Coincidences and How to Think about Them Elliott Sober

1 Coincidences and How to Think about Them Elliott Sober

The naïve see causal connections everywhere. Consider the fact that Evelyn Marie Adams won the New Jersey lottery twice. The naïve find it irresistible to think that this cannot be a coincidence. Maybe the lottery was rigged or some uncanny higher power placed its hand upon her brow. Sophisticates respond with an indulgent smile and ask the naïve to view Adams’ double win within a larger perspe...

Why explanatoriness is evidentially relevant

William Roche and Elliott Sober argue that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant. This conclusion is surprising since it conflicts with a plausible assumption—the fact that a hypothesis best explains a given set of data is evidence that the hypothesis is true. We argue that Roche and Sober?s screening-off argument fails to account for a key aspect of evidential strength: the weight of a bo...

Is Drift a Serious Alternative to Natural Selection as an Explanation of Complex Adaptive Traits?

Entropy increase and information loss in Markov models of evolution

Markov models of evolution describe changes in the probability distribution of the trait values a population might exhibit. In consequence, they also describe how entropy and conditional entropy values evolve, and how the mutual information that characterizes the relation between an earlier and a later moment in a lineage’s history depends on how much time separates them. These models therefore...

Understanding Frequency-dependent Causation

Causal effects often vary with the relative frequency of the causal property in the population of interest. (For example, "being a female candidate for high office causes a stir" only because such events are rare.) Such causal effects are called frequency-dependent, and they pose interesting problems for both philosophy of causality and philosophy of biology. 1 Elliot Sober 2 argues that certai...