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    Natural selection's core explanatory power rests on mecha... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Mary Williams successfully axiomatized the theory of natural selection using Bertalanffy's set-theoretic methods, yielding genuine synthetic theorems.

    Natural selection's core explanatory power rests on mechanisms (mutation, drift, differential reproduction) that may resist set-theoretic reduction without loss of explanatory content.

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    Key Terms

    Differential Reproduction(as used in evolutionary biology)
    The fact that some organisms produce more offspring than others, usually because they're better adapted to their environment.
    Explanatory content(measuring the usefulness of a scientific explanation)
    How much a theory actually tells you about why something happens, rather than just describing it or dodging questions.
    Mutation(as used in evolutionary biology)
    A random change in an organism's genetic code that can create new traits or variations that might be passed to offspring.
    Set-theoretic reduction(a way of trying to simplify complex phenomena)
    Breaking something down into its simplest mathematical building blocks (sets) to fully explain how it works.
    drift (genetic drift)

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    (Philosophy of biology, causation of evolutionary change)
    An evolutionary process involving indiscriminate sampling; sampling is implicit rather than explicit as a variable in mathematical models of drift
    natural selection(Endler's critique of Shanahan's continuum account)
    A process standardly requiring heritability as a necessary condition, distinguishable from random drift; when heritability is removed as a condition, natural selection trivially reduces to the observation that phenotypic differences exist

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    Mary Williams successfully axiomatized the theory of natural selection using Ber...

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    Mary Williams successfully axiomatized the theory of natural selection using Ber...

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