This course will explore important topics in Darwin's theory of evolution and in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories that grew out of it. These topics include fitness, adaptation, altruism, intragenomic conflict, units of selection, genetic drift, the randomness of mutation, gradualism, common ancestry, taxonomy, race, phylogenetic inference, and optimality models. The course will bring these and other biological topics into contact with numerous philosophical ideas - operationalism, reductionism, conventionalism, null hypotheses and default reasoning, instrumentalism versus realism, likelihoods versus probabilities, model selection, essentialism, falsifiability, parsimony, the principle of the common cause, comparisons of causal power, indeterminism, sensitivity to initial conditions, and the knowability of the past. The course will be built around my 2024 book, The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory, published by Cambridge University Press; there will also be other readings. PREREQUISITES: A course in philosophy of science, epistemology, or evolutionary biology. Grads enroll in PHIL 267E. Undergrads enroll in PHIL 167E.
4 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
This course will explore important topics in Darwin's theory of evolution and in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories that grew out of it. These topics include fitness, adaptation, altruism, intragenomic conflict, units of selection, genetic drift, the randomness of mutation, gradualism, common ancestry, taxonomy, race, phylogenetic inference, and optimality models. The course will bring these and other biological topics into contact with numerous philosophical ideas - operationalism, reductionism, conventionalism, null hypotheses and default reasoning, instrumentalism versus realism, likelihoods versus probabilities, model selection, essentialism, falsifiability, parsimony, the principle of the common cause, comparisons of causal power, indeterminism, sensitivity to initial conditions, and the knowability of the past. The course will be built around my 2024 book, The Philosophy of Evolutionary Theory, published by Cambridge University Press; there will also be other readings. PREREQUISITES: A course in philosophy of science, epistemology, or evolutionary biology. Grads enroll in 267E. Undergrads enroll in 167E.
Offered in Winter 2026 at Stanford University.