Hierarchies in Biology

Abstract

1 hat evolution happened is a fact. Just why and how it happened is, in part, still a matter for debate, and a number of evolutionary biologists are currently attempt ing to rethink the problem of causality in their discipline (e.g., Eldredge 1985, 1986; Gould 1982, 1986). Contem porary Darwinism appears to restrict the search for causes to two levels only: the level of changing gene frequencies, and the level of phenotypic characters of organisms?that is, the morphological or behavioral characters that are triggered by underlying genetic deter minants but that nevertheless produce effects having significant consequences for the differential reproduction of the organisms in question. At the phenotypic level, in other words, individuals are differently adapted to a given environment, and these differences result in varia tions in the number of offspring that these individuals are likely to leave in the next generation (Brandon 1981). Sometimes, at its most reduc tive, evolutionary theory predicates change at the genetic level only, re garding everything else as an epiphe nomenon of relative gene frequen cies (see, for example, Williams 1985). This is an extreme form of selfish-gene theorizing, which re gards an organism as merely a gene's way of making more genes. Some times, on the other hand, the organ ism is the focus of attention. What organisms do, after all, determines what genes will be handed on to their offspring. Genes may be good at bookkeeping, but it is Father and Mother Organism that run the family busi ness. No bookkeeping, no family business. Yet it goes the other way, too: no family business, nothing to bookkeep (Wimsatt 1980). Because Darwinian thinking moves between two levels, genes and organisms, evolu tionists have often argued that Darwinism is on principle nonreductive, or antireductive, in its import (Dob zhansky 1968; but compare Williams 1985). From the perspective of the current debate about evolutionary theory, however, it is Darwinism that ap pears reductive, since it limits evolutionary explanation

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