Revisiting darwinian teleology: A case for inclusive fitness as design explanation

Publication date: Available online 17 July 2019Source: Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical SciencesAuthor(s): Philippe HunemanAbstractThis paper elaborates a general framework to make sense of teleological explanations in Darwinian evolutionary biology. It relies on an attempt to tie natural selection to a sense of optimization. First, after assessing the objections made by any attempt to view selection as a maximising process within population genetics, it understands Grafen's Formal Darwinism (FD) as a conceptual link established between population genetics and behavioral ecology's adaptationist framework (without any empirical commitments). Thus I suggest that this provides a way to make sense of teleological explanations in biology under their various modes. Then the paper criticizes two major ways of accounting for teleology: a Darwinian one, the etiological view of biological functions, and a non-Darwinian one, here labeled “intrinsic teleology” view, which covers several subtypes of accounts, including plasticity-oriented conceptions of evolution or organizational views of function. The former is centered on traits while the latter is centered on organisms; this is shown to imply that both accounts are unable to provide a systematic understanding of biological teleology. Finally the paper argues that viewing teleology as maximization of inclusive fitness along the FD lines as understood...