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Elliott Sober

Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference Reprint Edition

by Elliott Sober (Author)

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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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

& quot; 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.& quot; -- Philip Kitcher, University of California, San Diego

" 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

--Philip Kitcher, University of California, San Diego

Review

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

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bradford Books; Reprint edition (February 5, 1991)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262691442
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262691444
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.65 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,612,885 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,520 in Biology (Books)
- #5,654 in Medical Cognitive Psychology
- #8,099 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)

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Nico M. Franz

Parsimony & assumptions about the world

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 7, 2002

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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