THIS paper requires a preliminary apology. It is written in Spain, and as the writer is taking a very minor part in the defence of Madrid he is unable to consult many works of reference. Readers to whom practice is as important as theory will excuse any inadequacy in citations.
Evolution
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. It occurs when evolutionary processes such as genetic drift and natural selection act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. The process of evolution has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation.
The Scientist Who Scrambled Darwin’s Tree of Life (Published 2018)
How the microbiologist Carl Woese fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life.
Lewontin, Dialectical Materialism, Evolutionary Biology • SftP Magazine
Lewontin and Levins's The Dialectical Biologist remains a classic. But what does it mean to be dialectical, and how does it aid our struggle?
Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin's 'The Dialectical Biologist' - Monthly Review
Brett Clark is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Oregon and coauthor of “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” Socialist Register 2004. Richard York teaches sociology at... READ MORE
Guest Post - Do we need (r)evolution in peer review? - The Scholarly Kitchen
Whether peer review needs revolution or evolution may be the wrong question. The more pressing one is whether the academic community is prepared to let scientific ideas be published, contested, and refined in public, rather than behind closed doors.
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection.
The Dialectical Biologist
The Dialectical Biologist is a 1985 book by the ecologist Richard Levins and the biologist Richard Lewontin, in which the authors sketch a dialectical approach to biology. They see "dialectics" more as a set of questions to ask about biological research, a weapon against dogmatism, than as a set of pre-determined answers.
Maximum power in evolution, ecology and economics
Ludwig Boltzmann suggested that natural selection was fundamentally a struggle among organisms for available energy. Alfred Lotka argued that organisms that capture and use more energy than their competition will have a selective advantage in the evolutionary process, i.e. the Darwinian notion of evolution was based on a fundamental, generalized energy principle. He extended this general principle from the energetics of a single organism or species to the energetics of entire energy pathways through ecosystems. Howard Odum and Richard Pinkerton, building on Lotka, extended this concept to ‘The maximum power principle’ and applied it to many biological and physical systems including human economies. We examine this history and how these ideas relate to concepts from other disciplines including philosophy. But there has been considerable confusion in understanding and applying these concepts which we attempt to resolve while providing various examples from routine life and discussing some unresolved issues. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Thermodynamics 2.0: Bridging the natural and social sciences (Part 2)’.
Darwin the abolitionist
The theory of evolution is regarded as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason. Yet, on the 150th anniversary of "On the Origin of Species," new research reveals that Darwin was driven to the idea of common descent by a great moral cause
Opinion | Can Evolution Have a ‘Higher Purpose’? (Published 2016)
The biologist William D. Hamilton entertained the notion. So can we.
Evolution and the Meaning of Life
In an aside to his contribution to our recent discussion of same-sex marriage (my contribution is here), Big Think’s Peter Lawler wrote that Darwinists agree with many religiously observant people […]
Evolutionary Political Economy: Content and Methods
In this paper we present the major theoretical and methodological pillars of evolutionary political economy. We proceed in four steps. Aesthetics: In chapter 1 the immediate appeal of evolutionary ...
Deleuze and Biosemiotics: Biological Emergence, Agency, and Subjectivity in Logic of Sense and A Thousand Plateaus
Fantastically Wrong: What Darwin Really Screwed Up About Evolution
It’s hard to overstate just how brilliant and huge an idea Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was and continues to be. It absolutely rocked Victorian England, to the extent that stuffy old Victorian England could be rocked past people just barely raising their voices in polite protest. But some folks, particularly highly \[…\]
