This essay provides sketches of recent and ongoing work in systematics, ecology, and natural selection theory as a way of illustrating:

(i) what kind of science biology is and is not; and (ii) an approach to philosophy of biology that is engaged with the scientific details, while still maintaining a conceptual focus. Because biological science is generally not well known among philosophers, we begin by identifying some com­mon misconceptions, and then move on to particular questions: How are inferences made about the deep past? What, if anything, are species? How do ecology and evolution interrelate? Upon what does natural selection operate? These questions and the issues surrounding them do not add up to a survey of the field. We have chosen instead to focus on interest­ing problems and to exemplify a way of taking them up.

1.