Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection [Hardcover]

Peter Godfrey-Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0199552045 | ISBN-13: 978-0199552047

In 1859 Darwin described a deceptively simple mechanism that he called "natural selection," a combination of variation, inheritance, and reproductive success. He argued that this mechanism was the key to explaining the most puzzling features of the natural world, and science and philosophy were changed forever as a result. The exact nature of the Darwinian process has been controversial ever since, however. Godfrey-Smith draws on new developments in biology, philosophy of science, and other fields to give a new analysis and extension of Darwin's idea. The central concept used is that of a "Darwinian population," a collection of things with the capacity to undergo change by natural selection. From this starting point, new analyses of the role of genes in evolution, the application of Darwinian ideas to cultural change, and "evolutionary transitions" that produce complex organisms and societies are developed. Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection will be essential reading for anyone interested in evolutionary theory.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Peter Godfrey-Smith's Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection is a dense and deep work on the foundations of evolutionary biology... Godrey-Smith's book fruitfully forces us to think in new ways about evolution and natural selection. Jay Odenbaugh, Science Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection will be something to be reckoned with for anybody interested in the conceptual foundations of evolutionary theory and in the applicability of Darwinian ideas beyond the strict confines of biological evolution. Massimo Pigliucci, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

About the Author

Peter Godfrey-Smith is Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature and Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 17, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199552045
• ISBN-13: 978-0199552047
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,250,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Enough New Material to Make Worth Reading, June 16, 2010

By 

Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Hardcover)

Peter Godfrey-Smith is among the very best of a new breed of philosopher of biology whose contributions are very strong both in the biological sciences and the philosophy thereof. This book reviews some major controversies in evolutionary biology over the past half-century, with the author's own attempt to adjudicate among the contestants.

It is not clear to me to whom this book is targeted. Godfrey-Smith describes the controversies at too high a level for a novice reader, but the descriptions are too detailed and labored for a reader who has followed the debates. His own contributions are very powerful in some cases, while in others he more or less follows the lead of others, supplying little that is new at all.

His most important point is that the replicator/vehicle approach to Darwinian evolution was motivated by paradigmatic controversies unleashed by Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, and is really a step backward. He shows rather definitively that the standard definition of Darwinian evolution by Lewontin and others is both adequate and much broader than that proposed by the replicator/vehicle proponents. Indeed, he gives examples of Darwinian evolution where there are no replicators at all. Godfrey-Smith also claims that the replicator/vehicle approach often embraces and ``agential'' view of genes, endowing them anthropomorphically with "plans" and "objectives." He does not make clear why this is a problem. I do not believe it is. There is nothing wrong with game-theoretic behavioral models in which different alleles at a locus are associated with different phenotypic behaviors. This "phenotypic gambit" has allowed evolutionary biology to develop very powerful models of strategic interactions within species.

Godfrey-Smith also presents a novel and interesting critique of the "gene's-eye view" approach to Darwinian evolution (which is of course closely related to the replicator/vehicle view). While recognizing that sometimes the gene's-eye view is the correct way to view the problem, it is not correct in general because the notion of a "gene" is simply not sufficiently well-defined to serve as a "Darwinian population." While this critique is novel and interesting, I do not think it is more powerful than the traditional critique that genes evolve only as part of gene complexes, and the highly non-linear interaction among genes renders the idea that we should always model evolution at the level of the gene implausible

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Innovative and Important, March 14, 2011

By 

mattphilos - See all my reviews

This review is from: Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Hardcover)

Godfrey-Smith sets out, generally with great clarity, reasons why we should dispense with the replicator foundation of evolutionary theory. As with many processes, there are degrees of some population behaving in Darwinian fashion and the replicator approach picks out only a subset of these. By introducing a sophisticated version of a conceptual space model Godfrey-Smith does much to advance conceptual analysis in general and philosophy of science in particular. Gone are the days of necessity and sufficiency, now there is a tool to deal with conceptual vagueness in a principled way. In places this book doesn't say enough. But the framework is laid for much further work in biology, and perhaps most interestingly, in social science.