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35On Calcott’s permissive and instructive cause distinctionBiology and Philosophy 34 (1): 1. 2019.I argue that Calcott :481–505, Calcott 2017) mischaracterizes in an important way the notion of causal specificity proposed by Woodward :287–318, Woodward 2010). This leads him to rely too heavily on one single aspect of Woodward’s analysis on causal specificity; propose an information-theoretic measure he calls ‘precision’ which is partly redundant with, but less general than one of the dimensions in Woodward’s analysis of specificity, without acknowledging Woodward’s analysis; and claim that c…Read more
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34Have Causal Claims About the Gut Microbiome Been Over‐Hyped?Bioessays 40 (12): 1800178. 2018.Graphical AbstractMicrobiome research attributes to whole microbiomes a causal role in the occurrence of different health outcomes. I argue, following some distinctions about causal relationships and explanations made within a philosophical account of causation, the “interventionist account,” that such claims need more scrutiny.
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31Fidelity and the grain problem in cultural evolutionSynthese 199 (3-4): 5815-5836. 2021.High-fidelity cultural transmission, rather than brute intelligence, is the secret of our species’ success, or so many cultural evolutionists claim. It has been selected because it ensures the spread, stability and longevity of beneficial cultural traditions, and it supports cumulative cultural change. To play these roles, however, fidelity must be a causally-efficient property of cultural transmission. This is where the grain problem comes in and challenges the explanatory potency of fidelity. …Read more
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29Generalizing Contextual AnalysisActa Biotheoretica 64 (2): 197-217. 2016.Okasha, in Evolution and the Levels of Selection, convincingly argues that two rival statistical decompositions of covariance, namely contextual analysis and the neighbour approach, are better causal decompositions than the hierarchical Price approach. However, he claims that this result cannot be generalized in the special case of soft selection and argues that the Price approach represents in this case a better option. He provides several arguments to substantiate this claim. In this paper, I …Read more
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29Variation of information as a measure of one-to-one causal specificityEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1): 11. 2018.The interventionist account provides us with several notions permitting the qualification of causal relationships. In recent years, there has been a push toward formalizing these notions using information theory. In this paper, I discuss one of them, namely causal specificity. The notion of causal specificity is ambiguous as it can refer to at least two different concepts. After having presented these, I show that current attempts to formalize causal specificity in information theoretic terms ha…Read more
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27Context Matters: A Response to Autzen and Okasha’s Reply to Takacs and BourratBiological Theory 1-7. forthcoming.In a recent reply to Takacs and Bourrat’s article (Biol Philos 37:12, 2022), Autzen and Okasha (Biol Philos 37:37, 2022) question our characterization of the relationship between the geometric mean and arithmetic mean measures of fitness. We here take issue with the claim that our characterization falls prey to the mistakes they highlight. Briefly revisiting what Takacs and Bourrat (Biol Philos 37:12, 2022) accomplished reveals that the key issue of difference concerns cases of deterministic but…Read more
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26Natural selection and the reference grain problemStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 80 1-8. 2020.
