The Trials of Life: Natural Selection and Random Drift

Walsh, Denis M.; Lewens, Tim; Ariew, André

doi:10.1086/342454

Cited by 193 publications

(123 citation statements)

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“…The "statistical" as opposed to the "dynamic" interpretation of evolutionary theory (fn. 6), which Walsh et al (2002) forcefully defend, supports the present view. As for Neander's suggestions, she appeals crucially to the cumulativity of the adaptive process, in which some earlier preservations and proliferations of some co-adapted sequence of genes changes the probability of what subsequent variations will arise.…”

Section: The Darwin-spencer Dividesupporting

confidence: 87%

“…6 On the so-called "statistical" interpretation of evolutionary theory, it is a theory about the structure of populations only, not a theory of "forces" acting on individual organisms (and hence not a theory about any "creative" forces). Walsh et al (2002) compare natural selection to a sorting process of biased coins, as a consequence of which the frequency of the heads-to-tails changes over a sequence of trials (the bias of each individual coin corresponds to the fitness of individual organisms). The systematic bias explains the sorting outcome, but the bias is not the property of any individual coin, being a mean.…”

Section: The Darwin-spencer Dividementioning

confidence: 99%

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Spencerism and the Causal Theory of Reference

Hinzen¹

2006

Biol Philos

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Spencer's heritage, while almost a forgotten chapter in the history of biology, lives on in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I particularly discuss externalist views of meaning, on which meaning crucially depends on a notion of reference, and ask whether reference should be thought of as cause or effect. Is the meaning of a word explained by what it refers to, or should we say that what we use a word to refer to is explained by what concept it expresses? I argue for the latter, "Darwinian" view, and against the former, "Spencerian" one, assuming conceptual structures in humans to be an instance of adaptive structures, and adaptive relations to an environment to be the effect rather than the cause of evolutionary novelties. I conclude with both the empirical implausibility and the methodological undesirability of a functionalist study of human concepts in the relational sense of "function", as it would be undertaken in a paradigm that identifies meaning with reference or that gives reference an explanatory role to play for what concepts we have.

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Section: The Darwin-spencer Dividesupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: The Darwin-spencer Dividementioning

confidence: 99%

Spencerism and the Causal Theory of Reference

Hinzen¹

2006

Biol Philos

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“…Nonetheless, in 'denying that process causation occurs at this level' (Matthen and Ariew [2002], p. 82), Matthen and Ariew seem to be embracing a concept of process causation that is 'strictly law governed,' and admits of no 'discontinuities' or 'reversals' ([2002], p. 79). (See Stephens [2004] for a critique of this Similarly, Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew ([2002], p. 453) assert, 'Selection and drift are not forces acting on populations; they are statistical properties of an assemblage of "trial" events: births, deaths and reproduction.' I understand both of these papers to be claiming that natural selection is purely statistical; natural selection, on their view, is a mere statistical summary of lower-level causes, but it is not itself a cause or a causal process.…”

Section: The Montane Willow Leaf Beetle: a Causal Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some authors argue that natural selection is nothing but a population-level, statistical consequence of lowerlevel events (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew [2002]). On this view, natural selection itself does not involve forces.…”

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confidence: 99%

Natural Selection as a Population-Level Causal Process

Millstein¹

2006

The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

120

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Recent discussions in the philosophy of biology have brought into question some fundamental assumptions regarding evolutionary processes, natural selection in particular. Some authors argue that natural selection is nothing but a population-level, statistical consequence of lowerlevel events (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew [2002]). On this view, natural selection itself does not involve forces. Other authors reject this purely statistical, population-level account for an individual-level, causal account of natural selection (Bouchard and Rosenberg [2004]). I argue that each of these positions is right in one way, but wrong in another; natural selection indeed takes place at the level of populations, but it is a causal process nonetheless. argue for a third logical possibility: natural selection is indeed a causal process, but it operates at the population level.The issues at stake in this debate will be fleshed out in more detail in the discussion below. However, at the outset it is important to distinguish this debate from the more well known debates over the units (or levels) of selection; unfortunately, similar terminology makes this distinction difficult. One obvious difference between the debates is that the units of selection debates assume a causal basis for natural selection, whereas the existence of selection's causal basis is one of the points of contention in the debate at hand. With regard to the issue of levels, however, the difference between the two debates can best be seen by the following example.Suppose that a person believes, in terms of the levels of selection debate, that selection (either sometimes or always) acts on organisms. Such a person still might ask whether that selection Millstein, p. of 3 of 41process was acting on individual organisms or populations of organisms. 1 It is the latter question that concerns us here, and indeed, throughout this paper I have, for the sake of simplicity, assumed organismic selection, although I believe that similar arguments can be made for other units of selection. Now, it may turn out that the present debate has interesting consequences for the debates over the units of selection, but I will not explore such consequences here.Further terminological confusion arises because of the distinction being made between an individual and a population. Indeed, one might wish to speak of an 'individual' population rather than a class or type of population. However, the reader should understand that, in what follows, 'individual' refers to an individual organism, whereas a population refers to a particular spatiotemporal collection of organisms.Some philosophers might object to the very idea of population-level causality. In response to this concern, I will argue in section 2.1 that anyone who accepts the reality of frequency-dependent selection is already committed to population-level causality. Moreover, in section 2.2 I will argue that population-level causality is consistent with three commonly accepted accounts of causality; thus,...

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“…This is yet another place where the PIF has gone astray. It is rather the predictive fitness (and, in particular, the predictive fitness of traits and not of individual organisms) that is the appropriate target for biological study (Walsh, Lewens, and Ariew 2002;Walsh 2003Walsh , 2004Walsh , 2007.…”

Section: Responses Abandoning the Pifmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fitness: Philosophical Problems

Ramsey

Pence

2013

Encyclopedia of Life Sciences

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[120-150 words] Fitness plays many roles throughout evolutionary theory, from a measure of populations in the wild to a central element in abstract theoretical presentations of natural selection.It has thus been the subject of an extensive philosophical literature, which has primarily centered on the way to understand the relationship between fitness values and reproductive outcomes. If fitness is a probabilistic or statistical quantity, how is it to be defined in general theoretical contexts? How can it be measured? Can a single conceptual model for fitness be offered that applies in all biological cases, or must fitness measures be case-specific? Philosophers have explored these questions over the last several decades, largely in the context of an influential definition of fitness proposed in the late 1970s: the propensity interpretation. This interpretation as first described undeniably suffers from significant difficulties, and debate regarding the tenability of amendments and alternatives to it remains unsettled.

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The Trials of Life: Natural Selection and Random Drift

Cited by 193 publications

References 22 publications

Spencerism and the Causal Theory of Reference

Spencerism and the Causal Theory of Reference

Natural Selection as a Population-Level Causal Process

Fitness: Philosophical Problems

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