Source
Caleb Hazelwood (2023), “An Emerging Dilemma for Reciprocal Causation”, LIT-156, Philosophy of Science 91(3): 595–614, read in full in NOTE-137. Page numbers are the journal’s.
What was actually shown
The target. RC: “the process of natural selection is both a cause and effect of processes such as niche construction”. Its textual basis is Laland et al. 2015, “process A is a cause of process B and, subsequently, process B is a cause of process A”. Weak reciprocal causation, between organism and environment as entities, is called “unobjectionable” (p. 597).
Horn 1: selection is emergent (§4.1). Emergence is Wilson’s synchronic dependence plus ontological and causal autonomy, shown by irreducibility (individuals “do not have the capacity to evolve”), novel laws (Hardy–Weinberg, Fisher’s theorem) and multiple realizability. Realization is argued to entail composition. Then niche construction (individual level) partly composes selection (population level), and their counterfactual dependence is compositional, like mean kinetic energy and temperature. RC is “conceptually incompatible with the emergent character of natural selection” (p. 603). Population-level niche construction does not help: variation in fitness is still “synchronously realized, not caused” (§4.2, p. 605).
Interventionism does not rescue RC (§4.3). Interlevel causation is “completely defensible under the right circumstances” (p. 606), but only between independently fixable variables. Intervening on “is a niche constructor” “simultaneously intervene[s] on (or perhaps introduce[s]) the emergent variation in fitness”, so the two processes are “not sufficiently distinct to stand in a causal relationship” (pp. 607–8). The same intervention can cause a later difference in reproductive success, so niche construction is “a bona fide cause of evolution — the product of natural selection” (p. 608).
Horn 2: selection is not emergent (§5). Statisticalism denies that selection is a cause, so RC fails a fortiori. Individual-level causalism is incoherent, because relative fitness is a property of at least a pair (Millstein 2006; Sober 2013).
Conclusion (§6). “No available metaphysical account of natural selection is compatible with the view that selection is both a cause and effect of developmental processes such as niche construction” (p. 610).
What could have come out otherwise. Niche construction and selection could have turned out independently fixable, so that one could be set without setting the other. The argument is that composition rules this out.
What this does not say
- That niche construction does not matter to evolution. Half the conclusion is that it causes evolutionary outcomes, by partly composing selection.
- That organisms and environments do not cause each other. That is the weak sense, granted.
- That the dilemma is airtight. It rests on the process/product distinction (Millstein, Stephens, Brandon), defended by citation. An advocate who identifies selection with differential reproduction would not accept that §4.3 closes the gap. The paper says a full defence of the compositional reading of realization is beyond its scope (p. 601).
- That the second horn is exhaustive. It considers statisticalism and individual-level causalism. Dispositional accounts are cited but not discussed.
- That a diachronic loop is excluded. Niche construction at one time may change selection at a later one, which changes its frequency later still. The reply that the diachronic arrow reaches only the product is asserted, and an unrolled model could press it. Baedke and colleagues’ unrolled organism–environment model (THEORY-446) is of that kind, but it does not make selection a relatum.
- That it targets Baedke et al. LIT-110 is cited twice in passing, and its organism–environment model falls under the weak sense (NOTE-137).
Connections
- QUESTION-033. It constrains the kinds of answer to “who drives?” across levels: a level and the parts that compose it at the same time cannot be one another’s causes, because they are not independently fixable. A part can make a difference to a later product of the whole.
- Interventions and proportionality. The paper takes causation to be Woodward’s interventionism, the account the record holds as THEORY-138, and this account presupposes it: the step from composition to “not causally related” runs through the interventionist requirement, which the paper takes from Woodward, that cause and effect be independently fixable. THEORY-138 states the definition (M1–M4) and not that requirement in so many words. List and Menzies’s proportional causation (THEORY-133) is another answer to when a higher level is a cause; it is not a premise here.
- Psychopathology. THEORY-048 and THEORY-058 already cite this paper in their text, for the same composition-versus-causation point.
- Emergence in physics and in information measures. NOTE-137 reads the test as the question that Rizi (LIT-150) and McKenzie (LIT-141) do not ask of “downward causation”, and that causal-emergence measures (LIT-025, LIT-027) leave open when they quantify macro-level causal power.