Supervenience vs. Specialization

GINNOBILI, SANTIAGO

Buenos Aires

Encuentro; Meeting on Alexander Rosenberg.; 2015

Posgrado en Epistemología e Historia de la Ciencia de UNTREF, y por el Programa de investigación en Filosofía e Historia de la Ciencia, de UNQ

Several authors have held the existence of two kinds of fitness. In the entry corresponding to ?fitness? in The Stanford Encyclopedia, Rosenberg and Bouchard distinguish between ecological fitness and population genetics fitness. The first concerns the ability of the organism to solve design problems, whereas the second concerns genetic reproduction rates. Once this distinction is made, there is a tendency to consider that population genetics fitness provides a more exact quantitative version of ecological fitness. The assumption behind this idea is that natural selection is defined solely based on the difference of success rates in different organisms in differential reproduction. If things were so, population genetics, by enabling us to determine quite precisely under certain assumptions that the genic frequency in a population is not as expected, would allow us to quantify the action of natural selection. On the other hand, many authors are against explicating the concept of fitness of natural selection by its place in population genetics (Glymour 2006, p. 388, Rosenberg 1994, pp. 110-111) . In agreement with these opinions, some authors have noted the restrictive character of the population genetics concept of fitness, and have defended instead the ecological concept of fitness, as more explanatory and comprehensive (Bouchard, 2011; Peacock, 2011). In this work I Will Introduce the distinction between ecological fitness and population genetics fitness. Discuss the relationship between them. Introduce many difficulties that those who try to explicate the ecological fitness face, and discuss their solutions. And finally, come up with a new solution having in mind metatheoretical structuralism.