Moth



Blackwell Publishing

Adaptive explanation - How do we study adaptations?

"We can tell that adaptations are not just inventions by seeing that they are not all equal. If you make up twenty different adaptationist hypotheses you can rank them in order of which are the good ones and which are the bad ones. That is empirically testable.

So, in the trivial sense they are inventions because every scientific hypothesis is an invention. But the good ones are confirmed as descriptions of patterns that are really in nature."

Daniel Dennett

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