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Chance and Natural Selection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

John Beatty
John Beatty*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Arizona State University
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Abstract

Among the liveliest disputes in evolutionary biology today are disputes concerning the role of chance in evolution—more specifically, disputes concerning the relative evolutionary importance of natural selection vs. so-called “random drift”. The following discussion is an attempt to sort out some of the broad issues involved in those disputes. In the first half of this paper, I try to explain the differences between evolution by natural selection and evolution by random drift. On some common construals of “natural selection”, those two modes of evolution are completely indistinguishable. Even on a proper construal of “natural selection”, it is difficult to distinguish between the “improbable results of natural selection” and evolution by random drift.

In the second half of this paper, I discuss the variety of positions taken by evolutionists with respect to the evolutionary importance of random drift vs. natural selection. I will then consider the variety of issues in question in terms of a conceptual distinction often used to describe the rise of probabilistic thinking in the sciences. I will argue, in particular, that what is going on here is not, as might appear at first sight, just another dispute about the desirability of “stochastic” vs. “deterministic” theories. Modern evolutionists do not argue so much about whether evolution is stochastic, but about how stochastic it is.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1984 , pp. 183 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1984

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Footnotes

†

This article was written during the academic year 1982–1983, while I was a fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Bielefeld, in Bielefeld, West Germany. I was part of a group research project, organized by Lorenz Krüger, which studied the rise and role of probabilistic thinking in the sciences since 1800. I am very grateful to the staff of the Center, the faculty of the University of Bielefeld, and of course my fellow probabilists for their thoughts and for their friendship.

Robert Brandon, Lorenz Krüger, Elliott Sober, Kenneth Waters, and the referees of Philosophy of Science all helped me to clarify the issues discussed here. The residual unclarity distinguishes my contributions from theirs. Some of the residual unclarity must be attributed to Jonathan Hodge's and Alexander Rosenberg's critiques of the notion of “fitness” used here. Their thoughtful critiques have, I must admit, left me a bit confused about my position.

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