Peter Godfrey-Smith Research Articles

How should we distinguish between selectable and circumstantial traits?

There is surprisingly little philosophical work on conceptually spelling out the difference between the traits on which natural selection may be said to act (e.g. "having a high running speed") and mere circumstantial traits (e.g. "happening to be in the path of a forest fire"). I label this issue the "selectable traits problem" and, in this paper, I propose a solution for it. I first show that, contrary to our first intuition, simply equating selectable traits with heritable ones is not an adequate solution. I then go on to argue that two recent philosophical solutions to this problem-due to Peter Godfrey-Smith and Pierrick Bourrat-are unconvincing because they cannot accommodate frequency-dependent selection. The way out of this difficulty is, I argue, to accept that extrinsic properties dependent on relations between intrinsic properties of the population members should also count as selectable traits. I then show that my proposal is legitimized by more than the simple accommodation of frequency-dependent selection.

Organized representations forming a computationally useful processing structure

Peter Godfrey-Smith recently introduced the idea of representational ‘organization’. When a collection of representations form an organized family, similar representational vehicles carry similar contents. For example, where neural firing rate represents numerosity (an analogue magnitude representation), similar firing rates represent similar numbers of items. Organization has been elided with structural representation, but the two are in fact distinct. An under-appreciated merit of representational organization is the way it facilitates computational processing. Representations from different organized families can interact, for example to perform addition. Their being organized allows them to implement a useful computation. Many of the cases where organization has seemed significant, but which fall short of structural representation, are cases where representational organization underpins a computationally useful processing structure.

The Ocean, the Undertaker’s Wind, a Wind Called Hawkins, and Other Natural Phenomena: Representations of Nature in Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die

This article explores representations of natural phenomena in the second novel in the James Bond series, Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die (London: Penguin, [1954] 2008). Several critics have noted the enjoyment Fleming derived from his Jamaican home, adjacent to the ocean. His relationship with the ocean and nature, particularly birds, is evident in his writing. Although the novel is firmly in the thriller/spy genre, the many references to natural phenomena provide the reader with points of reflection about humanity and the environment. The article demonstrates that although Fleming wrote in the thriller/spy genre, a significant element of his writing has value in the field of ecocriticism. The article draws on critic Greg Garrard, who refers to those who use nature for their own purposes as the Cornucopians. Other critics whose work informs this reading of Fleming’s novel include Arne Naess, a central figure in Deep Ecology, and Rachel Carson, who pioneered our understanding of the human relationship with the oceans. The work of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (whom Fleming knew personally) and Peter Godfrey-Smith is also considered.

Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 2nd edition, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 2nd edition, by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Constraint-evading surrogacy: the missing piece in Radical Embodied Cognition’s non-representationalist account of intentionality?

Radical Embodied Cognition (REC) is an anti-representationalist approach to the nature of basic cognition proposed by Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin. While endorsing REC’s arguments against a role for contentful representations in basic cognition we suggest that REC’s ‘teleosemiotic’ approach to intentional targeting results in a ‘grey area’ in which it is not clear what kind of causal-explanatory concept is involved. We propose the concept of constraint-evading surrogacy as a conceptual basis for REC’s account of intentional targeting. The argument is developed via a reconsideration of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s ‘environmental complexity thesis’. We show how constraint-evading surrogacy clarifies REC’s account of intentionality by specifying the role of external natural signs and certain internal states (REC’s ‘Local Indexical Guides’). We argue that the resulting view of intentionality can be extended to proto-biotic autocatalytic systems, offering support for the life-mind continuity thesis. We leave open the question of whether it is helpful to consider constraint-evading surrogacy to be a form of (non-contentful) representation, but we suggest that there is a prima facie case for such a view.

Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness - Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness. Glasgow: William Collins (2020), 288 pp., $24.99 (hardcover; also available in paperback, nook, and audiobook formats).

Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness - Peter Godfrey-Smith, Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness. Glasgow: William Collins (2020), 288 pp., $24.99 (hardcover; also available in paperback, nook, and audiobook formats). - Volume 89 Issue 3

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind by Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, edited by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith

<i>The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives</i>, edited by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Facts That We Have Been Mistaken About Our Minds, Language, and Octopuses; “Other Minds: The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness”

To date, we have made inferences on the behavior and mind of humans and animals from the perspective of humans, or for the sake of familiarity, vertebrates. The book, “Other Minds; The Octopus, The Sea, and The Deep Origins of Consciousness” by Peter Godfrey-Smith makes us realize how erroneous preconceived notions could be, and presents a novel perspective on the results of evolution. Through-out this book, readers will learn about the characteristics of the nervous system, behavior, and habits of cephalopods, which include oc-topuses. Through this book, readers will gain a new perspective on the embodiment, minds, nervous systems, consciousness, and soci-ality of humans and animals. Furthermore, the book will provide the imaginary experience of swimming in “Octopolis” inside the ocean with the author.

