Resumen de Precis of “Did Darwin write the Origin backwards?” Philosophical essays on Darwin’s theory
This book consists of four essays on Darwin’s theory of evolution and three postscripts on contemporary evolutionary theory. The main questions that the chapters address are: (1) How are common ancestry and natural selection related to each other in Darwin’s theory? (2) What were Darwin’s views about group selection and the evolution of altruism? (3) Why did Darwin change his mind about sex ratio, and how are his ideas related to the creationism that preceded him and the evolutionary biology that followed? (4) Do Darwin’s theory and modern evolutionary theory obey the principle of methodological naturalism and ought they to do so? The book is philosophical because it focuses on the logic of arguments. I attend closely to Darwin’s texts, but I sometimes use tools that Darwin did not have available. These include ideas from contemporary biology and from probability theory. I see merit in this approach because it helps elucidate Darwin’s theory. Darwin pointed to the need for this sort of ...
