Assessing statistical views of natural selection: Room for non-local causation?

Recently some philosophers (the “statisticalists”) have emphasized a potentially irreconcilable conceptual antagonism between the statistical characterization of natural selection (derived from population genetics) and the standard scientific discussion of natural selection in terms of forces and causes. Other philosophers have developed an account of the causal character of selectionist statements represented in terms of counterfactuals. I examine the compatibility between such statisticalism and counterfactually based causal accounts of natural selection (and related arguments about counterfactuals and causality) by distinguishing two distinct statisticalist claims: firstly the suggested impossibility for natural selection to be a cause acting upon populations and secondly the conceptualization that all evolutionary causes occur at the level of interactions between individual organisms. I argue that deriving the latter from the former involves supplementary assumptions concerning precisely what causation is. I critically examine two of these assumptions purportedly preventing natural selection being regarded as a cause: the locality claim and the modularity claim. I conclude that justifying the strongest version of statisticalism-i.e. evolutionary causation only occurs at the level of individual interactions between organisms-would require further metaphysical arguments that are likely to be deemed highly problematic. Additionally, I argue that such a metaphysical position would be considered incongruous with both our scientific and ordinary use of the concepts of causality and explanation as employed within our everyday epistemological framework.