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Books > Science & Mathematics > Biology, life sciences > Life sciences: general issues > Evolution
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Reconstructing the Past - Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (Paperback)
Loot Price: R1,037
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Reconstructing the Past - Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (Paperback)
Series: Reconstructing the Past
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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