Darwinism results 5 May 20145 May 2014 Here are the results of the survey. Since we had such a small response size (n=104) I do not know what can be taken from this. The results were pretty much as I expected – Selection is the main, but not only, key idea of Darwinism, a substantial minority think Darwinism does not exclude religion (even though close to all were not religious), 40% or so include genetic drift under “Darwinism”, but most think it means “natural selection” overall. Comments? 2. Age of respondent Evolution Philosophy
Evolution How to track a crisis 19 Mar 2010 The following post is by my friend Matt Silberstein. Matt is deeply concerned about the events occurring in places like Darfur, and brought the following to my attention. I asked him to write a post, and here it is. Hi folks, Matt here sitting in for our silverback. I like… Read More
Evolution Mill on Kinds and Types 14 Mar 200918 Sep 2017 A while back I excerpted some Whewell on classification by types. Here is John Stuart Mill disagreeing with him, and, I think, starting off the modern literature on natural kinds. Read More
Epistemology Pizza reductionism, emergence and phenomena 20 Sep 201227 Oct 2018 Debates over reduction in science are as old as philosophy of science, but in the 1960s, Ernest Nagel’s book The Structure of Science really set things going. Nagel argued that a goal of science was to reduce one theory to a more general and explanatory theory, so that one can deduce… Read More
Question 8 answers are so weird. Over 40% does not think that adaptationism is a key idea of Darwinism?! Adaptation is a key idea of natural selection. Does adaptationism mean something else than adaptation, perhaps?
Or there may have been varying ideas, including none at all, about “adaptationism”. I’m projecting here, I suppose. I know what adaptation means, or think I do; but I’m not anywhere near so confident when it’s an -ism. I tend to see the latter, because of a certain amount of usage I’ve seen, as a pejorative applied by some people whom the world would see as Darwinists to Those Other Guys (whom the world would also see as Darwinists) who consider adaptation all-important in evolution (ignoring genetic drift and cockeyed spandrels and so on). So, anybody who perceives the word in this way, if there is anybody, would see the question as not asking whether adaptation in an essential point in evolution but rather whether one agrees with the critique I tried to describe here.
The most natural interpretation of “adaptation” as a word in English is as an active process. But natural selection produces adaptedness of species by a passive process in which no individual or gene is deliberately adapting. So until someone defines it otherwise, I would say that the most natural interpretation of “adaptationism’ is as another word for Lamarkianism.
I would have said “Common descent with modification” but even after the bug with the “Other” option was (mostly) fixed, I still wasn’t able to use that for #6, so I chose “Natural selection”. As for the ” correct answers” – I’d be interested to know who you think best represent evolution, John. I’m not familiar with several of the names, so I (think I) chose Ernst Mayr.