•  16
    Signals and Spite in Fluctuating Populations
    with Rory Smead
    Open Philosophy 2 (1): 137-146. 2019.
    Spite (in the biological or evolutionary sense) is behavior that harms others at a cost to the actor. The presence of spite in human and animal populations presents an evolutionary puzzle. Recent work has suggested small populations and pre-play signaling can have a significant effect on the evolution of spite. Here, we use computational methods to explore these factors in fluctuating populations that may go extinct. We find that the presence of spite can make a population significantly more lik…Read more
  •  100
    Manipulation and the causes of evolution
    Philosophy of Science 72 (5): 1113-1123. 2005.
    Evolutionary processes such as natural selection and random drift are commonly regarded as causes of population-level change. We respond to a recent challenge that drift and selection are best understood as statistical trends, not causes. Our reply appeals to manipulation as a strategy for uncovering causal relationships: if you can systematically manipulate variable A to bring about a change in variable B, then A is a cause of B. We argue that selection and drift can be systematically manipulat…Read more
  •  90
    Reconceiving Eliminative Inference
    Philosophy of Science 78 (2): 185-208. 2011.
    Eliminative reasoning seems to play an important role in the sciences, but should it be part of our best theory of science? Statistical evidence, prevalent across the sciences, causes problems for eliminative inference, supporting the view that probabilistic theories of confirmation provide a better framework for reasoning about evidence. Here I argue that deductive elimination has an important inferential role to play in science, one that is compatible with probabilistic approaches to evidence.…Read more
  •  127
    Spandrels and a pervasive problem of evidence
    Biology and Philosophy 24 (2): 247-266. 2009.
    Evolutionary biology, indeed any science that attempts to reconstruct prehistory, faces practical limitations on available data. These limitations create the problem of contrast failure: specific observations may fail to discriminate between rival evolutionary hypotheses. Assessing the risk of contrast failure provides a way to evaluate testing protocols in evolutionary science. Here I will argue that part of the methodological critique in the Spandrels paper involves diagnosing contrast failure…Read more
  •  32
    The Evolution of Spite, Recognition, and Morality
    with Rory Smead
    Philosophy of Science 83 (5): 884-896. 2016.
    Recognition of and responsiveness to the behavioral dispositions of others are key features of moral systems for facilitating social cooperation and the mediation of punishment. Here we investigate the coevolutionary possibilities of recognition and conditional social behavior with respect to both altruism and spite. Using two evolutionary models, we find that recognition abilities can support both spite and altruism but that some can only coevolve with spite. These results show that it is essen…Read more
  •  56
    Nietzsche was no Darwinian
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2). 2007.
    John Richardson (2002, 2004) argues that Nietzsche’s use of teleological notions, such as the “will to power” and psychological “drives,” can be naturalized within the Darwinian framework of natural selection. Although this ambitious project has merit, the Darwinian framework does not provide the strong teleology necessary to interpret Nietzsche’s explanatory project. Examining the logic of selection, the conceptual limitations on biological functions, and the evidential demands that must be met…Read more
  •  12
    Nietzsche Was No Darwinian
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (2): 369-382. 2007.
    John Richardson (2002, 2004) argues that Nietzsche’s use of teleological notions, such as the “will to power” and psychological “drives,” can be naturalized within the Darwinian framework of natural selection. Although this ambitious project has merit, the Darwinian framework does not provide the strong teleology necessary to interpret Nietzsche’s explanatory project. Examining the logic of selection, the conceptual limitations on biological functions, and the evidential demands that must be met…Read more
  •  86
    On the explanatory roles of natural selection
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (2-3): 329-342. 2005.
    Can selection explain why individuals have the traits they do? This question has generated significant controversy. I will argue that the debate encompasses two separable aspects, to detrimental effect: (1) the role of selection in explaining the origin and evolution of biological traits and (2) the implications this may have for explaining why individuals have the traits they do. (1) can be settled on the basis of evolutionary theory while (2) requires additional, extra-scientific assumptions. …Read more
  •  60
    MacDonald and Kreitman (1991) propose a test of the neutral mutationrandom drift (NM-RD) hypothesis, the central claim of the neutral theory of molecular evolution. The test involves generating predictions from the NM-RD hypothesis about patterns of molecular substitutions. Alternative selection hypotheses predict that the data will deviate from the predictions of the NM-RD hypothesis in specifiable ways. To conduct the test Mac- Donald and Kreitman examine the evolutionary dynamics of the alcoh…Read more
  •  105
    Confirmation and explaining how possible
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (1): 32-40. 2010.
    Confirmation in evolutionary biology depends on what biologists take to be the genuine rivals. Investigating what constrains the scope of biological possibility provides part of the story: explaining how possible helps determine what counts as a genuine rival and thus informs confirmation. To clarify the criteria for genuine rivalry I distinguish between global and local constraints on biological possibility, and offer an account of how-possibly explanation. To sharpen the connection between con…Read more
  •  322
    Does science successfully uncover the deep structure of the natural world? Or are the depths forever beyond our epistemic grasp? Since the decline of logical positivism and logical empiricism, scientific realism has become the consensus view: of course our scientific theories apprehend the deep structure of the world. What else could explain the remarkable success of science? This is the explanationist defense of scientific realism, the “ultimate argument.” Kyle Stanford starts here and, using t…Read more
  •  28
    Confirmation and explaining how possible
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (1): 32-40. 2008.
