Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology, Second Edition

"This book has no competition whatsoever. There is no anthology which even attempts to cover this ground.... It will, I believe, become the standard text." -- Richard Boyd, Cornell University

There has been considerable and lively debate in philosophy of biology over the decade since the first edition of this anthology appeared. Changes and additions in the new edition reflect the ways in which the subject has broadened and deepened on several fronts; more than half of the chapters are new. In all, twenty-three selections take up fitness, function and teleology, adaptationism, units of selection, essentialism and population thinking, species, systematic philosophies, phylogenetic inference, reduction of Mendelian genetics to molecular biology, ethics and sociobiology, and cultural evolution and evolutionary epistemology.

Elliott Sober is Hans Reichenbach Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.