Abstract
In the recent philosophical literature, two questions have arisen concerning the status of natural selection: (1) Is it a population-level phenomenon, or is it an organism-level phenomenon? (2) Is it a causal process, or is it a purely statistical summary of lower-level processes? In an earlier work (Millstein, Br J Philos Sci, 57(4):627–653, 2006), I argue that natural selection should be understood as a population-level causal process, rather than a purely statistical population-level summation of lower-level processes or as an organism-level causal process. In a 2009 essay entitled “Productivity, relevance, and natural selection,” Stuart Glennan argues in reply that natural selection is produced by causal processes operating at the level of individual organisms, but he maintains that there is no causal productivity at the population level. However, there are, he claims, many population-level properties that are causally relevant to the dynamics of evolutionary processes. Glennan’s claims rely on a causal pluralism that holds that there are two types of causes: causal production and causal relevance. Without calling into question Glennan’s causal pluralism or his claims concerning the causal relevance of natural selection, I argue that natural selection does in fact exhibit causal production at the population level. It is true that natural selection does not fit with accounts of mechanisms that involve decomposition of wholes into parts, such as Glennan’s own. However, it does fit with causal production accounts that do not require decomposition, such as Salmon’s Mark Transmission account, given the extent to which populations act as interacting “objects” in the process of natural selection.
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Notes
- 1.
In this earlier work (Millstein 2006), I referred to an “individual-level” causal process instead of an “organism-level” causal process. This was a somewhat unfortunate choice of terminology on my part, since, as I will discuss below, populations are themselves individuals. On the other hand, the advantage of that terminology was that it was agnostic with respect to the units of selection; the individuals in question could be genes, cells, organisms, etc. So, to be clear – in this chapter, for the sake of simplicity – I discuss only populations of organisms, with the understanding that selection can occur in populations of other entities. The more general question, then, which I will not be discussing here, is whether natural selection consists of causes that act on the individuals of any sort that constitute a population (including a population of populations) or whether natural selection consists of causes that act on the population as a whole. Also, in this chapter I will be discussing Salmon’s sense of the term “causal process”; what I call a “causal process” in my 2006 paper would probably be, in Salmon’s terms, part of a “causal nexus.” I will return to this point briefly at the end of this chapter.
- 2.
- 3.
See Bechtel and Abrahamsen (2005).
- 4.
Thanks to Carl Craver, Lindley Darden, and Stuart Glennan for each pushing me on this point.
- 5.
He also states, “Microphysics is invoked to ascertain the age of the bone, but not explain its presence in the site where it was discovered” (1984, p. 268).
- 6.
Illari and Williamson (2010) also seem to understand MDC mechanisms as being decompositional. Kuorikoski (2009) usefully distinguishes between mechanisms that involve decomposition and those that do not; he agrees with Skipper and Millstein (2005) that natural selection falls into the latter category. (Thanks to Till Gruene-Yanoff for the pointer to the paper by Kuorikoski).
- 7.
Skipper and Millstein (2005) offer additional reasons for thinking that the new mechanistic philosophy does not, in its current form, adequately characterize natural selection. I have focused on the issue of decomposition here in order to address the decompositional assumption behind Glennan’s claim that population-level properties do not produce change because the population is not a part of the mechanism that produces changes in genotype and phenotype frequencies. I thus seek to highlight the way in which Salmon’s account can provide a non-decompositional picture of causal production in natural selection.
- 8.
I focus on Salmon’s Mark Transmission account rather than his later Conserved Quantity account because I believe that it is more broadly applicable to causation outside the domain of physics. Indeed, Salmon explicitly states that his 1984 account of scientific explanation is intended to cover many different disciplines, such as the behavioral sciences, the physical sciences, and the biomedical sciences (1984, p. 267).
- 9.
Similarly, Salmon notes that when two moving pool balls intersect in space-time, energy and momentum are transferred, altering the states of motion of both balls; thus, the intersection is a causal interaction in which the change in each process can be said to be produced by the other process (1984, pp. 169–170).
- 10.
Here one might worry about circularity if individuals (“objects”) are characterized in terms of interactions, if causal processes are objects persisting and changing through space-time, and if interactions are intersections of causal processes. However, Salmon (1994) clarifies that interactions are not to be defined in terms of causal processes, only in terms of processes more generally, where “[a] process is something that displays consistency of characteristics” (1994, p. 299). Causal processes are then characterized by their ability to transmit marks, where a mark is a type of interaction – “an alteration to a characteristic that occurs in a single local intersection” (Salmon 1994, p. 299). An object persisting or changing through space-time is one example of a causal process; however, a carrier wave is another.
- 11.
The interactions within (or among) the members of a population are to be distinguished from the interactions between the population as a whole and other entities. It is the occurrence of the former interactions that binds the population together as a whole and thus makes possible the latter kinds of interactions.
- 12.
Salmon intends his account to include probabilistic processes; see, for example, his 1984 work, p. 268.
- 13.
One worry that has been raised by a number of recent authors, including Glennan (Glennan 2009; see also Hitchcock 1995 and Craver 2007), is that Salmon’s account fails to pinpoint which of the causal processes that produce an effect are explanatorily relevant. In one version of an example which purports to illustrate the problem, Ms. Slims chalks her cue stick with blue chalk and deftly hits the cue ball, which hits the eight ball, which proceeds to the corner pocket. The claim seems to be that, while the blue “mark” has been transmitted (perhaps even to the eight ball), it is not explanatorily relevant to the effect. However, I think we need to be clear on what the effect is; if we are talking about a token chain of events (and not a type of chain of events), then the effect that occurred is that an eight ball with a blue mark dropped into a corner pocket. And the blue mark is explanatorily relevant to that token event, just as the momentum of the cue ball is. We still might be worried that Salmon wanted his account to be able to give an explanation for the event type “ball in the corner pocket” and that the blue mark is not relevant to that. Here, I think three possible responses are open. One is that explanatory relevance and causal relevance come apart; the blue mark is always causally relevant, but it simply is not explanatorily relevant to the event type. Second is to insist that in explaining why an eight ball with a blue mark has gone into the corner pocket, we have already explained why the eight ball has gone into the corner pocket. Third is to give up on using Salmon’s account to explain event types and only use it to explain event tokens. (Thanks to Christopher Hitchcock for helpful discussion).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Carl Craver, Lindley Darden, and Stuart Glennan for much relevant and productive discussion about causation and mechanisms. Thanks also to the Griesemer/Millstein Lab, my Winter 2011 Philosophy of Science seminar, and attendees of the Taiwan Conference on the Philosophy of Biology and Economics for helpful comments and questions, and to Joyce Havstad and Michael Strevens for helpful comments on my draft. Finally, thanks to Carl Craver for an excellent set of referee comments.
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Millstein, R.L. (2013). Natural Selection and Causal Productivity. In: Chao, HK., Chen, ST., Millstein, R. (eds) Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2454-9_8
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