Organisms, Traits, and Population Subdivisions: Two Arguments against the Causal Conception of Fitness?

A major debate in the philosophy of biology centers on the question of how we should understand the causal structure of natural selection. This debate is polarized into the causal and statistical positions. The main arguments from the statistical side are that a causal construal of the theory of natural selection's central concept, fitness, either (i) leads to inaccurate predictions about population dynamics, or (ii) leads to an incoherent set of causal commitments. In this essay, I argue that neither the predictive inaccuracy nor the incoherency arguments successfully undermine the causal account of fitness.