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Popper and Darwinism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

The first Darwin Lecture was given in 1977 by Karl Popper. He there said that he had known Darwin's face and name ‘for as long as I can remember’ (‘NSEM’ p. 339); for his father's library contained a portrait of Darwin and translations of most of Darwin's works (‘IA’, p. 6). But it was not until Popper was in his late fifties that Darwin begin to figure importantly in his writings, and he was nearly seventy when he adopted from Donald Campbell the term ‘evolutionary epistemology’ as a name for his theory of the growth of knowledge (OK, p. 67). There were people who saw evolutionary epistemology as a major new turn in Popper's philosophy. I do not share that view. On the other hand, there is a piece from this evolutionist period which I regard as a real nugget.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1995

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References

1 I am thinking especially of the late Bill Bartley; see Radnitzky, G. & Bartley, W. W. III (eds), Evolutionary Epistemology, Theory of Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge (Open Court, 1987)Google Scholar, part I.

2 He is the expert mentioned by Popper on p. 281 of OK.

3 See Hardy, A., The Living Stream (Collins, 1965)Google Scholar, and Proceedings of the Linnean Society, 168 (1957), pp. 85–7Google Scholar.

4 I am here drawing on the Popper papers.

5 See Dawkins, Richard, The Extended Phenotype (Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 3839Google Scholar.

6 Fisher, R. A., The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, (Clarendon Press, 1930), pp. 7778Google Scholar.

7 Passions, 34Google Scholar.

8 I take the example from Roger Brown.

9 Kellock, Harold, Houdini: His Life Story (Heinemann, 1928), p. 3Google Scholar.