Evolutionary theory is awash with probabilities. For example, natural selection is said to occur when there is variation in fitness, and fitness is standardly decomposed into two components, viability and fertility, each of which is understood probabilistically. With respect to viability, a fertilized egg is said to have a certain chance of surviving to reproductive age; with respect to fertility, an adult is said to have an expected number of offspring. There is more to evolutionary theory than the theory of natural selection, and here too one finds probabilistic concepts aplenty. When there is no selection, the theory of neutral evolution says that a gene’s chance of eventually reaching fixation is 1/(2N), where N is the number of organisms in the generation of the diploid population to which the gene belongs. The evolutionary consequences of mutation are likewise conceptualized in terms of the probability per unit time a gene has of changing from one state to another. The examples just mentioned are all “forwarddirected” probabilities; they describe the probability of later events, conditional on earlier events. However, evolutionary theory also uses “backwards probabilities ” that describe the probability of a cause conditional on its effects; for example, coalescence theory allows one to calculate the expected number of generations in the past that the genes in the present generation find their most recent common

Abstract. The second part of this survey examines biocomputing in intact multicellular organisms. The parallelism between creative problem solving and evolution is emphasized: both processes invoke heuristic searching and feature modularity prominently. Simonton’s chance-configuration theory of creative problem solving is recast in terms of pattern recognition and analyzed in terms of parallel and sequential processing. An attempt is made to demystify the creative process that is commonly thought to be the monopoly of geniuses. It is shown that the procedures utilized in high creativity and in everyday ingenuity are fundamentally the same, but geniuses push the creative process to the extreme. A re-interpretation of Freud’s concept of the unconscious in terms of selective attention is invoked to dispel the mystery surrounding the introspective account of Henri Poincaré on mathematical creation. Among the many attributes of consciousness, the elusive free will problem is singled out for analysis in terms of biological control laws. While free will is a philosophical problem, the conflict of free will and determinism can be treated as

Does evolutionary theory have implications about the existence of supernatural entities? This question concerns the logical relationships that hold between the theory of evolution and different bits of metaphysics. There is a distinct question that I also want to address; it is epistemological in character. Does the evidence we have for evolutionary theory also provide evidence concerning the existence of supernatural entities? An affirmative answer to the logical question would entail an affirmative answer to the epistemological question if the principle in confirmation theory that Hempel (1965, p. 31) called the special consequence condition were true: The special consequence condition: If an observation report confirms a hypothesis H, then it also confirms every consequence of H. According to this principle, if evolutionary theory has metaphysical implications, then whatever confirms evolutionary theory also must confirm those metaphysical implications. But the special consequence is false. Here‟s a simple example that illustrates why. You are playing poker and would dearly like to know whether the card you are about to be dealt will be the Jack of Hearts. The dealer is a bit careless and so you catch a glimpse of the card on top of the deck before it is dealt to you. You see that it is red. The fact that it is red confirms the hypothesis that the card is the Jack of Hearts, and the hypothesis that it is the Jack of Hearts entails that the card will be a Jack. However, the fact that the card is red does not confirm the hypothesis that the card will be a Jack. 2 Bayesians gloss these facts by understanding confirmation in terms of probability raising: The Bayesian theory of confirmation: O confirms H if and only if Pr(H│O)> Pr(H). The general reason why Bayesianism is incompatible with the special consequence

Introduction. The view that scientific explanation is achieved via unification was formally introduced by Michael Friedman (1974) and modified and extended by Philip Kitcher (1976, 1981, 1989, 1993). The essence of the unification view is that science increases our understanding of the world by extending our unified picture of it (Friedman 1974, 15). Kitcher's view is that we extend unification and, so, increase scientific understanding, by reducing the number of types of facts, brute facts, that scientists must accept in articulating their world view (1976, 212; 1981, 529; 1989, 432). The reduction of brute facts is achieved by deriving a maximum number of statements about scientific phenomena from a minimum number of schematic arguments, or argument patterns which bring together under one or a few schemata statements about a class of phenomena (Kitcher 1981, 512; 1989, 432). Among the unificatory schemata Kitcher has provided, he has shown that a certain economy of them unifies, and

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Abstract: Recently, philosophers of biology have debated the status of the evolutionary process: is it deterministic or indeterministic? I argue that there is insufficient reason to favor one side of the debate over the other, and that a more philosophically defensible position argues neither for the determinacy nor for the indeterminacy of the evolutionary process. In other words, I maintain that the appropriate stand to take towards the question of the determinism of the evolutionary process is agnosticism. I then suggest that an examination of the phenomenon of developmental noise might yield a solution to the problem. Is the Evolutionary Process Deterministic or Indeterministic? Millstein 2 An Argument for Agnosticism 1.

Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there can’t be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there can’t be an evolutionary theory of adaptation. The present article focuses mainly on the a priori argument. In their book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (hereafter, FP) try to drive a stake through the heart of evolutionary theory, but they are not the would-be vampire killers you might expect. They are not creationists; on the contrary, they repeatedly say that they are dyed-in-the-wool atheists. Nor do they deny that all current life traces back to one or a few common ancestors (1; unless otherwise noted, page numbers refer to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini 2010b). Sometimes they say that their target is the whole theory of natural selection. For example, they write that … the theory of natural selection reduces to a banal truth: “If a kind of creature

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