineteenth century, there was no agreement about the basis of observed patterns of similarity between organisms. What did these systematists think they were doing, when they named taxa, proposed relationships between taxa, and arranged taxa into representational schemes? In this paper I explicate Charles Frederic Girard’s (1822–1895) theory and method of systematics. A student of Louis Agassiz, and subsequently (1850–1858) a collaborator (...)
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  19. Dissolving the star-tree paradox.Bengt Autzen - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (3):409-419.
    While Bayesian methods have become very popular in phylogenetic systematics, the foundations of this approach remain controversial. The star-tree paradox in Bayesian phylogenetics refers to the phenomenon that a particular binary phylogenetic tree sometimes has a very high posterior probability even though a star tree generates the data. I argue that this phenomenon reveals an unattractive feature of the Bayesian approach to scientific inference and discuss two proposals for how to address the star-tree paradox. In particular, I defend the polytomy (...)
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  20. The Value of Phylogenetic Diversity.Christopher Lean & James Maclaurin - 2016 - In P. Grandcolas (ed.), Biodiversity Conservation and Phylogenetic Systematics. Springer.
    This chapter explores the idea that phylogenetic diversity plays a unique role in underpinning conservation endeavour. The conservation of biodiversity is suffering from a rapid, unguided proliferation of metrics. Confusion is caused by the wide variety of contexts in which we make use of the idea of biodiversity. Characterisations of biodiversity range from all-variety-at-all-levels down to variety with respect to single variables relevant to very specific conservation contexts. Accepting biodiversity as the sum of a large number of individual measures results (...)
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  21. William Whewell’s philosophy of architecture and the historicization of biology.Aleta Quinn - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 1 (59):11-19.
    William Whewell’s work on historical science has received some attention from historians and philosophers of science. Whewell’s own work on the history of German Gothic church architecture has been touched on within the context of the history of architecture. To a large extent these discussions have been conducted separately. I argue that Whewell intended his work on Gothic architecture as an attempt to (help) found a science of historical architecture, as an exemplar of historical science. I proceed by analyzing the (...)
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  22. Phylogenetic inference to the best explanation and the bad lot argument.Aleta Quinn - 2016 - Synthese 193 (9).
    I respond to the bad lot argument in the context of biological systematics. The response relies on the historical nature of biological systematics and on the availability of pattern explanations. The basic assumption of common descent enables systematic methodology to naturally generate candidate explanatory hypotheses. However, systematists face a related challenge in the issue of character analysis. Character analysis is the central problem for contemporary systematics, yet the general problem of which it is a case—what counts as evidence?—has not been (...)
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  23. Not So Human, After All?Brendan Shea - 2016 - In C. Lewis & K. McCain (eds.), Red Rising and Philosophy. Chicago, IL: Open Court. pp. 15-25.
    If asked to explain why the Golds’ treatment of other colors in Red Rising is wrong, it is tempting to say something like “they are all human beings, and it is wrong to treat humans in this way!” In this essay, I’ll argue that this simple answer is considerably complicated by the fact that the different colors might not be members of the same biological species, and it is in fact unclear whether any of them are the same species as (...)
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  24. John S. Wilkins and Malte C. Ebach: The Nature of Classification: Relationships and Kinds in the Natural Sciences: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2014, pp., vii + 197, Price £60/$100.00.Catherine Kendig - 2015 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37 (4):477-479.
    John Wilkins and Malte Ebach respond to the dismissal of classification as something we need not concern ourselves with because it is, as Ernest Rutherford suggested, mere ‘‘stamp collecting.’’ They contend that classification is neither derivative of explanation or of hypothesis-making but is necessarily prior and prerequisite to it. Classification comes first and causal explanations are dependent upon it. As such it is an important (but neglected) area of philosophical study. Wilkins and Ebach reject Norwood Russell Hanson’s thesis that classification (...)
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  25. Similarities as Evidence for Common Ancestry: A Likelihood Epistemology.Elliott Sober & Mike Steel - 2015 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science:axv052.
    Darwin claims in the Origin that similarity is evidence for common ancestry, but that adaptive similarities are ‘almost valueless’ as evidence. This second claim seems reasonable for some adaptive similarities but not for others. Here we clarify and evaluate these and related matters by using the law of likelihood as an analytic tool and by considering mathematical models of three evolutionary processes: directional selection, stabilizing selection, and drift. Our results apply both to Darwin’s theory of evolution and to modern evolutionary (...)
