Caleb Hazelwood (2023), Philosophy of Science 91(3):595–614 (July 2024) — DOI-10.1017/psa.2023.124
Key takeaways
- If natural selection is an emergent, population-level causal process, it is composed of (not caused by) individual-level processes like niche construction, so it cannot be both cause and effect of niche construction; denying that selection is emergent or causal fares no better — EES advocates must drop reciprocal causation involving selection.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-137. What follows is what the work says about itself.
In debates over the extended evolutionary synthesis, “reciprocal causation” is the view that adaptive evolution runs both ways, with organisms and environments acting on each other through niche construction and natural selection. Hazelwood argues this is incompatible with treating natural selection as a metaphysically emergent causal process. That emergent character creates a dilemma neither horn of which saves reciprocal causation, so EES proponents should give up the claim that selection takes part in cycles of reciprocal causation.
Standing in the record
Filed from the 2026-09-26 sweep of the papers-feed tracker for philosophy: 40 seconds of active reading over 1 session. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-137 is the close reading of 2026-09-26, and it placed the work: Active — worth reading as a tight, well-sourced argument that brings the reciprocal-causation debate into the composition, exclusion and interventionism literature. Its force depends on accepting a process/product split for selection and a compositional reading of realization, both argued briefly and flagged as contestable.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-137, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: medium — short visit (t = 40 s), a tight argument the skim captures well, but it pairs directly with the higher-engagement LIT-110.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-137 is that reading):
- Directly engages Baedke et al. (LIT-110) on reciprocal causation; read the two together.
- The compositional-vs-causal distinction for interlevel relations generalises to other emergence debates (LIT-150, LIT-141).
- Check whether the dilemma depends on a particular population-level causalism, and whether a process ontology of the kind Baedke et al. favour escapes it.
Access when seeded: Full open-access (CC BY) article HTML fetched directly from Cambridge Core and read by section; online date from Crossref.