Historical laws in modern biology

✍ Scribed by Paul Thompson

• Book ID: 104622868
• Publisher: Springer
• Year: 1983
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 510 KB
• Volume: 32
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0001-5342
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00047490

✦ Synopsis

Several important analyses of the structure of evolutionary explanation have explicitly or implicitly required that historical laws be among the explanans statements. The required historical laws take the form of a generalization which relates some property or event to a developmental sequence of properties or events. The thesis of this paper is that historical laws of this kind are precluded by modern biological theory and, hence, analysis of evolutionary explanation within modern biology that require such laws are defective.