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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The persistence of biologists' debates over the relative importance of drift and selection is explicable without making those debates seem trivial

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Elliot Sober argues that drift and selection are not causally distinct processes but differ only in whether population-level forces are systematically directional.
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    • 2.If drift is merely the absence of systematic selection pressure rather than a distinct causal process, debates about their 'relative importance' conflate a cause with its absence.
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    • 3.Persistent debate arising from a conceptual confusion about causal categories reflects theoretical disorder, not legitimate empirical underdetermination.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Bas van Fraassen's constructive empiricism holds that unobservable theoretical posits gain warrant only through their empirical adequacy, not their explanatory coherence.
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    • 2.If drift and selection produce identical observable outcomes, any methodological persistence in debating their relative contributions cannot be grounded in empirical evidence and thus lacks epistemic justification.
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    • 3.A debate that is structurally insulated from empirical resolution is trivial in the epistemically relevant sense, regardless of its sociological persistence among practitioners.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.Drift and selection can produce the same outcomes even though they are distinct processes
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    • 2.If two distinct processes can produce identical outcomes, scientists can reasonably disagree about which process was responsible in a given case
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