Spring 2014

From Peter Godfrey-Smith, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, p. 98.

Overview

This is a graduate reading course on philosophy of biology. Please contact me if you would like to participate. Independent study forms can now be filled out online. The reading list will evolve as the course progresses. A BibTeX file containing all the references below can be found here. Unless otherwise advertised, we meet in the Lewis White Beck Memorial Library at 4:40pm–5:40pm.

Schedule

Thursday 30 January

• Millstein, Roberta L. forthcoming. “Probability in Biology: The Case of Fitness”, in Hitchcock and Hájek (Ed), The Oxford Handbook of Probability and Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. URI: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/9225/

Thursday 6 February

• Stegmann, Ulrich E. 2010. “What Can Natural Selection Explain?”, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, Vol. 41, No. 1, March, pp. 61–66. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2009.12.002.

Thursday 13 February

• Strevens, Michael. 2014. “Fitness and the Impact of Variance on Selection”. §§1–2.

No meetings on Thursday 20 February and Thursday 27 February

Thursday 6 March

• Strevens, Michael. 2014. “Fitness and the Impact of Variance on Selection”. §§3–4.

No meeting Thursday 13 March

Thursday 20 March

Strevens continued.

Thursday 27 March

• Okasha, Samir. 2004. “The “Averaging Fallacy” and the Levels of Selection”, in Biology and Philosophy, Vol. 19, No. 2, March, pp. 167–184. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/B:BIPH.0000024406.61340.6c.

No meeting Thursday 3 April

Thursday 10 April

• West, Stuart A. and Griffin, Ashleigh S. and Gardner, Andy. 2007. “Social Semantics: Altruism, Cooperation, Mutualism, Strong Reciprocity and Group Selection”, in Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 20, No. 2, March, pp. 415–432. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2006.01258.x.

Thursday 17 April

• Wilson, David Sloan. 2008. “Social semantics: toward a genuine pluralism in the study of social behaviour”, in Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 21, No. 1, January, pp. 368–373. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01396.x.
• West, Stuart A. and Griffin, Ashleigh S. and Gardner, Andy. 2008. “Social semantics: how useful has group selection been?”, in Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 21, No. 1, January, pp. 374–385. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1420-9101.2007.01458.x.