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  26. Population-genetic trees, maps, and narratives of the great human diasporas.Marianne Sommer - 2015 - History of the Human Sciences 28 (5):108-145.
    From the 1960s, mathematical and computational tools have been developed to arrive at human population trees from various kinds of serological and molecular data. Focusing on the work of the Italian-born population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, I follow the practices of tree-building and mapping from the early blood-group studies to the current genetic admixture research. I argue that the visual language of the tree is paralleled in the narrative of the human diasporas, and I show how the tree was actually (...)
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  27. Time and Knowability in Evolutionary Processes.Elliott Sober & Mike Steel - 2014 - Philosophy of Science 81 (4):558-579.
    Historical sciences like evolutionary biology reconstruct past events by using the traces that the past has bequeathed to the present. Markov chain theory entails that the passage of time reduces the amount of information that the present provides about the past. Here we use a Moran process framework to show that some evolutionary processes destroy information faster than others. Our results connect with Darwin’s principle that adaptive similarities provide scant evidence of common ancestry whereas neutral and deleterious similarities do better. (...)
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  28. Phylogeny as population history.Joel D. Velasco - 2013 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 5:e402.
    The project of this paper is to understand what a phylogenetic tree represents and to discuss some of the implications that this has for the practice of systematics. At least the first part of this task, if not both parts, might appear trivial—or perhaps better suited for a single page in a textbook rather than a scholarly research paper. But this would be a mistake. While the task of interpreting phylogenetic trees is often treated in a trivial way, their interpretation (...)
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  29. Constraining prior probabilities of phylogenetic trees.Bengt Autzen - 2011 - Biology and Philosophy 26 (4):567-581.
    Although Bayesian methods are widely used in phylogenetic systematics today, the foundations of this methodology are still debated among both biologists and philosophers. The Bayesian approach to phylogenetic inference requires the assignment of prior probabilities to phylogenetic trees. As in other applications of Bayesian epistemology, the question of whether there is an objective way to assign these prior probabilities is a contested issue. This paper discusses the strategy of constraining the prior probabilities of phylogenetic trees by means of the Principal (...)
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  30. The New Foundations of Evolution: On the Tree of Life. [REVIEW]Mark Borrello - 2011 - Isis 102:154-155.
  31. Elliott Sober, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? Philosophical Essays on Darwin’s Theory. Amherst, NY: Prometheus (2011), 230 pp., $21.00. [REVIEW]Charles H. Pence, Hope Hollocher, Ryan Nichols, Grant Ramsey, Edwin Siu & Daniel John Sportiello - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (4):705-709.
  32. Species.Marc Ereshefsky - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  33. Testing for treeness: lateral gene transfer, phylogenetic inference, and model selection.Joel D. Velasco & Elliott Sober - 2010 - Biology and Philosophy 25 (4):675-687.
    A phylogeny that allows for lateral gene transfer (LGT) can be thought of as a strictly branching tree (all of whose branches are vertical) to which lateral branches have been added. Given that the goal of phylogenetics is to depict evolutionary history, we should look for the best supported phylogenetic network and not restrict ourselves to considering trees. However, the obvious extensions of popular tree-based methods such as maximum parsimony and maximum likelihood face a serious problem—if we judge networks by (...)
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  34. Explanation and Falsification in Phylogenetic Inference: Exercises in Popperian Philosophy.Arnold G. Kluge - 2009 - Acta Biotheoretica 57 (1-2):171-186.
    Deduction leads to causal explanation in phylogenetic inference when the evidence, the systematic character, is conceptualized as a transformation series. Also, the deductive entailment of modus tollens is satisfied when those kinds of events are operationalized as patristic difference. Arguments to the contrary are based largely on the premise that character-states are defined intensionally as objects, in terms of similarity relations. However, such relations leave biologists without epistemological access to the causal explanation and explanatory power of historical statements. Moreover, the (...)
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  35. Thinking in continua: Beyond the adaptive radiation metaphor.Mark E. Olson & Alfonso Arroyo-Santos - 2009 - Bioessays 31 (12):1337-1346.
