Since the nineteenth century, hominid palaeontology has offered critical information about prehistoric humans and evidence for human evolution. Human fossils discovered at a time when there was growing agreement that humans existed during the Ice Age became especially significant but also controversial. This paper argues that the techniques used to study human fossils from the 1850s to the 1870s and the way that these specimens were interpreted owed much to the anthropological examination of Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age skeletons (...) retrieved by archaeologists from prehistoric tombs throughout Europe. What emerged was the idea that a succession of distinct human races, which were identified using techniques such as craniometry, had occupied and migrated into Europe beginning in the Ice Age and continuing into the historic period. This marks a phase in the history of human palaeontology that gradually gave way to a science of palaeoanthropology that viewed hominid fossils more from the perspective of evolutionary theory and hominid phylogeny. (shrink)

The method of linguistic palaeontology has a controversial status within archaeology. According to its defenders, it promises the ability to see into the social and material cultures of prehistoric societies and uncover facts about peoples beyond the reach of archaeology. Its critics see it as essentially flawed and unscientific. Using a particular case-study, the Indo-European homeland problem, this paper attempts to discern the kinds of inference which proponents of linguistic palaeontology make and whether they can be warranted. I (...) conclude that, while the case for linguistic palaeontology has often been overstated, so has the case against it. (shrink)

In the present paper, the author aims at laying the foundations of a symbolics of technical gesture, according to the thesis that symbolic faculty is another face of the technological one, and that they are both in truth two sides of the same coin. Accordingly, the author suggests to rename the whole dimen-sion as “meta-environmentality”. The analysis is carried out on the basis of a specific comparison between Cassirer’s definition of “animal symbolicum” and its scientific consistence in the light of (...) modern palaeontology. “Animal symbol-icum” is here compared with Leroi-Gourhan’s homo technologicus, and Cassi-rer’s ideas on human identity tested starting from paleoanthropological data. The result of the inquiry lead us to recognize the urgency of integrating Cassi-rer’s argument with the primacy of the technological capacity, but a deep anal-ysis of the characterizing attributes of the latter compels us to uphold the symbolic attitude of the technological dimension. The author then sketches a basic description of the guidelines of a symbolic theory of technology, and tries to show how the basic elements of such an approach were familiar both to Cassirer and Leroi-Gourhan. As a consequence of the whole theory, the author elaborates a chronological analysis of human identity, whose basic result is the determination of the future as main temporal dimen-sion of human acting. (shrink)

Palaeontology developed as a field dependent upon comparison. Not only did reconstructing the fragmentary records of fossil organisms and placing them within taxonomic systems and evolutionary lineages require detailed anatomical comparisons with living and fossil animals, but the field also required thinking in terms of behavioural, biological and ecological analogies with modern organisms to understand how prehistoric animals lived and behaved. Yet palaeontological material often worked against making easy linkages, bringing a sense of mystery and doubt. This paper will (...) look at an animal whose study exemplified these problems: the Chalicothere. Increasingly recognized as a specific type from finds across North America and Eurasia from the early nineteenth century onwards, these prehistoric mammals showed short back legs terminating in pawed feet, long front limbs ending in sharp claws, a long flexible neck, and herbivorous grinding teeth. The Chalicothere became a significant organism within palaeontological studies, as the unexpected mix of characters made it a textbook example against the Cuvierian notion of “correlation of parts,” while explaining how the animal moved, fed and behaved became puzzling. However, rather than prevent comparisons, these actually led to comparative analogies becoming flexible and varied, with different forms of comparison being made with varying methods and degrees of confidence, and with the anatomy, movement and behaviour of giraffes, bears, horses, anteaters, primates and other organisms all serving at various points as potential models for different aspects of the animal. This paper will examine some of the attempts to reconstruct and define the Chalicotheres across a long timescale, using this to show how multiple comparisons and analogies could be deployed in a reconstructive and evolutionary science like palaeontology, and illustrate some of the limits and tensions in comparative methods, as they were used to reconstruct organisms which were thought to be incomparable to any modern animal. (shrink)

A collection of discussions of possible influences on Wittgenstein when he was writing the Tractatus, includes treatments of Reinach and Meinong.

