PHIL 464: Philosophy of Biology
Preliminary Reading List
Amundson, Ron. 1994. Two concepts of constraint: Adaptationism and the challenge from developmental
biology. Philosophy of Science 61: 556-578.
Beatty, John. 1990. Teleology and the relationship of biology to the physical sciences in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. In Frank Durham and Robert Purrington (eds.), Newton's Legacy: The Origins
and Influence of Newtonian Science. New York: Columbia University Press.
Beatty, John. 1984. Chance and natural selection." Philosophy of Science 51: 183-211.
Beatty, John. 1995. The evolutionary contingency thesis. In Gereon Wolters and James G. Lennox (eds.),
Concepts, Theories, and Rationality in the Biological Sciences, The Second Pittsburgh-Konstanz
Colloquium in the Philosophy of Science. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Beatty, John and Eric Cyr Desjardins. In press. History and natural selection. Biology and Philosophy.
Brandon, Robert N. 1990. Adaptation and environment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Coddington, Jonathan A. 1988. Cladistic tests of adaptational hypotheses. Cladistics 4: 3-22.
Cyr Desjardins, Eric. Under review. Biological historicity: Path dependence or historical contingency?
Darwin, Charles. 1859. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of
Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray.
Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dupré, John. 1993. The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2007. Conditions for evolution by natural selection. Journal of Philosophy 104: 489516.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Gould, Stephen Jay and Richard C. Lewontin. 1979. The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian
paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B205:
581–598
Griffiths, Paul E. 1996. The historical turn in the study of adaptation. British Journal for the Philosophy of
Science 47: 511-532.
Hodge, M.J.S. 1977. The structure and strategy of Darwin’s “long argument.” British Journal for the
History of Science 10: 237-245.
Hull, David. 1980. Individuality and selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 11: 311-332.
Lennox, James G. 1993. Darwin was a teleologist. Biology and Philosophy 8: 409-422.
Lennox, James G. and Bradley Wilson. 1994. Natural selection and the struggle for existence. Studies in
History and Philosophy of Science 25: 65-80.
Lewontin, Richard C. 1970. The units of selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 1: 1-18.
Lewontin, Richard C. 1978. Adaptation. Scientific American 239 (Sept.): 156-169.
Lloyd, Elizabeth A. 2002. Units of selection. In Evelyn Fox Keller and Elizabeth A. Lloyd (eds.), Keywords
in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Maynard Smith, John. 1978. Optimization theory in evolution. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
9: 31-56.
Mills, Susan B. and John Beatty. 1979. The propensity interpretation of fitness. Philosophy of Science 46:
263-286.
Millstein, Roberta L. 2008. Distinguishing drift and selection empirically: “The great snail debate” of the
1950s. Journal of the History of Biology 41: 339-367.
Okasha, Samir. 2008. Units and levels of selection. In Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski (eds.), A
Companion to the Philosophy of Biology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ospovat, Dov. 1978. Perfect adaptation and teleological explanation: Approaches to the problem of the
history of life in the mid-nineteenth century. Studies in the History of Biology 2: 33-56.
Paley, William. [1802] 1809. Natural Theology or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity,
Collected from the Appearances of Nature, 12th ed. London: Fauldner.
Rosales, Alirio. 2005. John Maynard Smith and the natural philosophy of adaptation. Biology and
Philosophy 20: 1027-1040.
Rosenberg, Alexander. 1994. Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Ruse, Michael. 1975. Darwin’s debt to philosophy: An examination of the influence of the philosophical
ideas of John F. W. Herschel and William Whewell on the development of Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution.” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 6: 159-181.
Seger, Jon and J. William Stubblefield. 1996. Optimization and adaptation. San Diego, CA: Academic
Press
Sober, Elliott. 1980. Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism. Philosophy of Science 47: 350-383.
Sober, Elliott. 2000. Philosophy of Biology. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Sober, Elliott and Richard C. Lewontin. 1982. Artifact, cause, and genic selection. Philosophy of Science
47: 157-180.
Stephens, Christopher. 2004. Selection, drift and the “forces” of evolution. Philosophy of Science 71: 550570.
Sterelny, Kim and Philip Kitcher. 1988. The return of the gene. Journal of Philosophy 85: 339-361.
Walsh, Denis M., Tim Lewens and André Ariew. 2002. The trials of life: Natural selection and random
drift. Philosophy of Science 69: 452-273.
Waters, C. Kenneth. 1991. Tempered realism about the forces of selection. Philosophy of Science 58:
553-573.