An Epistemology of Contingency: chance and determinism at the origin of life
نویسندگان
چکیده
In this article we provide an epistemological analysis of three uses of the concept of contingency in biology. On the basis of this analysis we propose a heuristic solution to the issue of contingency versus determinism in the domain of studies on the origin of life, which makes it possible to approach this problem from a scientific point of view rather than by recurring to belief.
منابع مشابه
Social and Ethical Responsibility against Social Determinism
Background: Because of the highlighted role of ethical responsibility in social and individual life, it is looked as an important issue in ethics area. Social responsibility that is defined as a sub-factor of ethical responsibility will have such an important place. What is discussed in responsibility discussions commonly is the “human will”. Responsibility is more based on the free will. In th...
متن کاملMorphological Diversity and the Roles of Contingency, Chance and Determinism in African Cichlid Radiations
BACKGROUND Deterministic evolution, phylogenetic contingency and evolutionary chance each can influence patterns of morphological diversification during adaptive radiation. In comparative studies of replicate radiations, convergence in a common morphospace implicates determinism, whereas non-convergence suggests the importance of contingency or chance. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS The endem...
متن کاملWonderful Life Revisited: Chance and contingency in the Ediacaran-Cambrian radiation
In his 1989 book Wonderful Life Stephen Jay Gould employed the fossils of the middle Cambrian Burgess Shale to argue for a pervasive role of contingency in the history of life. But Gould wrote at the advent of an explosion of research in the Ediacaran-Cambrian diversification of animals, before ‘tree-thinking’ had made great inroads into the reconstruction of phylogeny, and with just the first ...
متن کاملPhilosophical Reflections in Transcendental Modernism and Religious Politics
The current article believes that the intrinsic interdependence of modernity, science and secularism is an ideological non-universal interdependence but a hegemonic discourse. This kind of explanation and consideration is built upon a collection of ontological, epistemological, anthropological, methodological and evaluative sources. Based on two laws of "interchangeability of existence and scie...
متن کاملGissing’s Zolaist determinism and the heroines of The Nether World
Zola, in his book The Experimental Novel, introduces the aspects of what is now called the naturalistic novel. Later on, Zola’s ideas were exported to the English literature and the works of English novelists. George Gissing is one of the English authors who have successfully adopted the premises and the key elements of Zola’s naturalistic novel in their work. This paper deals with the naturali...
متن کاملذخیره در منابع من
با ذخیره ی این منبع در منابع من، دسترسی به آن را برای استفاده های بعدی آسان تر کنید
عنوان ژورنال:
دوره شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2011