Elliott Sober''s selection for/selection of distinction has been widely used to clarify the idea that some properties of organisms are side-effects of selection processes. It has also been used, however, to choose between different descriptions of an evolutionary product when assigning biological functions to that product. We suggest that there is a characteristic error in these uses of the distinction. Complementary descriptions of function are misrepresented as mutually excluding one another. This error arises from a failure to appreciate that selection (...) processes can be described at several different theoretical levels. (shrink)

Sustained controversy over a philosophical issue is often times symptomatic of differing commitments at a more fundamental philosophical level. I will argue that two current debates over the foundations of the theory of natural selection are cases in point. Alexander Rosenberg, at times together with Mary Williams, challenges what is becoming received orthodoxy about the foundations of this theory. He argues that the currently popular propensity interpretation of fitness does not legitimize explanations in terms of natural selection, and that furthermore, (...) the biological fields which typically study the ways in which selection pressures originate in the organism/environment complex are not in fact part of the theory of natural selection at all. His foils in the first case are Robert Brandon, John Beatty and Susan Mills;2 on the second issue he is engaged in debate with Elliott Sober.3 We will see that, although the controversies are ostensibly about the interpretation of fitness, the issues, at bottom, involve the nature of scientific explanation. (shrink)

Since the last decades of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, the use of metaphysics by philosophers when approaching conceptual problems in biology has increased. Some philosophers call this tendency in philosophy of biology ‘Metaphysics of Biology’. In this paper, I aim at characterizing Metaphysics of Biology by paying attention to the diverse ways philosophers use metaphysics when addressing conceptual problems in biology. I will claim that there are two different modes of doing Metaphysics of Biology, namely (...) Metaphysics for Biology and Metaphysics in Biology. (shrink)

Recent attempts to clarify the fitness in evolutionary theory as a propensity (Brandon 1978; Brandon and Beatty 1984; Burian 1983; Mills and Beatty 1979; Sober 1984a, 1984b) or as a primitive theoretical term (Rosenberg 1983, 1985; Williams 1970, Williams and Rosenberg 1985) all miss the mark in clarifying the empirical content and explanatory power of natural selection theory.I shall argue that the crucial distinction missing in these accounts is between the sense of fitness common in population genetics as actual relative (...) rate of increase of genotypes and fitness in the more ordinary sense--and Darwin’s--of adaptedness of organisms. The relation between these senses of ‘fitness’ is that fitness as actual reproduction success depends on, is a function of, variables representing adaptive capacities and environmental properties. (shrink)