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John S. Wilkins [41]John Simpson Wilkins [1]
  1. (1 other version)Species: a history of the idea.John S. Wilkins - 2009 - Univ of California Pr.
    "--Joel Cracraft, American Museum of Natural History "This is not the potted history that one usually finds in texts and review articles.
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  2. Philosophically speaking, how many species concepts are there?John S. Wilkins - 2011 - Zootaxa 2765:58–60.
  3. Essentialism in Biology.John S. Wilkins - manuscript
    Essentialism in philosophy is the position that things, especially kinds of things, have essences, or sets of properties, that all members of the kind must have, and the combination of which only members of the kind do, in fact, have. It is usually thought to derive from classical Greek philosophy and in particular from Aristotle’s notion of “what it is to be” something. In biology, it has been claimed that pre-evolutionary views of living kinds, or as they are sometimes called, (...)
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  4. Biological essentialism and the tidal change of natural kinds.John S. Wilkins - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (2):221-240.
    The vision of natural kinds that is most common in the modern philosophy of biology, particularly with respect to the question whether species and other taxa are natural kinds, is based on a revision of the notion by Mill in A System of Logic. However, there was another conception that Whewell had previously captured well, which taxonomists have always employed, of kinds as being types that need not have necessary and sufficient characters and properties, or essences. These competing views employ (...)
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  5. 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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  6. The Hunting of the SNaRC: A Snarky Solution to the Species Problem.Brent D. Mishler & John S. Wilkins - 2018 - Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 10 (1).
    We argue that the logical outcome of the cladistics revolution in biological systematics, and the move towards rankless phylogenetic classification of nested monophyletic groups as formalized in the PhyloCode, is to eliminate the species rank along with all the others and simply name clades. We propose that the lowest level of formally named clade be the SNaRC, the Smallest Named and Registered Clade. The SNaRC is an epistemic level in the classification, not an ontic one. Naming stops at that level (...)
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  7. The Nature of Classification: Relationships and kinds in the natural sciences.John S. Wilkins & Malte C. Ebach - 2013 - Palgrave-Macmillan.
    The Nature of Classification discusses an old and generally ignored issue in the philosophy of science: natural classification. It argues for classification to be a sometimes theory-free activity in science, and discusses the existence of scientific domains, theory-dependence of observation, the inferential relations of classification and theory, and the nature of the classificatory activity in general. It focuses on biological classification, but extends the discussion to physics, psychiatry, meteorology and other special sciences.
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  8. What is a species? Essences and generation.John S. Wilkins - 2010 - Theory in Biosciences 129:141-148.
    Arguments against essentialism in biology rely strongly on a claim that modern biology abandoned Aristotle's notion of a species as a class of necessary and sufficient properties. However, neither his theory of essentialism, nor his logical definition of species and genus (eidos and genos) play much of a role in biological research and taxonomy, including his own. The objections to natural kinds thinking by early twentieth century biologists wrestling with the new genetics overlooked the fact that species have typical developmental (...)
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  9. Could God create Darwinian accidents?John S. Wilkins - 2012 - Zygon 47 (1):30-42.
    Abstract Charles Darwin, in his discussions with Asa Gray and in his published works, doubted whether God could so arrange it that exactly the desired contingent events would occur to cause particular outcomes by natural selection. In this paper, I argue that even a limited or neo-Leibnizian deity could have chosen a world that satisfied some arbitrary set of goals or functions in its outcomes and thus answer Darwin's conundrum. In more general terms, this supports the consistency of natural selection (...)
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  10. Selection without replicators: the origin of genes, and the replicator/interactor distinction in etiobiology.John S. Wilkins, Ian Musgrave & Clem Stanyon - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (2):215-239.
    Genes are thought to have evolved from long-lived and multiply-interactive molecules in the early stages of the origins of life. However, at that stage there were no replicators, and the distinction between interactors and replicators did not yet apply. Nevertheless, the process of evolution that proceeded from initial autocatalytic hypercycles to full organisms was a Darwinian process of selection of favourable variants. We distinguish therefore between Neo-Darwinian evolution and the related Weismannian and Central Dogma divisions, on the one hand, and (...)
