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Natural Selection as a Process-Mechanism: A Tip from Cancer Research

In this paper, I will focus on the following question: how should we best characterize Darwinian natural selection? In particular, I will examine the prospects of a mechanistic answer to that question, such as one defended in Barros’ recent paper (Barros 2008). With the account advanced in that paper, the so-called ‘new mechanistic philosophy of science’ has made its most explicit contribution to the issue of evolutionary mechanisms and has joined to the debate between the two leading philosophical interpretations of the nature of Darwinian selection, i.e., the force and consequence interpretations (for an overview of these two interpretations, see Brunnander 2007). In answering the above question, I will proceed as follows: in the first part of the paper, Barros’ account of natural selection as a mechanism in a rather strict sense will be more closely analyzed. Accordingly, since Barros’ corresponding account works out a more comprehensive version of the so-called MDC account of mechanisms (see Machamer, Darden, and Craver 2000), and rejects the other main mechanistic account (see, e.g., Glennan 2002), relevant underpinnings of putative evolutionary mechanisms will also be addressed to a certain degree. In the second part of this paper, natural selection – considered as one of the main ‘ingredients for human cancer disasters’ (see Alberts et al. 2007) – will be described. Human cancer as a ‘micro-evolutionary process’ (see Merlo et al. 2006) offers in that regard suitable data resources for at least two related reasons: (i) the onset of human cancers provides a more direct access to evolution by natural selection, which draws on a determined time range of human life ; (ii) the proximity of natural selection in tumorigenesis and, more broadly, in cancerogenesis to the biological mechanisms in a more restricted sense. Both reasons will help in making progress toward a satisfying answer on what, after all, is the nature of natural selection. In that regard, I will argue in favor of the view according to which Darwinian natural selection is most adequately understood as a certain kind of process-mechanism. The final section of the paper will expand on that particular point given the evidence in human cancer research.

Natural selection; cancer research; evolutionary mechanisms

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