    Confirmation in evolutionary biology depends on what biologists take to be the genuine rivals. Investigating what constrains the scope of biological possibility provides part of the story: explaining how possible helps determine what counts as a genuine rival and thus informs confirmation. To clarify the criteria for genuine rivalry I distinguish between global and local constraints on biological possibility, and offer an account of how-possibly explanation. To sharpen the connection between con…Read more
  •  112
    Historical Reconstruction: Gaining Epistemic Access to the Deep Past
    Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology 3 (20130604). 2011.
    We discuss the scientific task of historical reconstruction and the problem of epistemic access. We argue that strong epistemic support for historical claims consists in the consilience of multiple independent lines of evidence, and analyze the impact hypothesis for the End-Cretaceous mass extinction to illustrate the accrual of epistemic support. Although there are elements of the impact hypothesis that enjoy strong epistemic support, the general conditions for this are strict, and help to clar…Read more
  •  53
    Conjecture and explanation: A reply to Reydon
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 298-301. 2012.
  •  85
    Introduction: A Primer on adaptationism
    Biology and Philosophy 24 (2): 155-159. 2009.
    Evolutionary biology, indeed any science that attempts to reconstruct prehistory, faces practical limitations on available data. These limitations create the problem of contrast failure: specific observations may fail to discriminate between rival evolutionary hypotheses. Assessing the risk of contrast failure provides a way to evaluate testing protocols in evolutionary science. Here I will argue that part of the methodological critique in the Spandrels paper involves diagnosing contrast failure…Read more
  •  23
    Conjecture and explanation: A reply to Reydon
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1): 298-301. 2012.
  •  44
    Evolution and the classification of social behavior
    with Rory Smead
    Biology and Philosophy 30 (3): 405-421. 2015.
    Recent studies in the evolution of cooperation have shifted focus from altruistic to mutualistic cooperation. This change in focus is purported to reveal new explanations for the evolution of prosocial behavior. We argue that the common classification scheme for social behavior used to distinguish between altruistic and mutualistic cooperation is flawed because it fails to take into account dynamically relevant game-theoretic features. This leads some arguments about the evolution of cooperation…Read more
  •  69
    When can macroscopic data about a system be used to set parameters in a microfoundational simulation? We examine the epistemic viability of tweaking parameter values to generate a better fit between the outcome of a simulation and the available observational data. We restrict our focus to microfoundational simulations—those simulations that attempt to replicate the macrobehavior of a target system by modeling interactions between microentities. We argue that tweaking can be effective but that th…Read more
  •  1587
    A Bargaining Game Analysis of International Climate Negotiations
    with John Basl, Ronald Sandler, and Rory Smead
    Nature Climate Change 4 442-445. 2014.
    Climate negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have so far failed to achieve a robust international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Game theory has been used to investigate possible climate negotiation solutions and strategies for accomplishing them. Negotiations have been primarily modelled as public goods games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, though coordination games or games of conflict have also been used. Many of these models have solutio…Read more
  •  76
    Can there be stochastic evolutionary causes?
    Philosophy of Science 74 (5): 616-627. 2007.
    Do evolutionary processes such as selection and random drift cause evolutionary change, or are they merely convenient ways of describing or summarizing it? Philosophers have lined up on both sides of this question. One recent defense (Reisman and Forber 2005) of the causal status of selection and drift appeals to a manipulability theory of causation. Yet, even if one accepts manipulability, there are still reasons to doubt that genetic drift, in particular, is genuinely causal. We will address t…Read more
  •  33
    Grounding the big picture
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (4): 913-923. 2005.
  •  33
    Confirmation and explaining how possible
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 41 (1): 32-40. 2010.
  •  107
    Evidence is an objective matter. This is the prevailing view within science, and confirmation theory should aim to capture the objective nature of scientific evidence. Modeling an objective evidence relation in a probabilistic framework faces two challenges: the probabilities must have the right epistemic foundation, and they must be specifiable given the hypotheses and data under consideration. Here I will explore how Sober's approach to confirmation handles these challenges of foundation and s…Read more
  •  34
    Evolution and the Levels of Selection
    Philosophical Review 117 (4): 626-630. 2008.
  •  52
    Meeting report: First ISHPSSB off-year workshop (review)
    with Melinda Fagan, Vivette GarcÍa Deister, Matthew H. Haber, Andrew Hamilton, and Grant Yamashita
    Biology and Philosophy 20 (4): 927-929. 2005.
  •  65
    An Evolutionary Paradox for Prosocial Behavior
    with Rory Smead
    Journal of Philosophy 111 (3): 151-166. 2014.
    We investigate how changes to the payoffs of cooperative behavior affect the evolutionary dynamics. Paradoxically, the larger the benefits of cooperation, the less likely it is to evolve. This holds true even in cases where cooperation is strictly dominant. Increasing the benefits from prosocial behavior has two effects: first, in some circumstances it promotes the evolution of spite; and second, it can decrease the strength of selection leading to nearly neutral evolution of strategies. In ligh…Read more
  •  53
    Biological Inheritance and Cultural Evolution in Nietzsche's Genealogy
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (2): 329-341. 2013.
    ABSTRACT Nietzsche's investigation into the origins of morality bears some striking similarities to contemporary investigations into human evolution. Here I investigate these similarities, using a comparison between Nietzsche's GM and Gould and Lewontin's influential “Spandrels” essay as a departure point. I argue that Nietzsche defends a proto-evolutionary psychology about morality, where the inheritance of enduring biological drives conflicts with our culturally evolved moral system. While Nie…Read more