Professor Holcomb's teaching and research interests include contemporary metaphysics and epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology. As a philosopher of evolution, he is a specialist in Darwinian approaches to naturalistic inquiry and to human nature. He teaches and publishes on a host of standard issues in philosophy of sciences, focusing on scientific method and scientific knowledge: the empirical, logical, social, and ideological dimensions of science, testability, evidence, explanation, scientific change, science and reality, unity of science, science and values, science and reality, environmental ethics. He not only sets these issues into the larger philosophical tradition of empiricism, but also connects them with specific, current controversies throughout academia over the validity and import of applying evolutionary theory to human mind and behavior. He works closely both with leading scientists who do sociobiology or evolutionary psychology and their critics to adjudicate issues involving Darwinian paradigms and scientific methods in dealing with human nature, individual and cultural variation, nature versus nurture, sex differences in behavior, evolution of morality, implications for social policy and private decisions, and so forth.

Recent Publications:

Conceptual Challenges in Evolutionary Psychology: Innovative Research Strategies, edited by Harmon R. Holcomb III, vol. 27 in the series Studies in Cognitive Systems, Kluwer Academic Press, 2001.

"Will Evolutionary Psychology Ever Become a Mature Science?" Free Inquiry 21 (2000-2001), 51-54.

"Lakatos Meets Evolutionary Psychology, or Does He?" Psychological Inquiry 11 (2000), 38-42.

"Are Rigorous Evolutionary Histories of Human Mating Possible?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (2000), 606-607.

"Explaining World History: Marxism, Evolutionism & Sociobiology", Biology and Philosophy 13 (1998), 597-618.

"Testing Evolutionary Hypotheses", in Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas, Issues, & Applications, Eds. C. Crawford and D. Krebs, Erlbaum, (1998), 303-334.

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