Scientific understanding and the controversy over adaptationism in evolutionary biology

Abstract

In this paper, I show how explanatory and objectual scientific understanding can be used to explain the early 1980s controversy over adaptationism. In this controversy, criticasters of adaptationism argued that adaptationists put too much emphasis on organismal traits as adaptations resulting from natural selection. Defenders of adaptationism argued that anti-adaptationist arguments were largely based on misconceptions. Building on work in the epistemology of scientific understanding, I show how criticasters and defenders of adaptationism can be read as accusing each other of inferior scientific understanding and that these accusations were an important source of fuel for the debate. In the process, I will argue that the philosophical accounts of the adaptationist controversy that has been suggested so far have offered at best partial explanations of the controversy and that the understanding-based account presented here can serve a coordinating role with respect to these accounts.