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25Transitions in evolution: a formal analysisSynthese 198 (4): 3699-3731. 2021.Evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs) are events during which individuals at a given level of organization (particles) interact to form higher-level entities (collectives) which are then recognized as new individuals at that level. ETIs are intimately related to levels of selection, which, following Okasha, can be approached from two different perspectives. One, referred to as ‘synchronic’, asks whether selection occurs at the collective level while the partitioning of particles into …Read more
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24Heritability, causal influence and localitySynthese 198 (7): 6689-6715. 2019.Heritability is routinely interpreted causally. Yet, what such an interpretation amounts to is often unclear. Here, I provide a causal interpretation of this concept in terms of range of causal influence, one of several causal dimensions proposed within the interventionist account of causation. An information-theoretic measure of range of causal influence has recently been put forward in the literature. Starting from this formalization and relying upon Woodward’s analysis, I show that an importa…Read more
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22Taming fitness: Organism‐environment interdependencies preclude long‐term fitness forecastingBioessays 43 (1): 2000157. 2021.Fitness is a central but notoriously vexing concept in evolutionary biology. The propensity interpretation of fitness is often regarded as the least problematic account for fitness. It ties an individual's fitness to a probabilistic capacity to produce offspring. Fitness has a clear causal role in evolutionary dynamics under this account. Nevertheless, the propensity interpretation faces its share of problems. We discuss three of these. We first show that a single scalar value is an incomplete s…Read more
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21Moving Past Conventionalism About Multilevel SelectionErkenntnis 1-14. forthcoming.The formalism used to describe evolutionary change in a multilevel setting can be used equally to re-describe the situation as one where all the selection occurs at the individual level. Thus, whether multilevel or individual-level selection occurs seems to be a matter of convention rather than fact. Yet, group selection is regarded by some as an important concept with factual rather than conventional elements. I flesh out an alternative position that regards groups as a target of selection in a…Read more
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21A New Set of Criteria for Units of SelectionBiological Theory 17 (4): 263-275. 2022.This article proposes two conditions to assess whether an entity at a level of description is a unit of selection qua interactor. These two conditions make it possible to (1) distinguish biologically relevant entities from arbitrary ones and (2) distinguish units that can _potentially_ enter a selection process from those that have already done so. I show that the classical approaches used in the literature on units and levels of selection do not fare well with respect to either or both of these…Read more
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21Grains of Description in Biological and Cultural TransmissionJournal of Cognition and Culture 22 (3-4): 185-202. 2022.The question of whether cultural transmission is faithful has attracted significant debate over the last 30 years. The degree of fidelity with which an object is transmitted depends on 1) the features chosen to be relevant, and 2) the quantity of details given about those features. Once these choices have been made, an object is described at a particular grain. In the absence of conventions between different researchers and across different fields about which grain to use, transmission fidelity …Read more
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20Measuring Causal Invariance FormallyEntropy 23 (6): 690. 2021.Invariance is one of several dimensions of causal relationships within the interventionist account. The more invariant a relationship between two variables, the more the relationship should be considered paradigmatically causal. In this paper, I propose two formal measures to estimate invariance, illustrated by a simple example. I then discuss the notion of invariance for causal relationships between non-nominal (i.e., ordinal and quantitative) variables, for which Information theory, and hence …Read more
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20Fitness: static or dynamic?European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (4): 1-20. 2021.The most consistent definition of fitness makes it a static property of organisms. However, this is not how fitness is used in many evolutionary models. In those models, fitness is permitted to vary with an organism’s circumstances. According to this second conception, fitness is dynamic. There is consequently tension between these two conceptions of fitness. One recently proposed solution suggests resorting to conditional properties. We argue, however, that this solution is unsatisfactory. Usin…Read more
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19Causation and Single Nucleotide Polymorphism HeritabilityPhilosophy of Science 87 (5): 1073-1083. 2020.Genome-wide association studies of human complex traits have provided us with new estimates of heritability. These estimates foreground the question of genetic causation. After having presen...
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19Variation of information as a measure of one-to-one causal specificityEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1): 1-18. 2018.The interventionist account provides us with several notions permitting the qualification of causal relationships. In recent years, there has been a push toward formalizing these notions using information theory. In this paper, I discuss one of them, namely causal specificity. The notion of causal specificity is ambiguous as it can refer to at least two different concepts. After having presented these, I show that current attempts to formalize causal specificity in information theoretic terms ha…Read more
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17Small Things, Big Consequences: Microbiological Perspectives on BiologyIn Kostas Kampourakis (ed.), The Philosophy of Biology: A Companion for Educators, Springer. pp. 1--373. 2013.
