Abstract
This paper develops alternative ways of understanding ‘adaptation to’ specific environmental conditions, with particular attention to the explanatory power offered by differing conceptions, the concomitant epistemic demands they make of explanations, and the models such explanations employ. It is shown that explanations of adaptation to particular environmental conditions can satisfy important intuitions only if the environmental conditions to which phenotypes are adapted are interactive causes of fitness. However, taking this constraint to be both necessary and sufficient for ‘adaptation to’ imposes epistemic burdens on our explanatory practice, and risks violating yet other intuitions. The paper briefly explores the consequences of the constraint for the idea that selection requires shared environments, the idea that selection requires a homogeneous environment, the idea that phenotypes may be extended, and the idea that niches may be constructed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
- 2.
I omit consideration of traits, genetic or phenotypic, which are in some important sense adaptive, but such that selection cannot drive the trait frequency to that expected from the mutation rate characteristic of the relevant genetic loci. Examples here include the sickle-cell allele. The issues here are important, but beyond the scope of this essay.
- 3.
- 4.
Recollect that on the conception of causation here employed, causal relations hold between variables, and to say that E causes W is to say that by changing E one can change (the probability density over) W; hence there will be values of E that increase the value of W, and other values of E that decrease the value of W. Loosely, the causes of an outcome include both producers and preventers of that outcome.
- 5.
Note that it matters here not at all whether the behavioral trait in question produces the non-homogenous environment by habitat selection, or by niche construction—in either case, it is not P, but the phenotypic cause of E 1 that is the immediate focus of selection, and hence the immediate locus of adaptation.
- 6.
This is an implicit consequence of any view that pairs dispositional fitnesses with the standard view that selection requires heritable differences in fitness. It is sometimes made explicit, as e.g. in (Brandon 1990).
- 7.
Marshall Abrams has in conversation pressed various critical points regarding actual non-homogeneous distributions of adapting conditions. Though what I say will doubtless leave him unsatisfied, his worries influenced some of what follows and I thank Marshall for pressing them.
- 8.
Both ideas remain largely metaphorical, and hence conceptually quite rich. Consequently, it is not the case that Fig. 3 represents the causal structure operative in any realization of either metaphor. It is rather that any system for which the structure in Fig. 3 holds is a system in which the E a value counts as an extended phenotype, in one sense of that term, and as a constructed niche, in one sense of that term.
- 9.
Though heritable variation in fitness is commonly taken to be either a necessary or a necessary and sufficient condition for selection (e.g. Lewontin 1970), on some views selection just is differential reproductive success (see e.g. Eldredge 1986 or Grant 1991) or differential fitness of types (e.g. Schluter 1988).
- 10.
The interactive causal connection between adapting conditions and fitness is of particular concern, but space prevents any useful elaboration here.
References
Brandon, Robert N. 1990. Adaptation and environment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Brandon, Robert N., and Janis Antonovics. 1996. The coevolution of organism and environment. In Concepts and methods in evolutionary biology, ed. Robert N. Brandon, 161–178. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caswell, Hal. 2001. Matrix population models. Sunderland: Sinauer.
Dawkins, Richard. 1999. The extended phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eldredge, Niles. 1986. Information, economics, and evolution. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 17: 351–369.
Glymour, Bruce. 1998. Contrastive, non-probabilistic statistical explanations. Philosophy of Science 65: 448–471.
Glymour, Bruce. 2007. In defense of explanatory deductivism. In Causation and explanation, ed. Joseph Campbell, Michael O’Rourke, and Harry Silverstein, 133–154. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Glymour, Bruce. 2011. Modeling environments: Interactive causation and adaptation to environmental conditions. Philosophy of Science 78: 448–471.
Grant, Peter R. 1991. Natural selection and Darwin’s finches. Scientific American 265: 82–87.
Guisan, Antione, and Wilfried Thuiller. 2005. Predicting species distribution: Offering more than simple habitat models. Ecology Letters 8: 993–1009.
Heywood, James. 2010. Explaining patterns in modern ruminant diversity: Contingency or constraint? Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 99: 657–672.
Hunt, Kevin D. 1994. The evolution of human bipedality: Ecology and functional morphology. Journal of Human Evolution 23: 183–202.
Jaenike, John. 1978. An hypothesis to account for the maintenance of sex within populations. Evolutionary Theory 3: 191–194.
Johnson, Matthew D. 2007. Measuring habitat quality: A review. The Condor 109: 489–504.
Kerr, Benjamin, and Peter Godfrey-Smith. 2002. Individualist and multi-level perspectives on selection in structured populations. Biology and Philosophy 17: 477–517.
Lande, Russell, and Stevan J. Arnold. 1983. The measurement of selection on correlated characters. Evolution 37: 1210–1226.
Lennox, James G., and Bradley E. Wilson. 1994. Natural selection and the struggle for existence. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25: 65–80.
Levene, Howard. 1953. Genetic equilibrium when more than one ecological niche is available. American Naturalist 87: 331–333.
Levin, Donald. 1975. Pest pressure and recombination systems in plants. American Naturalist 109: 437–451.
Lewontin, Richard C. 1970. The units of selection. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 1: 1–18.
Maynard Smith, John. 1976. What determines the rate of evolution? American Naturalist 110: 331–338.
McFadden, Bruce. 1992. Fossil horses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Odling-Smee, F. John, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman. 2003. Niche construction: The neglected process in evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pearl, Judea. 2000. Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roughgarden, Jonathan. 1979. Theory of population genetics and evolutionary ecology. New York: Macmillan.
Schluter, Dolph. 1988. Estimating the form of natural selection on a quantitative trait. Evolution 42: 849–861.
Spirtes, Peter, Clark Glymour, and Richard Scheines. 2000. Causation, prediction, and search, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Toju, Hirokazu, and Teiji Sota. 2006. Imbalance of predator and prey armament: Geographic clines in phenotypic interface and natural selection. American Naturalist 167: 105–117.
van Fraassen, Bas. 1980. The scientific image. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wheeler, Peter E. 1991. The influence of bipedalism on the energy and water budgets of early hominids. Journal of Human Evolution 21: 117–136.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Glymour, B. (2014). Adaptation, Adaptation to, and Interactive Causes. In: Barker, G., Desjardins, E., Pearce, T. (eds) Entangled Life. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7067-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7067-6_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-7066-9
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-7067-6
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)