Systematic Biology Advance Access originally published online on August 25, 2009
Systematic Biology 2009 58(5):544-545; doi:10.1093/sysbio/syp048
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© The Author(s) 2009. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of the Society of Systematic Biologists. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Evidence and Evolution: The Logic behind the Science
School of Philosophy and History, Quadrangle A14, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales 2006, Australia
E-mail: john@wilkins.id.au.
Evidence and Evolution: The Logic behind the Science.—Elliott Sober. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xx+392 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-87188-4. $90 £45 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-521-69274-8 $29.99 £15.99 (paperback).
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This book aims to deal with what has been a topic of continuous discussion since the Origin of Species was published: the epistemology of evolution. Elliott Sober's work on natural selection and phylogeny makes him the most familiar philosopher of science to many systematists and evolutionary biologists. In this book, he attempts to gather together and present as a coherent whole his writings on this complex topic. The target audience appears to be the same as for several of his prior books, such as The Nature of Selection (Sober 1984) and Reconstructing the Past (Sober 1988), which is to say mainly the philosophical audience but also theoretically inclined scientists and students.
The book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is perhaps the most philosophically technical as it deals with the use of probability and likelihood in inferences about evolution and is therefore going to