Elliott Sober

Elliott Sober is one of the leading philosophers of science and is a former winner of the Lakatos Prize, the major award in the field. This new collection of essays will appeal to a readership that extends well beyond the frontiers of the philosophy of science. Sober shows how ideas in evolutionary biology bear in significant ways on traditional problems in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Amongst the topics addressed are psychological egoism, solipsism, and the interpretation of belief and utterance, empiricism, Ockham's razor, causality, essentialism, and scientific laws. The collection will prove invaluable to a wide range of philosophers, primarily those working in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind, and epistemology.

In his latest book, Elliott Sober argues that Darwin's theory is best described not as evolution by natural selection but as common ancestry plus natural selection."-John Hedley Brooke, Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion and director of the Ian Ramsey Centre, University of Oxford. "In these essays, Elliott Sober offers analyses of the logical structure of evolutionary theory, natural selection, and the confrontation between naturalism and creationism."-Douglas J. Futuyma, Distinguished Professor, Department of Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University. Elliott Sober offers a reassessment of a number of aspects of Darwin's arguments in the Origin of Species. The book integrates historical material with contemporary evolutionary ideas.-Samir Okasha, Professor of philosophy of science, University of Bristol. --Book Jacket.

Evaluates Ockham's razor, the principle of parsimony which states that simpler theories are better than more complex ones, and discusses its applications in a variety of domains.

These essays by leading scientists and philosophers address conceptual issues that arise in the theory and practice of evolutionary biology. The third edition of this widely used anthology has been substantially revised and updated. Four new sections have been added: on women in the evolutionary process, evolutionary psychology, law in evolutionary theory, and race as social construction or biological reality. Other sections treat fitness, units of selection, adaptionism, reductionism, essentialism, species, phylogenetic inference, cultural evolution, and evolutionary ethics. Each of the twelve sections contains two or three essays that develop different views of the subject at hand.