Review of philosophy professor Daniel C. Dennett's book Freedom Evolves
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes that are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Different characteristics tend to exist within any given population as a result of mutations, genetic recombination and other sources of genetic variation. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on these variations, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or rare within a population. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organization, including the levels of species, individual organisms and molecules.
Articles
Review of philosophy professor Daniel C. Dennett's book Freedom Evolves
Review of the book Herbert Spencer (2013) by Alberto Mingardi, volume 18 of the "Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers" series
Traces Spencer's contributions to the fields now known as anthropology and sociology and how his concept of cultural evolution was developed
Which, then, is the most rational hypothesis?—that of special creation which has neither a fact to support it nor is even definitely conceivable: or that of modification, which is not only definitely conceivable, but is countenanced by the habitudes of every existing organism?Darwin and Wallace were both very impressed by this article.
Review of the second edition of Disturber of the Peace: The Life of H.L. Mencken by William Manchester
Interviews
Topics discussed include: ethics, science and philosophy, Karl Popper and the scientific method, Ayn Rand and epistemology, consciousness, relativism and the academic left and Nozick himself
RN: Evolution plays a large role in my discussion of necessary truths and metaphysical truths, and I ask "why would evolution have endowed us with such powerful cognitive capacities to know about all possibilities?" Maybe evolution just gives us 'good enough' theories like Euclidean geometry that are approximately true and able to get us around the world, but [then] we discover that they're not strictly speaking accurate ... I ...think that the capacities we have, including of apprehending a truth, have been strongly shaped, not to mention created, by evolution.
Books
by Richard Dawkins, 27 Oct 2004
- ISBN 0618005838
: Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin, 2004
- ISBN 061861916X
: Paperback, Mariner Books, 2005
by Richard Dawkins, 1987
- ISBN 0393315703
: Paperback, W. W. Norton & Company, reissue edition, 1996
by Richard Dawkins, 1976
- ISBN 0192177737
: Hardcover, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1989
- ISBN 0199291144
: Hardcover, Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2006
- ISBN 0192860925
: Paperback, Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 1990
- ISBN 0199291152
: Paperback, Oxford University Press, 3rd edition, 2006
The introductory paragraph uses material from the Wikipedia article "Evolution" as of 9 Oct 2018, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.