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Full-Text Articles in Philosophy of Science
Betting & Hierarchy In Paleontology, Leonard Finkelman
Betting & Hierarchy In Paleontology, Leonard Finkelman
Faculty Publications
In his Rock, Bone, and Ruin: An Optimist’s Guide to the Historical Sciences, Adrian Currie argues that historical scientists should be optimistic about success in reconstructing the past on the basis of future research. This optimism follows in part from examples of success in paleontology. I argue that paleontologists’ success in these cases is underwritten by the hierarchical nature of biological information: extinct organisms have extant analogues at various levels of taxonomic, ecological, and physiological hierarchies, and paleontologists are adept at exploiting analogies within one informational hierarchy to infer information in another. On this account, fossils serve the role …
Crossed Tracks: Mesolimulus, Archaeopteryx, And The Nature Of Fossils, Leonard Finkelman
Crossed Tracks: Mesolimulus, Archaeopteryx, And The Nature Of Fossils, Leonard Finkelman
Faculty Publications
Organisms leave a variety of traces in the fossil record. Among these traces, vertebrate and invertebrate paleontologists conventionally recognize a distinction between the remains of an organism’s phenotype (body fossils) and the remains of an organism’s life activities (trace fossils). The same convention recognizes body fossils as biological structures and trace fossils as geological objects. This convention explains some curious practices in the classification, as with the distinction between taxa for trace fossils and for tracemakers. I consider the distinction between “parallel taxonomies,” or parataxonomies, which privileges some kinds of fossil taxa as “natural” and others as “artificial.” The motivations …
Oyun: A New, Free Program For Iterated Prisoner’S Dilemma Tournaments In The Classroom, Charles H. Pence, Lara Buchak
Oyun: A New, Free Program For Iterated Prisoner’S Dilemma Tournaments In The Classroom, Charles H. Pence, Lara Buchak
Faculty Publications
Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (oy-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner's dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner's dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given “generation” directly determine contribution to the population in the next generation. Oyun is freely available, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, …