Organisms and Artifacts by Tim Lewens

Author:Tim Lewens [Lewens, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

book

October 9, 2003

11:47

Function, Selection, and Explanation

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caused past hearts to be selected. Finally, some of the heart’s beneficial effects, although they may contribute to fitness or well-being now, are not effects that ever caused hearts to be selected. For this reason, producing diagnostic noises is excluded as a function and is instead credited as a mere “accidental” benefit.

The consensus position among students of biological function these days is one of pluralism (e.g., Godfrey-Smith 1993, 1994; Amundson and Lauder 1994). SE function is the concept invoked when many function claims are made in evolutionary biology. Moreover, the SE function concept expresses a quite genuinely teleological sense of function ascription.

Yet not all biological functions are SE functions. In other branches of biology the CR function concept is involved, for example when one asks what is the function of free radicals in the formation of tumors. This is a wholly nonteleological function concept that corresponds to the causal role of an item in a system, and which lacks the connotations possessed by the function concept as it is used to describe the purposes of artifacts and their parts.

5.2 A Problem Case for the SE Account

SE accounts of function are too readily accepted, perhaps because their proponents overlook just what is involved in selection. I suspect that the move from an account of artifact function that refers to intention, to an account of biological function that refers to selection, is eased by the thought that intending that something do something is just to select it for those capacities. It is eased, in other words, by an appeal to the artifact model of evolution. Yet the strictly technical notion within biology of selection for some property is quite different to the intentional concept of selecting something under some set of criteria.

What does it mean to say that a trait is selected for some function?

Sober coined the expression to mark a distinction between selection of objects and selection for properties. He offers the following summary:

“Selection of” pertains to the effects of a selection process, whereas “selection for” describes its causes. To say that there is selection for a given property means that having that property causes success in survival and reproduction. But to say that a given sort of object was selected is merely to say that the result of the selection process was to increase the representation of that kind of object. (Sober 1984a, p. 100)

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