David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Science and Education 22 (2):173-188 (2013)
Adaptation is one of the central concepts in evolutionary theory, which nonetheless has been given different definitions. Some scholars support a historical definition of adaptation, considering it as a trait that is the outcome of natural selection, whereas others support an ahistorical definition, considering it as a trait that contributes to the survival and reproduction of its possessors. Finally, adaptation has been defined as a process, as well. Consequently, two questions arise: the first is a philosophical one and focuses on what adaptation actually is; the second is a pedagogical one and focuses on what science teachers and educators should teach about it. In this article, the various definitions of adaptation are discussed and their uses in some textbooks are presented. It is suggested that, given elementary students’ intuitions about purpose and design in nature and secondary students’ teleological explanations for the origin of adaptations, any definition of adaptation as a trait should include some information about its evolutionary history.
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
No references found.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
J. T. Wiebes (1982). L'adaptation Evolutive. Acta Biotheoretica 31 (4).
Timothy Shanahan (2004). The Evolution of Darwinism: Selection, Adaptation, and Progress in Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge University Press.
Robert C. Richardson (1996). The Prospects for an Evolutionary Psychology: Human Language and Human Reasoning. [REVIEW] Minds and Machines 6 (4):541-557.
Marlene Zuk (2002). A Straw Man on a Dead Horse: Studying Adaptation Then and Now. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (4):533-534.
Russil Durrant & Brian D. Haig (2001). How to Pursue the Adaptationist Program in Psychology. Philosophical Psychology 14 (4):357 – 380.
Bence Nanay (2005). Can Cumulative Selection Explain Adaptation? Philosophy of Science 72 (5):1099-1112.
Leigh Van Valen (2009). How Ubiquitous is Adaptation? A Critique of the Epiphenomenist Program. Biology and Philosophy 24 (2):267-280.
Luís R. Eleutério (2012). Mechanism of Stimulation: An Alternative Explanation for Genetic Variation in the Evolutionary Theory. World Futures 68 (1):49 - 68.
Owen Flanagan (2000). Dreaming is Not an Adaptation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (6):936-939.
Samir Okasha & Cedric Paternotte (2012). Group Adaptation, Formal Darwinism and Contextual Analysis. Journal of Evolutionary Biology 25 (6):1127–1139.
David Sloan Wilson (1990). Species of Thought: A Comment on Evolutionary Epistemology. Biology and Philosophy 5 (1):37-62.
Ronald Munson (1971). Biological Adaptation. Philosophy of Science 38 (2):200-215.
Henkjan Honing & Annemie Ploeger (2012). Cognition and the Evolution of Music: Pitfalls and Prospects. Topics in Cognitive Science 4 (4):513-524.
D. Turner (2000). The Functions of Fossils: Inference and Explanation in Functional Morphology. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 31 (1):193-212.
Added to index2012-01-01
Total downloads6 ( #202,094 of 1,098,996 )
Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #114,795 of 1,098,996 )
How can I increase my downloads?