What is evolutionary theory? : What is evolution? ; The place of evolutionary theory in biology ; Pattern and process ; Historical particulars and general laws ; The causes of evolution ; The domains of biology and physics ; Biological explanations and physical explanations -- Creationism : The danger of anachronism ; Paley's watch and the likelihood principle ; Hume's critique ; Why natural selection isn't a random process ; Two kinds of similarity ; The problem of predictive equivalence ; Is the design hypothesis unscientific? ; The incompleteness of science -- Fitness : An idealized life cycle ; The interpretation of probability ; Two ways to find out about fitness ; The tautology problem ; Supervenience ; Advantageousness and fitness ; Teleology naturalized -- The units of selection problem : Hierarchy ; Adaptation and fortuitous benefit ; Decoupling parts and wholes ; Red herrings ; Examples ; Correlation, cost, and benefit -- Adaptationism : What is adaptationism? ; How genetics can get in the way ; Is adaptationism untestable? ; the argument from complex traits ; If optimality models are too easy to produce, let's make them harder ; Game theory -- Systematics : The death of essentialism ; Individuality and the species problem ; Three systematic philosophies ; Internal coherence ; Phylogenetic inference based on overall similarity ; Parsimony and phylogenetic inference -- Sociobiology and the extension of evolutionary theory : Biological determinism ; Does sociobiology have an ideological function? ; Anthropomorphism versus linguistic Puritanism ; Ethics ; Models of cultural evoluion.
|
