Fitness Made Physical: The Supervenience of Biological Concepts Revisited | Philosophy of Science | Cambridge Core (original) (raw)

Abstract

The supervenience and multiple realizability of biological properties have been invoked to support a disunified picture of the biological sciences. I argue that supervenience does not capture the relation between fitness and an organism's physical properties. The actual relation is one of causal dependence and is, therefore, amenable to causal explanation. A case from optimality theory is presented and interpreted as a microreductive explanation of fitness difference. Such micro-reductions can have considerable scope. Implications are discussed for reductive physicalism in evolutionary biology and for the unity of science.

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