Instead of thinking of the question of race genealogically, and leaving it open whether vernacular races are genealogical units, the interest in biomedicine has been to determine whether vernacular racial categories are medically useful in diagnosis and treatment. There is on-going debate about this.

Just as thought experiments can't show that vitalism is true (or that it is false), they also can't show that dualism is true (or that it is false).

Some philosophical arguments (e.g., in connection with the mind/body problem) look pretty good, while others (e.g., those that criticize moral realism) do not.

I don't endorse deism or interventionist theism. My point is just that evolutionary biology is logically compatible with the former and with some versions of the latter.

Group selection and individual selection are just two of the selection processes that have played important roles in evolution. There also is selection within individual organisms (intragenomic conflict), and selection among multi-species communities (an idea that now is getting attention in work on the human microbiome). All four of these levels of selection find a place in multi-level selection theory.

"Simpler is always better" is an overstatement.

Methodological naturalism gives advice to scientists about what they should include in their theories. There is a second type of methodological naturalism that gives advice to philosophers, which I call "methodological naturalismp." It says that the methods that philosophers should use in assessing philosophical theories are limited to the methods that scientists ought to use in assessing scientific theories.