Browsing by Author "Brandon, Robert"

At the end of the nineteenth century Charles Sanders Peirce wrote that "chance begets order" - indeterministic or `chancy' processes can underlie orderly and seemingly deterministic processes. Indeed, Peirce argues that indeterminism is the seed of all order in the natural world. The dissertation explores this theme in three parts. The first chapter reconstructs and elaborates Peirce's objections against necessitarianism, the position that all natural laws are perfectly orderly, deterministic. The second chapter examines and elaborates Ronald Aylmer Fisher's sophisticated analogy between gas models from statistical mechanics and his own population genetics models. The final chapter treats a contemporary indeterministic account of biological fitness and examines several points on which intuitions from deterministic theories misinterpret this quintessentially indeterministic position. The dissertation motivates an indeterministic theory of natural law and reinvigorates its implications for hierarchical models of the natural world.

My dissertation applies models borrowed from game theory to the evolution of language and the emergence of meaning. To justify the use of such models, I begin in Chapter 1: Quantitative Methods in Philosophy by examining the prevalence of modeling techniques and other quantitative methods in philosophy. I then argue that reliance on quantitative methods is beneficial in some philosophical fields. Chapter 2: The Constructive Empiricist's Dilemma turns to computer models. In this chapter, I argue that only scientific realism can justify the use of computational models that assess the reliability of inference methods. This is surprising, given that modelers’ urge to idealize and simplify is often claimed to be at odds with scientific realism. In Chapter 3: Cheap Talk in Structured Populations, I present a model for the evolution of signaling and show both analytically and with computer simulations that signaling evolves with significantly lower signal cost if the population is spatially structured. Drawing on similar models of signaling, I examine in Chapter 4: Ambiguous Signals, Partial Beliefs, and Propositional Content the part that propositions are supposed to play in explanations of rational behavior. Simply put, my claim is that propositions cannot account for the behavior of rational agents.

Our only example of life is that of Earth- which is a single lineage. We know very little about what life would look like if we found evidence of a second origin. Yet there are some universal features of geometry, mechanics, and chemistry that have predictable biological consequences. The surface-to-volume ratio property of geometry, for example, places a maximum limit on the size of unassisted cells in a given environment. This effect is universal, interesting, not vague, and not arbitrary. Furthermore, there are some problems in the universe that life must invariably solve if it is to persist, such as resistance to radiation, faithful inheritance, and resistance to environmental pressures. At least with respect to these universal problems, some solutions must consistently emerge.

In this dissertation, I develop and defend my own account of universal biology, the study of non-vague, non-arbitrary, non-accidental, universal generalizations in biology. In my account, a candidate biological generalization is assessed in terms of the assumptions it makes. A successful claim is accepted only if its justification necessarily makes reference to principles of evolution and makes no reference to contingent facts of life on Earth. In this way, we can assess the robustness with which generalizations can be expected to hold. I contend that using a stringent-enough causal analysis, we are able to gather insight into the nature of life everywhere. Life on Earth may be our single example of life, but this is merely a reason to be cautious in our approach to life in the universe, not a reason to give up altogether.

This dissertation presents some of the first work written and published on the Zero Force Evolutionary Law (McShea and Brandon 2010). It is a collection of four philosophy of biology papers, which together, illustrate the importance of the Zero Force Evolutionary Law (ZFEL) spanning evolutionary studies. In particular, this dissertation includes issues in the history of philosophy of science (chapter 1), group formation and network theory (chapter 2), biological hierarchy and the major transitions in evolution (chapter 3), and the Price equation and quantifying evolutionary change (chapter 4). While these four chapters may differ in focus, they make the same general claim: evolutionary methods and explanations are improved when the underlying tendency of biological systems is characterized correctly as exhibiting increasing variance.