The life and career of the Soviet scholar of myth and religion Izrail′ Grigor′evič Frank-Kamenetskij is discussed, tracing his development from a scholar working exclusively on semitology to a theorist of myth and literature. The scholar’s relationship to German philosophy and Biblical scholarship is outlined, along with his relationship to Soviet scholarship of the 1920s and 1930s. The development of the scholar’s work is related to his encounter with N. Ja. Marr in the early 1920s, and the way in which (...) Marr’s doctrine underwent considerable revisions when subjected to German philosophy and applied to narrative material is detailed. Finally the way in which attention increasingly turned to the genesis of literary plots and poetic metaphor is discussed, along with both the influence such work exerted and the enduring value of such work today. (shrink)

The palaeontological activities of British oil interests in the Middle East from about 1920 to 1970 are described briefly, with emphasis on the nature of the published results. The predominance throughout of micro-palaeontology, due to its utility, is demonstrated. It is shown that, beginning with primary descriptive work on Middle East fossil records, emphasis shifted first to studies of distinctively Middle East palaeontology, and then to results of general application world-wide. It is concluded that the palaeontology of (...) the Middle East is better known today than it would have been without this earlier work, that there has been a feed-back effect on the knowledge of the remainder of the Tethyan area in which the Middle East lies, and that this in turn has stimulated other extra-Tethyan studies as well as contributing to the mainstream of current earth-science research. (shrink)

Alexander wept at the height of his triumphs because he had no new worlds to conquer. Whitehead declared that all of philosophy had been a footnote to Plato. The Preacher exclaimed (Ecclesiastes 1:10): "Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? It hath been already of old time, which was..

Recent advances in molecular biology and microanatomy have supported homologies of body parts between vertebrates and extant invertebrate chordates, thus providing insights into the body plan of the proximate ancestor of the vertebrates. For example, this ancestor probably had a relatively complex brain and a precursor of definitive neural crest. Additional insights into early vertebrate evolution have come from recent discoveries of Lower Cambrian soft body fossils of Haikouichthys and Myllokunmingia (almost certainly vertebrates, possibly related to modern lampreys) and Yunnanozoon (...) and Haikouella (evidently stem-group vertebrates). The earliest vertebrates had an unequivocally marine origin, probably evolved mineralised pharyngeal denticles before the dermal skeleton, and evidently utilised elastic recoil of the visceral arch skeleton for suction feeding. Moreover, the new data emphasise that the advent of definitive neural crest was supremely important for the evolutionary origin of the vertebrates. BioEssays 23:142–151, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The context of discovery and collection of Siwalik fossils had far less to do with science than with the ability to effect “translations” that helped bring together a wide range of social worlds, from the Doab Canal engineers working at the foot of the Hills, surgeon-botanists at the Saharanpur Botanic Gardens, other colonial officials, the native “Hindoo” diggers and collectors, to all of whom the Siwalik Hills was a “boundary object,” a common factor that bound their lives together. In this (...) colonial scientific collecting episode pertaining to the discovery of a new field of research, cooperation between different participants is achieved not by using methods of standardization but through an emphasis on greater heterogeneity, both in terms of the “allies” enrolled and fossils collected. Heterogeneity becomes a factor of strength rather than a weakness that deters the practice of science. This essay employs sociological reflection to examine the context of discovery, collection, and justification of a significant group of fossils in India in the 1830s–40s. (shrink)

Contrary to the view maintained by many philosophers that science employs the deductive testing of hypotheses, observational natural sciences such as paleoanthropology and the earth sciences apply a scientific methodology consisting in the proposal of hypotheses which are best fitted to the available empirical data, i.e. which best explain the data. Observational natural sciences are predominantly empirical. They are grounded in observation, and they do not implement any Popperian deductive testing of hypotheses. Theoretical natural sciences such as mathematical physics also (...) apply inference to the best explanation for the introduction of significant concepts and hypotheses. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that in contemporary science, the use of abductive reasoning continues to be as effective as ever. (shrink)

Certain palaeontological observations, of which some examples are described do not fit in either a Lamarckian or Darwinian view of evolution. Both of these mechanistic theories assume small character-changes in the end stages of ontogeny, which gradually accumulate and are supposed thus to have given rise to all evolutionary progress. Palaeontology, on the other hand, teaches that the fundamental qualitative changes in the morphological plan have taken place in a saltatory manner in more or less young ontogenetic stages . (...) Only after the morphological plan has been built in a phylogenetic phase of explosive, early ontogenetic changing of type follows a phase of stable, continous evolution. It is shown that, theoretically, no other kind of fundamental change in the organisation is possible and that many, otherwise inexplicable, phenomena, the lack of transition forms, the question of ancestral stocks, the ideas of the biology of organisms as a “whole” etc., find their explanation by this means.Il y a certaines observations paléontologiques, dont l'auteur donne plusieurs exemples, et qu'on ne pourrait mettre d'accord avec un aspect larmarckienne ou darwinienne. Ce sont là des essais mécaniques d'explication, qui comptent avec de petites modifications de caractères dans les derniers stades de l'ontogénèse qui se totalisent peu à peu et devraient ainsi avoir occasionné tout progrès phylogénétique. Par contre, la paléontologie enseigne que les transformations qualitatives profondes des plans de constructions ont évolué par bonds dans les stades ontogénétiques plus ou moins juvéniles . C'est seulement après que les types ont été formés dans une phase phylogénétique de transformation explosive et juvénile, qu'une phase d'une évolution stable et continue vient s'y ajouter. On démontre que théoriquement un autre procédé d'un changement profond d'organisation est absolument impossible et que de cette manière un grand nombre de phénomènes par ailleurs incompréhensibles trouvent de la sorte leurs explications: par exemple l'absence des formes transitoires, la question des formes de racines, les conceptions de la biologie du „tout” de l'organisme etc. (shrink)

Palaeontology is an historical science comparable to prehistory, archeology, and history, in that it deals with living beings from past times. The documents needed to write the history of life are the remains of organisms contained in geological deposits from the last four billion years. They are called “fossils.”.

In both scientific and popular circles it is often said that we are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. Although the urgency of our present environmental crises is not in doubt, such claims of a present mass extinction are highly controversial scientifically. Our aims are, first, to get to the bottom of this scientific debate by shedding philosophical light on the many conceptual and methodological challenges involved in answering this scientific question, and, second, to offer new philosophical perspectives (...) on what the value of asking this question has been — and whether that value persists today. We show that the conceptual challenges in defining ‘mass extinction’, uncertainties in past and present diversity assessments, and data incommensurabilities undermine a straightforward answer to the question of whether we are in, or entering, a sixth mass extinction today. More broadly we argue that an excessive focus on the mass extinction framing can be misleading for present conservation efforts and may lead us to miss out on the many other valuable insights that Earth’s deep time can offer in guiding our future. (shrink)

The emergence of the hominids, more than five million years ago, marked the start of the human odyssey through space and time. This book deals with the last stage of this fascinating journey: the exploration of cyberspace and cybertime. Through the rapid global implementation of information and communication technologies, a new realm for human experience and imagination has been disclosed. Reversely, these postgeographical and posthistorical technologies have started to colonize our bodies and minds. Taking Homer's Odyssey and Kubrick's 2001: A (...) Space Odyssey as his starting point, the author investigates the 'informatization of the worldview', focusing on its implications for our culture-arts, religion, and science-and, ultimately, our form of life. Moving across a wide range of disciplines, varying from philosophical anthropology and palaeontology to information theory, and from astrophysics to literary, film and new media studies, the author discusses our 'cyberspace odyssey' from a reflective position beyond euphoria and nostalgia. His analysis is as profound as nuanced and deals with issues that will be high on the agenda for many decades to come. In 2003 a Dutch Edition of Cyberspace Odyssey received the Socrates Prize for the best philosophy book published in Dutch. (shrink)

