The Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology

Philosophy of evolutionary biology is a major subfield of philosophy of biology concerned with the methods, conceptual foundations, and implications of evolutionary biology. It also concerns relationships between evolutionary biology and neighboring fields, such as biochemistry, genetics, cell and molecular biology, developmental biology, and ecology. Initially, many of the questions of central concern to philosophy of biology grew out of general philosophy of science. For instance, one long-standing debate in philosophy of science concerns the matter of what is distinctive of scientific inquiry. Various criteria have been proposed, and much of the early work in philosophy of biology concerned whether evolutionary biology meets these criteria. Another long-standing debate in philosophy of science concerns whether there is any legitimate role for values in science. The study of the evolution of human behavior and cognition has been scrutinized as an instance of both potentially pernicious and positive influence of values in science. More recently, philosophers of biology both collaborate with and draw upon evolutionary biology to either address broader philosophical concerns, such as the nature of consciousness, or engage directly with debates internal to evolutionary biology. For example, philosophers have engaged in conceptual and methodological debates within evolutionary biology over the appropriate conditions for testing hypotheses about adaptation, the units, targets, or levels of selection, mechanisms and measures of inheritance, modes of phylogenetic inference, and classification and systematics. In this category, the line between science and philosophy blurs; participants in many of these debates include both philosophers and biologists. This entry will focus on philosophers’ contributions. To be sure, evolutionary biologists have contributed far more. Please see the Oxford Bibliographies on these topics for scientific contributions to all of these topics. I also urge readers to review the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on topics including but not limited to “Evolution,” “Natural Selection,” “Teleological Notions in Biology,” “Units and Levels of Selection,” “Adaptationism,” “Evolutionary Genetics,” “Evolutionary Psychology,” and “Developmental Biology.”