JHE355H1

History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology

An examination of the place of the organism in evolutionary theory from the early 1900s to the present. Biology is the science of living things, and yet, paradoxically, living things--organisms--have been comprehensively left out of the Modern Synthesis theory of evolution that developed in the twentieth century. This course surveys the reasons--historical, philosophical and empirical--for the marginalization of organisms from evolutionary theory. It examines the ways in which evolutionary developmental biology attempts to restore the organisms to a central place in evolutionary biology. Offered by faculty in the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.