It is customary to distinguish experimental from purely observational sciences. The former include physics and molecular biology, the latter astronomy and palaeontology. Experiments involve actively intervening in the course of nature, as opposed to observing events that would have happened anyway. When a molecular biologist inserts viral DNA into a bacterium in his laboratory, this is an experiment; but when an astronomer points his telescope at the heavens, this is an observation. Without the biologist’s handiwork the bacterium would never (...) have contained foreign DNA; but the planets would have continued orbiting the sun whether or not the astronomer had directed his telescope skyward. The observational/experimental distinction would probably be difficult to make precise 1, as the notion of an ‘intervention’ is not easily defined, but it is intuitively fairly clear, and is frequently invoked by scientists and historians of science. Experimentation, or ‘putting questions to nature’, is often cited as a hallmark of the modern scientific method, something that permitted the enormous advances of the last 350 years. And it is sometimes said that the social sciences lag behind the natural because controlled experiments cannot be done so readily in the former. Moreover in certain sciences, e.g. epidemiology, students are explicitly taught that experimental data is preferable to observational data, particularly for doing causal inference. So the distinction between observational and experimental science has quite wide currency, and is often regarded as methodologically significant. Surprisingly, mainstream philosophy of science has had rather little to say about the observational/experimental distinction. 2 For example, discussions of confirmation usually invoke a notion of ‘evidence’, to be contrasted with ‘theory’ or ‘hypothesis’; the aim is to understand how the evidence bears on the hypothesis. But whether this ‘evidence’ comes from observation or experiment generally plays no role in the discussion; this is true …. (shrink)

The generalized Darwinian research programme accepts physicalism, but holds that all life is purposive in character. It seeks to understand how and why all purposiveness has evolved in the universe – especially purposiveness associated with what we value most in human life, such as sentience, consciousness, person-to-person understanding, science, art, free¬dom, love. As evolution proceeds, the mechanisms of evolution themselves evolve to take into account the increasingly important role that purposive action can play - especially when quasi-Lamarckian evolution by cultural (...) means comes into existence. This programme of research brings together, into a coherent field of inquiry, aspects of such diverse fields of research as orthodox Darwinian theory (given its purposive interpretation), the study of animal behaviour, palaeontology, archaeology, history, anthropology, psycho-neurology, artificial intelligence, psychology, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, semantics, history and philosophy of science, and history and philosophy of inquiry more generally (the history and philosophy of ideas and culture). The great advantage of the generalized Darwinian research programme is that it provides a framework for understanding the deeds, achievements and experiences of people in a way that is compatible with the kind of knowledge and understanding achieved in the physical sciences, without being reducible to such knowledge and understanding. It promises to enable us to understand ourselves as a part of the biological domain without our humanity, our distinctive human value, being in any way denied: persons are not reduced to animals, and nor are animals misconceived to be persons. It holds out the hope that we can come to understand the human world as an integral part of the natural world without the meaning and value of the human world being thereby conceptually annihilated. The programme specifies in general terms what we must seek to do in order to develop a coherent understanding of nature and of ourselves which does justice to the character of both. (shrink)

