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Essays on Darwinism

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Acta Biotheoretica, 2016

Sacred Web, A Journal of Tradition and Modernity (Volume 46), 2020

Touted as ‘the single best idea that anyone has ever had’, Charles Darwin’s idea — that living organisms have originated and evolved from a common biological ancestor by a mechanism of natural selection acted on by random mutations – has a reputation of being scientifically sound and is regarded as unassailable. This essay aims to debunk that assumption, using arguments against macro‐evolution, from the standpoints of both science and metaphysics.

This work proposes and elaborates a philosophy of nature that, although influenced by Darwinism, aims ultimately to transcend Darwinism. My particular focus is on two purified versions of Darwinism: gene-Darwinism and process-Darwinism. The essential claims of these two approaches are first explicated and then subjected to criticism. This elaborated critique is not exogeneous to Darwinism, proposing another philosophy of nature from the outset; instead an immanent critique is developed, starting from within the investigated Darwinian paradigms. Focussing on internal inconsistencies of these paradigms, reveals tendencies that will lead us beyond Darwinism.But not only theories can transcend themselves, the central claim of this work is that Nature, due to inner or outer necessities, continually transcends itself, not only in its products but in its evolutionary mechanisms. As theories are moulded not only by external forces, but by inherent tendencies as well (where the rules of change may sometimes depend on the theory itself), also evolution may depend on evolved evolutionary mechanisms.

Evolution and Development, 2004

Rather astonishing is our confirmatory evidence for neurologist J. Z. Young’s conclusion that we are [Mankind is] the only species which constructs models for survival outside the brain and outside the genetic system. This confirmatory evidence takes the form of a unifying description of three biological model-building processes: (I) chemico-genetic; (II) chemico-neural; and (III) the extra-corporeal, this last being unique to Mankind. The unifying connection is that each of these “Three Worlds” — an allusion to one of philosopher Karl Popper’s notions — is “conducted” via a single sixstage model-building process containing two major (and a third, less major) corrective feedback loops.

Theory, Culture & Society, 2005

Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 1993

To Be Or Not To Be Darwinian, 2020

In this paper, we aim to test Darwin’s theory of evolution using the tools provided by comparative genomics and systems biology. We trace the development of evolutionary biology through the years, since 1859 on the origin of species release to the present day, passing by the Modern synthesis, the neutral theory and the nearly neutral theory. We will reach the conclusion the natural selection is not a quantitatively dominant factor of evolution, whereas non-adaptive forces are much more prominent. Evolution is not directed towards increasing complexity, and when complexity increases it seems as a result of weak purifying selection, but not adaptation. Our perspective of a tree of life will be shifted towards “network” of life, due to the works of horizontal gene transfer and diverse selfish genetic elements. Also, we will see that there is an invariable distribution of rate of evolution between orthologous genes and paralogous gene family size and that it exists a negative correlation between level of expression of genes and rate of sequence evolution

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  4. (PDF) Essays on Darwinism

    Essays on Darwinism . ... Download Free PDF. Download Free PDF. Essays on Darwinism. Barry McMullin. 1992. See full PDF download Download PDF. Related papers. Exploring Darwinian Worlds: From Darwin to the Extended Synthesis. elena casetta. Acta Biotheoretica, 2016.

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    mental evolution. Darwin's views on the origin of humans did not rely entirely on selection but had a supplementary set of mechanisms consistent with a selectionist account. Darwin eventually wrote The Descent of Man, a rich and sophisticated treatment of evolution, even by contemporary standards. Yet, during his lifetime, Darwin's treatment of

  6. PDF Darwin's Principles of Divergence and Natural Selection: Why Fodor

    4 Darwin's Essays of 1842 and 1844 were never published in his life time. His son Francis published them on the hundredth anniversary of his father's birth. See Charles Darwin, Foundations of the Origin of Species: Two Essays Written in 1842 and 1844, ed. Francis Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909).

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    Universal Darwinism Richard Dawkins coined the phrase 'Universal Darwinism' in an essay pub-lished in 1983. If we find life beyond this earth, he argued, it will surely evolve by 'the principles of Darwinism' (Dawkins 1983: 403). But there will also be differences. For example, the replicators may not be genes. Dawkins

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    Social Darwinism was an intellectual movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries that merged ... Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), and Herbert Spencer's (1820-1903) Social Statics (1851) informed the debate over whether poverty was a structural or economic problem