Natural Selection and the Nature of Statistical Explanations

Abstract

There is a widespread philosophical interpretation of natural selection in evolutionary theory: natural selection, like mutation, migration, and drift are seen as forces that propel the evolution of populations. Natural selection is thus a population level causal process. This account has been challenged by the Statistics, claiming that natural selection is not a population level cause but rather a statistical feature of a population. This paper examines the nature of the aforementioned ontological debate and the nature of statistical explanations given by population genetics. I claim that the Modern Synthesis provides good explanations of the changes in trait structure of populations without appealing to detailed causal information about the individual trajectories of the members of a population.