    ‘‘Adaptive radiation’’ is an evocative metaphor for explosive evolutionary divergence, which for over 100 years has given a powerful heuristic to countless scientists working on all types of organisms at all phylogenetic levels. However, success has come at the price of making ‘‘adaptive radiation’’ so vague that it can no longer reflect the detailed results yielded by powerful new phylogeny-based techniques that quantify continuous adaptive radiation variables such as speciation rate, phylogenetic tree shape, and morphological diversity. Attempts to shoehorn the (...)
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  36. Reflections on Systematics and Phylogenetic Reconstruction.Jeffrey H. Schwartz - 2009 - Acta Biotheoretica 57 (1-2):295-305.
    I attempt to raise questions regarding elements of systematics—primarily in the realm of phylogenetic reconstruction—in order to provoke discussion on the current state of affairs in this discipline, and also evolutionary biology in general: e.g., conceptions of homology and homoplasy, hypothesis testing, the nature of and objections to Hennigian “phylogenetic systematics”, and the schism between Darwinian descendants of the “modern evolutionary synthesis” and their supposed antagonists, cladists and punctuationalists.
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  37. The prior probabilities of phylogenetic trees.Joel D. Velasco - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (4):455-473.
    Bayesian methods have become among the most popular methods in phylogenetics, but theoretical opposition to this methodology remains. After providing an introduction to Bayesian theory in this context, I attempt to tackle the problem mentioned most often in the literature: the “problem of the priors”—how to assign prior probabilities to tree hypotheses. I first argue that a recent objection—that an appropriate assignment of priors is impossible—is based on a misunderstanding of what ignorance and bias are. I then consider different methods (...)
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  38. Foundational issues concerning taxa and taxon names.Mark Ereshefsky - 2007 - Systematic Biology 56 (2):295-301.
    In a series of articles, Rieppel (2005, Biol. Philos. 20:465–487; 2006a, Cladistics 22:186–197; 2006b, Systematist 26:5–9), Keller et al. (2003, Bot. Rev. 69:93–110), and Nixon and Carpenter (2000, Cladistics 16:298–318) criticize the philosophical foundations of the PhyloCode. They argue that species and higher taxa are not individuals, and they reject the view that taxon names are rigid designators. Furthermore, they charge supporters of the individuality thesis and rigid designator theory with assuming essentialism, committing logical inconsistencies, and offering proposals that render (...)
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  39. Essay-review of Valentine's 'On the Origin of Phyla'. [REVIEW]Robert J. O'Hara - 2007 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 21 (1): 109–112.
    James Valentine's "On the Origin of Phyla" is divided into three main sections: "Evidence of the Origins of Metazoan Phyla," "The Metazoan Phyla," and "The Evolution of the Phyla." The second section is the zoological core of the book, a more or less conventional treatment of major animal taxa, arranged in chain-of-being fashion from sponges to cnidarians to "worms" of many kinds, and so onward to arthropods, echinoderms, chordates, and all others in between. Philosophically inclined readers will be most interested (...)
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  40. The dimensions, modes and definitions of species and speciation.John Wilkins - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (2):247-266.
    Speciation is an aspect of evolutionary biology that has received little philosophical attention apart from articles mainly by biologists such as Mayr (1988). The role of speciation as a terminus a quo for the individuality of species or in the context of punctuated equilibrium theory has been discussed, but not the nature of speciation events themselves. It is the task of this paper to attempt to bring speciation events into some kind of general scheme, based primarily upon the work of (...)
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  41. Taxonomy, Polymorphism, and History: An Introduction to Population Structure Theory.Marc Ereshefsky & Mohan Matthen - 2005 - Philosophy of Science 72 (1):1-21.
    Homeostatic Property Cluster (HPC) theory suggests that species and other biological taxa consist of organisms that share certain similarities. HPC theory acknowledges the existence of Darwinian variation within biological taxa. The claim is that “homeostatic mechanisms” acting on the members of such taxa nonetheless ensure a significant cluster of similarities. The HPC theorist’s focus on individual similarities is inadequate to account for stable polymorphism within taxa, and fails properly to capture their historical nature. A better approach is to treat distributions (...)
