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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Drift is an evolutionary force, but a force of a different color from selection, mutation, and migration.

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Drift is not a cause but an absence of cause — it is what remains when selection, mutation, and migration are subtracted from total change.
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    • 2.Matthen and Ariew (2002) argue that drift names a statistical residual, not a force, making the 'different color' framing a category error.
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    • 3.Forces must be individuable and capable of vector addition; a residual variance term cannot coherently occupy the same ontological category as directional causes.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Selection is no more deterministic than drift at the level of individual organisms — both are probabilistic processes described by expected value distributions.
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    • 2.If drift and selection are distinguished only by whether expected change is zero, this is a difference of degree in directional bias, not a difference in causal kind.
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    • 3.Brandon and Carson's own Newtonian analogy commits a level-of-analysis fallacy by treating population-level statistics as if they were individual-level physical forces.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Selection, mutation, migration, and drift all play causal roles in evolutionary change.
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    • 2.Selection is deterministic in the sense that given trait frequencies and fitness values, it predicts a specific directional outcome for the next generation.
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    • 3.Drift does not have a definite direction — it could yield an increase in any of the types present in the population.
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