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  11. Defining species: a sourcebook from antiquity to today.John S. Wilkins - 2009 - Peter Lang.
    Defining Species: A Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today provides excerpts and commentary on the definition of «species from source material ranging from the ...
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  12. The concept and causes of microbial species.John S. Wilkins - 2006 - Studies in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 28 (3):389-408.
    Species concepts for bacteria and other microbes are contentious, because they are often asexual. There is a Problem of Homogeneity: every mutation in an asexual lineage forms a new strain, of which all descendents are clones until a new mutation occurs. We should expect that asexual organisms would form a smear or continuum. What causes the internal homogeneity of asexual lineages, if they are in fact homogeneous? Is there a natural “species concept” for “microbes”? Two main concepts devised for metazoans (...)
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  13. The Advantages of Theft over Toil: The Design Inference and Arguing from Ignorance.John S. Wilkins & Wesley R. Elsberry - 2001 - Biology and Philosophy 16 (5):709-722.
    Intelligent design theorist William Dembski hasproposed an ``explanatory filter'' fordistinguishing between events due to chance,lawful regularity or design. We show that ifDembski's filter were adopted as a scientificheuristic, some classical developments inscience would not be rational, and thatDembski's assertion that the filter reliablyidentifies rarefied design requires ignoringthe state of background knowledge. Ifbackground information changes even slightly,the filter's conclusion will vary wildly.Dembski fails to overcome Hume's objections toarguments from design.
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  14. The evolutionary structure of scientific theories.John S. Wilkins - 1998 - Biology and Philosophy 13 (4):479–504.
    David Hull's (1988c) model of science as a selection process suffers from a two-fold inability: (a) to ascertain when a lineage of theories has been established; i.e., when theories are descendants of older theories or are novelties, and what counts as a distinct lineage; and (b) to specify what the scientific analogue is of genotype and phenotype. This paper seeks to clarify these issues and to propose an abstract model of theories analogous to particulate genetic structure, in order to reconstruct (...)
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  15. The adaptive landscape of science.John S. Wilkins - 2008 - Biology and Philosophy 23 (5):659-671.
    In 1988, David Hull presented an evolutionary account of science. This was a direct analogy to evolutionary accounts of biological adaptation, and part of a generalized view of Darwinian selection accounts that he based upon the Universal Darwinism of Richard Dawkins. Criticisms of this view were made by, among others, Kim Sterelny, which led to it gaining only limited acceptance. Some of these criticisms are, I will argue, no longer valid in the light of developments in the formal modeling of (...)
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  16.  56
    Replication.David L. Hull & John S. Wilkins - 2005 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  17. The role of secularism in protecting religion.John S. Wilkins - 2010 - In Warren Bonett (ed.), The Australian Book of Atheism. Scribe Publications.
  18. Gods Above: Naturalizing Religion in Terms of our Shared Ape Social Dominance Behavior.John S. Wilkins - 2015 - Sophia 54 (1):77-92.
    To naturalize religion, we must identify what religion is, and what aspects of it we are trying to explain. In this paper, religious social institutional behavior is the explanatory target, and an explanatory hypothesis based on shared primate social dominance psychology is given. The argument is that various religious features, including the high status afforded the religious, and the high status afforded to deities, are an expression of this social dominance psychology in a context for which it did not evolve: (...)
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  19. Darwin’s Unkindly Variable: Fitness and the Tautology Problem.John S. Wilkins - manuscript
    Few problems in the philosophy of evolutionary biology are more widely disseminated and discussed than the charge of Darwinian evolution being a tautology. The history is long and complex, and the issues are many, and despite the problem routinely being dismissed as an introductory-level issue, based on misunderstandings of evolution, it seems that few agree on what exactly these misunderstandings consist of. In this paper, I will try to comprehensively review the history and the issues. Then, I will try to (...)
