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Selection, Indeterminism, and Evolutionary Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Bruce Glymour
Bruce Glymour*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University
*
†Send requests for reprints to the author, at Department of Philosophy, 201 Dickens Hall, Kansas State University, 66506; email: glymour@ksu.edu.
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Abstract

I argue that results from foraging theory give us good reason to think some evolutionary phenomena are indeterministic and hence that evolutionary theory must be probabilistic. Foraging theory implies that random search is sometimes selectively advantageous, and experimental work suggests that it is employed by a variety of organisms. There are reasons to think such search will sometimes be genuinely indeterministic. If it is, then individual reproductive success will also be indeterministic, and so too will frequency change in populations of organisms employing such search.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 68 , Issue 4 , December 2001 , pp. 518 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 2001

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Footnotes

‡

My thanks to Ray Dacey for the conversational motivation, to Craig Goodman for help reproducing the figures, to Clark Glymour and Chris Smith for their advice, and to two anonymous referees for their careful, and very useful, comments.

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