Four main ingredients are necessary for the recipe of natural selection: a common demanding and competitive environment; individual, spontaneous variation; inheritance of part of this variation; a sufficient time frame. The result is a differential survival and reproduction of varying individuals, multiplied over generations: self-reproducing lineages of organisms change over time. As a statistical process with probabilistic outcomes, natural selection can be explained without using somehow misleading terms such as “adaptation” and “chance”. The selective process is an experienced fact in nature and an explanatory pattern that could be generalized in different forms (like sexual selection, kin selection and so on). Despite its strong explanatory power, natural selection is a constrained process and is not self-sufficient: it is the pivot within a plurality of complementary and alternative explanatory patterns, the most important of which is the genetic drift.

Philosophy of Selection (Natural, Sexual and Drift)

PIEVANI, DIETELMO
2015

Abstract

Four main ingredients are necessary for the recipe of natural selection: a common demanding and competitive environment; individual, spontaneous variation; inheritance of part of this variation; a sufficient time frame. The result is a differential survival and reproduction of varying individuals, multiplied over generations: self-reproducing lineages of organisms change over time. As a statistical process with probabilistic outcomes, natural selection can be explained without using somehow misleading terms such as “adaptation” and “chance”. The selective process is an experienced fact in nature and an explanatory pattern that could be generalized in different forms (like sexual selection, kin selection and so on). Despite its strong explanatory power, natural selection is a constrained process and is not self-sufficient: it is the pivot within a plurality of complementary and alternative explanatory patterns, the most important of which is the genetic drift.
File in questo prodotto:
Non ci sono file associati a questo prodotto.
Pubblicazioni consigliate

I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.

Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11577/3144133
Citazioni
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.pmc??? ND
  • Scopus ND
  • ???jsp.display-item.citation.isi??? ND
  • OpenAlex ND
social impact