This article defends the Negative View of natural selection explanation, according to which natural selection cannot explain of any given individual why it has the traits it does. Over the years, this view has been criticized on empirical, metaphysical, and explanatory grounds. I review the debate and offer additional reasons for rejecting the empirical and metaphysical objections. The explanatory objection, which holds that the Negative View is rooted in a flawed account of contrastive explanation, initially seems plausible. However, I argue (...) that a closer consideration of the desiderata of contrastive explanation shows that this objection fails as well. (shrink)

An influential species of evolutionary debunking argument against moral realism holds that since cumulative natural selection shaped the contents of our moral beliefs, those beliefs do not count as knowledge. Critics have taken issue with a range of empirical, epistemic, and metaphysical assumptions that EDAs are said to rely on, which has engendered a complex debate over whether and to what extent the debunking challenge succeeds. However, recently it has been argued that we can reject EDAs without having to enter (...) this thicket of issues. EDAs supposedly fail at the outset, by trading on a glaring misunderstanding about the scope of natural selection explanations. I argue that this objection to EDAs fails, and itself rests on a mistaken view of natural selection explanation and its relation to justification. (shrink)

Evolutionary explanations are not only common in the biological sciences, but also widespread outside biology. But an account of how evolutionary explanations perform their explanatory work is still lacking. This paper develops such an account. I argue that available accounts of explanations in evolutionary science miss important parts of the role of history in evolutionary explanations. I argue that the historical part of evolutionary science should be taken as having genuine explanatory force, and that it provides how‐possibly explanations sensu Dray. (...) I propose an account of evolutionary explanations as comparative‐composite explanations consisting of two distinct kinds of explanations, one processual and one historical, that are connected via the explanandum's evolvability to show how the explanandum is the product of its evolutionary past. The account is both a reconstruction of how evolutionary explanations in biology work and a guideline specifying what kind of explanations evolutionary research programs should develop. (shrink)

Many moral philosophers accept the Debunking Thesis, according to which facts about natural selection provide debunking explanations for certain of our moral beliefs. I argue that philosophers who accept the Debunking Thesis beg important questions in the philosophy of biology. They assume that past selection can explain why you or I hold certain of the moral beliefs we do. A position advanced by many prominent philosophers of biology implies that this assumption is false. According to the Negative View, natural selection (...) cannot explain the traits of individuals. Hence, facts about past selection cannot provide debunking explanations for any of our moral beliefs. The aim of this paper is to explore the conflict between the Debunking Thesis and the Negative View. (shrink)

The “negative view” is the claim that natural selection cannot explain why a particular individual has one trait, rather than another. Here, I modify an example from Lewens (2001) to show that this claim is sometimes false. I then advance a variation on the negative view. It is the claim that selection at the organism level within a lineage cannot explain why a particular individual in that lineage has one allele, rather than another. This formulation better describes the explanatory role (...) of selection. (shrink)

There are ongoing debates in philosophy of biology about what falls within natural selection's explanatory scope. These include debates about whether selection can explain individual-level traits, the extent to which selection can explain distributions of trait frequencies, and whether selection can explain the origin of novel traits. Here I'll survey these debates, suggest which views seem most plausible, and describe some useful conceptual frameworks for thinking about the issues involved.

The proper function of the heart is pumping the blood. According to what we call the type etiological view, this is because previous tokens of the type HEART were selected for pumping the blood. Nanay :412–431, 2010) argues that the type etiological view is viciously circular. He claims that the only plausible accounts of trait type individuation use proper functions, such that whenever the type etiological view is supplemented with a plausible account of trait type individuation, the result is a (...) view that uses proper functions to explain proper functions. We refine this objection, and argue that Nanay at most establishes a potentially benign definitional circularity. However, we show that the type etiological view’s reliance on types nevertheless generates a vicious regress. Hence the type etiological view is false. We reject dispositional and modal alternatives to the type etiological view for the reason that they either cannot accommodate malfunction, or do so at the cost of proliferation; and then formulate a novel token etiological view that overcomes both problems because it makes no reference to trait types. (shrink)

A long-running dispute concerns which adaptation-related explananda natural selection can be said to explain. At issue are explananda of the form: why a given individual organism has a given adaptation rather than that same individual having another trait. It is broadly agreed that one must be ready to back up a “no” answer with an appropriate theory of trans-world identity for individuals. I argue, against the conventional wisdom, that the same is true for a “yes” answer. My conclusion recasts the (...) landscape and opens the door to a potential resolution. (shrink)

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection provided the first, and only, causal-mechanistic account of the existence of adaptations in nature. As such, it provided the first, and only, scientific alternative to the “argument from design”. That alone would account for its philosophical significance. But the theory also raises other philosophical questions not encountered in the study of the theories of physics. Unfortunately the concept of natural selection is intimately intertwined with the other basic concepts of evolutionary theory—such as the (...) concepts of fitness and adaptation —that are themselves philosophically controversial. Fortunately we can make considerable headway in getting clear on natural selection without solving all of those outstanding problems. (shrink)