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Science and Selection: Essays on Biological Evolution and the Philosophy of Science
One way to understand science is as a selection process. David Hull, one of the dominant figures in contemporary philosophy of science, sets out in this volume a general analysis of this selection process that applies equally to biological evolution, the reaction of the immune system to antigens, operant learning, and social and conceptual change in science. Science and Selection brings together many of Hull's most important essays on selection (some never before published) in one accessible volume.
- GenresPhilosophy
Paperback
First published November 13, 2000
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About the author
David L. Hull
17 books10 followersDavid Lee Hull was an American philosopher who was most notable for founding the field philosophy of biology. Additionally, Hull is recognized within evolutionary culture studies as contributing heavily in early discussions of the conceptualization of memetics. In addition to his academic prominence, he was well known as a gay man who fought for the rights of other gay and lesbian philosophers. Hull was partnered with Richard "Dick" Wellman, a Chicago school teacher, until Wellman's passing during the drafting of Science as Process.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 4, 2021
As the subtitle states, this is a collection of papers that Hull (co-)authored on science and the development of a more generalized notion of "selection" of evolutionary information. As the rest of Hull's career indicates, he was inspired by biological evolution as a mechanism that he argued existed in some form of loose analogy in many other spaces than in genetics. In large part this is an extended arch of a concept that challenges a particular set of popular claims in evolutionary science in order to demonstrate that Richard Dawkins created several dogmas in theory that required a response so that evolutionary theory could continue to develop. As such, Hull offers justification of the evolutionary functions of "interactors," "selection," and "information." Interactors, as opposed to Dawkins' "vehicle" intends to limit a linguistic confusion around the material/idea oriented dichotomy that Dawkins created in evolutionary theory. Selection is a property of agency and strategy that a replicated evolutionary entity has. And information is underexplored in evolutionary theory as Hull argues and so at the point of this publication (2001), he doesn't offer it a full conceptualization, but leaves it open for further scholarship.
These primary concepts lay the groundwork for Hull's justification for evolutionary epistemology and its relationship to a more general evolutionary theory. In particular, Hull focuses on "conceptual evolution" in the second part of the book, which is the evolution of culture. Namely, Hull leaned significantly on Dawkins' meme concept (which he suggests here and elsewhere is basically the same as the conception of 'the mneme' in Richard Wolfgang Semon's 1921 book of the same name.) However, Hull's disagreements with Dawkins on genetic explanations carry through to his memetic arguments. In doing so, Hull is an understudied theorist in Science of Science and Science and Technology Studies. That said, his work is more ingrained in the philosophical arguments of Popper, Kuhn, and Campbell than the French anthropology that inspired STS and the applied statistical work that inspired scientometrics and bibliometrics.
In relation to how Hull is looking to different theorists than those who empirically study under the paradigm Hull set out to form, it would seem rather obvious that most of this work feels dated to someone who studies STS or SoS. In fact, the whole last part of this book can be summed up as being theory moving towards what these areas of research do. 20 years later, most of the practical concerns in that section have been answered, however Part 1 and 2 of this book remain extremely relevant to people in information science and cultural evolution.
A heavy criticism that I have (which might be more of a stylistic way in which these kinds of books were published in the 1990s and 2000s) is that these papers weren't really edited and updated to account for things Hull came to realize were mistaken in his own thinking. I feel as though he should have at least added in footnotes of thoughts where he came to disagree with himself. Having died only 9 years after this book was published, he never seemed to be able to fully respond to some of the criticisms he was given. For example, he originally claims that "scientists are interactors in scientific evolution," but in his introduction to this book he says, 'obviously this was a mistaken belief' but does not go much further than beyond explaining a sentence or two of why this is true. In a sense, this is literally the same criticism that I have about memetics and how people in Internet memetics treat the agents in it. I could have gained so much more had Hull been able to respond to this particular concern, but the format of this genre of publication didn't enable Hull to give some exposition. Oh well, at least now I can say Hull and I have some common demons in evolutionary theory and cite them.
These primary concepts lay the groundwork for Hull's justification for evolutionary epistemology and its relationship to a more general evolutionary theory. In particular, Hull focuses on "conceptual evolution" in the second part of the book, which is the evolution of culture. Namely, Hull leaned significantly on Dawkins' meme concept (which he suggests here and elsewhere is basically the same as the conception of 'the mneme' in Richard Wolfgang Semon's 1921 book of the same name.) However, Hull's disagreements with Dawkins on genetic explanations carry through to his memetic arguments. In doing so, Hull is an understudied theorist in Science of Science and Science and Technology Studies. That said, his work is more ingrained in the philosophical arguments of Popper, Kuhn, and Campbell than the French anthropology that inspired STS and the applied statistical work that inspired scientometrics and bibliometrics.
In relation to how Hull is looking to different theorists than those who empirically study under the paradigm Hull set out to form, it would seem rather obvious that most of this work feels dated to someone who studies STS or SoS. In fact, the whole last part of this book can be summed up as being theory moving towards what these areas of research do. 20 years later, most of the practical concerns in that section have been answered, however Part 1 and 2 of this book remain extremely relevant to people in information science and cultural evolution.
A heavy criticism that I have (which might be more of a stylistic way in which these kinds of books were published in the 1990s and 2000s) is that these papers weren't really edited and updated to account for things Hull came to realize were mistaken in his own thinking. I feel as though he should have at least added in footnotes of thoughts where he came to disagree with himself. Having died only 9 years after this book was published, he never seemed to be able to fully respond to some of the criticisms he was given. For example, he originally claims that "scientists are interactors in scientific evolution," but in his introduction to this book he says, 'obviously this was a mistaken belief' but does not go much further than beyond explaining a sentence or two of why this is true. In a sense, this is literally the same criticism that I have about memetics and how people in Internet memetics treat the agents in it. I could have gained so much more had Hull been able to respond to this particular concern, but the format of this genre of publication didn't enable Hull to give some exposition. Oh well, at least now I can say Hull and I have some common demons in evolutionary theory and cite them.
January 11, 2023
Needs update
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews