Abstract
The scope of this paper can be clarified by means of a well-known phenomenon that is usually called ‘industrial melanism’: the fact that the melanic form of the peppered moth became dominant in industrial areas in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such changes in relative phenotype frequencies are important explananda for population biologists. Apart from trying to explain such changes over time, population biologists also often try to explain differences between populations, e.g. why yellow shell colour is dominant in certain colonies of land snails and almost absent in other colonies. The causal explanations that are given to address such explananda are the objects of analysis in this paper. Our primary aim is to explicate their structure: we want to capture the typical ingredients of causal explanations in population biology, and their organisation. Based on this explication, we discuss how natural selection fits into recent mechanical philosophy of science, and engage in the debate on the nature of evolutionary theory.
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Notes
One reason for this is pragmatic: one cannot discuss both types in one paper. Our choice for causal explanation as topic of this paper is related to a broader research interest, which is comparing causal explanations in population biology with causal explanations in the social sciences.
The moths could have been hunted by other visually oriented predators, but that was not the case.
Note that the use of models creates a controlled setting, because it excludes factors such as smell and escaping from predators (all attempts result in bite marks on the models). However, in natural experiments control can be incomplete, which makes causal inference more challenging and susceptible to error.
We thank one of the referees for pointing this out to us.
However, decomposition into entities is required. This is why Ioannidis and Psillos (2017) say this definition is ‘not truly minimalistic’. Their concept of mechanism as causal pathways does not require decomposition. Hence all mechanisms in the sense of Glennan are causal pathways (as conceived by Ioannidis & Psillos) but not vice versa.
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Weber, E., Degeyter, R. The Structure of Causal Explanations in Population Biology. Acta Biotheor 69, 449–476 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09405-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-020-09405-9