Abstract
The shadow of Archdeacon Paley and the argument from design still broods over evolutionary theory. Although the inference is now not to a Contriver but to Natural Selection, the premise from which the argument starts is still the same: the phenomenon of adaptation, the remarkable fashion in which tissues, organs, organ systems of living things appear ‘suited to’ the functions they perform. This premise is sometimes baldly stated in the identification of animals with machines, sometimes left implicit, as with Darwin, in the direction and emphasis of evolutionary theory, but its role is crucial in either case.
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References
Oxford 1930 (New York, Dover 1959).
It is often said that Fisher has ‘proved mathematically’ the truth of neo-Darwinism. The confidence with which the ‘synthetic’ theory has been asserted on the basis of Fisher’s argument is reflected, for example, in the contributions by Huxley, Fisher and Mayr in Huxley, Hardy, Ford, Evolution as a Process, London 1954;
or in the conclusion of the third edition of de Beer’s Embryos and Ancestors, Oxford 1958, or in
P. M. Sheppard’s Natural Selection and Heredity, London 1959 - to mention but a few.
Sir Ronald Fisher, The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, New York 1959, p. 38. I am following the Dover edition, which is in part revised, but not, with one exception, to be noted later, in ways that are philosophically relevant.
Op. cit., p. 41.
Op. cit., p. 26.
Op. cit., p. 37.
I am speaking here (as Fisher is doing) of genie inheritance. The question of cytoplasmic inheritance introduces another dimension altogether into the evolutionary problem.
Loc. cit. (my italics).
Op. cit., p. 40.
Op. cit., p. 27.
H. B. D. Kettlewell, Nature 175 (1955) 943; Heredity 9 (1955) 323, and 10 (1956) 287; Proc. Roy. Soc. B 145 (1956) 297.
Or if, alternatively, we say that in war it is the (‘normally’) mal-adapted who are better adapted, and vice versa, then we are using ‘better adapted’ to mean ‘surviving’ and are saying only: ‘those who survive, survive’.
The demonstrative character of Darwin’s argument was pointed out by C. F. A. Pantin (in History of Science, London 1953; cf. the discussion by A. G. N. Flew, in New Biology 28 (1959) 25ff.
Fisher, op. cit., p. 38.
If one has set up a selection experiment, of course they are so.
R. Fisher, ‘The Bearing of Genetics on Theories of Evolution’, Science Progress 27 (1932) 273–287.
R. Fisher, ‘The Bearing of Genetics on Theories of Evolution’, Science Progress 27 (1932) pp. 131–132.
Op. cit., p. 37.
Op. cit., pp. 30–32.
In an address to the British Society for the Philosophy of Science in February 1959.
Op. cit., p. 39.
This section is added in the second edition, but what Fisher says here is implicit in the usage of the first edition also.
Op. cit., p. 49 (my italics).
Op. cit., p. 40.
Op. cit., p. 40. For an excellent discussion of the logical place of biological improvement in Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theory, see the article by Flew (n. 13 above).
C. D. Darlington, Evolution of Genetic Systems, 2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1958, p. 239.
See, for example, the contributions of Huxley and Fisher to the Huxley, Hardy, Ford volume, referred to in note 2, p. 171 above, or Huxley’s Evolution in Action, 1953.
Loc. cit.
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Grene, M. (1974). Statistics and Selection. In: The Understanding of Nature. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2224-8_8
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