A copy of this work was available on the public web and has been preserved in the Wayback Machine. The capture dates from 2005; you can also visit the original URL.
The file type is application/pdf
.
Explanatory Pluralism in Paleobiology
1999
Philosophy of Science
This paper is a defense of "explanatory pluralism" (i.e., the view that some events can be correctly explained in two distinct ways). To defend pluralism, I argue that a certain class of macroevolutionary trends (what I call "asymmetrical passive trends") can be explained in two distinct but compatible ways. The first approach ("actual sequence explanation") is to trace out the particular forces that affect each species. The second approach treats the trend as "passive" or "random" diffusion
doi:10.1086/392727
fatcat:x5w3qrropfgp3fyw4cpimt6nsy