UPA: PAST EVENTS

• Kwame Anthony Appiah (Princeton), "The Ethics of Identity"
  Monday, November 1, 2004, 7:00 p.m.
  Law School, Room 290
• Agnieszka Jaworska (Stanford), "Vanishing Persons and the Authority of the Former Self: Dilemmas in Alzheimer's Disease"
  November 5, 2004, noon to 1:00 p.m.
  Building 100, Room 101K
• Richard Rorty (Stanford), "How I Write"
  November 9, 2004, 7:00 p.m.
  Building 460, in basement (Stanford Writing Center)
• Josiah Ober (Princeton), Wesson Lectures on the Problems of Democracy
  November 9, 2004, 5:30 p.m. - Aristotle's Natural Democracy
  November 11, 2004, 5:30 p.m. - Democracy and Happiness
  Building 370 (Main Quad), Room 370
• Steven Pinker (Harvard), "Humanities and the Human Mind"
  November 12, 2004, 7:00 p.m.
  Kresge Auditorium (Law School), 555 Nathan Abbott Way

• A talk, Philosophy of Science Meets Public Policy: The Case of Federal Intervention in Deciding Appropriate Research Methodology, by Prof. Denis Phillips, followed by a dinner conversation with Prof. Phillips and Prof. John Perry.
• A talk by Prof. Jennifer Whiting of Cornell University, followed by a dinner conversation with Prof. Whiting.
• A pizza lunch for majors and prospective majors with Professors Debra Satz and Ken Taylor.

• Govind Persad: The Role of Privileged Individuals in Fighting Racism
• David Garfield: Why Fitness Problems Won't Roll Over and Die
• Marcin Rusinkiewicz: The Trouble With Tertiary Syphilis
• Adam Stone: Do Intentions Matter? The Case of Advocacy Nonprofits
• and the keynote speaker, Prof. Alan Code (UC Berkeley): A Philosophical Puzzle about Definition in Aristotle

  A dinner with Prof. Code followed the conference.

Why the Fitness Problem Won't Just Go Away:
A Pluralistic Account of "Fitness" in Evolutionary Biology

The term "fitness" has been used in biological explanations since Darwin's time, yet there is little agreement in the literature (of both Biology and Philosophy) as to exactly what "fitness" is. Suggested definitions of "fitness" generally fall into two camps. On one hand there are those (Mills and Beatty 1979; Sober 1984; Brandon 1990) for whom "fitness" represents a property of an individual organism in an environment -- specifically a propensity for an organism to have a certain number of offspring in a given environment. On the other hand there are those (eg. Byerly and Michod 1991; DeJong 1994; Lewontin 1990) who hold that "fitness" simply is the reproductive success of a genotype within the context of a model.

In this talk I argue two points. First, there has been a shift in the meaning of "fitness" since Darwin's time. For Darwin, "fitness" was used as a synonym for adaptedness - general properties of organisms in their environment that increase the organism's ability to survive and reproduce. Modern biologist of both schools of thought, however, treat "fitness" as something that is independent of, and possibly dependent on, adaptedness. Attempts to define "fitness" as a single scalar quantity like adaptedness are misguided because they attempt to squeeze the modern notion of fitness into a very different explanatory schema. Second, while both definitions of "fitness" have support in the biological literature, the two definitions of "fitness" cannot simply be equated. This is because of the simple fact that within some population genetics models, there are factors that can affect the contribution of a genotype to the next generation that are independent of the interaction of a single individual with its environment (for example some cases of environmental stochasticity as discussed by Gillespie 1979). This realization suggests that we should be pluralistic with regards to how we define "fitness" recognizing that there may not be any one single measure of "fitness" that works for all biological research programs.