Biography:

Inigo Ongay de Felipe ( Bilbao- Spain, 1979) is a Ph D in Philosophy at the University of Oviedo- Spain with a Doctoral Thesis which addresses some issues of philosophical interests in relation to the Great Ape Project .He currently teaches Philosophy in the American School of Bilbao in Berango ( Spain). His research interests are in the Philosophy of Biology and the Philosophy of Psychology . More specifically, his work focuses on various epistemological and ontological topics concerning the relations between Evolutionary Biology and Behavioral Sciences as well as the conceptual and epistemological connections linking the notions of behavior and organic evolution together. He has published several papers on such issues in a number of different scientific and philosophical journals of Spain.

Abstract:

What does genetic selection miss?: Taking the Darwinian concept of selection seriously

I will review the way in which the original concept of Natural Selection as it was developed by Charles Darwin in his Origin of Species was sidestepped in Evolutionary Biology by the architects of Modern Synthesis over the course of the 1930s. While such Darwinian original concept primarily included the central role that the behavior of individual organisms may play as an active agent in the process of biological Evolution, Synthetic Theory, in its turn, tended to focus primarily on genetic heritance and genetic selection in order to explain evolutionary changes of populations.

I will not defend that the Modern Synthesis made any conceptual or empirical mistake by defining the concept of evolution in terms of genetic changes nor will I argue that things should have occurred otherwise for there were very good reasons for this to be so. However, what I shall argue is that in so doing there is something seriously important that Evolutionary Biology fails inevitably to grasp: the very behavior of the organisms that need to act in their ecological environment if copies of their genes are to be transmitted to make room for the evolutionary change to take place.

I will show how the research of many ethologists and comparative psychologists helps understand the way Evolution works in the real ground as well as how the concept of Natural Selection in its Darwinian sense can indeed take place in the individual level These ethological processes offer some enlightening insights that help reinterpret, in a way that does not imply a metaphysical hypostatization of the idea of Nature, much of the current discussion in relation to the very concept of Natural Selection as a real force acting in the Outside World