Literally speaking, "Philosophy of biology" is a rather old expression. William Whewell coined it in 1840, at the very time he introduced the expression "philosophy of science". Whewell was fond of creating neologisms, like Auguste Comte, his French counterpart in the field of the philosophical reflection about science. Historians of science know that a few years earlier, in 1834, Whewell had generated a small scandal when he proposed the word "scientist" as a general term by which "the students of the (...) knowledge of the material world" could describe themselves, and distinguish themselves from artists. The term "philosopher", Whewell argued, was too wide. A new generic term, more or less equivalent to the French term "savant", was needed in order to prevent the disintegration of science that seemed to flow from its specialization in modern times.1 When Whewell first introduced the terms "philosophy of science" and "philosophy of biology" in his 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences, the latter term was merely a special branch of "philosophy of science". The expression "philosophy of science" itself had two justifications: firstly, this phrase expressed the idea that "science" remained cognitively coherent enough to justify a critical enquiry into its methodological unity and its foundation; secondly, the phrase "philosophy of science" was required in order to distinguish a properly "philosophical" enquiry from a "historical" approach to science. Although Whewell's 1840 Philosophy of the inductive sciences 2 had approximately the same chapter structure as his 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences 3 (that is, a series of chapters successively devoted to the concept of science in general, and although there was considerable overlap between the contents of the two books, then to particular sciences), its theoretical purpose was different. Clearly, Whewell was not willing to confuse the genres of history and philosophy as Auguste Comte had done in his 1830 Cours de philosophie positive.4 Note also that the word "biology" was still extremely rare in English when Whewell used it in 1840. In fact, Whewell's 1837 History of the Inductive Sciences does not make use of the word "biology": Whewell successively examines "botany", "zoology", "physiology" and "comparative antomy" as special branches of "analytico-classificatory science", then discusses palaeontology as a special case of the "palaeo-etiological sciences". Three years later, in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Whewell does use "biology" as a generic term for all the sciences dealing with life. The various sciences which were separately examined in the previous book are now collectively considered. Furthermore, the main philosophical problem raised by biology is its dual nature: biology is both nomological and a historical science. Modern philosophers of biology are generally unaware of the story of the origins of the expression "philosophy of biology", but Whewell's dual theoretical nature of biology is still a major concern for modern "philosophy of biology". (shrink)

The Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency found in Wonderful Life can be dissected into three premises: palaeontological, macro-evolutionary, and developmental. Discussions of evolutionary contingency have revolved primarily around the developmental. However, a shift in methodological practice and new palaeontological evidence subsequent to the book’s publication appears to threaten the palaeontological premise that asserts high Cambrian disparity, or, roughly, that morphological differences between the Cambrian species were high. This presents a prima facie problem: Did the Cambrian consist of enough anatomical variety (...) to fuel a different outcome upon a replay of the tape of life? I investigate the role that disparity plays in the Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency and conclude that the reduced disparity view does not undermine the argument, per se. As for the macro-evolutionary premise, Gould never offers any explicit justification for the idea that species sorting was indiscriminate or ‘lottery-like’ (though he certainly gestures at it). Putting aside the exegetical, I consider certain empirical avenues for underwriting the macro-evolutionary premise and argue that the most plausible route is to appeal to the special status of mass extinctions, a move that is not entirely unfamiliar to macro-evolutionists. That is, mass extinctions can be good sources of contingency due to their being ‘chancy’ in at least three respects. In sum, I update the palaeontological and macro-evolutionary premises as to reconstrue the Gouldian argument for evolutionary contingency in its strongest form. (shrink)

Phenotypic integration refers to the study of complex patterns of covariation among functionally related traits in a given organism. It has been investigated throughout the 20th century, but has only recently risen to the forefront of evolutionary ecological research. In this essay, I identify the reasons for this late flourishing of studies on integration, and discuss some of the major areas of current endeavour: the interplay of adaptation and constraints, the genetic and molecular bases of integration, the role of phenotypic (...) plasticity, macroevolutionary studies of integration, and statistical and conceptual issues in the study of the evolution of complex phenotypes. I then conclude with a brief discussion of what I see as the major future directions of research on phenotypic integration and how they relate to our more general quest for the understanding of phenotypic evolution within the neo-Darwinian framework. I suggest that studying integration provides a particularly stimulating and truly interdisciplinary convergence of researchers from fields as disparate as molecular genetics, developmental biology, evolutionary ecology, palaeontology and even philosophy of science. (shrink)

