Abstract
How often should we invoke adaptation to explain the features of the biological world? Ideally, just as often as a history of natural selection explains the form and function of those features. This is partly an empirical question about evolutionary history. But it is also partly a question about the methods we should use to investigate evolutionary history. And the answers to the question have consequences for our views about our place in the biological world. Controversy over these issues is at least as old as Darwin. In contemporary evolutionary biology this controversy continues as the debate over adaptationism, raising a number of deep issues about the science of evolutionary biology and our philosophical understanding of the science. This makes adaptationism particularly relevant to science education, for the controversy provides traction on large scale questions about the nature of evidence and explanation, the plurality of scientific methods, and how science should guide our views about our biological nature. In this chapter I will investigate some of the issues about evidence and methodology brought out by the controversy, and I will argue that the debate over adaptationism provides an excellent and informative example of science in action. This is more than a mere philosophical controversy, for it interacts with the practice of biology in fascinating and complex ways.
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Notes
- 1.
Indeed, Gould and Vrba (1982) found this phenomenon so prevalent in evolutionary history that they recommended a new term for adaptations co-opted to play a different role: exaptation.
- 2.
Evolutionary biologists take fitness to be a measure of reproductive success, usually expected number of offspring. However, there are a variety of fitness measures available and determining the correct interpretation of fitness is notoriously complex (see, e.g., Ariew and Lewontin (2004) or Beatty (1992)).
- 3.
- 4.
While the definitions are directly quoted from Godfrey-Smith (2001), I have changed to order to fit my exposition.
- 5.
See Depew this volume on this topic.
- 6.
- 7.
Sober (2008) provides a precise analysis of testing in evolutionary biology that takes these model selection issues seriously.
- 8.
Assume the fit is statistically rigorous. The protocol also assumes that sufficient evolutionary time has elapsed for selection to operate (Sober 2008, pp. 199–200).
- 9.
Sober’s protocol is based on the law of likelihood and so can easily be extended to incorporate constraint hypotheses, so long as such hypotheses specify an appropriate likelihood function. Pigliucci and Kaplan (2000) have an alternative protocol for contrasting selection and constraint that compares the probabilities of transition between possible forms.
- 10.
Lloyd (2005) makes an interesting argument of this kind about how methodological biases obscured evolutionary research on human female orgasms.
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Forber, P. (2013). Debating the Power and Scope of Adaptation. In: Kampourakis, K. (eds) The Philosophy of Biology. History, Philosophy and Theory of the Life Sciences, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6537-5_8
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