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Contextual Unanimity and the Units of Selection Problem

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Stuart Glennan
Stuart Glennan*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy and Religion, Butler University
*
Send requests for reprints to the author, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Butler University, 4600 Sunset Ave., Indianapolis, IN 46208 sglennan@butler.edu.
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Abstract

Sober and Lewontin's critique of genic selectionism is based upon the principle that a unit of selection should make a context-independent contribution to fitness. Critics have effectively shown that this principle is flawed. In this paper I show that the context independence principle is an instance of a more general principle for characterizing causes,called the contextual unanimity principle. I argue that this latter principle, while widely accepted, is erroneous. What is needed is to replace the approach to causality characterized by the contextual unanimity criterion with an approach based on the concept of causal mechanism. After sketching such an approach, I show how it can be used to shed light on the units of selection problem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 69 , Issue 1 , March 2002 , pp. 118 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

This paper is based on a talk presented at a colloquium at the University of Maryland's Center for the History and Philosophy of Science. I am grateful to the faculty and students at Maryland, and especially to Lindley Darden, for feedback. Thanks also to Ken Waters and to two referees for comments on an earlier draft of this paper and to my colleagues Tom and Becky Dolan for their insights on malaria, moths, and other things biological.

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