Product Description: Applying philosophy to everyday life.  Core Questions in Philosophy emphasizes the idea that philosophy is a subject de­voted to evaluating arguments and constructing theories.  Presented in an engaging lecture-style format, this text/reader focuses on the basic issues and ideas in philosophy with lectures/discussions, supported by readings from historically important sources...read more

Product Description: ALERT: Before you purchase, check with your instructor or review your course syllabus to ensure that you select the correct ISBN. Several versions of Pearson's MyLab & Mastering products exist for each title, including customized versions for individual schools, and registrations are not transferable...read more

Product Description: These essays by leading scientists and philosophers address conceptual issues that arise in the theory and practice of evolutionary biology. The third edition of this widely used anthology has been substantially revised and updated...read more

Product Description: The theory of adaptationism argues that natural selection contains sufficient explanatory power in itself to account for all evolution. However, there are differing views about the efficiency, or optimality, of the adaptation model of explanation...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This new collection of essays will appeal to a readership that extends well beyond the frontiers of the philosophy of science. Sober shows how ideas in evolutionary biology bear in significant ways on traditional problems in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Reconstructing the Past seeks to clarify and help resolve the vexing methodological issues that arise when biologists try to answer such questions as whether human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas...read more

The Nature of Selection presents a powerful analysis of the evolutionary concepts of natural selection, fitness, and adaptation. The book clarifies controversial issues concerning altruism, group selection, and the idea that organisms are survival machines built for the good of the genes that inhabit them. As the book unfolds, it provides a straightforward and self-contained introduction to philosophical and biological problems in evolutionary theory. In the first part, "Evolutionary Theory as a Theory of Forces," Sober offers an illuminating characterization of the structure of evolutionary theory. Besides laying to rest the spurious charge that theory is vacuous and unscientific, Sober describes the role of chance in evolution and pinpoints the characteristic structure of evolutionary explanations. The book's second part, "The Group Above and the Gene Below: The Units of Selection Controversy," thoroughly explores the problem of the units of selection, superseding the author's earlier essays, which are widely regarded as the best available treatment of this problem.