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Optimization in Evolutionary Ecology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Robert C. Richardson
Robert C. Richardson*
Affiliation:
University of Cincinnati
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Extract

Within evolutionary ecology, there is a substantial tradition treating natural selection as an optimizing agent tending to produce maximal adaptedness to the environment. This includes the work of Sewall Wright and R.A. Fisher, as well as a number of influential modern defenders such as G.C. Williams, J.R. Krebs, Richard Levins, Robert MacArthur, E.O. Wilson, and John Maynard Smith. In one widely deployed class of models, the phenotype or behavior of organisms is predicted on the basis of optimization principles, assuming ”… that the organisms’ preferences are related to evolutionary fitness and that the options more prefeaed must lead to greater survival and reproduction” (Real and Caraco 1986, 371-2). Optimality is measured by some “currency,” or what Richard Lewontin (1987) calls a “criterion scale,” providing an independent operational measure of fitness.

Type
Part I. Philosophy of Biology
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 13 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (DIR-8921837), and the Taft Faculty Committee of the University of Cincinnati. I am indebted to many people for discussion of this work at one time or another, including John Beatty, Robert Brandon, Richard Burian, W. R. Carter, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Gauker, Donald Gustafson, Lawrence Jost, W. E. Morris, Elliott Sober, Miriam Solomon and William Wimsatt.

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