Abstract
Darwinian theories vary. Some of the variation consists in differences in conceptual frames. These identify the entities and processes over which natural selection ranges. Different conceptual schemes are most easily identifiable by the different images, similes, analogies, and metaphors—in general, tropes—by which evolutionary theories are brought to bear on particulars. I show how Darwin’s metaphors balanced function, chance, and determinism in living things by seeing artificial selection in terms of natural forces and natural forces in terms of artificial selection. I then argue that the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis highlighted Darwin’s view of natural selection as a creative process, which earlier Darwinians had abandoned, by shifting to a conceptual framework and family of tropes that made images of force and design recessive. With the use of mathematical game theory to model gene frequency changes in the 1970s, however, design and force metaphors became dominant again, with the unintended result that images of Darwinism as promoting a god-abandoned, dog-eat-dog that had lodged deeply in popular culture long ago, were reawakened. Analysis of evolutionary discourse that hopes to reach students and the public must attend closely to the uses and abuses of conceptual tropes, ‘force’ and ‘design’ among them. This poses a question for pedagogy. How well can one teach evolutionary science without teaching some of its conceptual, and hence its rhetorical, history? Will students perceive this history as enhancing their knowledge of evolution, as an irrelevant waste of time, or, in its contentious diversity, as undermining its scientific status? Answering this question calls for empirical research.
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Notes
- 1.
Unless otherwise noted, references to letters to and from Darwin are to the Darwin Correspondence Database [DCD] http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk
- 2.
One can see the over-reliance on chance on display in Steve Fuller’s inaccurate description of natural selection. “Chance mutations,” he writes, “are the driving force of evolution.” So natural selection consists of “compounded historical accidents” (Fuller 2007, pp. 31, 48). It is not surprising that Fuller testified on the side of intelligent design in Kitzmiller vs. Dover (Pa.) Area School Board (2005). If natural selection is anything as chancy as Bowen, Fuller, or the physicist Steven Weinberg imagine it to be, intelligent design can seem a sensible alternative (Weinberg 1992).
- 3.
The passage also shows that neither did Darwin confuse selection for traits with selection of traits. The whiteness of arctic birds is (possibly) a “direct effect” of cold not of the protection it affords against prey. If we choose to call this selection at all, it is selection of whiteness, not for it. The philosopher Elliott Sober illustrates the distinction by imagining a sorting mechanism that allows balls of several sizes to fall through holes of various sizes. Balls of each size are painted a different color. There is selection for size, but only selection of color (Sober 1984, pp. 99–100).
- 4.
The elimination of Darwin’s natural teleology is encoded in the stress Darwinians placed on natural selection as a mechanism. Spencer writes that “survival of the fittest” is Darwin’s ‘natural selection’ “express[ed] in mechanical terms” (Spencer 1864, I, p. 445). Wallace liked to compare natural selection to a steam engine fitted out with a Watt automatic governor. In contrasting Spencer with Darwin I take myself to be in agreement with, and reliant on, Gayon (1995). I do not mean to contravene Gayon’s claim that for Darwin natural selection is not metaphorical, but real (Gayon 1995, p. 269). I merely put his point otherwise. Darwin’s interactionist and explanatory sense of metaphor was itself a casualty of his caving in to allies who viewed metaphor as mere decoration. In acknowledging ‘survival of the fittest’ in the 3th and subsequent editions of the Origin Darwin says that natural selection falls on the metaphorical side of a distinction between literal and metaphorical senses. (For his variant ways of making this concession, see Peckham 1959, p. 165.) But this distinction severely disrupts the “one long argument” of the text.
- 5.
Some philosophers of biology are not as insouciant as Fisher in believing that the many underlying context-dependent causes of fitness can be omitted from any definition of the concept of fitness that purports to understand its role in a theory of adaptive natural selection (Sober 1984; Brandon 1990, p. 13). To be sure, these philosophers are understandably as jumpy as Fisher about identifying fitness solely with the aggressive traits with which the popular mind still associates it. But they take fitness to be identical with relative adaptedness and so think it depends by definition on an array of underlying differences as its components. These do not have to be stated unless we are interested in analyzing one or another of them (for a recent discussion of fitness, see Ariew and Lewontin 2004).
