A Defense of Propensity Interpretations of Fitness

Abstract

That there was some chance element to evolutionary change was clear even to Darwin (cf. Hodge 1987; also Hodge & Kohn 1986), but chance has assumed a more central role in evolutionary theory since the early decades of this century. It was certainly clear to theoreticians such as Dobzhansky, Wright and Fisher that an adequate evolutionary theory would have to take a stochastic form, though they disagreed as to the significance of chance in evolution (Gigerenzer et al., 1989, ch. 4; Turner 1987). As Beatty explains, the central difference is that in more modern treatments, not only is the origin of variations a matter of chance, their evolutionary fates are also matters of chance (Beatty 1984; cf. Beatty 1987). Probabilistic theories of evolutionary change, as we shall be concerned with them, emphasize this dependency of evolutionary fates on chance, and treat evolutionary change as irreducibly probabilistic.

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