Save Our Selves from Science Gone Wrong: Physicalism, Natural Selection

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Accordingly, prima facie, the proposed definition provides no hope of cardinal or even ordinal measurement that would enable us to predict or explain quantitatively differences in rates of reproduction, and the evolutionary processes that depend on these rates. Moreover, ecological fitness accounts may not have provided a satisfactory story about how to carve up the relevant reference environment that is supposed to have an impact on the survival of said organisms Abrams This tendency of course simply adds force to the original argument.

If the only way to make fitness differences scientifically tractable is to trivialize the theory, so much the worse for the theory. Some philosophers notably Sober, have argued that evolutionary fitness is a property of populations and not of individual organisms, or alternatively that fitness is a property of traits and not of the individuals that possess them. Individual fitness values are, they argue, empirically inaccessible and predictively useless. This claim has been challenged cf.

Pence and Ramsey It has also been held that trait fitness and fitness difference are both something more than and different from the average of individual fitnesses and fitness differences. On this view trait fitness is a property of populations and in part of their population structure, that is, the ways in which traits are distributed in the population.

An example to be explored further below is reflected in cases where the fitness of a trait depends not just on its incidence in a population, but also on its variance within. This suggests that trait fitness is not reducible to, definable in terms of, or even entirely supervenient on the relationship between individuals e. The disagreement about whether fitness is a property of biological individuals genes, genotypes, organisms, families, populations and other groups or even species as opposed to a property of traits of these individuals, has made significant another debate about the explanatory role of fitness in the theory of natural selection.

Among those who endorse trait fitness differences , and not individual fitness differences , as a fundamental explanatory factor in natural selection, there is a dispute about whether its explanatory role reflects its causal force, or whether trait fitness is a purely statistical concept employed in the theory of natural selection to make demographic predictions about future trait distributions, without entering into any causal nexus among the objects so to speak.

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As such it causally intervenes between the relationship of environments to organisms that cause it, and the actual rates of reproduction that are its effects. These properties, and all dispositions are distinguished both from the actual behaviour to which they give rise—e. The fact that fitness is a probabilistic disposition makes for no special difficulty on this analysis. The charge of tautology against the theory thus rests on the mistaken demand that an explanatory variable must always be defined in terms distinct from its causes and effects.

Mutatis mutandis for comparative fitness differences. Thus, definitions such as the following were advanced by proponents of this approach Beatty and Mills , Brandon Of course, if fitness is a probabilistic propensity, then the fitter among competing organisms will not always leave more offspring, and the theory of natural selection will have to be understood as making the claim that probabilistic fitness difference result in reproductive differences not invariably but only with some probability.

With the inclusion of such propensities, the tautological nature of the explanation is dissolved since there is no deterministic path between the propensity to leave more offspring and the actual reproductive rates. But putting aside the tautology issue, there is also a scientific reason for favoring propensity approaches: The question arises however of what sort of a probabilistic propensity the definition invokes. One candidate that has not found much favour among philosophers is that the probability invoked by the definition is long run relative frequency.

To begin with owing to periods of environmental and genetic instability actual frequencies may vary rapidly while still approaching their long run relative frequencies conditional on the counterfactual assumption that environment and genes had been stable.

This makes it difficult to confirm measures of fitness so defined. Moreover, treating single case probabilities as long run relative frequencies is a long-standing objection. In the biological case it is particularly serious owing to the role of small numbers e. Finally, if long run relative frequencies reflect dispositions of organisms or populations to leave descendants, the question arises whether these dispositions are grounded on some occurrent properties or not.

If not then long run relative frequencies turn out to be or immediately give way to objective chances. See Earman , Some philosophers have argued that fitnesses are precisely such objective chances. Brandon and Carson held that here, as in quantum mechanics, we find a brute unanalyzable probabilistic dispositional property of a particular item, which generates the long run relative frequencies. It is indeed the case that among philosophers of quantum mechanics some hold that probabilistic propensities can explain actual frequencies [cf.

Railton , ], and some hold that they do so via a detour into long run relative frequencies. But few are comfortable with such arguments and adopt them only because, at the level of the quantum mechanical probabilistic propensities are indispensable and irreducible [cf. Proponents of probabilistic propensities in biology may envision two possibilities here.

No one doubts the potential biological significance of quantum percolation. It may well be an important source of mutation [cf. Stamos for a discussion]. But the claim that it has a significant role in most fitness differences is not supported by any independent evidence [cf. Millstein and Glymour for a discussion]. The claim that there are brute probabilistic propensities at the level of organismal fitness differences is only slightly more tenable. No one has adduced any evidence that, for instance, the probabilistic generalizations about the behaviour of animals that ethology and behavioural biology provide, are irreducibly probabilistic, instead of simply expressions of the current state of our knowledge and ignorance of the causes and conditions of the behaviour in question.

Rosenberg and Kaplan [] advance an alternative account of the nature and source of objective chances in Darwinian processes, arguing that they are not quantum mechanical in origin but are identical to the objective chances that operate in the processes described by the second law of thermodynamics. Of course this suggestion trades one problem for another, since the source of thermodynamic chances is a vexed question in the philosophy of physics.

There is however a much more serious issue facing the propensity definition of fitness: The difficulty reflects features of natural selection that we must accommodate. And if this is so, the probabilistic propensity definition will not defuse the threat of triviality facing the theory of natural selection. We review here the research program of delivering a propensity definition of fitness that has sought to deal with these difficulties.

Take a simple example from Brandon It is also the case that in some biologically actual circumstances—for example, in circumstances in which mean fitnesses are low, increased variance is sometimes selected for Ekbohm, Fagerstrom, and Agren One simple way to do so is to add a ceteris paribus clause to the definition.

But the question must then be raised of how many different exceptions to the original definiens need to be accommodated? Thus Brandon writes , But how many such factors are there, and when do they play a non-zero role in fitness?

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The answer is that the number of such factors is probably indefinitely large. The reason for this is given by the facts about natural selection as Darwin and his successors uncovered them. Community Saloon bar To do list What is going on?

External links Twitter Facebook Discord. This page was last modified on 14 August , at Unless explicitly noted otherwise, all content licensed as indicated by RationalWiki: For concerns on copyright infringement please see: The divine comedy Creationism. Evidence against a recent creation: Text of creationist bills: Institute for Creation Research: How does that happen? This is Ben Stein's problem. These are legitimate questions.

And there are legitimate theories to explain them. They don't agree with evolutionists in many cases, but the discussion is fascinating. By the way, the Tufts guy didn't even offer one obvious answer that maybe a complete visual system just showed up. One fish is blind. Its babies have sight. An anti-evolution scientist I talked with once called it the hopeful monster theory. So maybe that series of happy accidents actually happened and maybe they didn't. My news reporter training makes me intensely curious about such matters, but in the grand scheme of things I am not a biologist and I am not a scientist, and I really don't have a clue.

I read and listen to others and make my decisions based on the facts presented to me. Like others interested in the topic, I have changed my mind a dozen times and will probably make a dozen more changes before all is said and done.

And really, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't affect me all that much one way or another. What does concern me, as does concern Ben Stein, is the constant shouting down of other opinions by one part of society or another. The Polish scientist in the movie hit it right on the head and says everything that is really wrong with the United States.

We are way too worried about being politically correct. Not being politically correct gets you yelled at. Not saying the politically correct things gets you ostracized. It ought not to be this way.

We should all feel free to express our opinions and to discuss differences and discuss ideas. There is the old saying that I have never learned anything from someone who agreed with me. I think that's what Ben Stein is trying to say with his movie. We all learn when differing opinions