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Is it a revolution?

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Abstract

Jablonka and Lamb's claim that evolutionary biology is undergoing a ‘revolution’ is queried. But the very concept of revolutionary change has uncertain application to a field organized in the manner of contemporary biology. The explanatory primacy of sequence properties is also discussed.

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Notes

  1. Olby (1994) finds Kuhnian revolutions in mid-century cell biology, but he has to push the concept pretty hard and also locate the revolutionary changes on a very fine scale.

  2. The relation between the more pragmatic and substantive aspects of this focus is a theme in Ken Waters' work (eg., Waters 2000).

  3. The assertion of "parity" or "symmetry" here recalls arguments over Developmental Systems Theory (Oyama, Griffiths and Gray 2001).

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  1. Philosophy Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Peter Godfrey-Smith

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  1. Peter Godfrey-Smith
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Correspondence to Peter Godfrey-Smith.

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Godfrey-Smith, P. Is it a revolution?. Biol Philos 22, 429–437 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9062-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9062-1

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