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In What Sense Does ‘Nothing Make Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’?

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Abstract

Dobzhansky argued that biology only makes sense if life on earth has a shared history. But his dictum is often reinterpreted to mean that biology only makes sense in the light of adaptation. Some philosophers of science have argued in this spirit that all work in ‘proximal’ biosciences such as anatomy, physiology and molecular biology must be framed, at least implicitly, by the selection histories of the organisms under study. Others have denied this and have proposed non-evolutionary ways in which biologists can frame these investigations. This paper argues that an evolutionary perspective is indeed necessary, but that it must be a forward-looking perspective informed by a general understanding of the evolutionary process, not a backward-looking perspective informed by the specific evolutionary history of the species being studied. Interestingly, it turns out that there are aspects of proximal biology that even a creationist cannot study except in the light of a theory of their effect on future evolution.

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Notes

  1. I am using ‘adaptive’ and ‘adaptation’ in the conventional, neo-Darwinian sense outlined in Sect. 2 above. A trait is adaptive if a Cummins-style (1975) functional analysis of an organism’s fitness assigns a causal function to that trait. Something is an adaptation if it has a ‘modern history’ selective function sensu Godfrey-Smith (1994, see also Griffiths 1992, 1993).

  2. These methods are frequently used to establish what traits are adaptations for (their selected function) as well as whether and how traits are currently adaptive. The account of evolutionary explanation which I advocate in Sect. 7 below would imply that when this occurs these methods are either 1. Applied to hypothesised ancestral organisms in hypothesised ancestral environments, or, 2. Applied to current organisms on the assumption that the selective advantage they now confer is one they also conferred in the past. Criticisms of both these uses of optimality analysis can be found in the literature on ‘adaptationism’ (Dupré 1987; Gould and Lewontin 1978; Orzack and Sober 2001).

  3. On the view I advocate below sterile individuals could be dealt with by analysing the causal contribution of parts and processes to their inclusive fitness, which may be the correct approach for e.g. sterile castes in social insects, or by regarding them as pathological, which may be the correct approach for sterile hybrids e.g. mules.

  4. Some molecular biologists use the term ‘homology’ to mean sequence similarity, and most molecular biologists refer to different forms of homology, resulting from different copying mechanisms, as ‘orthology’, ‘paralogy’ and ‘xenology’ (on this and other aspects of the homology concept see Brigandt 2002, 2003; Griffiths 2006, 2007a).

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    Paul Edmund Griffiths

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Griffiths, P.E. In What Sense Does ‘Nothing Make Sense Except in the Light of Evolution’?. Acta Biotheor 57, 11–32 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10441-008-9054-9

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