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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that It is reasonable to conceive of drift and natural selection as population-level causes in some cases

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Causal explanations in population genetics are fully reducible to organism-level birth, death, and reproductive events without remainder.
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    • 2.Positing population-level causes beyond aggregated individual causes violates the principle of causal parsimony defended by Sober and Lewontin's methodological individualism.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Drift is not a cause but a statistical artifact of sampling, as Matthen and Ariew argue in distinguishing causal from statistical population-level descriptions.
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    • 2.If drift lacks causal efficacy independently of physical forces acting on organisms, treating it as a population-level cause conflates mathematical models with causal mechanisms.
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Drift and natural selection can depend on indeterministic events
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    • 2.Some cases of frequency-dependent selection warrant population-level causal treatment
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