Inscrutability and the Opacity of Natural Selection and Random Genetic Drift: Distinguishing the Epistemic and Metaphysical Aspects

Abstract

Statisticalists' argue that the individual interactions of organisms taken together constitute natural selection. On this view, natural selection is an aggregated effect of interactions rather than some added cause acting on populations. The statisticalists' view entails that natural selection and drift are indistinguishable aggregated effects of interactions, so that it becomes impossible to make a difference between them. The present paper attempts to make sense of the difference between selection and drift, given the main insights of statisticalism; basically, it will disentangle the various kinds of indistinguishability between selection and drift that happen within biology, by examining the epistemological and metaphysical nature of the distinction between selection and drift. It will be based on a 'difference-making account' of selection. The first section will explicate the inscrutability of selection and drift, its various types in the statisticalist writings, and its implications. The second section specifies concepts of natural selection and drift in the difference making account of selection I am using, and shows that one can derive from this the statistical signatures of selection and drift. On this basis I focus on one sort of indistinguishability issue about selection and drift, which I call epistemic opacity, and explain why it mostly affects small populations. The last section explains why epistemic opacity does not raise an genuine epistemic problem for evolutionary biology.

What Is It Like To Be an Environment? A Semantic and Epistemological Inquiry

“…Selection is an individualizing factor for environments in the sense of evolutionary biology. That is, selective pressures are factors that differentially impact on individuals in a species: if a factor, namely an ecological force, affects all individuals in the same way, no matter their genetic constitution, then it's not relevant for natural selection (Huneman 2015). Hence it is not part of the "environment."…”

The Propensity Interpretation of Probability: A Re-evaluation

“…Popper thought of propensity as the most appropriate interpretation of the probabilities in QM, and indeed propensity has been one of the main interpretations of these probabilities (see, for example, Popper 1967;Redhead 1987 andKrips 1989). The propensity interpretation has also played a central role in biology, and a number of papers in this volume consider whether propensity could help explicate the notions of fitness and selection in theoretical population biology (see Abrams 2015;Drouet and Merlin 2014;Huneman 2014 andWalsh 2014).…”