The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives ed. by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith

The Scientific Imagination: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives ed. by Arnon Levy and Peter Godfrey-Smith

Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

Animal Studies Journal 2021 10(1): [Review] Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 2020. 336 pp.

Minds, Machines, and Molecules

Recent debates about the biological and evolutionary conditions for sentience have generated a renewed interest in fine-grained functionalism. According to one such account advanced by Peter Godfrey-Smith, sentience depends on the fine-grained activities characteristic of living organisms. Specifically, the scale, context and stochasticity of these fine-grained activities. One implication of this view is that contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) is a poor candidate for sentience. Insofar as current AI lacks the ability to engage in such living activities it will lack sentience, no matter what its coarse-grained functions. In this paper, we review the case for fine-grained functionalism and show that there are contemporary machines that fulfil the fine-grained functional criteria identified by Godfrey-Smith, and thus are candidates for sentience. Molecular machines such as Brownian computers are analogous to metabolic activity in their scale, context and stochasticity, and can serve as the basis of AI. Molecular computation is a promising candidate for artificial sentience according to contemporary philosophical accounts of sentience.

On mycorrhizal individuality

This paper argues that a plant together with the symbiotic fungus attached to its roots, a mycorrhizal collective, is an evolutionary individual, and further, that mycorrhizal individuality has important implications for evolutionary theory. Theoretical individuation is defended and then employed to show that mycorrhizal collectives function as interactors according to David Hull’s replicator-interactor model of evolution by natural selection, and because they have the potential to engage in pseudo-vertical transmission, mycorrhizal collectives also function as Darwinian individuals, according to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Darwinian Populations model of evolution by natural selection. Mycorrhizae in nature usually connect the roots of multiple plants, so mycorrhizal individuality entails the existence of overlapping evolutionary individuals, and because the potential to engage in pseudo-vertical transmission comes in degrees, it follows that these overlapping evolutionary individuals also come in degrees. I suggest here that the degree of evolutionary individuality in a symbiotic collective corresponds to its probability of reproducing with vertical or pseudo-vertical transmission. This probability constitutes a fourth parameter of graded Darwinian individuality in collective reproducers and warrants an update to Godfrey-Smith’s 3D model.

Temporal naturalism: reconciling the “4Ms” and points of view within a robust liberal naturalism

In the past generation, various philosophers have been concerned with the so-called “placement problem” for naturalism. The problem has taken on the shorthand alliteration of the 4Ms, since Mind/Mentality, Meaning, Morality, and Modality/Mathematics are four important phenomena that are difficult to place within orthodox construals of naturalism, typified by physicalism and a methodological preference for ways of knowing associated with the natural sciences. In this paper I highlight the importance of temporality to this ostensibly forced choice between naturalism and the 4Ms, and then reframe the problem by advocating a temporal naturalism rather than the atemporal versions that remain the orthodoxy. In short, I argue in Section 1 that scientific naturalism is standardly atemporal in outlook and in philosophical presuppositions, in Section 2 that temporality is a fundamental condition for each of the 4Ms (drawing on insights from classical phenomenology), and hence the intransigence of the dilemma. Instead of accepting this construal, in Section 3 I outline a temporal naturalism that owes more to biology than to physics (and hence more to Peter Godfrey-Smith than Huw Price), where we also see temporally dependent “points of view” in incipient biological forms, and where the norms surrounding explanation are less nomological and reductive in orientation.

In What Sense Can There Be Evolution by Natural Selection Without Perfect Inheritance?

ABSTRACTIn Darwinian Population and Natural Selection, Peter Godfrey-Smith brought the topic of natural selection back to the forefront of philosophy of biology, highlighting different issues surrounding this concept. One such issue is whether the perfect transmission of characters from parent(s) to offspring is necessary for evolution by natural selection (ENS). Drawing on the classical summaries for ENS, Godfrey-Smith's answer is that it is not, and opposes his view to the replicator framework. In this paper, I show that Godfrey-Smith's approach to ENS is only one of two legitimate perspective on ENS. One focuses on natural selection in the context of other evolutionary processes, while the other assumes their absence. After having presented these two perspectives, which I call the ‘contextual’ and the ‘pure’ perspective respectively, I draw on a framework which conceptualises the difference between natural selection, drift, and mutation in a causal rather than statistical fashion developed elsewhere. From there, I show that following the pure rather than the contextual perspective, perfect inheritance of characters is a necessary condition for ENS. This is because, I argue, imperfect inheritance is inevitably associated with an evolutionary process conceptually distinct from natural selection, namely mutation. I conclude by proposing that the classical summaries for ENS correspond more to the contextual perspective and the replicator framework more to the pure perspective.

Developmental push or environmental pull? The causes of macroevolutionary dynamics.

