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Spandrels and a pervasive problem of evidence

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Abstract

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 problems. I then distinguish the problem of contrast failure from the more familiar philosophical problem of underdetermination, and demonstrate how contrast failure arises in scientific practice with an investigation into Lewontin and White’s (Evolution 14:116–129, 1960) estimation of an adaptive landscape.

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Notes

  1. This is but one of many threads woven into the Spandrels paper. A nexus of related adaptationist theses have been disentangled (Sober 1996; Godfrey-Smith 2001; Godfrey- Smith and Wilkins 2008; Lewens 2009), and there are proposals on how to test the empirical ones (Orzack and Sober 1994, 1996; Brandon and Rausher 1996). I will not focus on the standard issues of adaptationism, and instead turn to the general morals we can draw for testing any evolutionary hypothesis.

  2. That set of alternatives may include one or two key rivals (Royall’s (1997) likelihoodism or Sober’s (1990) contrastive empiricism) or the exhaustive list of possibilities (Bayesianism). Given that scientists seldom consider all possible hypotheses, instead focusing on a set of key rivals, I will construct my argument based on the more restrictive approach of Royall and Sober. My analysis can easily be embedded in a Bayesian framework by examining when two or more hypotheses (the genuine rivals) confer the same likelihood on some data.

  3. Beatty (1984, p. 196) notes the significance of this problem early on with regard to selection and drift: “… it is difficult to distinguish between random drift on the one hand, and the improbable results of natural selection on the other hand. Wherever there are fitness distributions associated with different types of organisms, there will be ranges of outcomes of natural selection.”

  4. There is an important promissory note in Turner’s analysis: he relies upon the concept of a genuine rival to define a local underdetermination problem, yet an account of genuine rivalry is not provided. Without such an account the problem of local underdetermination could be circumvented in any particular case by denying genuine rival status to an alternative, especially if scientists claim, reasonably in my view, that genuine rivals must admit of some in-practice discriminating evidence.

  5. Using the Dietrich and Skipper (2007, p. 303) framework, a contrast failure problem occurs when the X-set is the set of rivals for explaining a particular target evolutionary phenomenon, the Y-set is the set of data or observations collected from the target system, and the C relation that holds equally between the Y-set and each hypothesis in X is the confirmation relation. In other words, contrast failure occurs when a choice between precise evolutionary rivals (the X-set) is Dietrich–Skipper underdetermined by the evidence (the Y-set) with respect to purely epistemic evaluation (identical confirmation relations between the Y-set and each X).

  6. There are different ways to understand Wright’s concept of a landscape. The landscape may map possible genotypes to genotypic fitness, or it may map possible population states to mean fitness. Lewontin and White take adaptive landscapes to do the latter. See Gavrilets (2004) for discussion of different evolutionary landscape concepts. Also see Wilkins and Godfrey-Smith (2009) for an insightful discussion of the utility of the landscape metaphor.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Godfrey-Smith, Elliott Sober, Kyle Stanford, Kim Sterelny, Derek Turner, Ben Jeffares, and the audience at ISHPSSB 2005 for astute comments and discussion. Thanks also to Bill Wimsatt for pointing me towards Wright’s discussion of the M. scurra case.

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  1. Tufts University, Medford, USA

    Patrick Forber

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Forber, P. Spandrels and a pervasive problem of evidence. Biol Philos 24, 247–266 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-008-9144-8

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