Natural Selection as a Population-Level Causal Process

Recent discussions in the philosophy of biology have brought into question some fundamental assumptions regarding evolutionary processes, natural selection in particular. Some authors argue that natural selection is nothing but a population-level, statistical consequence of lower-level events (Matthen and Ariew [2002]; Walsh et al. [2002]). On this view, natural selection itself does not involve forces. Other authors reject this purely statistical, population-level account for an individual-level, causal account of natural selection (Bouchard and Rosenberg [2004]). I argue that each of these positions is right in one way, but wrong in another; natural selection indeed takes place at the level of populations, but it is a causal process nonetheless. 1. Introduction 2. A brief justification of population-level causality 2.1 Frequency-dependent selection 2.2 Accounts of causation 3. The montane willow leaf beetle: a causal story 4. The montane willow leaf beetle: a population-level story 4.1 Response to ‘naïve individualism’ 4.2 Response to ‘sophisticated individualism’ 5. Conclusion