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Fitness Made Physical: The Supervenience of Biological Concepts Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Marcel Weber
Marcel Weber*
Affiliation:
Fachgruppe Philosophie, Universität Konstanz
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Abstract

The supervenience and multiple realizability of biological properties have been invoked to support a disunified picture of the biological sciences. I argue that supervenience does not capture the relation between fitness and an organism's physical properties. The actual relation is one of causal dependence and is, therefore, amenable to causal explanation. A case from optimality theory is presented and interpreted as a microreductive explanation of fitness difference. Such micro-reductions can have considerable scope. Implications are discussed for reductive physicalism in evolutionary biology and for the unity of science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 63 , Issue 3 , September 1996 , pp. 411 - 431
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1996

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Footnotes

†

I am especially grateful to Richard Burian, Paul Hoyningen-Huene and two anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions. I also wish to thank Hanne Andersen, Reinhart Brüning, Peter McLaughlin, Bernhard Schmid and Paul Schmid-Hempel for critically reading various drafts. This work is part of a Ph.D. thesis submitted to the University of Konstanz and was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grant #5001–35228.

‡

Send reprint requests to the author, Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, 309 Ford Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455.

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