From Toys to Games: Overcoming the View of Natural Selection as a Filter

Abstract

The conceptualization of natural selection by Elliott Sober has had an enormous influence on both philosophers of biology and professional biologists. He addresses, in his work The Nature of Selection, the issues of how to understand and explain natural selection. This position has become known as the ‘Negative View’. It maintains that natural selection is a negative force or cause which works as a filter by eliminating those individuals with less fit traits and leaving the rest intact. From this view, natural selection has only a distributive role: the existence of population variation is assumed and selection only changes traits frequencies in it. In this case, Sober follows a long-standing tradition that dates back to