Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

W.F.R. Weldon changes his mind

  • Paper in History and Philosophy of Science
  • Published:
European Journal for Philosophy of Science Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

A recent debate over the causal foundations of evolutionary theory pits those who believe that natural selection causally explains long-term, adaptive population change against those who do not. In this paper, I argue that this debate – far from being an invention of several articles in 2002 – dates from our very first engagements with evolution as a quantified, statistical science. Further, when we analyze that history, we see that a pivotal figure in the early use of statistical methodology in evolutionary theory, W.F.R. Weldon (1860–1906), changes his mind about precisely the central claim at issue. I close by drawing some morals which I think the case can offer for the contemporary debate going forward.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. I thank an anonymous reviewer for mentioning this potential objection.

  2. Thanks to Gregory Radick for raising this objection.

  3. It is worth noting that, while Weldon’s focus on these questions was intensified in his response to Mendel’s work, these are ideas that he developed during what I called the “period of transition” in the last subsection. Many of the basic ideas are present in a letter he writes to Galton in June, 1896 (Weldon 1896a).

  4. For a nice reconstruction of these issues in Fisher’s case, see Morrison (2002), though I am less certain that Morrison’s claims about Pearson’s lack of concern for biological detail would withstand scrutiny, and am certain that any such claims cannot justly be applied to Weldon.

  5. A series of anonymous accounts of the content of these lectures was published in The Lancet; see issues beginning with Weldon (1905a). (I follow common practice in citing them under Weldon’s name as the lecturer; the author of the accounts is unknown, even to the journal’s editors [pers. comm.].)

  6. An anonymous reviewer notes that this makes for a significant difference between Weldon and his close colleague and collaborator Pearson, who had argued on the contrary that the concept of cause is meaningless and to be replaced by something like functional or statistical dependence (Pearson 1900). Indeed, the two men differed significantly in their conceptions of causation, a disagreement which appears clearly, among other places, in the correspondence pages of Nature, and which I have described elsewhere (Pence 2015; under contract).

  7. While this is not the right context to explore the connection in detail, it is quite similar, for instance, to the question of “universality” in statistical physics; see Batterman (1998, 2000).

  8. Thanks to Marshall Abrams for raising this objection.

  9. For a delightful recounting of the debate between Galton and Maxwell over their physical nature, see Radick (2011).

  10. Morrison notes quite accurately that this is one reason that the mathematics of parent-offspring transmission remained intractable for the biometricians, and, by extension, one of the reasons that Pearson remained unable theoretically to separate genetic variation into its different sources, a feat that was much easier for Fisher (Morrison 2004, p. 1199).

  11. In one of his first papers now taken to establish the Modern Synthesis, Fisher writes that “if a complete analysis is unattainable it is also unnecessary to practical progress. […] A number of points of general interest are shown to flow from purely statistical premises” (Fisher 1922, p. 415).

  12. In response to Fisher on dominance, Wright focuses on the special cases required for Fisher’s conclusions to go through, arguing that in the absence of them, rather than being supported by statistical principles, “probably most geneticists would hold that dominance in general has some immediate physiological explanation” (Wright 1929, p. 277).

  13. It is also, interestingly, largely independent from the classic “debate between biometry and Mendelism” framing which has so dominated both historical and philosophical presentations of Pearson and Weldon.

  14. In addition to the analogy with physics mentioned above, I also lack both the space here and the expertise to pursue the similarity between this structure and that of the philosophy of mind; the only attempt, to my knowledge, to do so is Shapiro and Sober (2007).

References

  • Ariew, A., & Lewontin, R.C. (2004). The confusions of fitness. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 55(2), 347–363.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ariew, A., Rice, C., & Rohwer, Y. (2015). Autonomous-statistical explanations and natural selection. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 66 (3), 635–658.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ariew, A., Rohwer, Y., & Rice, C. (2017). Galton, reversion and the quincunx: the rise of statistical explanation. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 66, 63–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Batterman, R.W. (1998). Why equilibrium statistical mechanics works: Universality and the renormalization group. Philosophy of Science, 65 (2), 183–208.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Batterman, R.W. (2000). Multiple realizability and universality. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 51(1), 115–145.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bowler, P.J. (2014). Francis Galton’s saltationism and the ambiguities of selection. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 48B, 272–279.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brandon, R.N. (1990). Adaptation and environment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Fisher, R.A. (1922). Darwinian evolution by mutations. Eugenics Review, 14, 31–34.

    Google Scholar 

  • Galton, F. (1889). Natural inheritance. London: Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hodge, M.J.S. (1987). Natural selection as a causal, empirical, and probabilistic theory. In Krüger, L., Gigerenzer, G., & Morgan, M.S. (Eds.) The probabilistic revolution, Volume 2: Ideas in the Sciences, Bradford Books, Cambridge, MA (pp. 233–270).

  • Hodge, M.J.S. (2009). Capitalist contexts for Darwinian theory: land, finance, industry and empire. Journal of the History of Biology, 42(3), 399–416.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lankester, E.R. (1896). Are specific characters useful? [letter of Jul. 16, 1896]. Nature, 54(1394), 245–246.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matthen, M. (2009). Drift and “statistically abstractive explanation”. Philosophy of Science, 76(4), 464–487.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matthen, M., & Ariew, A. (2002). Two ways of thinking about fitness and natural selection. Journal of Philosophy, 99(2), 55–83.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mills, S.K., & Beatty, J.H. (1979). The propensity interpretation of fitness. Philosophy of Science, 46(2), 263–286.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Millstein, R.L. (2006). Natural selection as a population-level causal process. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 57(4), 627–653.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Millstein, R.L. (2008). Distinguishing drift and selection empirically: “The Great Snail Debate” of the 1950s. Journal of the History of Biology, 41(2), 339–367.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Millstein, R.L. (2013). Natural selection and causal productivity. In Chao, H K, Chen, S T, & Millstein, R L (Eds.) Mechanism and causality in biology and economics (pp. 147–163). New York: Springer.

