Marjorie Grene, ?tTwo Evolutionary Theories? and modern evolutionary theory

Synthese ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 92 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niles Eldredge
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Modern Evolutionary Theory

scholarly journals The Modern Evolutionary Theory

1996 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Mayr
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Modern Evolutionary Theory

scholarly journals Gender and evolutionary theory in workplace health promotion

2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (8) ◽  
pp. 893-905
Author(s):  
Erika Björklund ◽  
Jan Wright
Keyword(s):  
Health Promotion ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Workplace Health Promotion ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Stone Age ◽  
Workplace Health ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Health Promotion Interventions ◽  
Health Promotion Practice

Objective: Ideas from evolutionary theories are increasingly taken up in health promotion. This article seeks to demonstrate how such a trend has the potential to embed essentialist and limiting stereotypes of women and men in health promotion practice. Design: We draw on material gathered for a larger ethnographic study that examined how discourses of health were re-contextualised in four workplace health promotion interventions in Sweden. Method: This study provided the opportunity to investigate how ideas derived from evolutionary theories produced particular constructs of the healthy employee. A Foucauldian notion of governmentality was used to examine the rationalities, truths and techniques that informed what we have called a ‘Stone Age’ discourse as these contributed to shaping the desires, actions and beliefs of lecturers and participants in the interventions. Results: We focus on one intervention which used the Stone Age discourse as an organising idea to constitute differences in women’s and men’s health through references to women as gatherers and men as hunters, thereby positioning men as the physical, emotional and mental ideal and women as the problematic and lacking ‘other’. Conclusion: The paper concludes by discussing the implications of such ideas about health and gender for interventions aimed at changing behaviour and lifestyles.

The Evolution of Cultural Entities

2002 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Human Sciences ◽  
Research Traditions ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Modern Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Cultural Entities

Ever since Charles Darwin, scholars have noted that cultural entities such as languages, laws, firms, and theories seem to ‘evolve’ through sequences of variation, selection and replication, in many ways just like living organisms. This book considers whether this comparison is ‘just a metaphor’, or whether modern evolutionary theory can help us to understand the dynamics of different cultural domains. The ‘evolutionary paradigm of rationality’ has a significant role to play throughout the human sciences, but raises complex issues in every cultural context where it is applied. By fostering discussion between scholars from a wide range of research traditions, this book aims to influence the evolution of all of them.

scholarly journals A Comprehensive Evolutionary Theory Deduced from Thermodynamics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ji-Ming Chen
Keyword(s):  
Amino Acids ◽  
Origin Of Life ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Sympatric Speciation ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Significant Progress ◽  
Animal Group ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Group Evolution

Studies on evolution have made significant progress in multiple disciplines, but evolutionary theories remain incomplete, controversial, and inadequate in explaining origin of life and macroevolution. Here we create the concept of carbon-based entities (CBEs) which include methane, amino acids, proteins, bacteria, animals, plants, and other entities containing carbon atoms. We then deduce the driving force, the progressive mechanisms, and the major steps of CBE evolution from thermodynamics. We hence establish a comprehensive evolutionary theory termed the CBE evolutionary theory (CBEET), which suggests that evolution is driven hierarchy-wise by thermodynamics and favors fitness and diversity. The CBEET provides novel explanations for origin of life (abiogenesis), macroevolution, natural selection, sympatric speciation, and animal group evolution in a comprehensive and comprehensible way. It elucidates that collaboration, altruism, obeying rules with properly increased freedom are important throughout the CBE evolution. It refutes thoroughly the notion that negative entropy (negentropy) leads to biological order which is distinct from thermodynamic order. It integrates with research advances in multiple disciplines and links up laws of physics, evolution in biology, and harmonious development of human society.

scholarly journals Non-genetic inheritance in evolutionary theory - the importance of plant studies

2015 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Robertson ◽  
Christina Richards
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Process ◽  
Epigenetic Inheritance ◽  
Causal Role ◽  
Epigenetic Variation ◽  
Epigenetic Mechanisms ◽  
Epigenetic Machinery ◽  
Evolutionary Studies ◽  
Modern Evolutionary Theory

AbstractEmerging evidence points to a causal role for epigenetic variation in evolution, but evolutionary biologists have been reluctant to incorporate epigenetics into modern evolutionary theory. Part of this ambivalence comes from the assumption that epigenetic inheritance is only relevant to the evolution of plants, which is perpetuated by a comparative lack of evolutionary studies in animals. However, although most of the evidence for epigenetic inheritance comes from plants, plants and animals share many homologous epigenetic mechanisms, and plants provide a more tractable system for investigating the causal role of epigenetic mechanisms underlying phenotypic variation and its relationship with fitness. The insights from studies of epigenetic inheritance in plants may be applicable across a broad range of taxa once we establish commonalities and differences in epigenetic machinery. In this paper we present evidence for a role of epigenetic mechanisms in the evolutionary process and discuss common objections to incorporating epigenetics into evolutionary theory. This review is not exhaustive, but is meant to demonstrate that epigenetic inheritance can be incorporated into current evolutionary theory without overhauling its foundations.

scholarly journals If ageing is a disease, then life is also a disease

2020 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-315
Author(s):  
Piotr Paweł Chmielewski ◽  
Bartłomiej Strzelec
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Genetic Disease ◽  
Gene Mutations ◽  
Pathological Process ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Pleiotropic Gene ◽  
Genetically Determined ◽  
Modern Evolutionary Theory

AbstractAgeing is distinct from a disease. Sound arguments have been adduced to explain that senescence cannot be understood as a pathological process. Nevertheless, this distinction is believed to be artificial (Holliday 1995), and other eminent researchers argue that the senescence-pathology dichotomy is also misleading. Recently, it has been suggested that ageing should be classified as a complex pathological syndrome or a ‘pre-disease’ that is treatable. Proponents of this new paradigm argue that: (i) modern evolutionary theory predicts that ‘although organismal senescence is not an adaptation, it is genetically programmed’, (ii) ‘insofar as it is genetically determined, organismal senescence is a form of genetic disease’ (Janac et al. 2017) and (iii) ‘ageing is something very much like a genetic disease: it is a set of pathologies resulting from the action of pleiotropic gene mutations’ (Gems 2015). Also new generations of researchers, free of these traditional shackles, come with the belief that it is time to classify ageing as a disease, as the distinction between normal dysfunction and abnormal dysfunction is not completely clear and should be abandoned. Although they marshal their arguments in a convincing manner, persuasive counterarguments can be mounted. Here, the senescence-pathology dichotomy is critically discussed. A deeper analysis of this subject reveals the underlying problem of undefined terminology in science.

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