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  1. Two explanations of evolutionary progress.Gregory Radick - 2000 - Biology and Philosophy 15 (4):475-491.
    Natural selection explains how living forms are fitted to theirconditions of life. Darwin argued that selection also explains what hecalled the gradual advancement of the organisation, i.e.evolutionary progress. Present-day selectionists disagree. In theirview, it is happenstance that sustains conditions favorable to progress,and therefore happenstance, not selection, that explains progress. Iargue that the disagreement here turns not on whether there exists aselection-based condition bias – a belief now attributed to Darwin – but on whether there needs to be such a bias (...)
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  • Darwin's Ambiguity: The Secularization of Biological Meaning.David Kohn - 1989 - British Journal for the History of Science 22 (2):215-239.
    Darwin is well known for his wondrously ambiguous rhetoric. The author who used an ‘entangled bank’ as his metaphor for Nature and its complex relationships built up the substance of his text from a corresponding entanglement of unresolved theoretical relations. Ambiguous positions, arguments that seem to fold in on themselves, vacillations, contradictions, and pluralities of explanation suffuse Darwin's science and its constituent metascience. The Origin abounds in ambiguities with regard to the technical features of evolutionary biology. But the domain of (...)
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  • Background and Foreground: Getting Things in Context.David Knight - 1987 - British Journal for the History of Science 20 (1):3-12.
    Historians generally grumble at the liberties taken with letters and papers by editors and biographers in the past, while reviewers may complain at the professorial pomposities which interfere with the reader's interaction with the text. Certainly, reading is not a mere matter of information retrieval or of source-mining, but a meeting of minds, and any over-zealous editing which makes this more difficult will have failed. Editors, whether of journals or of documents, are midwives of ideas—self-effacingly bringing an author's meaning and (...)
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  • Darwin’s perception of nature and the question of disenchantment: a semantic analysis across the six editions of On the Origin of Species.Bárbara Jiménez-Pazos - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (2):1-28.
    This body of work is motivated by an apparent contradiction between, on the one hand, Darwin’s testimony in his autobiographical text about a supposed perceptual colour blindness before the aesthetic magnificence of natural landscapes, and, on the other hand, the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, where he claims to perceive the forms of nature as beautiful and wonderful. My aim is to delve into the essence of the Darwinian perception of beauty in the context of the Weberian (...)
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  • Multiple explanations in Darwinian evolutionary theory.Walter J. Bock - 2009 - Acta Biotheoretica 58 (1):65-79.
    Variational evolutionary theory as advocated by Darwin is not a single theory, but a bundle of related but independent theories, namely: (a) variational evolution; (b) gradualism rather than large leaps; (c) processes of phyletic evolution and of speciation; (d) causes for the formation of varying individuals in populations and for the action of selective agents; and (e) all organisms evolved from a common ancestor. The first four are nomological-deductive explanations and the fifth is historical-narrative. Therefore evolutionary theory must be divided (...)
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