Abstract
The goal of this essay is to assess the Selected-Effects Etiological Theory of biological function, according to which a trait has a function F if and only if it has been selected for F. First, I argue that this approach should be understood as describing the paradigm case of functions, rather than as establishing necessary and sufficient conditions for function possession. I contend that, interpreted in this way, the selected-effects approach can explain two central properties of functions and can satisfactorily address some recent counterexamples. This reading, however, shows that there is only a partial overlap between biological functions and selected effects, so the former cannot be reduced to the latter. Finally, I maintain that this result is still compatible with a naturalistic theory of function that appeals to some evolutionary process.
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Notes
This paper is about biological functions. For brevity, I will sometimes speak of ‘functions’, but please keep in mind that I always mean ‘biological function’. For a complementary account of artifact function, see Artiga (forthcoming).
Selected-effect etiological theorists usually hold that for a trait to have a function it must have recently been selected for (Griffiths 1993; Godfrey-Smith 1994; Millikan 2002: 123). Since this modification is largely irrelevant for the purposes of this paper and would unnecessarily complicate some of the claims and arguments I will develop below, in this paper I will simply assume that the relevant past is the recent one.
‘T’ refers to a type. Tokens have the function F in virtue of being instances of type T (see, for instance, Neander, 1991b: 460).
As Millikan (1993: 17) suggests, “The various properties, the various analogies, which are influential in leading us to speak of quite diverse categories of items as having “functions” are properties or analogies that are characteristically accounted for by the fact that these items have coincident proper functions.”
For a biological example illustrating the same idea, think about recent definitions of organism, which seek to specify the key aspects that are central for being a clear case of organismality such as integration, cohesiveness, genetic uniformity, etc. Queller and Strassmann (2009), for instance, define what they call the ‘paradigm organism’ as an entity with high cooperation and low conflict among its parts and classify entities along these dimensions, in the same way we will do in Section 3.2.
Recall that the function of a token depends on its belonging to a certain type. See footnote 3.
For a good reason: it is hard to see how functions could provide origin explanations. For one thing, that would require that the effect of a trait existed before the very trait evolved. For another, the standard way of accommodating Explanation I sketched above suggests that the fact that present hearts pump blood is explained by some members of the same type pumping blood in the past and this explanans presupposes that hearts already existed. Notice that the claim that functions provide persistence explanations is fully compatible with natural selection underpinning origin explanations (see Section 4).
This is not to say that the teleological dimension can be fully analyzed in terms of robustness, or that this is the only way to connect Variation and Explanation; my modest claim is just that this is a possible avenue for arguing that Variation (as well as Differential Reproduction) is a defining feature of functions that contributes to accounting for Explanation.
Of course, here I do not aim to provide an exhaustive analysis, since that would require a much longer and more detailed discussion from than the one I can offer. For instance, I do not examine Differential Reproduction, although it interestingly depends on the existence of Variation. To keep things manageable, I concentrate on the claims that are required to justify my main point.
Wrongness should be understood here in a very weak sense, of course. Nothing like moral normativity is involved. Still, it is hard to see why the mere fact that function depends on past performance suffices for even a weak form of normativity.
Although a fair assessment of these approaches would require a more detailed analysis than what I can offer here, notice that if a trait’s function depends on its current contribution to the organism’s fitness (or on the fact that members of the same type currently contribute to fitness), then a trait’s function fails to explain the existence or maintenance of a trait (so it does not fulfill explanation). Furthermore, as many philosophers have pointed out, this account has difficulties in dealing with malfunction: it is impossible, for instance, for all present traits to malfunction, because if all of them fail to contribute to fitness, then there is no basis for saying that they have a function in the first place (Neander, 1991a).
Since in this paper we are not only addressing the question of whether an entity is classified as a function or not, but also whether it counts as a paradigm or a marginal case, the notion of ‘coextension’ is similarly fine-grained: in the sense intended here, property A is coextensional with property B if and only if central cases of A are central cases of B and marginal cases of A are marginal cases of B. I want to thank a reviewer for pressing me on this point
See Kreamer (2014) for a more realistic example.
There are different ways of failing to comply with Heredity. A population in which there is low parent-offspring ressemblance, for example, would also score low on that dimension for a different reason.
To dispel any remaining doubt about considering Buller’s and Garson’s examples to be marginal, notice that this category also admits of degrees: an item can be marginal with respect to some dimension without being marginal with respect to others. In other words: an item can qualify as a marginal case of marginality.
Let me stress that Godfrey-Smith (2009) does not draw this figure. Here I am combining the results of our previous discussion with his suggestions about how to spatially represent concepts. Some significant differences between our approaches remain; for instance, he primarily focuses on Darwinian populations (and, secondarily, on Darwinian individuals- see Godfrey-Smith, 2009: 40), whereas my focus here is on traits and their effects.
I mainly considered effects that occupy corners, but some intermediate cases could also be described. For instance, a population in which there is little variation with respect to a trait, would occupy a position near 〈0.5, 1, 1〉. Part of the reason it is difficult to discuss these intermediate cases here derives from the coarse-grained categories we are using. In any case, I think that for the main goals of the paper, this coarse-grained analysis suffices.
A much more disputed question is whether natural selection can explain why particular individuals have certain traits.
Bouchard defends a non-etiological theory of function called the ‘Persistence Enhancing Propensity’ Account (Dussault and Bouchard, 2017), but again, I think there is a way of accommodating these cases without departing from an etiological theory.
This is not to say that cancer cells are paradigm cases of function all things considered (see Lean and Plutynski, 2016; Cf. Germain, 2012, Germain and Laplane, 2017). Figure 2 highlights the area that paradigm cases of function occupy only with respect to three dimensions: variation, heredity and contribution to the fitness of a larger system.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ruth Millikan, Fermín C. Fulda, Justin Garson, Javier Gonz ález de Prado Salas, John Horden, Fabian Hundertmark, Ulrich Krohs, Brian Leahy, Christian Nimtz, Cailin O’Connor, Peter Schulte, Ema Sullivan-Bisset, Hannah Rubin and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments and criticisms. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the workshop ‘Teleosemantics and the Nature of Functions’ at the University of Bielefeld in September 2017 and the conference ‘The Generalized Theory of Evolution’ at the University of Duesseldorf in February 2018. Financial support was provided by the MINECO project ‘la Complejidad de la Percepción: Un Enfoque Multidimensional’ (FFI2014-51811-P) and ‘Varieties of Information’ (PGC2018-101425-B-I00).
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Artiga, M. Biological functions and natural selection: a reappraisal. Euro Jnl Phil Sci 11, 54 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-021-00357-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-021-00357-6