Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the

How should the concept of evidence be understood? And how does the concept of evidence apply to the controversy about creationism as well as to work in evolutionary biology about natural selection and common ancestry? In this rich and wide-ranging book, Elliott Sober investigates general questions about probability and evidence and shows how the answers he develops to those questions apply to the specifics of evolutionary biology. Drawing on a set of fascinating examples, he analyzes whether claims about intelligent design are untestable; whether they are discredited by the fact that many adaptations are imperfect; how evidence bears on whether present species trace back to common ancestors; how hypotheses about natural selection can be tested, and many other issues. His book will interest all readers who want to understand philosophical questions about evidence and evolution, as they arise both in Darwin's work and in contemporary biological research.

List of figures	p. ix
Preface	p. xv
Acknowledgements	p. xix
Evidence	p. 1
Royall's three questions	p. 3
The ABCs of Bayesianism	p. 8
Likelihoodism	p. 32
Frequentism I: Significance tests and probabilistic modus tollens	p. 48
Frequentism II: Neyman-Pearson hypothesis testing	p. 58
A test case: Stopping rules	p. 72
Frequentism III: Model-selection theory	p. 78
A second test case: Reasoning about coincidences	p. 104
Concluding comments	p. 107
Intelligent design	p. 109
Darwin and intelligent design	p. 109
Design arguments and the birth of probability theory	p. 113
William Paley: The stone, the watch, and the eye	p. 118
From probabilities to likelihoods	p. 120
Epicureanism and Darwin's theory	p. 122
Three reactions to Paley's design argument	p. 125
The no-designer-worth-his-salt objection to the hypothesis of intelligent design	p. 126
Popper's criterion of falsifiability	p. 129
Sharpening the likelihood argument	p. 131
The principle of total evidence	p. 136
Some strengths of the likelihood formulation of the design argument	p. 139
The Achilles heel of the likelihood argument	p. 141
Paley's stone	p. 147
Testability	p. 148
The relationship of the organismic design argument to Darwinism	p. 154
The relationship of Paley's design argument to contemporary intelligent-design theory	p. 154
The relationship of the design argument to the argument from evil	p. 164
The design argument as an inductive sampling argument	p. 167
Model selection and intelligent design	p. 177
The politics and legal status of the intelligent-design hypothesis	p. 184
Darwinism, theism, and religion	p. 186
A prediction	p. 188
Natural selection	p. 189
Selection plus drift (SPD) versus pure drift (PD)	p. 192
Comparing the likelihoods of the SPD and PD hypotheses	p. 199
Filling in the blanks	p. 201
What if the fitness function of the SPD hypothesis contains a valley?	p. 212
Selection versus drift for a dichotomous character	p. 215
A breath of fresh air: Change the explanandum	p. 219
Model selection and unification	p. 226
Reichenbach's principle of the common cause	p. 230
Testing selection against drift with molecular data	p. 235
Selection versus phylogenetic inertia	p. 243
The chronological test	p. 253
Concluding comments	p. 261
Common ancestry	p. 264
Modus Darwin	p. 265
What the common ancestry hypothesis asserts	p. 268
A Bayesian decomposition	p. 275
A single character: Species matching and species mismatching	p. 277
More than one character	p. 294
Concluding comments on the evidential significance of similarity	p. 310
Evidence other than similarity	p. 314
Phylogenetic inference: The contest between likelihood and cladistic parsimony	p. 332
Conclusion	p. 353
Bibliography	p. 368
Index	p. 385
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science

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