•  83
    Increasingly Radical Claims about Heredity and Fitness
    Philosophy of Science 79 (3): 396-412. 2012.
    On the classical account of evolution by natural selection found in Lewontin and many subsequent authors, ENS is conceived as involving three key ingredients: phenotypic variation, fitness differences, and heredity. Through the analysis of three problem cases involving heredity, I argue that the classical conception is substantially flawed, showing that heredity is not required for selection. I consider further problems with the classical account of ENS arising from conflations between three dis…Read more
  •  5
    Evolution by natural selection explains the tree of life and the complex adaptations found throughout nature. The power and versatility of evolutionary explanations have proved tempting to scientists outside of biology, but adapting evolutionary concepts to new domains has been challenging. Even within biology, there are many difficult questions and problem cases that face evolutionary theory. Modelling Evolution offers a new, general account of evolution by natural selection that identifies the…Read more
  •  23
    How I Solved Hume’s Problem...
    Philosophy Now 119 39-42. 2017.
  •  63
    Group selection and contextual analysis
    Synthese 192 (1): 305-316. 2015.
    Multi-level selection can be understood via the Price equation or contextual analysis, which offer incompatible statistical decompositions of evolutionary change into components of group and individual selection. Okasha argued that each approach suffers from problem cases. I introduce further problem cases for the Price approach, arguing that it is appropriate for MLS 2 group selection but not MLS 1. I also show that the problem cases Okasha raises for contextual analysis can be resolved. For so…Read more
  •  16
    Mark Borrello. Evolutionary Restraints: The Contentious History of Group Selection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Pp. ix+215. $40.00 ; $25.00 (review)
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (2): 356-360. 2013.
  •  42
    Nelson and Winter’s An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982) was the foundational work of what has become the thriving sub-discipline of evolutionary economics. In attempting to develop an alternative to neoclassical economics, the authors looked to borrow basic ideas from biology, in particular a concept of economic “natural selection.” However, the evolutionary models they construct in their seminal work are in many respects quite different from the models of evolutionary biology. Ther…Read more
  •  30
    Evolutionary forces and the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium
    Biology and Philosophy 30 (3): 423-437. 2015.
    The Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium has been argued by Sober, Stephens and others to represent the zero-force state for evolutionary biology understood as a theory of forces. I investigate what it means for a model to involve forces, developing an explicit account by defining what the zero-force state is in a general theoretical context. I use this account to show that Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium is not the zero-force state in biology even in the contexts in which it applies, and argue based on this t…Read more