Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences

There are what we might think of as “population” and “organismal” perspectives in evolutionary biology. The population perspective is concerned with populations of alleles that evolve in response to various processes like selection and drift. Organisms do not play a prominent role here. Indeed, organisms are often construed as mere abstract objects that house alleles prior to reproduction. The Modern Synthesis exemplified this perspective, and it is predominant in mainstream evolutionary biology still.

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The organismal perspective, in contrast, is concerned with the role that organisms themselves play in evolution and adaptation. Among the advocates of this perspective I would include Scott Gilbert (1996), Stuart Kauffman (1993), Alvaro Moreno and his collaborators (e.g., Moreno and Mosio [2015]), and Denis Walsh (2015). Those who adopt the organismal perspective emphasize that organisms are complex, autocatalytic, self-organizing systems and claim that, if one wants to understand population-level patterns, one must attend to these organismal properties.

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These population and organismal perspectives come into sharp contrast over whether selection can “create” traits. Many of those who adopt the population perspective also endorse a “creative view” of selection, according to which selection can change the composition of a population and thereby make the appearance of certain novel traits more probable.1 Many architects of the Modern Synthesis endorsed such a creative view, and it continues to be the “received” view in evolutionary biology.

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Those who adopt the organismal perspective, in contrast, often endorse a “non-creative view” of selection, according to which selection can perhaps explain intergenerational trait dynamics, but not trait origins. Gilbert articulates this view when he writes, “Natural selection oversteps its bounds when its advocates claim that it both generates and selects variation. Generating variation is the province of development” (2006, 209). Kauffman agrees. In fact, this is in part why Kauffman is interested in self-organization: “One of the purposes of an examination of self-organization in complex systems is the hope that spontaneous order will help account for origin problems in evolution” (1993, 21). The “problem” is that selection does not create traits, so we need to discover what does. Walsh (2000, 2015) also denies that selection can explain trait origins because he denies that selection has any causal power at all.

 

In this talk, I’ll defend the creative view, but I am sympathetic to the complaint, made by proponents of the organismal perspective, that mainstream evolutionary biology is far too focused on populations of alleles and not focused enough on organisms themselves. Fortunately, these population and organismal perspectives need not conflict, at least when it comes to trait origins. Selection and development can each play a role in the creation of a novel trait. Selectionsimply occurs earlier in the causal chain leading up to the trait’s appearance.

I could think of no better venue to present these ideas than the Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences Workshop in San Sebastian. The “San Sebastian” approach to evolution is, roughly, the “organismal perspective” I described above. I very much hope to reach out to those working within this tradition and to find common ground between these population and organismal perspectives. Indeed, that is the primary goal of the paper around which this talk is based. Moreover, while my talk is not explicitly related to issues in cognitive science, I am familiar with topics in that field, and I would welcome a discussion that connects what I say above to issues in the evolution and development of mind.

 

References

Gilbert, Scott F. 2006. “The generation of novelty: the province of developmental biology”. Biological Theory 1 (2): 209–212.

Gilbert, Scott F, John M Opitz, and Rudolf A Raff. 1996. “Resynthesizing evolutionary and developmental biology”. Developmental biology 173 (2): 357–372.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 1993. The origins of order: self-organization and selection in evolution. Oxford University Press.
Moreno, Alvaro, and Matteo Mossio. 2015. Biological autonomy: a philosophical and theoretical inquiry. Springer.
Razeto-Barry, Pablo, and Ramiro Frick. 2011. “Probabilistic causation and the explanatory role of natural selection”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 42 (3): 344–355.

Walsh, Denis M. 2000. “Chasing shadows: natural selection and adaptation”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 31 (1): 135–153.

— . 2015. Organisms, agency, and evolution. Cambridge University Press.

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Footnotes

1The terms “creative view” and “non-creative view” come from Razeto-Barry and Frick
(2011).