- 6.
The makers of the Modern Synthesis called mutation, selection, drift, and gene flow “factors” because they thought of themselves as contributing to the resolution of a long-running “factors of evolution debate” that had been unfolding ever since Spencer wrote a book with that title in 1886 (Pearce 2010).
- 7.
On selectionist explanations of adaptation as naturally teleological, see Wright (1976) and Brandon (1981, 1990). On Darwin’s inclination to say this, see Gray (1963), p. 237, Darwin to Gray, June 5, 1874, DCD, entry 9483; see also Lennox (1993, 1994), Depew (2008), and Lennox and Kampourakis, this volume.
- 8.
In contrast to E. O. Wilson, who has recanted his earlier embrace of genocentric kin-selection theory in favor of the trait-group selectionism of D. S. Wilson (Nowak et al. 2010).
- 9.
To be fair, it should be noted that Dobzhansky, too, had a weakness for metaphysics, although more on the idealist than the materialist side. From the start, he argued that natural selection is creative because it evolves adaptations for adapting and evolving. It does so by preserving variation that may prove useful in changed and changing environments and by favoring the evolution of phenotypic plasticity (Dobzhansky 1937). But toward the end of his life Dobzhansky went further. He extended his conception of natural selection’s creativity to evolution’s creativity in a way that was only a whisker away from the religiously inspired, progress-oriented orthogenesis of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Dobzhansky 1970, pp. 430–431).
- 10.
The origins of this analogy have little to do with the reason for its subsequent diffusion. The analogy was initially invoked by analytical philosophers of biology who were trying to decide whether the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium formula is a law of nature. David Hull, in his pioneering Philosophy of Biological Science, evoked Newton’s laws as a model, but followed the founders of the Modern Synthesis in calling natural selection, mutation, drift, and gene flows agents and processes (Hull 1974, p. 58). It was the philosopher Elliott Sober who developed the Newtonian analogy further by talking about mutation, selection, drift, and gene flow as forces (Sober 1984). He should not be held too responsible for the rhetorical uses to which this idea has been put.
- 11.
Ariew’s and Matthen’s critique of ‘force talk’ is aimed at knocking the causal wind out of population genetics in order to assign causal explanatory power (as opposed to the merely descriptive uses of population genetics) to the developmental process of individual organisms as the source of variation and the locus of adaptation. The rise of evolutionary developmentalism (“evo-devo”) might well be nurturing a paradigm shift from populations back to organisms (Walsh 2006; Pigliucci and Kaplan 2006; for “evo-devo” see Love, this volume). Still, it is worth noting that the population-genetical paradigm it wishes to displace is not as wedded to the force metaphor as these critics presume and so does not rise and fall with it. As I have shown, the metaphor has a recent origin, not an ancient pedigree.
- 12.
Ironically, the introductory biology textbook that some of the same authors have written for non-majors does a better and more coherent job of inviting students to imaginatively project themselves into an evolutionary and ecological perspective. Because it does not have to teach all the concepts that majors and future health professionals will need it is not burdened with smoothing out the inherent heterogeneity of these concepts, which were developed at different stages in the history of biology and often contain in the way they are named and described traces of the conceptual frameworks in which they first arose.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank André Ariew, Deirdre Egan, Kostas Kampourakis, and Jaime Sabel for substantial and collegially offered help in developing the ideas in this chapter. I developed its basic picture of Darwinism’s history in my long collaboration with Bruce Weber.
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Depew, D. (2013). Conceptual Change and the Rhetoric of Evolutionary Theory: ‘Force Talk’ as a Case Study and Challenge for Science Pedagogy. 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_7
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