This is the first volume to address directly the question of the speciation of modern Homo sapiens. The subject raises profound questions about the nature of the species, our defining characteristic, and the brain changes and their genetic basis that make us distinct. The British Academy and the Academy of Medical Sciences have brought together experts from palaeontology, archaeology, linguistics, psychology, genetics and evolutionary theory to present evidence and theories at the cutting edge of our understanding of these issues.Palaeontological (...) and genetic work suggests that the transition from a precursor hominid species to modern man took place between 100,000 and 150,000 years ago. Some contributors discuss what is most characteristic of the species, focussing on language and its possible basis in brain lateralization. This work is placed in the context of speciation theory, which has remained a subject of considerable debate since the evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian theory. The timing of specific transitions in hominid evolution is discussed, as also is the question of the neural basis of language. Other contributors address the possible genetic nature of the transition, with reference to changes on the X and Y chromosomes that may account for sex differences in lateralization and verbal ability. These differences are discussed in terms of the theory of sexual selection, and with reference to the mechanisms of speciation.These essays will be vital reading for anyone interested in the nature and origins of the species, and specifically human abilities. (shrink)

Finding Time for the Old Stone Age explores a century of colourful debate over the age of our earliest ancestors. In the mid nineteenth century curious stone implements were found alongside the bones of extinct animals. Humans were evidently more ancient than had been supposed - but just how old were they? There were several clocks for Stone-Age time, and it would prove difficult to synchronize them. Conflicting timescales were drawn from the fields of geology, palaeontology, anthropology, and archaeology. (...) Anne O'Connor draws on a wealth of lively, personal correspondence to explain the nature of these arguments. The trail leads from Britain to Continental Europe, Africa, and Asia, and extends beyond the world of professors, museum keepers, and officers of the Geological Survey: wine sellers, diamond merchants, papermakers, and clerks also proposed timescales for the Palaeolithic. This book brings their stories to light for the first time - stories that offer an intriguing insight into how knowledge was built up about the ancient British past. (shrink)

Summary The development of stratigraphy started with the work of the Danish scientist Nicolaus Steno (1638–1696), who ascribed the formation of strata to the gradual deposition of sediment in the sea. In the course of the eighteenth century, his work was complemented by the independent observations of various European scientists, who recorded deposits of fossilized plants and animals in sedimentary strata. Late in the eighteenth century, William Smith (1769–1839) discovered the specificity of fossil deposits in successive strata, an observation that (...) allowed the identification of sedimentary layers by their fossil contents as well as by their lithological composition. These findings paved the way for the establishment of biostratigraphy as an additional tool for geognostic studies and later for the establishment of evolutionary biology. Stratigraphy—initially an interdisciplinary field between palaeontology and geognosy—thus achieved a transdisciplinary status as a new discipline in its own right. This paper traces the course of the concurrent development of biostratigraphy on the one hand and lithostratigraphy on the other, and their geognostic or stratigraphic application. In addition, there were the implications for naturalists asking for the history of life in the first third of the nineteenth century. The present study is based on the examples of printed and unprinted historical sources from that period, with special reference to developments in Central Europe. (shrink)

. Lamarck and Darwin agreed on the inconstancy of species and on the exclusive gradualism of evolution. Darwinism, revived as neo-Darwinism, was almost generally accepted from about 1930 till 1960. In the sixties the evolutionary importance of selection has been called in question by the neutralists. The traditional conception of the gene is disarranged by recent molecular-biological findings. Owing to the increasing confusion about the concept of genotype, this concept is reconsidered. The idea of the genotype as a cluster of (...) genes is replaced by a cybernetical interpretation of the genotype. As nature does jump, exclusive gradualism is dismissed. Saltatory evolution is a natural phenomenon, provoked by a sudden collapse of the thresholds which resist against evolution. The fossil record and the taxonomic system call for a macromutational interpretation. As Lamarck and Darwin overlooked the resistance of evolutionary thresholds, an alternative evolution model is needed, the first to be constructed on a palaeontological and taxonomic basis. (shrink)

