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The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science Advance Access originally published online on December 10, 2008
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 2009 60(1):51-78; doi:10.1093/bjps/axn047
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Lineage Explanations: Explaining How Biological Mechanisms Change

Brett Calcott

Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences; Centre for Macroevolution and Macroecology, School of Botany and Zoology, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200 Australia


  Abstract

This paper describes a pattern of explanation prevalent in the biological sciences that I call a ‘lineage explanation’. The aim of these explanations is to make plausible certain trajectories of change through phenotypic space. They do this by laying out a series of stages, where each stage shows how some mechanism worked, and the differences between each adjacent stage demonstrates how one mechanism, through minor modifications, could be changed into another. These explanations are important, for though it is widely accepted that there is an ‘incremental constraint’ on evolutionary change, in an important class of cases it is difficult to see how to satisfy this constraint. I show that lineage explanations answer important questions about evolutionary change, but do so by demonstrating differences between individuals rather than invoking population processes, such as natural selection.

  1. Introduction
  2. Turning a ‘Scale’ into a ‘Plume’
  3. Lineage Explanations in Biology
    3.1 The evolution of eyes
    3.2 The evolution of feathers

  4. The Two Dimensions of a Lineage Explanation
    4.1 The production dimension
    4.2 The continuity dimension
    4.3 The dual role of the parts

  5. Constraining the Explanations
  6. Operational and Generative Lineages
  7. Explaining Change Without Populations
  8. Conclusion


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