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Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "Philosophers have often viewed the question of the past's knowability as an occasion for treating more general issues about the possibility of knowledge..." (more)
Key Phrases: Big Bang, Van Fraassen, Von Baer (more...)
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Editorial Reviews

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"For biologists interested in evolutionary systematics and for philosophers concerned with some aspects of inductive and causal inference, this book will be a must. Reconstructing the Past is full of valuable clarifications, methodological insights, and rigorous argumentation. It is an excellent contribution to philosophy of biology and philosophy of science generally."
—Philip Kitcher, University of California, San Diego



"Sober is a philosopher who studies biology, and be brings a rare skill to bear upon the philosophical arguments with which biologists (and others) have tried to justify parsimony."
—Mark Ridley, Nature --This text refers to the Paperback edition.


Product Description

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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
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Product Details

  • Hardcover: 265 pages
  • Publisher: Bradford Book (February 1989)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 026219273X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0262192736
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,570,221 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Elliott Sober
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Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Parsimony & assumptions about the world, December 7, 2002
By Nico M. Franz (Ithaca, NY United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (Paperback)
Sober has spent much of his academic life trying to figure out why we prefer the most simple explanations in science and what the underlying empirical assumptions of such a preference are. In "Reconstructing the Past", he takes on to advance the discussion of parsimony as an inferential method in systematics, focussing on the discussion among Farris and Felsenstein throughout the 70s & 80s. Sober is (in my opinion) a very sophiscated empiricist philosopher, so he attempts to motivate an argument in favor of parsimony, yet adopts a likelihood-kind of solution to the problem of phylogeny reconstruction - the so-called "Smith/Quackdoodle Theorem." Whether this particular solution will advance our understanding of systematics remains to be seen, yet I consider this book invaluable in another sense: it drives home very convincingly the claim that parsimony has no a priori justification in systematics. Rather, using parsimony reliably requires that we make some approximately correct inference about the abundance and directionality of homoplasy in cladistic characters. Sober interprets Felsenstein's seminal 1978 paper (about "positively misleading" parsimony) philosophically. That is, if we can conceive hypothetical examples in which parsimony fails, this must mean that using parsimony cannot be deductively valid as some Popper-oriented cladists have tried to argue. This doesn't mean in any way that parsimony shouldn't be used, but rather that using parsimony must have an a posteriori, inductive justification. I believe that these widely ignored insights will eventually have an impact on the current debate between cladists and likelihoodist. If you are interested in the conceptual aspects of this debate, Sober's book is a must.
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