  • Millstein, R.L., Skipper, R.A., & Dietrich, M.R. (2009). Misinterpreting mathematical models: Drift as a physical process. Philosophy and Theory in Biology, 1, e002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morrison, M. (2002). Modelling populations: Pearson and Fisher on Mendelism and biometry. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 53(1), 39–68.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Morrison, M. (2004). Population genetics and population thinking: Mathematics and the role of the individual. Philosophy of Science, 71(5), 1189–1200.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pearson, K. (1895). Contributions to the mathematical theory of evolution. II. Skew variation in homogeneous material. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A, 186, 343–414.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pearson, K. (1900). The grammar of science, 2nd edn. London: Adam and Charles Black.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pearson, K. (1908). On a mathematical theory of determinantal inheritance, from suggestions and notes of the late W.F.R. Weldon. Biometrika, 6(1), 80–93.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pence, C.H. (2011). Describing our whole experience: The statistical philosophies of W. F. R. Weldon and Karl Pearson. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 42(4), 475–485.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pence, C.H. (2015). The early history of chance in evolution. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 50, 48–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pence, C.H. (in press). The causal structure of natural selection. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Pence, C.H. (under contract). The rise of chance in evolutionary theory: a pompous parade of arithmetic. Elsevier.

  • Pence, C.H., & Ramsey, G. (2013). A new foundation for the propensity interpretation of fitness. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 64(4), 851–881.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pence, C.H., & Ramsey, G. (2015). Is organismic fitness at the basis of evolutionary theory? Philosophy of Science, 82(5), 1081–1091.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Quetelet, A. (1835). Sur l’homme et le développement de ses facultés ou Essai de physique sociale. Bachelier, Paris.

  • Radick, G. (2011). Physics in the Galtonian sciences of heredity. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 42(2), 129–138.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ramsey, G. (2013). Driftability. Synthese, 190(17), 3909–3928.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shapiro, L., & Sober, E. (2007). Epiphenomenalism – the dos and the don’ts. In Wolters g, & Machamer, P (Eds.) Thinking about causes: From Greek philosophy to modern physics (pp. 235–264). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

  • Sloan, P.R. (2000). Mach’s phenomenalism and the British reception of Mendelism. Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Sciences: Series III: Sciences de la Vie, 323, 1069–1079.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sober, E. (2001). The two faces of fitness. In Singh, R.S. (Ed.) Thinking about evolution: historical, philosophical, and political perspectives (pp. 309–321). Cambridge: The MIT Press.

  • Sober, E. (2013). Trait fitness is not a propensity, but fitness variation is. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 44(3), 336–341.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vicedo, M. (1995). What is that thing called Mendelian genetics? Social Studies of Science, 25(2), 370–382.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Walsh, D.M., Lewens, T., & Ariew, A. (2002). The trials of life: Natural selection and random drift. Philosophy of Science, 69(3), 429–446.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Walsh, D.M., Ariew, A., & Matthen, M. (2017). Four pillars of statisticalism. Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology, 9, 1.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1890a). Letter from WFRW to FG, 1890-01-07.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1890b). The variations occurring in certain decapod Crustacea. — I. Cragnon vulgaris. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 47, 445–453.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1893). On certain correlated variations in Carcinus mœnas. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 54, 318–329.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1895). An attempt to measure the death-rate due to the selective destruction of Carcinus mœnas with respect to a particular dimension. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 57, 360–379.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1896a). Letter from WFRW to FG, 1896-06-06.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1896b). The utility of specific characters [letter of Jul. 30, 1896]. Nature, 54(1396), 294–295.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1896c). Utility Of specific characters [letter of Sep. 3, 1896]. Nature, 54(1401), 413–413.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1898). Address of the President of Section D (zoology). Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 68, 887–902.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1900). Letter from WFRW to KP, 1900-12-12.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1902). Letter from WFRW to KP, 1902-06-23.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1904). Letter from WFRW to KP, 1904-10.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1905a). Current theories of the hereditary process [1], (Vol. 165.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1905b). MS notes on animals and plants, Pearson Papers, University College London, PEARSON/5/2/10/7.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. (1905c). MS of Theory of Inheritance book, Pearson Papers, University College London, PEARSON/5/2/10/4.

  • Weldon, W.F.R. Strong, T.B. (Ed.). (1906). Inheritance in animals and plants. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

  • Wright, S. (1929). Fisher’s theory of dominance. American Naturalist, 63(686), 274–279.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

Prior versions of this paper benefited from comments from three reviewers. Thanks to audiences at EPSA 2019 in Geneva (especially Joe Dewhurst, Jan Potters, and Phyllis Illari), and at ISHPSSB 2019 in Oslo (especially Marshall Abrams, Greg Radick, Yafeng Shan, Mike Buttolph, and Stephen Hecht Orzack). Particular thanks, as always, to my partners in Weldoniana, Gregory Radick and Yafeng Shan, and to my guiding lights in post-Darwinian history of biology, Jon Hodge and Phil Sloan.

Funding

CHP was supported by the US National Science Foundation, HPS Scholars Award #1826784.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Catholique de Louvain, Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, Collége Mercier, Place du Cardinal Mercier 14, bte. L3.06.01, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Charles H. Pence

Authors
  1. Charles H. Pence
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Charles H. Pence.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Pence, C.H. W.F.R. Weldon changes his mind. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 11, 61 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-021-00384-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-021-00384-3

Keywords

Search

Navigation