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Evolutionary Epistemology 49 comes both from mutations providing new semistable molecular arrangements of the genetic material and from new combinations of existing genes. Considered as improvements or solutions, none of these variations has any a priori validity. None has the status of revealed truth nor of analytic deduction. Whatever degree of validation emerges comes from the differential surviving of a winnowing, weeding-out, process. Popper’s first contribution to an evolutionary epistemology is to recognize the process of the succession of theories in science as a similar selective elimination process. The theme is expressed clearly, if but in passing, in the 1934 Logik der Forschung. Here are two relevant passages: According to my proposal, what characterizes the empirical method is its manner of exposing to falsification, in every conceivable way, the system to be tested. Its aim is not to save the lives of untenable systems but, on the contrary, to select the one which is by comparison the fittest, by exposing them all to the fiercest struggle for survival.! . How and why do we accept one theory in preference to others? The preference is certainly not due to anything like an experiential justification of the statements composing the theory; it is not due to a logical reduction of the theory to experience. We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive. This will be the one which not only has hitherto stood up to the severest tests, but the one which is also testable in the most rigorous way. A theory is a tool which we test by applying it, and which we judge as to its fitness by the results of its applications? Fuller expressions of this evolutionary epistemology were contained in his first book (1932) Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenninistheorie. In later publications, especially as collected in Conjectures and Refutations, the theme is more explicitly presented and elaborated? ‘These additions add trial-and-error learning by man and animals to the proto- typic illustrations of his basic logic of inference (logic of discovery, logic of the expansion of knowledge). They make explicit his willingness to identify the process of knowledge with the whole evolutionary sequence. Without waiting, passively, for repetitions to impress or impose regularities upon us, we actively try to impose regularitics upon the world. We try to diggovegsimilarities 1959), p. 42. Hereinafter cited as L.Se.D. Reprinted by pet 2. L.Sc.D., p. 108. Z Bh clnor tne Ge ee binen g : 8 J.C. B. Mohr Verlag, 1979).

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