Causation, State Spaces, Evolvability, and Creativity in Evolution

Pence, Charles
(2023) Leibniz Universität Hannover Colloquium Philosophie und Wissenschaftsreflexion — Location: Hannover, Allemagne (5.December.2023)

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Philosophers of biology have long been divided over how to interpret the idea that evolution is a “creative” process. Is natural selection itself somehow creative, or is mutation rather the engine of creation, with natural selection playing the role of a kind of “headsman” (in Gould’s words), a negative filter of deleterious variation? Evolvability seems intimately related to this sense of “creativity,” at the very least insofar as the two are what we might call “second-order” properties of evolutionary trajectories over time. In this talk, I will use some of my own recent work on causation in natural selection, which considers the state spaces through which evolution moves individuals and populations, to try to shed some light on what it might mean for evolution to (be able to) produce genuine novelty.
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Pence, C. (2023). Causation, State Spaces, Evolvability, and Creativity in Evolution. Leibniz Universität Hannover Colloquium Philosophie und Wissenschaftsreflexion, Hannover, Allemagne. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/26708