COURSE DESCRIPTION: The Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of the modern era. Although it is a theory of biology with its revolutionary consequences in all life sciences it has also had an enormous impact on science in general, philosophy, religion, and politics the last 150 years. In this course, some of the major concepts and problems of evolutionary biology, such as fitness, adaptation, the structure of the evolutionary theory, the problem of the units of selection, the species problem, are presented and examined from a philosophical perspective.

COURSE OBJECTIVES: At the end of this course, the student will have learned:

basic concepts about the evolutionary theory, such as natural selection, fitness, adaptation;

basic philosophical problems related with the evolutionary theory, such as nature of biological laws/models, biological explanations, the creationism-evolution debate, the tautology problem, reduction, biological teleology, the units of selection problem, the problems about adaptationism, the species problem, biological determinism, evolution of morality and culture.