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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 -
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The Modern Synthesis - Evolution and the Organization of Information (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2021)
Loot Price: R2,184
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The Modern Synthesis - Evolution and the Organization of Information (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2021)
Series: Evolutionary Biology - New Perspectives on Its Development, 4
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This book is about evolutionary theory. It deals with aspects of
its history to focus upon explanatory structures at work in the
various forms of evolutionary theory - as such this is also a work
of philosophy. Its focus lies on recent debates about the Modern
Synthesis and what might be lacking in that synthesis. These claims
have been most clearly made by those calling for an Extended
Evolutionary Synthesis. The author argues that the difference
between these two positions is the consequence of two things.
First, whether evolution is a considered as solely a population
level phenomenon or also a theory of form. Second, the use of
information concepts. In this book Darwinian evolution is
positioned as a general theory of evolution, a theory that gave
evolution a technical meaning as the statistical outcome of
variation, competition, and inheritance. The Modern Synthesis (MS)
within biology, has a particular focus, a particular architecture
to its explanations that renders it a special theory of evolution.
After providing a history of Darwinian theory and the MS, recent
claims and exhortations for an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
(EES) are examined that see the need for the inclusion of
non-genetic modes of inheritance and also developmental processes.
Much of this argument is based around claims that the MS adopts a
particular view of information that has privileged the gene as an
instructional unit in the emergence of form. The author analyses
the uses of information and claims that neither side of the debate
explicitly and formally deals with this concept. A more formal view
of information is provided which challenges the EES claims about
the role of genes in MS explanations of form whilst being
consilient with their own interests in developmental biology. It is
concluded that the MS implicitly assumed this formal view of
information whilst using information terms in a colloquial manner.
In the final chapter the idea that the MS is an informational
theory that acts to corral more specific phenomenal accounts, is
mooted. As such the book argues for a constrained pluralism within
biology, where the MS describes those constraints.
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