Sahotra Sarkar
Biographic Data
| ID | 3785666 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sahotra Sarkar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sahotra |
| FAMILY NAME | Sarkar |
| SIGNATURE | SARKAR S |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8248-658X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 30 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
In Memoriam
In Memoriam
John Stachel, 1928–2025 – Physicist, Philosopher, and Historian of Physics
John Stachel (29 March 1928–9 May 2025) passed away earlier this year in Berkeley, California, shortly after celebrating his ninety-seventh birthday. His passing marked the final end of an era duri...
Serpents for Salvation
Veronica Strang, Water Beings: From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis. London: Reaktion Books, 2023. 280 pp.; 126 color plates; 5 halftones. US$45.00
Lewontin’s Legacy and the Influence of Engels
Dick Lewontin's passing on the 4th of July, while this journal's inaugural issue was being compiled, marks the end of a dominating, and yet troubled, era for radical science, especially in the United States. He was preceded in death by his longterm comrade and friend
Logical Empiricism at its Peak
A Sustainable Philosophy—The Work of Bryan Norton
Developing an objectives hierarchy for multicriteria decisions on land use options, with a case study of biodiversity conservation and forestry production from Papua, Indonesia
A framework was developed for the construction of an objectives hierarchy for multicriteria decisions in land use planning. The process began through identification of fundamental objectives; these were iteratively decomposed into a hierarchy of subobjectives until a level was reached at which subobjectives had measurable attributes. Values were derived for attributes through a variety of methods and weights assigned to objectives through prefere…
Haldane and Mayr
Nagel on reduction11For discussions, in some cases over many decades, thanks are due to Jordi Cat, Alan Love, Ken Schaffner, Abner Shimony, John Stachel, and Bill Wimsatt. Comments by participants of …
R. A. Fisher, Lancelot Hogben, and the ‘Competition’ for the Chair of Social Biology at the London School of Economics in 1930
From 1930 to 1937 Lancelot Hogben FRS occupied the Chair of Social Biology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. According to standard histories of this appointment, he and R. A. Fisher FRS both applied for the position, but Hogben was selected over Fisher. The episode has received attention in large part because of the later prominence of the two figures involved. The surviving archival records, however, tell a remarkably diff…
Introduction
The Genomic Challenge to Adaptationism
Since the late 1990s, the characterization of complete DNA sequences for a large and taxonomically diverse set of species has continued to gain in speed and accuracy. Sequence analyses have indicated a strikingly baroque structure for most eukaryotic genomes, with multiple repeats of DNA sequences and with very little of the DNA specifying proteins. Much of the DNA in these genomes has no known function. These results have generated strong intere…
Lederberg on bacterial recombination, Haldane, and cold war genetics
Does “Information” Provide a Compelling Framework for a Theory of Natural Selection? Grounds for Caution
Frank has recently argued for an information-theoretic interpretation of natural selection. This interpretation is based on the identification of a measure related to the Malthusian parameter (for population change) with the Jeffreys divergence between the present allelic distribution of the population and that distribution in the next generation. It is pointed out in this analysis that this identification only holds if the mean fitness of the po…
Environmental philosophy
Environmental philosophy
Flights of fancy
The science question in intelligent design
Sober on Intelligent Design
This response to Sober's (2008) Evidence and Evolution draws out and criticizes some consequences of his analysis because of its reliance on a likelihood framework for adjucating the dispute between (Intelligent Design) creationism and evolution. In particular, Sober's analysis does not allow it to be formally claimed that evolutionary theory better explains living phenomena than Intelligent Design and makes irrelevant the contribution of the the…
Doubting Darwin
Doubting Darwin
Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
This book explores the epistemological and ethical issues at the foundations of environmental philosophy, emphasising the conservation of biodiversity. Sahota Sarkar criticises attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature and defends an anthropocentric position on biodiversity conservation based on an untraditional concept of transformative value. Unlike other studies in the field of environmental philosophy, this book is as much concerned wit…
Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
Evolutionary Theory in the 1920s
This paper analyzes the development of evolutionary theory in the period from 1918 to 1932. It argues that: (i) Fisher's work in 1918 constituted a not fully satisfactory reduction of biometry to Mendelism; (ii) there was a synthesis in the 1920s but that this synthesis was mainly one of classical genetics with population genetics, with Haldane's The Causes of Evolution being its founding document; (iii) the most important achievement of the mode…
Models of reduction and categories of reductionism
Did Malament Prove the Non-Conventionality of Simultaneity in the Special Theory of Relativity
David Malament's (1977) well-known result, which is often taken to show the uniqueness of the Poincaré-Einstein convention for defining simultaneity, involves an unwarranted physical assumption: that any simultaneity relation must remain invariant under temporal reflections. Once that assumption is removed, his other criteria for defining simultaneity are also satisfied by membership in the same backward (forward) null cone of the family of such …
Environmental philosophy
Sober on Intelligent Design
This response to Sober's (2008) Evidence and Evolution draws out and criticizes some consequences of his analysis because of its reliance on a likelihood framework for adjucating the dispute between (Intelligent Design) creationism and evolution. In particular, Sober's analysis does not allow it to be formally claimed that evolutionary theory better explains living phenomena than Intelligent Design and makes irrelevant the contribution of the the…
Evolutionary Theory in the 1920s
This paper analyzes the development of evolutionary theory in the period from 1918 to 1932. It argues that: (i) Fisher's work in 1918 constituted a not fully satisfactory reduction of biometry to Mendelism; (ii) there was a synthesis in the 1920s but that this synthesis was mainly one of classical genetics with population genetics, with Haldane's The Causes of Evolution being its founding document; (iii) the most important achievement of the mode…
The Genomic Challenge to Adaptationism