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  20. Trémaux on species: A theory of allopatric speciation (and punctuated equilibrium) before Wagner.John S. Wilkins & Gareth J. Nelson - 2008 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 30 (1):179-206.
    Pierre Trémaux’s 1865 ideas on speciation have been unjustly derided following his acceptance by Marx and rejection by Engels, and almost nobody has read his ideas in a charitable light. Here we offer an interpretation based on translating the term sol as “habitat”, in order to show that Trémaux proposed a theory of allopatric speciation before Wagner and a punctuated equilibrium theory before Gould and Eldredge, and translate the relevant discussion from the French. We believe he may have influenced Darwin’s (...)
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  21.  31
    Darwin.John S. Wilkins - unknown
    This chapter contains sections titled: Progress and the Tree of History Discovering the Past Teleological Thinking References and Further Reading.
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  22. (1 other version)The Salem Region: Two Mindsets about Science.John S. Wilkins - 2013 - In Massimo Pigliucci & Maarten Boudry (eds.), Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. University of Chicago Press.
    It is often noted that if someone has a tertiary degree in a scientific field who promotes an anti-science-establishment, antiscience, or pseudoscience agenda, they are very often engineers, dentists, surgeons or medical practitioners. While this does not mean that all members of these professions or disciplines are antiscience, of course, the higher frequency of pseudoscience among them is indicative of what I call the “deductivist mindset” regarding science itself. Opposing this is the “inductivist mindset”, a view that has been deprecated (...)
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  23. (1 other version)Crossing the Milvian Bridge: When Do Evolutionary Explanations of Belief Debunk Belief?Paul E. Griffiths & John S. Wilkins - 2015 - In Phillip R. Sloan, Gerald P. McKenny & Kathleen Eggleson (eds.), Darwin in the twenty-first century. University of Notre Dame Press. pp. 201-231.
  24. Are creationists rational?John S. Wilkins - 2011 - Synthese 178 (2):207-218.
    Creationism is usually regarded as an irrational set of beliefs. In this paper I propose that the best way to understand why individual learners settle on any mature set of beliefs is to see that as the developmental outcome of a series of “fast and frugal” boundedly rational inferences rather than as a rejection of reason. This applies to those whose views are opposed to science in general. A bounded rationality model of belief choices both serves to explain the fact (...)
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  25. A deflation of genetic information.John S. Wilkins - manuscript
    It is often claimed there is information in some biological entity or process, most especially in genes. Genetic “information” refers to distinct notions, either of concrete properties of molecular bonds and catalysis, in which case it is little more than a periphrasis for correlation and causal relations between physical biological objects (molecules), or of abstract properties, in which case it is mind-dependent. When information plays a causal role, nothing is added to the account by calling it “information”. In short, if (...)
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  26. Tower of babel: The evidence against the new creationism.John S. Wilkins - 2001 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 79 (2):302 – 304.
    Book Information Tower of Babel: the evidence against the new creationism. By Robert T. Pennock. Bradford/MIT Press. Cambridge MA. 1999. Pp. xviii + 429.
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  27. Secularism protects religions.John S. Wilkins - 2010 - In Warren Bonett (ed.), The Australian Book of Atheism. Scribe Publications.
  28.  67
    A deflationary account of information in biology.John S. Wilkins - unknown
    An oft-repeated claim is that there is information in some biological entity or process, most especially in genes. Some of these claims derive from the Central Dogma, population genetics, and the neo-Darwinian program. Others derive from attacks upon evolution, in an attempt to show that “information cannot be created” by natural selection. In this paper I will try to show that the term “information” is a homonym for a range of distinct notions, and that these notions are either of concrete (...)
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  29.  9
    Intelligent Design and Religion as a Natural Phenomenon: Volume V.John S. Wilkins - 2010 - Routledge.
