Popper's Darwinian analogy

One of the most deeply entrenched ideas in Popper's philosophy is the analogy between the growth of scientific knowledge and the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection. Popper gave his first exposition of these ideas very early on. In a letter to Donald Campbell, 1 Popper says that the idea goes back at least to the early thirties. 2 And he had a fairly detailed account of it in his "What is dialectic?", a talk given in 1937 and published in 1940: 3 If we want to explain why human thought tends to try out every conceivable solution for any problem with which it is faced, then we can appeal to a highly general sort of regularity. The method by which a solution is approached is .

Cultural replication and microbial evolution

The aim of this paper is to argue that cultural evolution is in many ways much more similar to microbial than to macrobial biological evolution. As a result, we are better off using microbial evolution as the model of cultural evolution. And this shift from macrobial to microbial entails adjusting the theoretical models we can use for explaining cultural evolution

Replicate after reading : on the extraction and evocation of cultural information

Does cultural evolution happen by a process of copying or replication? And how exactly does cultural transmission compare with that paradigmatic case of replication, the copying of DNA in living cells? Theorists of cultural evolution are divided on these issues. The most important objection to the replication model has been leveled by Dan Sperber and his colleagues. Cultural transmission, they argue, is almost always reconstructive and transformative, while strict 'replication' can be seen as a rare limiting case at most. By means of some thought experiments and intuition pumps, I clear up some confusion about what qualifies as 'replication'. I propose a distinction between evocation and extraction of cultural information, applying these concepts at different levels of resolution. I defend a purely abstract and information-theoretical definition of replication, while rejecting more material conceptions. In the end, even after taking Sperber's valuable and important points on board, the notion of cultural replication remains a valid and useful one. This is fortunate, because we need it for certain explanatory projects (e.g., understanding cumulative cultural adaptations)

Natural Selection Reconsidered

In this thesis, I inspect some key assumptions which tend to underpin mainstream accounts of natural selection, noting where those assumptions break down and taking this as a basis for fresh analysis. First, I examine the assumption that natural selection inherently involves struggle or competition. I show selection can take place without zero-sum competition and that competition is not essential for selection to positively facilitate novel adaptations. Moving on to fitness, I address the assumption that biological fitness should be measured as a function of the number of elements of some set of entities (offspring, gene copies or otherwise). Noting cases where selection seemingly acts in terms of persistence and somatic growth, and with these alternative fitness metrics not reducible to one another, I suggest a pluralist stance. Subsequently extending this rationale to the temporal dimension, I show that attempting to measure fitness over any single time frame often fails to capture the action of selection. In later chapters, I explore the possibility of uniting my multiple fitness metrics via a single “common currency” metric. I rule out metrics based around resource or energy consumption, as per Van Valen and others, as unworkable. However, I find some potential in conceptualising the various aspects of fitness in terms of negative entropy. This fails to deliver a quantifiable common currency metric, but does address conceptual issues and allows for the unification of our account of biological fitness with the popular thermodynamic definition of life. The need to buttress earlier arguments necessitates a concluding analysis of the Darwinian population concept. Contra complacent assumptions that they are readily defined, I find that there are no clear means to bound Darwinian populations in many cases. I also argue that analysis of the Darwinian population concept has been confounded by the conflation of pragmatic groupings, assembled for comparative inference, with causally bound Darwinian populations

Reconceptualising evolution by natural selection

This thesis examines the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the concept of natural selection which is pervasively invoked in biology and other ‘evolutionary’ domains. Although what constitutes the process of natural selection appears to be very intuitive (natural selection results from entities exhibiting differences in fitness in a population), this conceals a number of theoretical ambiguities and difficulties. Some of these have been pointed out numerous times; others have hardly been noticed. One aim of this work is to unpack these difficulties and ambiguities; another is to provide new solutions and clarifications to them using a range of philosophical and conceptual tools. The result is a concept of natural selection stripped down from its biological specificities. I start by revisiting the entangled debates over whether natural selection is a cause of evolutionary change as opposed to a mere statistical effect of other causes, at what level this putative cause operates and whether it can be distinguished from drift. Borrowing tools from the causal modelling literature, I argue that natural selection is best conceived as a causal process resulting from individual level differences in a population. I then move to the question of whether the process of natural selection requires perfect transmission of types. I show that this question is ambiguous and can find different answers. From there, I distinguish the process of natural selection from some of its possible products, namely, evolution by natural selection and complex adaptation. I argue that reproduction and inheritance are conceptually distinct from natural selection, and using individual-based models, I demonstrate that they can be conceived as evolutionary products of it. This ultimately leads me to generalise the concepts of heritability and fitness used in the formal equations of evolutionary change. Finally, I argue that concepts of fitness and natural selection crucially depend on the grains of description at and temporal scales over which evolutionary explanations are given. These considerations reveal that the metaphysical status of the process of natural selection is problematic and why neglecting them can lead to flawed arguments in the levels of selection debate