Since the late 1990s, the characterization of complete DNA sequences for a large and taxonomically diverse set of species has continued to gain in speed and accuracy. Sequence analyses have indicated a strikingly baroque structure for most eukaryotic genomes, with multiple repeats of DNA sequences and with very little of the DNA specifying proteins. Much of the DNA in these genomes has no known function. These results have generated strong intere…
Does “Information” Provide a Compelling Framework for a Theory of Natural Selection? Grounds for Caution
Frank has recently argued for an information-theoretic interpretation of natural selection. This interpretation is based on the identification of a measure related to the Malthusian parameter (for population change) with the Jeffreys divergence between the present allelic distribution of the population and that distribution in the next generation. It is pointed out in this analysis that this identification only holds if the mean fitness of the po…
The boundless ocean of unlimited possibilities
Rudolf Carnap, 1891?1970
The boundless ocean of unlimited possibilities
Rudolf Carnap, 1891?1970
Models of reduction and categories of reductionism
Conceptual Foundations of Organization Theory
J. B. S. Haldane and R. A. Fisher’s Draft Life of Karl Pearson
A.W.F. Edwards has recently chronicled how L.G. Wickham Legg, the Editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, invited R.A. Fisher to write the life of Karl Pearson and how, after many disagreements, Fisher withdrew his draft contribution. Pearson’s major contributions had been in statistics and Fisher, the foremost statistician of his generation, was a natural choice to write his life when Legg first approached him on 14 April 1945 inviting a…
Evolution by association
Did Malament Prove the Non-Conventionality of Simultaneity in the Special Theory of Relativity
David Malament's (1977) well-known result, which is often taken to show the uniqueness of the Poincaré-Einstein convention for defining simultaneity, involves an unwarranted physical assumption: that any simultaneity relation must remain invariant under temporal reflections. Once that assumption is removed, his other criteria for defining simultaneity are also satisfied by membership in the same backward (forward) null cone of the family of such …
Information in Genetics and Developmental Biology
Maynard Smith notes that he provides a natural history and not a philosophical analysis of the use of concepts of information in contemporary biology. Just a natural history, however rich, would do little to resolve the ongoing controversy about the role of these concepts in biology. None of the disputants deny that the biological use of these concepts is pervasive. The dispute is about whether these concepts—and the framework in which they are e…
Depictions as surrogates for places
Habitat dioramas depicting ecological relations between organisms and their natural environments have become the preferred mode of museum display in most natural history museums in North America and Europe. Dioramas emerged in the late nineteenth century as an alternative mode of museum installation from taxonomically arranged cases. We suggest that this change was closely connected to the emergence of a biogeographical framework rooted in evolut…
Evolutionary Theory in the 1920s
This paper analyzes the development of evolutionary theory in the period from 1918 to 1932. It argues that: (i) Fisher's work in 1918 constituted a not fully satisfactory reduction of biometry to Mendelism; (ii) there was a synthesis in the 1920s but that this synthesis was mainly one of classical genetics with population genetics, with Haldane's The Causes of Evolution being its founding document; (iii) the most important achievement of the mode…
Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
This book explores the epistemological and ethical issues at the foundations of environmental philosophy, emphasising the conservation of biodiversity. Sahota Sarkar criticises attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature and defends an anthropocentric position on biodiversity conservation based on an untraditional concept of transformative value. Unlike other studies in the field of environmental philosophy, this book is as much concerned wit…
Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy
Doubting Darwin
Doubting Darwin
The science question in intelligent design
Sober on Intelligent Design
This response to Sober's (2008) Evidence and Evolution draws out and criticizes some consequences of his analysis because of its reliance on a likelihood framework for adjucating the dispute between (Intelligent Design) creationism and evolution. In particular, Sober's analysis does not allow it to be formally claimed that evolutionary theory better explains living phenomena than Intelligent Design and makes irrelevant the contribution of the the…
Flights of fancy
Environmental philosophy
Environmental philosophy
Lederberg on bacterial recombination, Haldane, and cold war genetics
Does “Information” Provide a Compelling Framework for a Theory of Natural Selection? Grounds for Caution
Frank has recently argued for an information-theoretic interpretation of natural selection. This interpretation is based on the identification of a measure related to the Malthusian parameter (for population change) with the Jeffreys divergence between the present allelic distribution of the population and that distribution in the next generation. It is pointed out in this analysis that this identification only holds if the mean fitness of the po…
Nagel on reduction11For discussions, in some cases over many decades, thanks are due to Jordi Cat, Alan Love, Ken Schaffner, Abner Shimony, John Stachel, and Bill Wimsatt. Comments by participants of …
R. A. Fisher, Lancelot Hogben, and the ‘Competition’ for the Chair of Social Biology at the London School of Economics in 1930
From 1930 to 1937 Lancelot Hogben FRS occupied the Chair of Social Biology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. According to standard histories of this appointment, he and R. A. Fisher FRS both applied for the position, but Hogben was selected over Fisher. The episode has received attention in large part because of the later prominence of the two figures involved. The surviving archival records, however, tell a remarkably diff…
Introduction
The Genomic Challenge to Adaptationism
Since the late 1990s, the characterization of complete DNA sequences for a large and taxonomically diverse set of species has continued to gain in speed and accuracy. Sequence analyses have indicated a strikingly baroque structure for most eukaryotic genomes, with multiple repeats of DNA sequences and with very little of the DNA specifying proteins. Much of the DNA in these genomes has no known function. These results have generated strong intere…
Philosophy (23 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (13 works) · Biology (10 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Ecology (8 works) · Mathematics (8 works) · Philosophy of science (8 works)