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Agents and acacias: replies to Dennett, Sterelny, and Queller

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Abstract

The commentaries by Dennett, Sterelny, and Queller on Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (DPNS) are so constructive that they make it possible to extend and improve the book’s framework in several ways. My replies will focus on points of disagreement, and I will pick a small number of themes and develop them in detail. The three replies below are mostly self-contained, except that all my comments about genes, discussed by all three critics, are in the reply to Queller. Agential views of evolution, discussed by Queller and Dennett, are addressed in my reply to Dennett.

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Notes

  1. Dennett says "Ironically, PGS himself finds it irresistible to engage in agential talk when explaining and defending his own best ideas," but I think Dennett casts this net too broadly, and includes adaptationist description and sometimes ordinary causal talk. Here I have inserted comments after his italicized examples. "Here are a few examples among many, in PGS’s discussion of de-Darwinizing: “Their independent evolutionary activities are curtailed, constrained, or suppressed by what is happening at the higher level” (p. 122), [ordinary causal description, with some metaphor, but not agential in the relevant sense] “Another way of dealing with this problem [point granted] would be for one member of the collective to prevent [ordinary causal description] reproduction altogether by other individuals…” “This can be put more explicitly in terms due to Calcott (2008). For a transition to occur there must somehow be both the generation of benefit and the alignment of reproductive interests.” (p. 124) [point granted, and I do think Calcott's terms are helpful here] So Calcott is praised for putting it “more explicitly” instead of condemned for indulging in such metaphorical agential talk.”

  2. Dennett compares the accounting project in Francis (2004), which I think much more highly of than he does.

  3. I follow Fletcher and Doebeli’s description here though talk of alleles at loci is problematic in the absence of sex.

  4. Sometimes genes seem to be more abstract than this because they are not being treated as Darwinian individuals, or other objects, at all. Genetic properties are often used to characterize organisms. When this is being done, organisms are being treated as particular objects, perhaps as Darwinian individuals, and genetic features, such as being AA, are used to identify a similarity between them. This is not treating genes as Darwinian individuals.

  5. There is a sense in which Dennett is both at once, given his interpreter-dependent treatment of semantic properties.

  6. A view of this kind is also being developed by Austin Booth (forthcoming).

  7. Ruby and Asato (1993) did find that a single bacterium can suffice to establish the symbiosis in a young squid. Wollenberg and Ruby (2009) conclude that the usual number is six to twelve, one or two for each of six "crypts" in the developing light organ.

  8. Or five if methylated C is a different option from unmethylated C.

  9. I am not sure how Queller intends his analysis to apply to asexual organisms, such as bacteria, where the entire genome is the usual unit of replication. Here I assume there are not separate Darwinian populations for each nucleotide-sized locus, as facts about competition at a locus are dependent on meiosis.

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    Peter Godfrey-Smith

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Godfrey-Smith, P. Agents and acacias: replies to Dennett, Sterelny, and Queller. Biol Philos 26, 501–515 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-011-9246-6

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