Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T23:01:52.679Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Pluralism and Sex: More Than a Pragmatic Issue

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Carla Fehr
Carla Fehr*
Affiliation:
Iowa State University
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author. Department of Philosophy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011; email: cfehr@iastate.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The evolution of sexual reproduction is a case of explanatory pluralism, meaning that there is more than one explanation for this phenomenon. I use the concept of a domain to more clearly explicate the various explananda that can be found in this case. I argue that although pluralism with respect to some types of domains can be decreased using van Fraassen's pragmatics of explanation, there remains an important class of domain, an orthogonal domain, for which this is not the case.

Type
Philosophy of Biology and Cognition
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 68 , Issue S3: No. 3 Supplement: Proceedings of the 2000 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers Sep., 2001 , 2001 , pp. S237 - S249
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 2001

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

‡

Thanks to Robert Brandon and Kevin de Laplante for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

References

Beatty, John (1997), “Why Do Biologists Argue Like They Do?”, Philosophy of Science 64 (Proceedings): S432–S443.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Harris. Henry Byerly. Fred Hopf, and Michod, Richard (1985a), “Genetic Damage, Mutation, and the Evolution of Sex”, Science 229:1277–1281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bernstein, Harris. Henry Byerly. Fred Hopf, and Michod, Richard (1985b), “DNA Repair and Complementation: The Major Factors in the Origin and Maintenance of Sex”, in The Origin and Evolution of Sex. New York: A. R. Liss, 29–45.Google Scholar
Dybdahl, Mark and Lively, Curtis (1995a), “Host Parasite Interactions: Infection of Common Clones in Natural Populations of a Freshwater Snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum)”. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B 260:99–103.Google Scholar
Dybdahl, Mark and Lively, Curtis (1995b), “Diverse, Endemic and Polyphyletic Clones in Mixed Populations of a Freshwater Snail (Potamopyrgus antipodarum)”, Journal of Evolutionary Biology 8:385–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fehr, Carla (2001), “The Evolution of Sex: Domains and Explanatory Pluralism”, Biology and Philosophy, forthcoming.CrossRefGoogle Scholar