Bucket thinking:the future framework for evolutionary explanation

The hierarchical interplay between ecology and genealogy is a fundamental ingredient for the most compelling current explanations in evolutionary biology. Yet philosophy of biology has hardly welcomed a classic fundamental intuition by palaeontologist Niles Eldredge, i.e. the non-coincidence and interrelation between ecology and genealogy, and their interaction in a Sloshing Bucket fashion. Hierarchy Theory and the Sloshing Bucket need to be made precise, developed and updated in light of an explosion of new discoveries and fields and philosophical issues. They also suggests re-thinking concepts such as natural selection, species, and speciation that have always been part of evolutionary theory