Causal Processes, Fitness, and the Differential Persistence of Lineages

Abstract

Ecological fitness has been suggested to provide a unifying definition of fitness. However, a metric for this notion of fitness was in most cases unavailable except by proxy with differential reproductive success. In this article, I show how differential persistence of lineages can be used as a way to assess ecological fitness. This view is inspired by a better understanding of the evolution of some clonal plants, colonial organisms, and ecosystems. Differential persistence shows the limitation of an ensemblist noncausal understanding of evolution. Causal explanations are necessary to understand the evolution by natural selection of these biological systems.

Cancer cells and adaptive explanations

“…I believe it is not the best way to make sense of this dimension. Wholly external fitness differences can lead to evolution by natural selection (see for instance Bouchard 2008), and a better way to understand the dimension would be in terms of the stability of the fitness differences over lineages. However, as the full elaboration and defence of this account is beyond the scope of this paper, I will here keep to Godfrey-Smith's characterization of the dimension.…”

Making the Most of Clade Selection

“…But most fail to offer any sufficiently explicit MLS formulation or to distinguish between species-level and higher-level processes, paying little attention to the problem of non-reproduction of clades more inclusive than species, the problem I focus on here. In this my arguments parallel those of Fredéric Bouchard (2008Bouchard ( , 2011Bouchard ( , 2014, see also Dussault and Bouchard 2016), whose emphasis has been on the persistence of clonal individuals and ecosystems. And although my thesis might seem to some to depend too much on a mere conventioncladist rules of naming -there are interesting and useful consequences to thinking this way.…”

“…Copyright Philosophy of Science 2016 Preprint (not copyedited or formatted) Please use DOI when citing or quoting proposed by the philosopher Frédéric Bouchard for the evolution through persistence of non-reproducing clonal biological individuals (Bouchard 2008(Bouchard , 2011(Bouchard , 2014) but his emphasis is on clonal individuals like aspen groves or communities as biological organisms and mine is on understanding clades above species as entities under selection within a MLS framework.…”

Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality

“…This suggestion has been criticized (Godfrey-Smith 2009: 31-36), but several authors still find the notion of an interactor useful. This includes those who deny that reproduction is a necessary condition for evolution by natural selection and who consider that persistence can also lead to relevant fitness differences (Bouchard 2008). Are also concerned those who want to insist that natural selection acts sometimes on collaborative units of living entities (e.g., a symbiotic consortium) which are so tightly integrated that they are strictly dependent one on the other for their survival and reproduction (Dupré and O'Malley 2009).…”