Natural Selection: Its Scope and Limits

James Maclaurin
University of Otago

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     Last modified: February 13, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 2:00 PM in ROZH 108
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Abstract
Many things evolve: species, languages, sports, tools, biological niches, and theories. But are these real instances of natural selection? How do we assess the proper scope of Darwinian theory? Current work focuses on the broad similarity of cultural or non-organic processes to familiar central instances of natural selection. That similarity is analysed in terms of abstract functional descriptions of the constituents of Darwinian evolution (e.g. replicators, interactors, developmental systems etc). But rather than zeroing in on the boundaries of natural selection, these strategies have produced a proliferation of competing evolutionary analyses.

While I accept that current work has been useful in increasing our understanding of evolution, I argue that such reasoning ought not to be employed in arbitrating debates about whether particular phenomena count as instances of natural selection. My argument is based on hierarchical functional descriptions of natural selection. I suggest that natural selection ought not to be thought of as a single process but rather as a series of processes which can be analysed in terms of a hierarchy of functional descriptions (in much the same way as many people think of cognition). This, in turn, casts doubt on the idea that it is possible in principle to settle debates about whether particular phenomena count as instances of natural selection. Ultimately this calls into question the idea that natural selection is a determinately bounded process.