| The interpretation of chance from the Greek theory of the origin of life has deeply influenced the biological thoughts and philosophical discussions during and after Darwin’s time,and is also the source of the dispute between determinism and indeterminism.From the perspective of the development history of philosophy of biology,chance is indeed a controversial topic.The first chapter mainly discusses the interpretation of biological chance in the tradition of European natural philosophy.The chance in indeterminism can be first found in the thoughts of Empedocles and developed by Aristotle,Epicurus and Lucretius.Chance is essential to the process of life,and this sets the stage for Darwin’s later explanations of determinism and indeterminism.The second chapter explains the chance in Darwinism.In this chapter,we put the chance into a more specific theory for research.It mainly combs the chance problem in the 19 th century natural history tradition,the Darwinian variation theory and the chance explanation in the natural selection theory.We can see that the issue of chance affects the consistency and integrity of evolutionary theory at different levels.The third chapter is the explanation of the chance in the early days of New Darwinism.Mainly in the statistical theory of Galton,Pearson and Weldon,to make a more concrete and scientific explanation of the chance in biology,such as combining mixed genetic theory with statistical theory to explore the meaning of chance.Combining chance with experimental cases and explaining them within certain rules and frameworks,although there is still no way to explore the reasons,we have found that chance have complementary implications in biological interpretation.The fourth chapter of this paper is the explanation of chance in the Modern synthesis,which explains the chance from the perspective of probability theory.The biostatistician in the early stage of Modern synthesis established evolutionary theory on the basis of mathematics,trying to abstract the chance factor into a mathematical element or equilibrium state,while later biologists focused on the evolution of chance.The role is more clearly defined.The fifth chapter summarizes the controversy of contemporary chance.It focuses on three issues: the debate on anti-progress,arms race and niche.The core of the debate is whether human evolution occurs due to chance.On the basis of summarizing the full text,the conclusion that chance have a special status in the history of evolution,and the chance to refute an explanatory factor of evolutionary determinism is a foothold of indeterminists.It is necessary to sort out the problem of chance in the history of biology and explore the explanatory role of chance in evolution as an indispensable factor in the history of evolution. |