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  30.  28
    Species Problems and Beyond: Contemporary Issues in Philosophy and Practice.John S. Wilkins, Igor Pavlinov & Frank Zachos (eds.) - 2022 - Boca Raton: CRC Press.
    Species, or ‘the Species Problem’, is a topic in science, in the philosophy of science, and in general philosophy. There is not one, but many, species problems, and these are dealt with in this volume. Species are often thought of as units of biology, to be used in ecology, conservation, classification, and theory. The chapters in this book present opposing views on the current philosophical and conceptual issues of the Species Problem in biology. -/- Divided into four sections Theories and (...)
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  31. The Origins of Species Concepts.John Simpson Wilkins - 2003 - Dissertation, University of Melbourne
    The longstanding species problem in biology has a history that suggests a solution, and that history is not the received history found in many texts written by biologists or philosophers. The notion of species as the division into subordinate groups of any generic predicate was the staple of logic from Aristotle through the middle ages until quite recently. However, the biological species concept during the same period was at first subtly and then overtly different. Unlike the logic sense, which relied (...)
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  32. The roles, reasons and restrictions of science blogs.John S. Wilkins - 2008 - Trends in Ecology and Evolution 23 (8):411-413.
    Over the past few years, blogging (“web logging”) has become a major social movement, and as such includes blogs by scientists about science. Blogs are highly idiosyncratic, personal and ephemeral means of public expression, and yet they contribute to the current practice and reputation of science as much as, if not more than, any popular scientific work or visual presentation. It is important, therefore, to understand this phenomenon.
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  33.  37
    Why Do Believers Believe Silly Things? Costly Signaling and the Function of Denialism.John S. Wilkins - 2018 - In Hans van Eyghen, Rik Peels & Gijsbert van den Brink (eds.), New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion - The Rationality of Religious Belief. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 109-129.
    People often have beliefs that are widely regarded as silly by the experts or by the general population. This leads us to ask why believers believe silly things if they are widely thought to be silly, and then why believers believe the specific things they do. I propose that silly beliefs function as in-group and out-group tribal markers. Such markers act as an honest costly signal; honest and costly because such beliefs are hard to fake. Then I offer a developmentalist (...)
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  34. Philosophy of Biology, by Peter Godfrey-Smith: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014, pp. ix + 187, US$29.95. [REVIEW]John S. Wilkins - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1):206-207.
  35. Is “meme” a new “idea”? Reflections on Aunger. [REVIEW]John S. Wilkins - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3):585-598.
    Memes are an idea whose time has come, again, and again, and again, but which has never really made it beyond metaphor. Anthropologist Robert Aunger’s book 'The Electric Meme' is a new attempt to take it to the next stage, setting up a research program with proper models and theoretical entities. He succeeds partially, with some contributions to the logic of replication, but in the end, his proposal for the substrate of memes is a non-solution to a central problem of (...)
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  36. Mayr’s Centenary Festschrift. [REVIEW]John S. Wilkins - 2007 - Biology and Philosophy 22 (4):603-610.
  37.  39
    Drawing the tree of life: J. David Archibald: Aristotle’s ladder, Darwin’s tree: The evolution of visual metaphors for biological order. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 256 pp, US$65.00/£45.00 HB. [REVIEW]John S. Wilkins - 2016 - Metascience 25 (3):421-424.
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  38.  96
    Remembering Gould. [REVIEW]John S. Wilkins - 2007 - Metascience 16 (1):169-173.
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  39. Review of the Cambridge Companion to Darwin. [REVIEW]John S. Wilkins - 2010 - Reports of the National Center for Science Education.
    Part I includes pieces by Phillip Sloan on how Darwin theorized evolution, Jon Hodge on the Notebooks and the years Darwin spent in London after the voyage of the Beagle , and essays on Darwin’s views on heredity (Jim Endersby), on mind and the emotions (Robert Richards) and the argument structure of the Origin (Ken Waters). All of these are excellent and nuanced, and well referenced, written by leading specialists on each topic. Endersby’s essay in particular introduced me to material (...)
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