Contextual unanimity and the units of selection problem

Stuart Glennan, Butler University

Abstract

Eliot Sober and Richard Lewontin claim that genic selection misrepresents the causes of evolution. Their argument is based upon a general condition for distinguishing genuine from spurious causes that is sometimes called the contextual unanimity condition. According to this condition, a genuine cause must increase the probability of its effect across all causally relevant background contexts. Their critics claim that even the higher level units that Sober and Lewontin suggest are the causes of evolutionary change fail to meet this condition. In this paper I side with the critics, but argue that Sober and Lewontin's attack on genic selectionism can be sustained by abandoning the contextual unanimity condition and replacing it with a principle in which genuine causes are distinguished by their roles in the mechanisms of evolution.

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