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Populations without Reproduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Mathieu Charbonneau
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Abstract

For a population to undergo evolution by natural selection, it is assumed that the constituents of the population form parent-offspring lineages, that is, that they must reproduce. I challenge this assumption by dividing the notion of reproduction into two subprocesses, that is, multiplication and inheritance, that produce parent-offspring lineages between the parts of a population, and I show that their population-level roles, generation and memory, respectively, can be effected by processes that do not rely on such local-level lineages. I further argue that these two population-level processes, not local parent-offspring lineages, are necessary conditions for a population to undergo Darwinian evolution.

Type
Biological Sciences
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 81 , Issue 5 , December 2014 , pp. 727 - 740
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I am especially grateful to Roberta Millstein for organizing and inviting me to join the symposium, as well as for inviting me for a stay at UC Davis in the fall of 2010, where the ideas for this paper were first developed. I also thank Frédéric Bouchard for his support and advice and my colleagues at the KLI for helpful comments. This paper was written with the financial support of the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Société et culture while being hosted by the KLI Institute.

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