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Screening-Off and the Units of Selection

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Elliott Sober
Elliott Sober*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin, Madison
*
‡Send reprint requests to the author, Department of Philosophy, 5173 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
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Abstract

Brandon ([1982] 1984, 1990) has argued that Salmon's (1971) concept of screening-off can be used to characterize (i) the idea that natural selection acts directly on an organism's phenotype, only indirectly on its genotype, and (ii) the biological problem of the levels of selection. Brandon also suggests (iii) that screening-off events in a causal chain are better explanations than the events they screen off. This paper critically evaluates Brandon's proposals.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1992 , pp. 142 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1992

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Footnotes

†

My thanks to Ellery Eells for his comments on an earlier draft and to the anonymous referee of this journal for useful suggestions.

References

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