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)

It is commonly thought that natural selection explains the rise of adaptive complexity. Razeto-Barry and Frick have recently argued in favour of this view, dubbing it the Creative View. I argue that the Creative View is mistaken if it claims that natural selection serves to answer Paley’s question. This is shown by a case that brings out the contrastive structure inherent in this demand for explanation. There is, however, a rather trivial sense in which specific environmental conditions are crucial for (...) the rise of specific adaptations, but this is hardly what opponents of the Creative View are denying. (shrink)

In this paper, we address the question whether a mechanistic approach can account for evolutionary causes. The last decade has seen a major attempt to account for natural selection as a mechanism. Nevertheless, we stress the relevance of broadening the debate by including the other evolutionary causes inside the mechanistic approach, in order to be a legitimate conceptual framework on the same footing as other approaches to evolutionary theory. We analyse the current debate on natural selection as a mechanism, and (...) extend it to the rest of the evolutionary causes. We focus on three approaches that we call the stochastic view, the functional view, and the minimalist view. We argue that all of them are unable to account for evolutionary causes as mechanisms. It is concluded that the current mechanistic proposals cannot be accepted as a common framework for evolutionary causes. Finally, we outline some guidelines and requirements that any mechanistic proposal should meet in order to be applied to evolutionary theory. (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)