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Seven types of adaptationism

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Abstract

Godfrey-Smith (2001) has distinguished three types of adaptationism. This article builds on his analysis, and revises it in places, by distinguishing seven varieties of adaptationism. This taxonomy allows us to clarify what is at stake in debates over adaptationism, and it also helps to cement the importance of Gould and Lewontin’s ‘Spandrels’ essay. Some adaptationists have suggested that their essay does not offer any coherent alternative to the adaptationist programme: it consists only in an exhortation to test adaptationist hypotheses more thoroughly than was usual in the 1970s. Here it is argued that the ‘Spandrels’ paper points towards a genuinely non-adaptationist methodology implicit in much evolutionary developmental biology. This conclusion helps to expose the links between older debates over adaptationism and more recent questions about the property of evolvability.

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Notes

  1. Thanks to Paul Sherman for pointing me in the direction of Williams’ paper, and for penetrating criticisms of the following paragraphs.

  2. There are many proponents of the selected effects account. Most of the contributors to Buller (1999) defend a view of this form, although the tide may be turning against it (e.g. Davies, 2001, Boorse, 2002, Lewens, 2004).

  3. In fact, things are more complex than this. Just-so stories typically relate the ecological pressures that have acted on organisms to determine their fitness. Drift hypotheses instead rely on data about the size of populations and the difference in fitness between variants that suggest actual trait frequencies may not match expected trait frequencies. Stories about the determinants of fitness are at a different level of explanation to stories about both drift and selection, for while drift hypotheses concern the likelihood of actual frequencies not matching expected frequencies in virtue of the differences in fitness between variants and the size of populations, stories about the determinants of fitness instead tell us what gives the different variants the fitnesses they have. Drift may occur in a population with two variants of equal fitness. A further ecological story is needed to explain why those variants were able to survive and reproduce in the ways they did, and with the same expected values of survival and reproduction.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the audience at the Bristol University philosophy department, where a short version of this paper was read. Thanks also to Ron Amundson, Patrick Forber, Peter Godfrey-Smith and Denis Walsh for comments, and especially to Paul Sherman for vigorous discussion of an earlier draft. Lastly, I am grateful to a referee from Biology and Philosophy. The completion of this work was facilitated by support from the Isaac Newton Trust and the Leverhulme Trust.

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  1. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, UK

    Tim Lewens

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Lewens, T. Seven types of adaptationism. Biol Philos 24, 161–182 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-008-9145-7

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