Have the large-scale evolutionary patterns illustrated by the fossil record been driven by fluctuations in environmental opportunity, by biotic factors, or by changes in the types of phenotypic variants available for evolutionary change? Since the Modern Synthesis most evolutionary biologists have maintained that microevolutionary processes carrying on over sufficient time will generate macroevolutionary patterns, with no need for other pattern-generating mechanisms such as punctuated equilibrium or species selection. This view was challenged by paleontologists in the 1970s with proposals that the differential sorting and selection of species and clades, and the effects of biotic crises such as mass extinctions, were important extensions to traditional evolutionary theory. More recently those interested in macroevolution have debated the relative importance of abiotic and biotic factors in driving macroevolutionary patterns and have introduced comparative phylogenetic methods to analyze the rates of change in taxonomic diversity. Applying Peter Godfrey-Smith's distinction between distributional explanations and explanations focusing on the origin of variation, most macroevolutionary studies have provided distributional explanations of macroevolutionary patterns. Comparative studies of developmental evolution, however, have implicated the origin of variants as a driving macroevolution force. In particular, the repatterning of gene regulatory networks provides new insights into the origins of developmental novelties. This raises the question of whether macroevolution has been pulled by the generation of environmental opportunity, or pushed by the introduction of new morphologies. The contrast between distributional and origination scenarios has implications for understanding evolutionary novelty and innovation and how macroevolutionary process may have evolved over time.

Pluralism, Pragmatism and Functional Explanations

Abstract While many philosophers speak of ‘pluralism’ within philosophy of biology, there has been little said about what such pluralism amounts to or what its underlying assumptions are. This has provoked so me anxiety about whether pluralism is compatible with their commitment to naturalism (Cussins 1992). This paper surveys three prominent pluralist positions (Sandra Mitchell and Michael Dietrich’s (2006) ‘integrative pluralism’, and both Peter Godfrey-Smith’s (1993) and Beth Preston’s (1998) pluralist analyses of functional explanations in evolutionary biology) and demonstrates how all three are committed to a form of pragmatism. This analysis both clarifies the justification and grounding of pluralism and allows these pluralisms to avoid the criticisms of Cussins. I close by making some more general points about pluralism and its relationship to history and integration.

Pain in parallel

Pain in parallel

Peter Godfrey-Smith, Philosophy of Biology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (2014), 200 pp., $29.95.

Review of Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Philosophy of Biology Cailin O’Connor March 9, 2015 In Philosophy of Biology, Peter Godfrey-Smith provides an introductory overview of some of the most important areas in the field. Each chapter of the book focuses on a major research topic (or cluster of topics) in philosophy of biology. Since most readers here will be interested in the book for teaching purposes, this review will outline the main topics of the book and then briefly discuss its merits as a course text. Godfrey-Smith begins with a discussion of laws, mechanisms and models in biology. As he points out, philosophers of biology have largely rejected the idea that biological knowledge is usefully thought of as law-like. It is famously difficult to make broad gener- alizations about the biological world—exceptions abound. 1 Recent attempts to account for biological knowledge have instead focused on mechanistic explanation (especially in molecular and neurobiology) or on mathetmatical modeling (especially in evolutionary biology and ecology). Godfrey-Smith seems to support a pluralistic view of biological knowledge where ‘resilient’ or ‘stable’ generalizations can take the place of biological laws and where both mechanistic and mathematical analyses can generate genuine biological knowledge. Godfrey-Smith moves on to discuss evolution by natural selection. He lays out sev- eral influential accounts of evolutionary change rather than committing to one. As he points out, any such account that is simple and predictive will struggle with difficult cases, whereas accounts that attempt to cover all interesting cases of change by natural selection will be trivial. Godfrey-Smith’s discussion of fitness concepts in this chapter is particularly clear. He distinguishes those that focus on the actual structure of an organ- ism as embodying its fitness and those that are based on offspring count, including both propensity definitions and definitions that simply associate fitness with actual offspring produced. He finishes the chapter with a very brief overview of work on levels of selection and on Darwinian concepts as applied to non-biological realms. In fact, researchers have just discovered an exception to the central dogma of molecular biology: that codes for amino acid sequences are derived from DNA and RNA (Shen et al. 2015).

Pathways to pluralism about biological individuality

What are the prospects for a monistic view of biological individuality given the multiple epistemic roles the concept must satisfy? In this paper, I examine the epistemic adequacy of two recent accounts based on the capacity to undergo natural selection. One is from Ellen Clarke, and the other is by Peter Godfrey-Smith. Clarke’s position reflects a strong monism, in that she aims to characterize individuality in purely functional terms and refrains from privileging any specific material properties as important in their own right. I argue that Clarke’s functionalism impairs the epistemic adequacy of her account compared to a middle-ground position taken by Godfrey-Smith. In comparing Clarke and Godfrey-Smith’s account, two pathways emerge to pluralism about biological individuality. The first develops from the contrast between functionalist and materialist approaches, and the second from an underlying temporal structure involved in using evolutionary processes to define individuality.