Abstract
The ideas Darwin published in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in the nineteenth century continue to have a major impact on our current understanding of the world in which we live and the place that humans occupy in it. Darwin’s theories constitute the core of the contemporary life sciences, and elicit enduring fascination as a potentially unifying basis for various branches of biology and the biomedical sciences. They can be used to understand the biological ground of human cognition, common behavioral patterns and disorders, and psychopathology more generally in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. Perhaps the best known expression of this fact is Dobzhansky’s famous dictum that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky T. Am Zool 4:443–452, 1964: 449; Am Biol Teach 35:125–129, 1973: 125), and given that all human behavior supervenes on some biological basis, evolutionary thinking has a vast scope even just in this regard.
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Notes
- 1.
The volume originates in the expert workshop “Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines. Problems and Perspectives in Generalized Darwinism”, which was organized by the volume editors at the Institut des Systèmes Complexes in Paris in October 2021. This expert workshop was the first event that was organized in the context of the project “The Explanatory Scope of Generalized Darwinism: Towards Criteria for Evolutionary Explanations Outside Biology” (GenDar), a research project located at the Institut d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques, CNRS / Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the Institut für Philosophie, Leibniz Universität Hannover, and jointly funded by the Agence Nationale de la Récherche (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The GenDar project closely collaborates with the Evolution and Social Science group at the University of Missouri, and the expert workshop in Paris was a joint event of this collaboration.
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du Crest, A., Valković, M., Ariew, A., Desmond, H., Huneman, P., Reydon, T.A.C. (2023). Generalizing Darwinism as a Topic for Multidisciplinary Debate. In: du Crest, A., Valković, M., Ariew, A., Desmond, H., Huneman, P., Reydon, T.A.C. (eds) Evolutionary Thinking Across Disciplines. Synthese Library, vol 478. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33358-3_1
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