Publicaties

This target article summarizes our discourse on one of the major questions raised in our recent book U+201CEvolution Science and Ethics in the Third Millennium,U+201D namely, to what degree are traditional religious belief systems and modern secular ideologies capable of contributing to an evolutionarily based ethical framework that can guide humanity to higher levels of hominization within the context of a further progressing modernization and ...

Traditionally, Thomas S. KuhnU+2019s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match ...

In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term U+201CpalætiologicalU+201D have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of ...

The genesis of Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) is well known, and the changes that it underwent in subsequent editions are well documented. However, less is known or has been published about the genesis of its original title and about the seven modifications that it subsequently underwent. That original title was much longer than ...

Welch (Biol Philos 32(2):263U+2013279, 2017) has recently proposed two possible explanations for why the field of evolutionary biology is plagued by a steady stream of claims that it needs urgent reform. It is either seriously deficientand incapable of incorporating ideas that are new, relevant and plausible or it is not seriously deficient at all but is prone to attracting discontent and to the championing of ideas that are not very relevant, ...

Although classical evolutionary theory, i.e., population genetics and the Modern Synthesis, was already implicitly 'gene-centred', the organism was, in practice, still generally regarded as the individual unit of which a population is composed. The gene-centred approach to evolution only reached a logical conclusion with the advent of the gene-selectionist or gene's eye view in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas classical evolutionary theory can only ...

Historians tend to speak of the problem of the origin of species or the species question, as if it were a monolithic problem. In reality, the phrase (or similar variants) refers to a, historically, surprisingly fluid and pluriform scientific issue. It has, in the course of the past five centuries, been used in no less than ten different ways or contexts. A clear taxonomy of these separate problems is useful or relevant in two ways. It certainly ...

The crucial role that mathematical notation systems have played in the success of the hard or mathematical sciences is well known and richly documented: the origin of the history of these sophisticated notation systems more or less coincides with the birth of modern science. The role of our linguistic notation systems (as applied to, or used in, the scientific study of nature), by contrast, is hardly documented at all, at least not in a ...