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Charles Pence: The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic

Academic Press: London 2022, 190 pp., €116,63, ISBN 978-0-323-91291-4

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Notes

  1. Pence specifies that Darwin introduced natural selection into his theory of evolution “with barely any reference to mathematics whatsoever” (p. 2). Although this absence of mathematics in Darwin’s book is a fact, certain scholars have wondered whether his way of thinking could somehow be interpreted as “statistical” (see Ariew 2022).

  2. Pence names and analyzes researchers whose works contributes to this “equal footing”: Castle, Jennings, Johannsen, Punnett and East. He makes special mention to George Udny Yule who, though harshly criticized by Weldon himself, above all others actively attempted to show how “biometric analysis can, at least in certain situations, be applied to Mendelian phenomena” (p. 117).

  3. In fact, Pence reminds us that Fisher’s work also introduces important differences from the past, such as moving from the study of actual populations (“‘actualist’ ontology of extant organisms and populations” (p. 171); workhorse of biometrics) to a study of “counterfactual [and infinite] populations in a space of evolutionary possibilities” (p. 171). However, Pence stresses that these innovations were possible thanks to the conceptual and methodological context that biometrics had built over previous years.

References

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  1. Université Paris Cité, 1 - LabEx Who Am I?, Paris, France

    Marco Casali

  2. IHPST, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, CNRS, Paris, France

    Marco Casali

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  1. Marco Casali
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Correspondence to Marco Casali.

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Casali, M. Charles Pence: The Rise of Chance in Evolutionary Theory: A Pompous Parade of Arithmetic. J Gen Philos Sci 55, 159–164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-023-09656-3

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