What's ia means Politics?

Definitions

 

• Politics involves making common decisions for a group of people.

 

• It is the activity by which differing interests within a given unit of rule are conciliated by giving them a share in power in proportion to their importance to the welfare and survival of the whole community.

Introduction: conceptual tracings

 

The history and philosophy of biology and natural history has often been told by tracing the long thread of 'species concepts. Philosophically minded historians and historically-minded biologists have been especially enamoured with this way of telling the tale.' Fundamental dichotomies realist/antirealist, essentialist/nominalist, populationist/topological-have long provided the organizational glue which made the history and philosophy of species stick.

 

We've become accustomed to such accounts on this side of the 'Modern Synthesis of the 1930s and 40s. For, in that great synthesis of Mendelian genetics and natural selection, species really do matter. Species in a modern sense are 'theory-laden', gaining their strict meaning by being part of the edifice of population genetics.

 

The Modern Synthesis solution to the putative species problem turned on getting a definition 'right'. The 'Biological Species Concept', formally articulated by the population-geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky significantly, in the journal Philosophy of Science and adapted with great optimality by Ernst Mayr, placed great emphasis on the proper 'meaning' of *Science Studies, Department of Contemporary Studies, University of King's College, Halifax,

 

Nova Scotia, Canada B3H 2A1. Received 20 April 1994; in revised form 27 July 1995.

 

"The history of natural history was dominated by the question of species', G. Canguilhem, Idéologie et rationalité dans l'histoire des sciences de la vie, 2nd edn (Paris: Vrin, 1981), p. 129. See, for example, E. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), and E. Nordenskiöld, The History of Biology (reprinted New York: Tudor, 1946).