The scope of this paper can be clarified by means of a well-known phenomenon that is usually called ‘industrial melanism’: the fact that the melanic form of the peppered moth became dominant in industrial areas in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such changes in relative phenotype frequencies are important explananda for population biologists. Apart from trying to explain such changes over time, population biologists also often try to explain differences between populations, e.g. why yellow shell colour is dominant in certain colonies of land snails and almost absent in other colonies. The causal explanations that are given to address such explananda are the objects of analysis in this paper. Our primary aim is to explicate their structure: we want to capture the typical ingredients of causal explanations in population biology, and their organisation. Based on this explication, we discuss how natural selection fits into recent mechanical philosophy of science, and engage in the debate on the nature of evolutionary theory.

中文翻译：

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种群生物学中因果解释的结构

本文的范围可以通过一个众所周知的现象来阐明，该现象通常被称为“工业黑色素”：19 世纪下半叶，胡椒蛾的黑色形式在英国工业区占据主导地位。 . 相对表型频率的这种变化是种群生物学家的重要解释。除了试图解释这种随时间的变化外，种群生物学家还经常试图解释种群之间的差异，例如为什么黄壳颜色在某些陆生蜗牛种群中占主导地位而在其他种群中几乎不存在。为解决此类解释而给出的因果解释是本文的分析对象。我们的主要目的是解释它们的结构：我们想要捕捉群体生物学因果解释的典型成分，和他们的组织。在此基础上，我们讨论自然选择如何融入近代机械科学哲学，并参与关于进化论本质的辩论。