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Reply to Rosenberg on Genic Selectionism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Elliott Sober  and
Richard C. Lewontin
Elliott Sober
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin—Madison
Richard C. Lewontin
Affiliation:
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University
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Extract

Rosenberg (1983), in his comments on our article (Sober and Lewontin 1982) concerning the units of selection controversy, has matters precisely backwards. He chides us for conflating a causal theory with a mathematical model, whereas this is precisely the error we argued is at the core of the position defended by Williams (1966) and Dawkins (1976). Their idea—genic selectionism—confuses the computational adequacy of a mathematical model with a substantive causal theory. The main point of our paper was simply this: the fact that evolution by natural selection can be “represented” in terms of selection coefficients that attach to single genes does not imply that selection is always selection for or against the possession of those single genes.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 50 , Issue 4 , December 1983 , pp. 648 - 650
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1983

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References

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