Reconceptualising evolution by natural selection

This thesis examines the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of the concept of natural selection which is pervasively invoked in biology and other ‘evolutionary’ domains. Although what constitutes the process of natural selection appears to be very intuitive (natural selection results from entities exhibiting differences in fitness in a population), this conceals a number of theoretical ambiguities and difficulties. Some of these have been pointed out numerous times; others have hardly been noticed. One aim of this work is to unpack these difficulties and ambiguities; another is to provide new solutions and clarifications to them using a range of philosophical and conceptual tools. The result is a concept of natural selection stripped down from its biological specificities. I start by revisiting the entangled debates over whether natural selection is a cause of evolutionary change as opposed to a mere statistical effect of other causes, at what level this putative cause operates and whether it can be distinguished from drift. Borrowing tools from the causal modelling literature, I argue that natural selection is best conceived as a causal process resulting from individual level differences in a population. I then move to the question of whether the process of natural selection requires perfect transmission of types. I show that this question is ambiguous and can find different answers. From there, I distinguish the process of natural selection from some of its possible products, namely, evolution by natural selection and complex adaptation. I argue that reproduction and inheritance are conceptually distinct from natural selection, and using individual-based models, I demonstrate that they can be conceived as evolutionary products of it. This ultimately leads me to generalise the concepts of heritability and fitness used in the formal equations of evolutionary change. Finally, I argue that concepts of fitness and natural selection crucially depend on the grains of description at and temporal scales over which evolutionary explanations are given. These considerations reveal that the metaphysical status of the process of natural selection is problematic and why neglecting them can lead to flawed arguments in the levels of selection debate

The force interpretation of evolutionary theory: scope and limits

La teoría evolutiva suele entenderse como una teoría causal donde las causas principales del cambio evolutivo son identificadas con la selección natural, la deriva genética, la mutación y la migración. Siguiendo este razonamiento, muchos biólogos y filósofos de la biología han estructurado la teoría evolutiva de forma análoga a la mecánica newtoniana, entendiendo la teoría evolutiva como una teoría de fuerzas. El punto clave en el que se sustenta la analogía, es que la estructura de la mecánica newtoniana permite identificar los elementos causales del sistema de interés. De esta manera, la teoría evolutiva encuentra una útil imagen explicativa del fenómeno evolutivo, estructurándose como una ‘teoría quasi-newtoniana’ (Maudlin 2004). Esta forma de estructurar o conceptualizar una teoría de forma similar a la newtoniana ha sido utilizada en diferentes áreas: en la composición de colores, de deseos, de servicios, en la composición de “fuerzas sociales”, de deberes, en cuestiones éticas, y en la composición de poderes causales en general (Massin 2016). Esta analogía, sin embargo, ha sido desafiada en la última década, mostrando no sólo las limitaciones de la misma, sino postulando una visión radicalmente nueva según la cual las entendidas como fuerzas o causas evolutivas no serían más que pseudoprocesos. La acción causal se encontraría en el nivel de los individuos siendo la selección, la deriva, etc., resúmenes estadísticos de dichos hechos. Lo que nos proponemos en este trabajo es analizar esta polémica, mostrar las bondades pero también las limitaciones de la analogía de fuerzas y, sobre todo, vislumbrar cuál es la estructura adecuada de la teoría evolutiva, prestando especial atención a la deriva genética por ser el factor causal que peor encaja en el marco de las fuerzas.Since Darwin’s times, evolutionary theory has been conceptualized as a causal theory. In order to emphasize this causal view, textbooks and most of the evolutionary literature talk about evolutionary forces acting on a population. Elliott Sober, in his influential book The Nature of Selection (1984), argues that evolutionary theory is a theory of forces because, in the same way that different forces of Newtonian mechanics cause changes in the movement of bodies, evolutionary forces cause changes in gene and/or genotype frequencies. As a result, selection, drift, mutation and migration would be the main forces or causes of evolution. Nevertheless, the appropriateness of the causal view, and particularly the Newtonian analogy, has been challenged in the last decade. Several authors (Denis Walsh, Mohan Matthen, André Ariew…) have argued for a new view, the statistical view, where the evolutionary process and its parts (selection, drift, etc.) are mere statistical outcomes, inseparable from each other. The so called evolutionary forces should be conceptualized as statistical population-level tendencies, abandoning any causal role for them. I have developed a third way to defend the causal view. Authors committed to the Newtonian analogy capture the common theoretical structure between evolutionary theory and Newtonian mechanics. On the other hand, causalists not committed to the Newtonian analogy share statisticalists’ concern about some important problems in the force interpretation (the most important being the mismatch in the analogy produced by the lack of directionality of genetic drift). My approach postulates a broader causal framework (a difference-maker account of causation) unifying different causalists approaches, and avoiding problems like searching a directionality for genetic drift. In addition, clarifies the features that any Zero-Cause Law must accomplish. Finally, my approach explains the reason why the force metaphor was formulated in the first place and why it still continues in evolutionary literature. The Newtonian analogy is illuminating insofar as it is helpful in revealing the causal structure of evolutionary theory. In other words, the theory is constructed from a Zero-Cause Law that stipulates a default behaviour and arises by introducing factors which alters that behaviour. On the other hand, I have developed a new analysis of the Price equation, showing its virtues as a key equation in evolutionary theory, and overcoming recent critiques about its usefulness