Reconstructing the Past - Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (Paperback)

Winner, 1991 Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science sponsored by the London School of Economics & Political Science. "Reconstructing the Past "seeks to clarify and help resolve the vexing methodological issues that arise when biologists try to answer such questions as whether human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas. It explores the case for considering the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony as a useful principle for evaluating taxonomic theories of evolutionary relationships. For the past two decades, evolutionists have been vigorously debating the appropriate methods that should be used in systematics, the field that aims at reconstructing phylogenetic relationships among species. This debate over phylogenetic inference, Elliott Sober observes, raises broader questions of hypothesis testing and theory evaluation that run head on into long standing issues concerning simplicity/parsimony in the philosophy of science. Sober treats the problem of phylogenetic inference as a detailed case study in which the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony can be tested as a principle of theory evaluation. Bringing together philosophy and biology, as well as statistics, Sober builds a general framework for understanding the circumstances in which parsimony makes sense as a tool of phylogenetic inference. Along the way he provides a detailed critique of parsimony in the biological literature, exploring the strengths and limitations of both statistical and nonstatistical cladistic arguments.

General

Imprint:	MIT Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Reconstructing the Past
Release date:	February 1991
First published:	1991
Authors:	Elliott Sober (Professor)
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 18mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback - Trade
Pages:	288
ISBN-13:	978-0-262-69144-4
Categories:	Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Metaphysics & ontology Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Evolution Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Metaphysics & ontology
LSN:	0-262-69144-2
Barcode:	9780262691444

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