This collection of essays by a leading philosopher of science defends integrative pluralism as the best description for today's complexity of scientific inquiry. The tendency of some scientists to reduce all theories to a few fundamental laws of the most basic particles that populate our universe is not appropriate for the biological sciences, which study multi-component, multi-level, evolved complex systems. This book will be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science.

This collection of essays by a leading philosopher of science defends integrative pluralism as the best description for today's complexity of scientific inquiry. The tendency of some scientists to reduce all theories to a few fundamental laws of the most basic particles that populate our universe is not appropriate for the biological sciences, which study multi-component, multi-level, evolved complex systems. This book will be of interest to students and professionals in the philosophy of science.

Representing a wide range of disciplines -- biology, sociology, anthropology, economics, human ethology, psychology, primatology, history, and philosophy of science -- the contributors to this book recently spent a complete academic year at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) discussing a plethora of new insights in reference to human cultural evolution. These scholars acted as a living experiment of "interdisciplinarity in vivo." The assumption of this experiment was that the scholars -- while working and residing at the ZiF -- would be united intellectually as well as...