Evolution Now: A Century after Darwin

A Century of Evolution: Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) Mayr’s view of Darwin: was Darwin wrong about speciation?

We commonly read or hear that Charles Darwin successfully convinced the world about evolution and natural selection, but did not answer the question posed by his most famous book, ‘On the Origin of Species . . .’. Since the 1940s, Ernst Mayr has been one of the people who argued for this point of view, claiming that Darwin was not able to answer the question of speciation because he failed to d...

On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution

Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical ...

Darwin and the evolution of flowers.

Evolution and evolvability: celebrating Darwin 200.

The concept of 'evolvability' is increasingly coming to dominate considerations of evolutionary change. There are, however, a number of different interpretations that have been put on the idea of evolvability, differing in the time scales over which the concept is applied. For some, evolvability characterizes the potential for future adaptive mutation and evolution. Others use evolvability to c...

Darwin and the popularization of evolution.

Evolution was popularized from 1860 to 1900 in the USA and Britain in a wide variety of media. Here I investigate traditional texts associated with the intellectual elite, including philosophical or scientific monographs, sermons, and published lectures. Evolution was rarely popularized in ways that reflected Darwin's major contribution to biology, his theory of natural selection. This meant th...