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  42. The composite species concept: a rigorous basis for cladistic practice.D. J. Kornet & James W. McAllister - 2005 - In Thomas Reydon & Lia Hemerik (eds.), Current Themes in Theoretical Biology. Springer. pp. 95--127.
  43. The species concept for prokaryotic microorganisms—An obstacle for describing diversity?P. Kämpfer & R. Rosselló-Mora - 2004 - Poiesis and Praxis 3 (1-2):62-72.
    Species are the basis of the taxonomic scheme. They are the lowest taxonomic category that are used as units for describing biodiversity and evolution. In this contribution we discuss the current species concept for prokaryotes. Such organisms are considered to represent the widest diversity among living organisms. Species is currently circumscribed as follows: A prokaryotic species is a category that circumscribes a (preferably) genomically coherent group of individual isolates/strains sharing a high degree of similarity in (many) independent features, comparatively tested (...)
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  44. Character individuation in phylogenetic inference.Richard Richards - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (2):264-279.
    Ontological questions in biology have typically focused on the nature of species: what are species; how are they identified and individuated? There is an analogous, but much neglected concern: what are characters; how are they identified and individuated? Character individuation is significant because biological systematics relies on a parsimony principle to determine phylogeny and classify taxa, and the parsimony principle is usually interpreted to favor the phylogenetic hypothesis that requires the fewest changes in characters. But no character individuation principle identified (...)
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  45. How to be a chaste species pluralist-realist: The origins of species modes and the synapomorphic species concept.John S. Wilkins - 2003 - Biology and Philosophy 18 (5):621-638.
    The biological species (biospecies) concept applies only to sexually reproducing species, which means that until sexual reproduction evolved, there were no biospecies. On the universal tree of life, biospecies concepts therefore apply only to a relatively small number of clades, notably plants andanimals. I argue that it is useful to treat the various ways of being a species (species modes) as traits of clades. By extension from biospecies to the other concepts intended to capture the natural realities of what keeps (...)
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  46. Philosophy and Phylogenetic Inference: A Comparison of Likelihood and Parsimony Methods in the Context of Karl Popper's Writings on Corroboration.Kevin de Queiroz & Steven Poe - 2001 - Systematic Biology 50 (3):305-321.
    Advocates of cladistic parsimony methods have invoked the philosophy of Karl Popper in an attempt to argue for the superiority of those methods over phylogenetic methods based on Ronald Fisher's statistical principle of likelihood. We argue that the concept of likelihood in general, and its application to problems of phylogenetic inference in particular, are highly compatible with Popper's philosophy. Examination of Popper's writings reveals that his concept of corroboration is, in fact, based on likelihood. Moreover, because probabilistic assumptions are necessary (...)
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  47. Names, numbers and indentations: A guide to post-linnaean taxonomy.M. Ereshefsky - 2001 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32 (2):361-383.
    The vast majority of biological taxonomists use the Linnaean system when constructing classifications. Taxa are assigned Linnaean ranks and taxon names are devised according to the Linnaean rules of nomenclature. Unfortunately, the Linnaean system has become theoretically outdated. Moreover, its continued use causes a number of practical problems. This paper begins by sketching the ontological and practical problems facing the Linnaean system. Those problems are sufficiently pressing that alternative systems of classification should be investigated. A number of proposals for an (...)
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  48. "An objective time-based phylogenetic classification of primates that places chimpanzees and humans in the genus" Homo".Morris Goddman - 2001 - Ludus Vitalis 9 (15):47-62.
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  49. Discussion: Phylogenetic species concept: Pluralism, monism, and history. [REVIEW]Christopher D. Horvath - 1997 - Biology and Philosophy 12 (2):225-232.
    Species serve as both the basic units of macroevolutionary studies and as the basic units of taxonomic classification. In this paper I argue that the taxa identified as species by the Phylogenetic Species Concept (Mishler and Brandon 1987) are the units of biological organization most causally relevant to the evolutionary process but that such units exist at multiple levels within the hierarchy of any phylogenetic lineage. The PSC gives us no way of identifying one of these levels as the privileged (...)
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  50. Population thinking and tree thinking in systematics.Robert J. O'Hara - 1997 - Zoologica Scripta 26 (4): 323–329.
    Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view (...)
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