Evolution: A View from the 21st Century James Shapiro Upper Saddle River, NJ: FT Press Science, 2011

Introduction Nothing in biology makes sense, Dobzhansky famously claimed, except in the light of evolution. Without qualification the statement is surely an exaggeration, but evolutionary issues loom sufficiently large in biology to cast a shadow that extends well beyond the discipline. They have long absorbed the energies of philosophers of biology, for instance. If we see evolution as the quintessence of biologicality, the process that in some sense lies at farthest remove from the physical sciences, then it is scarcely surprising that it was a central player in the consolidation from roughly the 1970s onwards of a biologically oriented branch of philosophy of science, with Hull one of its foundational texts. To notions of biological fundamentality and remoteness from physics, however, can be added – perhaps a little awkwardly – another idea of comparable plausibility: that evolution was also the biological topic most consonant with the formalist outlook of positivist traditions in mainstream philosophy of science. For in biological evolution we apparently have a phenomenon in relation to which techniques of mathematical analysis and theory construction have found ready and often fruitful application. To appreciate the point one need only think of the work of Fisher, Wright and Haldane in population genetics, and the subsequent development of mathematical biology.