A PrioriCausal Models of Natural Selection

Abstract

To evaluate Hume's thesis that causal claims are always empirical, I consider three kinds of causal statement: ‘e1 caused e2 ’, ‘e1 promoted e2 ’, and ‘e1 would promote e2 ’. Restricting my attention to cases in which ‘e1 occurred’ and ‘e2 occurred’ are both empirical, I argue that Hume was right about the first two, but wrong about the third. Standard causal models of natural selection that have this third form are a priori mathematical truths. Some are obvious, others less so. Empirical work on natural selection takes the form of defending causal claims of the first two types. I provide biological examples that illustrate differences among these three kinds of causal claim.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.