Special Sciences and the Unity of Science


Book Description

Science is a dynamic process in which the assimilation of new phenomena, perspectives, and hypotheses into the scientific corpus takes place slowly. The apparent disunity of the sciences is the unavoidable consequence of this gradual integration process. Some thinkers label this dynamical circumstance a ‘crisis’. However, a retrospective view of the practical results of the scientific enterprise and of science itself, grants us a clear view of the unity of the human knowledge seeking enterprise. This book provides many arguments, case studies and examples in favor of the unity of science. These contributions touch upon various scientific perspectives and disciplines such as: Physics, Computer Science, Biology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, and Economics.







Evolution and the Diversity of Life


Book Description

The diversity of living forms and the unity of evolutionary processes are the focus of these essays. The collection helps form much of the basis of contempoary undertanding of evolutionary biology.




Unifying Biology


Book Description

Unifying Biology offers a historical reconstruction of one of the most important yet elusive episodes in the history of modern science: the evolutionary synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s. For more than seventy years after Darwin proposed his theory of evolution, it was hotly debated by biological scientists. It was not until the 1930s that opposing theories were finally refuted and a unified Darwinian evolutionary theory came to be widely accepted by biologists. Using methods gleaned from a variety of disciplines, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis argues that the evolutionary synthesis was part of the larger process of unifying the biological sciences. At the same time that scientists were working toward a synthesis between Darwinian selection theory and modern genetics, they were, according to the author, also working together to establish an autonomous community of evolutionists. Smocovitis suggests that the drive to unify the sciences of evolution and biology was part of a global philosophical movement toward unifying knowledge. In developing her argument, she pays close attention to the problems inherent in writing the history of evolutionary science by offering historiographical reflections on the practice of history and the practice of science. Drawing from some of the most exciting recent approaches in science studies and cultural studies, she argues that science is a culture, complete with language, rituals, texts, and practices. Unifying Biology offers not only its own new synthesis of the history of modern evolution, but also a new way of "doing history."




A Sacred Unity


Book Description

In his new collection of essays, Bateson, author of the enormously influential book Steps to an Ecology of Mind, takes readers further along the pathways by which he arrived at his now-famous synthesis, and continues to illuminate such diverse fields as biology, anthropology, psychiatry, and linguistics.




Consilience


Book Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • "A dazzling journey across the sciences and humanities in search of deep laws to unite them." —The Wall Street Journal One of our greatest scientists—and the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for On Human Nature and The Ants—gives us a work of visionary importance that may be the crowning achievement of his career. In Consilience (a word that originally meant "jumping together"), Edward O. Wilson renews the Enlightenment's search for a unified theory of knowledge in disciplines that range from physics to biology, the social sciences and the humanities. Using the natural sciences as his model, Wilson forges dramatic links between fields. He explores the chemistry of the mind and the genetic bases of culture. He postulates the biological principles underlying works of art from cave-drawings to Lolita. Presenting the latest findings in prose of wonderful clarity and oratorical eloquence, and synthesizing it into a dazzling whole, Consilience is science in the path-clearing traditions of Newton, Einstein, and Richard Feynman.




Evolutionary Biology


Book Description

This volume is the twenty-ninth in this series, which includes twenty-eight numbered volumes and one unnumbered supplement. The editors continue to focus on critical reviews, commentaries, original papers, and controversies in of the reviews range from anthropology to evolutionary biology. The topics molecular evolution, population biology to paleobiology. Recent volumes have included a broad spectrum of chapters on such subjects as population biology, comparative morphology, paleobiology, molecular phy logenetics, developmental evolutionary biology, systematics, and the history of evolutionary biology. The editors continue to solicit manuscripts in all areas of evolutionary biology. Manuscripts should be sent to anyone of the following: Max K. Hecht, Department of Biology, Queens College of the City University of New York, Flushing, New York 11367; Ross 1. MacIntyre, Department of Genetics and Development, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853; or Michael T. Clegg, Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California, Riverside, California 92521. vii Contents 1. Homology and Embryonic Development Brian K. Hall Introduction .............................................. 1 A Brief History of the Concept of Homology ................. 1 von Baer's Laws ........................................ 4 Germ Layers and Ernst Haeckel ............................ 6 Embryology and Homology ............................... 7 Homology: An Unsolved Problem ............................ 8 Latent Homology ........................................ 8 Serial Homology ........................................ 9 Common Origins and Common Inductions ..................... 12 Mechanisms of Gastrulation ............................... 13 Origin of the Alimentary Canal ............................ 14 Origin of Germ Cells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 . . . . . . . . . . Induction of Meckel's Cartilage ............................ 15 Induction of the Lens of the Eye ........................... 16 Development of Internal and External Cheek Pouches .......... 18 Selection for Increased Tail Length in Mice .................. 19 Regeneration and Homology .... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 . . . . . . .




Agents and Goals in Evolution


Book Description

Samir Okasha approaches evolutionary biology from a philosophical perspective in Agents and Goals in Evolution, analysing a mode of thinking in biology called agential thinking. He considers how the paradigm case involves treating an evolved organism as if it were an agent pursuing a goal, such as survival or reproduction, and seeing its phenotypic traits as strategies for achieving that goal or furthering its biological interests. As agential thinking deliberately transposes a set of concepts--goals, interests, strategies--from rational human agents and to the biological world more generally, Okasha's enquiry firstly looks at the justification for this: is it mere anthropomorphism, or does it play a genuine intellectual role in the science? From this central question, key points are considered such as: how do we identify the 'goal' that evolved organisms will behave as if they are trying to achieve? Can agential thinking ever be applied to groups rather than to individual organisms? And how does agential thinking relate to the controversies over fitness-maximization in evolutionary biology? In addition, Okasha examines the relation between the adaptive and the rational by considering whether organisms can validly be treated as agent-like. Should we expect their evolved behaviour to correspond with that of rational agents as codified in the theory of rational choice? If so, does this mean that the fitness-maximizing paradigm of the evolutionary biologist can be mapped directly to the utility-maximizing paradigm of the rational choice theorist? All of these important questions are engagingly raised and discussed at length.




Maximus the Confessor and Evolutionary Biology


Book Description

This book brings Maximus the Confessor’s logoi doctrine into dialogue with modern-day evolutionary biology. It explores the extent to which the logoi, as described by Maximus, exhibit features that are concordant with evolution before going on to consider more discordant aspects that cannot be ignored. The author addresses the curious resonance between the logoi and evolution in a systematic way through a close reading of primary textual material allied with a deep understanding of both the classical Darwinian and ‘extended’ evolutionary syntheses. The study joins with other Maximian interpreters in attesting to the incarnational and theophanic nature of the logoi, but seeks to extend this distinctively Eastern Christo-cosmology into the problematic territory of biological evolution, a territory historically dominated by Western scholarship. The book will be of interest to scholars of religion and science, as well as Patristics and the Eastern Orthodox theological traditions.