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16Adding causality to the information-theoretic perspective on individualityEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (1): 1-16. 2024.I extend work from Krakauer et al. (2020), who propose a conception of individuality as the capacity to propagate information through time. From this conception, they develop information-theoretic measures. I identify several shortcomings with these measures—in particular, that they are associative rather than causal. I rectify this shortcoming by deriving a causal information-theoretic measure of individuality. I then illustrate how this measure can be implemented and extended in the context of…Read more
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15A coarse-graining account of individuality: how the emergence of individuals represents a summary of lower-level evolutionary processesBiology and Philosophy 38 (4): 1-23. 2023.Explaining the emergence of individuality in the process of evolution remains a challenge; it faces the difficulty of characterizing adequately what ‘emergence’ amounts to. Here, I present a pragmatic account of individuality in which I take up this challenge. Following this account, individuals that emerge from an evolutionary transition in individuality are coarse-grained entities: entities that are summaries of lower-level evolutionary processes. Although this account may _prima facie_ appear…Read more
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14When local causes are more explanatorily usefulBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Madole & Harden plead for better integration of causal knowledge of different depths to understand complex human traits. Classically, local causes – a particular type of shallow causes – are considered less useful than more generalisable causes, giving a false impression that the latter causes are more useful and desirable. Using a simple example, I show that sometimes the contrary is true.
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13Multilevel selection 1, multilevel selection 2, and the Price equation: a reappraisalSynthese 202 (3): 1-19. 2023.The distinction between multilevel selection 1 (MLS1) and multilevel selection 2 (MLS2) is classically regarded as a distinction between two multilevel selection processes involving two different kinds of higher-level fitness. It has been invoked to explain evolutionary transitions in individuality as a shift from an MLS1 to an MLS2 process. In this paper, I argue against the view that the distinction involves two different kinds of processes. I show, starting from the MLS2 version of the Price …Read more
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11Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality by Endogenization of Scaffolded PropertiesBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
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11Group transformation: life history tradeoffs, division of labor and evolutionary transitions in individualityIn Matthew Herron, Peter L. Conlin & William Ratcliff (eds.), The Evolution of Multicellularity, Crc Press. pp. 227-248. 2022.Reproductive division of labor has been proposed to play a key role for evolutionary transitions in individuality (ETIs). This chapter provides a guide to a theoretical model that addresses the role of a tradeoff between life-history traits in selecting for a reproductive division of labor during the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms. In particular, it focuses on the five key assumptions of the model, namely (1) fitness is viability times fecundity; (2) collective traits are…Read more
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10Are Biology Experts and Novices Function Pluralists?Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1-19. forthcoming.Philosophers have proposed many accounts of biological function. A coarse-grained distinction can be made between backward-looking views, which emphasise historical contributions to fitness, and forward-looking views, which emphasise the current contribution to fitness or role of a biological component within some larger system. These two views are often framed as being incompatible and conflicting with one another. The emerging field of synthetic biology, which involves applying engineering pri…Read more
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8Review of Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb's "Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis" (review)BJPS Review of Books. 2021.
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5Supernatural beliefs and the evolution of cooperationIn James Liddle & Todd K. Shackelford (eds.), Oxford Handbook of the Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion, Oxford University Press. 2016.
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4Beliefs about God, the afterlife and morality support the role of supernatural policing in human cooperationEvolution and Human Behavior 32 (1): 41-49. 2011.Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation…Read more
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4A Pricean Formalization of GaiaPhilosophy of Science 1-34. forthcoming.The compatibility of the Gaia hypothesis with Darwinism is often challenged on the grounds that 1) to be potent, natural selection requires the existence of a population (whereas Gaia is a single entity), and 2) natural selection requires the entities forming a population to reproduce (while Gaia merely persists). However, using the Price equation, I argue, following others, that the Gaia hypothesis can fit squarely within a Darwinian framework because Gaia can exhibit adaptations if a process a…Read more
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Biology |
Evolutionary Biology |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
General Philosophy of Science |