Wilkins, J.S. (2008). The adaptive landscape of science. Biology & Philosophy. DOI: 10.1007/s10539-008-9125-y
This is a paper returning to my roots - the evolutionary view of scientific theory change. My first paper, back in the Jurassic, was a rough and ready attempt to make sense of David Hull's view of science as a semantic conception of theories. In the light of problems such as suboptimality in evolution, many people decided that science could not be just an evolutionary (in the sense of selectionist) process because science did not require the sort of random wanderings in order to reach more optimal solutions that species, gene pools and artificial intelligence systems needed, and was always progressive. In the light of recent work by Sergey Gavrilets, however, the need for the "descent into the adaptive valley" became otiose. Gavrilets showed that for genomes (problem spaces) of sufficiently high dimensionality, there was almost always a "nearly neutral corridor" of high fitness between one solution and another. So I argue that in the light of Gavrilets' work, we no longer need to oppose selection and drift, in science or in biology (see my earlier paper on speciation).
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$32.00
Can you save me some dollars and e-mail it to me?
I thought 'Biology and Philosophy' would be Open Access by now....
Hi John,
would you mind mailing it to me aswell?
Thanx!
Nice paper - I need to read it again and pull Hull off the shelf.
I am curious about the idea that science is progressive. I could advocate we are losing knowledge as we gain it - natural history knowledge possessed by indigenous peoples is lost as languages and species go extinct and ecosystems are altered. Genetics and zoos can't replace living with organisms within a functioning ecosystem. Just an idea that has been running through my head lately...
^
maybe we lose culture...
I think that science is only mostly progressive, to quote Miracle Max. Often it is regressive, through loss of older techniques and knowledge. Not everything is retained in the standing wave of information that is published science.
Viewed over long periods and with hindsight science does show cumulative progress but one should not fall into the trap of thinking that this progress is linear or that the path of development/evolution of an individual discipline is anything like straight.
It is not even a question of one step forward and two steps back. Sometimes the steps are sideways, at other times the path leads up a blind alleyway, occasionally what seems to be progress turns out to be a full circle leading back to where you came from. Another variation is a period of intense activity that goes nowhere at all or it can be that a discipline is simply dropped for a period of time with no activity at all, both of these are forms of marking time. There are numerous other variations that the path of progress or even regress can take and as I said at the beginning it is only over longer periods of time and with hindsight that progress can be discerned.
My theory of scientific progress is called "the drunken hotel guest theory" and is an analogy that describes scientific progress as being like the attempts of a hotel guest to find his way back to his hotel on foot, in a large strange town, in the middle of the night after he had consumed way too much alcohol. He finally reaches his aim after many deviations but in the morning when sober he is only capable with the help of a city plan to make a rational reconstruction of his nighttime inebriated meanderings.
A good illustration of this in my subject (history of the mathematical sciences, mostly Renaissance) can be found in Carl Boyer's excellent book The Rainbow: From Myth to Mathematics in his description of the development of the understanding of the cause of the rainbow from Grosseteste to Newton. Another good example is the expansions of the number system in the 16th and 17th centuries for which unfortunately, I know of no single book that does all of the twist, turns and loops of this development historical justice. These are not isolated examples but are in my opinion the norm.
Science progresses but it does so in a most peculiar way!
Sounds like an interesting paper, but mean old Springer won't let me read it without paying $32 (US). Is there a free article or web page that has some of the same information?
Interesting paper, I'm going to need some sleep/coffee before I start being able to pick up the contents more fully, but thus far it's quite thought provoking. Particularly on the apparent benefits of evolutionary models of science in overcoming the issues with definitions and methodology of "science".
I might even be able to make use of it possibly for my coming HaPS essay. Thanks.