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Critical notice: Darwinian reductionism

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Abstract

This notice provides a critical discussion of some of the issues from Alex Rosenberg’s Darwinian Reductionism, in particular proper functions and the relationship of proximate and ultimate biology, developmental programs and genocentrism, biological laws, the principle of natural selection as a fundamental law, genetic determinism, and the definition of “reductionism.”

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Notes

  1. It is certainly not, because as stated it is only applicable to populations with discrete generations. Evolutionary theorists use different fitness measures for populations with discrete generations and for age-structured populations with overlapping generations. In Weber (1998, Chapter 6), I argue that if there is a general principle of natural selection, then it is highly abstract and needs to be instantiated by specific models. On this view, the theory of natural selection is a family of models (“semantic view” of theories) and its content is not appropriately expressed by a universally quantified claim. Universally quantified claims only come in when it comes to stating classes of natural systems to which the models apply. The general theory is merely some sort of a guideline for building specific models. But I cannot prove that there is no universal formulation of the principle of natural selection in the manner in which Rosenberg envisions it.

  2. The latter kind of antireductionism is usually justified on the grounds of the multiple realizability of fitness, see Sober (1984).

  3. I owe this formulation to Daniel Sirtes.

  4. Experimental biologists tend to think in causal-mechanical rather than in computational terms. Note that Rosenberg’s main witness, J.W. Bodnar, is a computer scientist, not an experimental biologist.

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Correspondence to Marcel Weber.

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Alex Rosenberg, Darwinian Reductionism. Or, How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2006. Cloth $40.00spec ISBN: 978-0-226-72729-5 (ISBN-10: 0-226-72729-7)

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Weber, M. Critical notice: Darwinian reductionism . Biol Philos 23, 143–152 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-007-9080-z

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