The formal Darwinism project: editors’ introduction

Abstract

The theme of this special issue is Alan Grafen’s ‘‘Formal Darwinism Project’’. This ambitious project, which Grafen has been pursuing for over a decade now, aims at nothing less than a new mathematical foundation for Darwinism. As Grafen explains, his aim is to provide a mathematical justification for Darwin’s argument in The Origin of Species that natural selection will lead to the appearance of organismic design. One might have thought that evolutionary theory had already achieved this end, but Grafen disputes this. He argues that although many working biologists, particularly in behavioural ecology, routinely assume that well-adapted or ‘optimal’ phenotypes will evolve by natural selection, a formal basis for this assumption has not been provided. The aim of the formal Darwinism project is to fill the lacuna. The papers that comprise the formal Darwinism project are rather technical, and highly abstract. Moreover they involve a novel and rather unusual style of argument, of a sort not previously seen in evolutionary biology. This is because Grafen’s aim is not to build a mathematical model of a particular biological phenomenon per se, which is the usual aim of model-building in evolutionary biology, but rather to formalize Darwin’s verbal argument. The novelty and unfamiliarity of this aim, and the abstractness of the resulting analysis, mean that the formal Darwinism project has not received the attention it deserves among biologists or philosophers of biology; and even among those who are familiar with the project there remains considerable unclarity about what it does and doesn’t achieve. To help remedy this situation, we invited Grafen to write a target article outlining the aims and achievements of the formal Darwinism project to date, in as non-