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The author considers the structure of August Weismann’s arguments for the all-sufficiency principle of natural selection (NS) to conclude that a variety of lines of reasoning can be identified in his account and that parsimony plays a different role to each. After considering different accounts of simplicity as a scientific virtue to be taken into account in science evaluation, the paper goes on to scrutinize a particular example of the principle of parsimony at work. This paper explores the use of the principle of simplicity in August Weismann’s critiques of the inheritance of acquired characters.
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