Friday, July 23, 2004

Eccovi alcune riflessioni sul pensiero scientifico di S.J. Gould 

Grantham T (in press)
Constraints and spandrels in Gould’s Structure of evolutionary theory
Biology and Philosophy, 2004

Mark E. Borrello
Essay review.
Radicals and revolution . The structure of evolutionary theory Stephen Jay Gould; Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA & London, 2002, pp. xxi+1433
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences . Volume 35, Issue 1 , March 2004, Pages 209-216

Marshall J.A.R.
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould
Artificial Life, 1 March 2004, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 113-115

Kitcher P.
Evolutionary Theory and the Social uses of Biology
Biology and Philosophy, January 2004, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 1-15(15)
Stephen Jay Gould is rightly remembered for many different kinds of contributions to our intellectual life. I focus on his criticisms of uses of evolutionary ideas to defend inegalitarian doctrines and on his attempts to expand the framework of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I argue that his important successes in the former sphere are applications of the idea of local critique, grounded in careful attention to the details of the inegalitarian proposals. As he became more concerned with the second project, Gould was inclined to suggest that the abuses of evolutionary ideas rested on an insufficiently expanded Darwinism. I suggest that what is valuable in Gould's contribution to general evolutionary theory is the original claim about punctuated equilibrium (advanced, with Niles Eldredge in1972), and the careful defense of that claim through the accumulation of paleontological evidence. I try to show that the more ambitious program of a hierarchical expansion of neo-Darwinism is misguided, and that the endeavor to go beyond local critique fails

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