The theme of this book is the appropriate methodology for the study of the history of life on earth. In particular, it focuses on the interplay between form and structure: the things that we might predict and model and the things we cannot predict -- the arbitrary and the contingent -- which may be as important, or even more important, than the way in which life on earth has evolved. The contributors are drawn from palaeontology, archaeology, anthropology and human (...) evolution; the timescales covered are from the development of life on earth, through human evolution to later prehistory and historic archaeology. Underpinning the theme of the book is the work of Stephen Jay Gould, who has developed a distinctive philosophy of history concerning the nature of long-term and short-term evolutionary processes, particularly stressing the interplay between structure and contingency. (shrink)

This book offers a penetrating analysis of issues raised by the perennial question, 'Are We Special?' It brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines, from astronomy and palaeontology to philosophy and theology, to explore this question. Contributors cover a wide variety of issues, including what makes humans distinct from other animals, the possibilities of artificial life and artificial intelligence, the likelihood of life on other planets, and the role of religious behavior. A variety of religious and scientific perspectives (...) are brought to bear on these matters. As a whole, the book addresses whether the issue of human uniqueness is one to which sciences and religions necessarily offer differing responses. (shrink)

Known as 'Darwin's Bulldog', the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley was a tireless supporter of the evolutionary theories of his friend Charles Darwin. Huxley also made his own significant scientific contributions, and he was influential in the development of science education despite having had only two years of formal schooling. He established his scientific reputation through experiments on aquatic life carried out during a voyage to Australia while working as an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy; ultimately he became President of (...) the Royal Society. Throughout his life Huxley struggled with issues of faith, and he coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his beliefs. This nine-volume collection of Huxley's essays, which he edited and published in 1893–4, demonstrates the wide range of his intellectual interests. Volume 8 contains public lectures given by Huxley, on themes as diverse as yeast, lobsters and palaeontology. (shrink)

Nach der Problemumgrenzung werden im zweiten Abschnitt die Möglichkeiten der aktualistischen Methode behandelt. Zuerst werden Beispiele für die Anwendung der Methode auf vorwiegend geologischem Gebiet gebracht, gegliedert in exogene und endogene Vorgänge. Wegen der gleichzeitigen Bedeutung für Geologie und Paläontologie und Biologie schliesst sich eine Besprechung der Biostratonomie an. Der letzte Teil dieses Abschnittes behandelt ausgewählte Beispiele aus der Paläontologie. Der dritte Abschnitt schliesslich behandelt die Grenzen aktualistischer Betrachtungsmethode an Hand typischer Beispiele.The theory of actualism is the most important in (...) geological and palaeontological thinking. In this paper the historical development of this theory, its possibilities and boundaries are described and elucidated by geological and palaeontological examples. (shrink)

ERNST CASSIRER AND BIOLOGY: FROM EVOLUTIONISM TO PALEOANTHROPOLOGY AS HUMAN TRANSCENDENTAL SCIENCE In the present paper I will deal with the special epistemological problem of setting the basic conditions of a transcendental science of man in the spirit of Cassirer’s critical philosophy. Bearing in mind this aim, I will particularly analyze the section Cassirer dedicated to the history and epistemology of biology in his Erkenntnisproblem IV, and I will focus, on the one hand, on the emergence of the theory of (...) types, and on the other hand, on the rise of the theory of evolution. In considering that the empirical data we now possess are pushing us towards the refutation of a too continuous concept of evolution, I will try to shed some light on how the modern palaeontology, and not properly the evolutionary theory, could represent the very basis of such a transcendental theory of man. (shrink)

