Additivity and the Units of Selection

Abstract

Variation is the fuel of evolution, but as is well known, not all variation will drive Darwin’s engine along. Within population genetics, “additivity” is one concept used to characterize the salient type of variation. The characterization of variation (variance) in terms of additivity originates with R.A. Fisher (1918), and Fisher’s “fundamental theorem of natural selection” (1930) states that the rate of evolutionary change is proportional to the additive variance in fitness in the population at that time. Evolution proceeds until the additive variance is exhausted. It would not be surprising if a concept so important in the mathematical structure of evolutionary theory had philosophical significance. In two important works, William Wimsatt (1981) and Elisabeth Lloyd (1988) have claimed that additivity can be used to give a criterion for deciding the “unit of selection” in an evolutionary process.

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 — 13 citations exist upstream.

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