Abstract
Here I reply to Jean Gayon's, Tim Lewens's, and Samir Okasha's comments on Did Darwin write the Origin backwards? The topics addressed include: (1) Darwin's thinking that common ancestry is "evidentially prior" to natural selection; (2) how Darwin uses phylogenetic trees to test hypotheses concerning natural selection; (3) how group and indivdiual selection should be defined, and how each is related to the concept of adaptation.
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Notes
Darwin is explicit about making a claim concerning chronological order in his discussion of bamboo hooks in the same paragraph; I quote this in DDWOB, p. 39.
If this is Darwin’s reasoning, he is conforming to an inference principle that biologists would later call cladistic parsimony: the most reasonable estimate of the character states of the ancestors in a phylogenetic tree is the one that minimizes the number of changes that must have occurred in the tree to yield the characteristics observed in the leaves; this is discussed in DDWOB’s first postscript.
Darwin’s tree-thinking may help explain why he changed his mind about sex ratio; see DDWOB, pp. 105–106.
When I talk about the two “approaches” in what follows, I mean the two equations where the two addends are interpreted as described. Each approach can of course be supplemented.
I discuss what kin selection has to do with genealogical relatives in DDWOB’s second postscript.
Gayon (1998, p. 72) discusses Darwin’s commitment to “individualism” in connection with this problem.
A manipulation experiment can break the correlation, yielding data that show that there was selection for running speed, not for eye color. Still, the fact remains that the change-in-trait-frequency equation used by the Price approach for running speed and the Price approach equation for eye color must be identical if the two traits are perfectly correlated; similarly for the two contextual approach equations, one for running speed, the other for eye color. The contextual approach equation can be supplemented by a partial regression treatment of how running speed and eye color each affect an individual’s fitness; a similar supplementation is possible for the Price approach equation (Frank 2012, pp. 1013–1014). These supplements go beyond what I am describing as the two “approaches.”
Okasha (2006, pp. 45–46) argues that the interactionist concept is sometimes inappropriate, but I find his reasons unpersuasive. I think the interactionist conception is right for MLS1, regardless of whether one is a contextualist or a Pricean; Okasha’s point about genealogically defined groups concerns MLS2.
The same point applies to Okasha’s (2006, p. 99) observation that the Price approach requires that groups not overlap.
I now think that “models” would have been a better term.
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The author thank Steve Frank, Charles Goodnight, Brian McLoone, and David Wilson for useful discussion.
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Sober, E. Replies to commentators on Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards? . Philos Stud 172, 829–840 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0372-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0372-2