"Defending the Importance of Lineage-Forming Reproduction in Evolution by Natural Selection "

This lecture is part of a new series of lectures introduced by the Philosophy School of Fudan University: "The Young Scholars English Lecture Series". Its primary aim is to provide a platform for young teachers to share ideas and present their recent working progress.
Speaker:
Mingjun ZHANG.Mingjun ZHANG is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy of Science and Logic, School of Philosophy, Fudan University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Michael Weisberg, and was trained as a philosopher of biology. His recent work concerns a wide range of topics in the philosophy of biology (including the debates about adaptationism, the nature of natural selection, modelling and explanations in biology) and philosophical issues in evolutionary game theory. He has published several articles in esteemed journals of philosophy of science, including Biology & Philosophy, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, and Public Understanding of Science.
Contents:
Charbonneau (2014) and Papale (2021) challenge the necessity of reproduction for evolution by natural selection (ENS) by contending that what really matter for ENS are memory and (re)generation at the population level, rather than lineage-forming reproduction at the local level. In this article, we critically evaluate their reproduction-independent accounts of ENS and defend the importance of lineage-forming reproduction in paradigmatic ENS on both empirical and theoretical grounds. We argue that none of the empirical cases cited by them can demonstrate the existence of paradigmatic ENS without lineage-forming reproduction, and adopting their reproduction-independent accounts of ENS would lead to a series of conceptual and methodological problems.