Canadian Journal of Philosophy 31 (2):201-220 (2001)
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| Abstract |
Does natural selection explain why individual organisms have the traits that they do? According to "the Negative View," natural selection does not explain why any individual organism has the traits that it does. According to "the Positive View," natural selection at least sometimes does explain why an individual organism has the traits that it does. In this paper, I argue that recent arguments for the Positive View fail in virtue of running afoul of the doctrine of origin essentialism and I demonstrate that other recent defenses of the Negative View depend upon my own for their plausibility.
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| Keywords | Contemporary Philosophy General Interest |
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| ISBN(s) | 0045-5091 |
| DOI | 10.1080/00455091.2001.10717565 |
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References found in this work BETA
Reasons and Persons.Joseph Margolis - 1986 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 47 (2):311-327.
Explaining Behaviour: Reasons in a World of Causes.Andy Clark - 1990 - Philosophical Quarterly 40 (158):95-102.
Reply to Alexander Rosenberg's Review of The Nature of Selection.Elliott Sober - 1986 - Behaviorism 14 (1):77-88.
View all 19 references / Add more references
Citations of this work BETA
The Trials of Life: Natural Selection and Random Drift.Denis M. Walsh, Andre Ariew & Tim Lewens - 2002 - Philosophy of Science 69 (3):452-473.
Do Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Rest on a Mistake About Evolutionary Explanations?Andreas L. Mogensen - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (7):1799-1817.
Probabilistic Causation and the Explanatory Role of Natural Selection.Pablo Razeto-Barry & Ramiro Frick - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (3):344-355.
Teleosemantics Without Natural Selection.Marshall Abrams - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):97-116.
The Negative View of Natural Selection.Jonathan Birch - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2):569-573.
View all 17 citations / Add more citations
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