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Competing Units of Selection? A Case of Symbiosis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Sandra D. Mitchell
Sandra D. Mitchell*
Affiliation:
Philosophy Department, The Ohio State University
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Abstract

The controversy regarding the unit of selection is fundamentally a dispute about what is the correct causal structure of the process of evolution by natural selection and its ontological commitments. By characterizing the process as consisting of two essential steps—interaction and transmission—a singular answer to the unit question becomes ambiguous. With such an account on hand, two recent defenses of competing units of selection are considered. Richard Dawkins maintains that the gene is the appropriate unit of selection and Robert Brandon, in response, argues that the individual organism is better suited to the role. This paper argues that by making explicit the underlying questions that each of these views addresses, the apparent conflict can be resolved. Furthermore, such a resolution allows for a more complete and realistic understanding of the process of evolution by natural selection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , September 1987 , pp. 351 - 367
Copyright
Copyright © 1987 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank John Beatty, James Boster, Robert Brandon, Nancy Cartwright, Steve Gaulin, Peter Machamer, Merrilee Salmon and the two referees for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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