Our next meeting will be Tuesday, December 4 at 7:35 p.m. in the 2nd floor lounge of the West Duke building on East Campus.
Our paper is co-written by Aryn Conrad and Carlos Mariscal and concerns the nature of evolution. Briefly: evolution is occasionally used as a metaphor to describe the change over time of culture, chemistry, and stars, among other objects. This is sometimes taken to be more than a mere metaphor– as when authors claim cultural variants actually evolve according to the human environment. But much of Darwinian evolution is written in terms of populations that have offspring with discrete generations. These are ontological commitments that do not seem to have neat analogues in other systems. Most authors have attempted to refit the data to the theory to show how their domains of interest can be reinterpreted to fit the theory. Some authors reject the analogy altogether and argue that the different sorts of evolution are fundamentally different. In this paper, Conrad and Mariscal reanalyze the theory in light of the phenomena. They accept that there is one sort of evolution, of which biology is merely a special case. They explore this account and consider what it takes to be a strong evolutionary system.