Wright’s “adaptive landscape” has been influential in evolutionary thinking but controversial, especially because the landscape that organisms encounter is altered by the evolutionary process itsel...

Social evolution theory conventionally takes an externalist explanatory stance, treating observed cooperation as explanandum and the positive assortment of cooperative behaviour as explanans. We ask how the circumstances bringing about this positive assortment arose in the first place. Rather than merely push the explanatory problem back a step, we move from an externalist to an interactionist explanatory stance, in the spirit of Lewontin and the Niche Construction theorists. We develop a theory of ‘social niche construction’ in which we consider biological (...) entities to be both the subject and object of their own social evolution. Some important cases of the evolution of cooperation have the side-effect of causing changes in the hierarchical level at which the evolutionary process acts. This is because the traits that act to align the fitness interests of particles in a collective can also act to diminish the extent to which those particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance, while augmenting the extent to which collectives of such particles are bearers of heritable fitness variance. In this way, we can explain upward transitions in the hierarchical level at which the Darwinian machine operates in terms of particle-level selection, even though the outcome of the process is a collective-level selection regime. Our theory avoids the logical and metaphysical paradoxes faced by other attempts to explain evolutionary transitions. (shrink)

Dans cet article, je présente une approche sémantique de l’analyse de la fonction de la métaphore du paysage dans la biologie de l’évolution. Le concept de paysage adaptatif a suscité une attention considérable dans la philosophie de la biologie récente. La plupart des auteurs ont considéré ce concept de l’une des deux manières suivantes: en tant qu’outil heuristique, comme partie intrinsèque de modèles mathématiques robustes, ou comme un ensemble définissable d’analogies sur lesquelles les modèles sont basés et testés. Chacune de (...) ces visions conduit à la conclusion que la valeur de la métaphore du paysage dépend seulement du succès des modèles que sous-tend la métaphore, en vue de représenter adéquatement la dynamique de l’évolution. J’essaie de montrer que cette conclusion, ainsi que les visions qui y conduisent, ne tiennent pas compte d’épisodes importants dans l’histoire de la métaphore du langage. Ces visions proviennent plutôt de thèses générales, en philosophie des sciences, quant au rôle des métaphores dans les théories scientifiques. L’analyse sémantique que je propose met en lumière le fait que la fonction première du concept de relief adaptatif, au cours de la synthèse évolutionniste, a été de servir de cadre général d’unification conceptuelle, qui a rendu possible la conciliation de phénomènes empiriques hétérogènes. De ce point de vue, la métaphore du paysage est un outil linguistique-théorique qui ne doit pas être abandonné (et qui ne l’est de fait pas) suite à la falsification des modèles construits et interprétés au moyen de la métaphore. (shrink)

There is considerable correspondence between theories and models used in biology and the social sciences. One type of model that is in use in both biology and the social sciences is the fitness landscape model. The properties of the fitness landscape model have been applied rather freely in the social domain. This is partly due to the versatility of the model, but it is also due to the difficulties of transferring a model to another domain. We will demonstrate that in (...) order to transfer the biological fitness landscape model to the social science it needs to be substantially modified. We argue that the syntactic structure of the model can remain unaltered, whilst the semantic dimension requires considerable modification in order to fit the specific phenomena in the social sciences. We will first discuss the origin as well as the basic properties of the model. Subsequently, we will demonstrate the considerations and modifications pertaining to such a transfer by showing how and why we altered the model to analyse collective decision-making processes. We will demonstrate that the properties of the target domain allow for a transfer of the syntactic structure but don’t tolerate the semantic transfer. (shrink)

The concepts of adaptation and fitness have such an appeal that they have been used in other scientific domains, including the social sciences. One particular aspect of this theory transfer concerns the so-called fitness landscape models. At first sight, fitness landscapes visualize how an agent, of any kind, relates to its environment, how its position is conditional because of the mutual interaction with other agents, and the potential routes towards improved fitness. The allure of fitness landscapes is first and foremost (...) that it represents a complex story about adaptation and fitness in one coherent image. Different accounts of fitness landscapes in different domains in the social sciences suggest that the properties and functions of fitness landscapes are attributed rather freely. These differences are testimony of the model’s versatility. At the same time, one will notice that the different approaches can also create ambiguity about the exact meaning and role of fitness landscapes in the social sciences. This article presents an extensive literature survey of the diverging interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences and discusses the implications in terms of how these models inform scientific inquiry. (shrink)