Originally published in 1995, The Selected Works of George McCready Price is the seventh volume in the series, Creationism in Twentieth Century America, reissued in 2019. The volume brings together the original writings and pamphlets of George McCready Price, a leading creationist of the early antievolution crusade of the 1920s. McCready Price labelled himself the 'principal scientific authority of the Fundamentalists' and as a self-taught scientist he enjoyed more scientific repute amongst fundamentalists of the time. This interesting and unique collection (...) of original source material includes five of his writings between 1906 and 1924, challenging the new Darwinian theory of evolution and natural selection through his writings on the natural sciences. His literature covers the topics of evolution and biology and critiques biological arguments for evolution. He also wrote widely on geology offering his own alternative argument of 'flood geography' in opposition to the Darwinian theory concerning palaeontology and geology. This volume will be of interest to historians of natural history and the creationism movement, as well as scholars of religion and American history. (shrink)

Quite honestly, it is not easy to see what all the fuss is about. Sir Julian Huxley was clearly impressed. “A landmark in modern thought which we cannot afford to pass by” wrote John Stewart Collis in the Sunday Times, and the following week Arnold Toynbee in the Observer wrote: “This is a great book. If it is eclipsed by anything, it is by the spirit of the author, which shines through it”. The French reaction to the original text was (...) at least equally enthusiastic. André Rousseaux in Figaro Littéraire says: “Not since the 12th. Century has there been such a satisfying exposition of the perfect understanding between the material world and that of Christ Incarnate”. One wonders how much of the enthusiasm is due to the fact that Father Teilhard was not allowed to publish his philosophical thought in his own lifetime. The facts of his life are well known. Born in 1881, he joined the Jesuits in 1899 and was ordained. in 1912. Prehistory, geology, palaeontology, anthropology, were his chief intellectual interests, and he took his doctorate in the Sorbonne in 1922. He became professor of geology in the Institut Catholique in Paris and in 1923 went with Pére Licent S.J. to China on a palaeontological mission. The detail is given by Sir Julian in the introduction, in the course of which he pays Père Teilhard many felicitous tributes, notably that he was “a dedicated Christian priest.” On his return to France, Sir Julian tells us, “some of the ideas which he had expressed in his lectures about original sin and its relation to evolution, were regarded as unorthodox by his religious superiors, and he was forbidden to continue teaching.” He spent the next twenty years mostly in China with occasional scientific visits to India, Burma, Java, Abyssinia and the United States. The work under review was all but finished in Peking in 1938-1940. (shrink)

Florentino Ameghino was probably the most important naturalist in nineteenth-century Argentina, being a self-taught palaeontologist, whose theories rivalled the most advanced of the time in Europe and the United States. On top of his vast palaeontological discoveries, Ameghino’s fame came from his theory of the origin of the human species in the Argentine Pampas, published in 1880. The idea of Ameghino’s followers was to create a place of secular pilgrimage for the new Argentine nation to honour their own secular hero (...) or saint, as Ingenieros had called him. A few accusations by the local Catholic Church were posed with Ameghino’s followers denying them. The education of the nation was one of the greatest concerns that Catholics had, and some saw in the positivist liberal position a rejection of the education on the virtues required for the building of a nationally educated society in Argentina for the twentieth century. -/- . (shrink)

Recent controversy about the use of the vertebrate fossil record for external calibration of molecular clocks centers on two issues, the number of dates used for calibration and the reliability of the fossil calibration date. Viewing matters from a palaeontological perspective, we propose three qualitative, phylogenetic criteria that can be used within a comparative framework for the selection of well-constrained calibration dates from the vertebrate fossil record. On the basis of these criteria, we identify three highly suitable new fossil calibration (...) dates for molecular clock estimates: the lungfish–tetrapod split (between 419 and 408 Ma), the bird–crocodile split (between 251 and 243 Ma), and the alligator–caiman split (between 71 and 66 Ma). Together with our previously suggested bird–lizard split (between 252 and 257 Ma), these four fossil dates span a range of very different ages. They are, in our opinion, more suitable for molecular clock calibration than the traditionally used mammal–bird split, which is less well constrained. We plea for closer interactions between paleontologists and molecular biologists in studying the timescale of vertebrate evolution. BioEssays 27:1069–1075, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)