Proximate and ultimate causes in evolutionary biology have come to conflate two distinctions. The first is a distinction between immediate and historical causes. The second is between explanations of mechanism and adaptive function. Mayr emphasized the first distinction but many evolutionary biologists use proximate and ultimate causes to refer to the second. I recommend that ‘ultimate cause’ be abandoned as ambiguous.

Research on animal behavior is typically organized according to a combination of two influential frameworks: Ernst Mayr’s distinction between proximate and ultimate causes, and Niko Tinbergen’s “four questions”. My aim is to debunk two common interpretive misconceptions about Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction and its relationship to Tinbergen’s four questions, and to offer a new interpretation that avoids both. The first misconception is that the proximate–ultimate distinction maps cleanly onto Tinbergen’s four questions, marking a boundary between Tinbergen’s evolutionary and survival value questions (...) versus developmental and mechanistic questions. The second is that Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction is meant to rule out the relevance of proximate causes to evolutionary explanations. I argue that neither is plausible given the text and Mayr’s philosophical aims, namely, to argue that evolutionary biology cannot be reduced to either the physical sciences or to other areas of biology. Through a reconstruction of Mayr’s anti-reductionist argument, I develop an interpretation according to which the proximate–ultimate distinction marks two ways that teleological reasoning can be naturalistically grounded in biology, corresponding to Mayr’s distinction between teleonomic and adapted systems. Mayr distinguishes reduction, which the proximate–ultimate distinction is meant to block, from analysis, through which he allows that proximate causes, causes that are neither proximate nor ultimate, and chance can all contribute to evolutionary explanations. I conclude by suggesting some ways in which the interpretation defended here reframes our understanding of Mayr’s disagreements with some evolutionary-developmental biologists. (shrink)

Research on animal behavior is typically organized according to a combination of two influential frameworks: Ernst Mayr’s distinction between proximate and ultimate causes, and Niko Tinbergen’s “four questions”. My aim is to debunk two common interpretive misconceptions about Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction and its relationship to Tinbergen’s four questions, and to offer a new interpretation that avoids both. The first misconception is that the proximate–ultimate distinction maps cleanly onto Tinbergen’s four questions, marking a boundary between Tinbergen’s evolutionary and survival value questions (...) versus developmental and mechanistic questions. The second is that Mayr’s proximate–ultimate distinction is meant to rule out the relevance of proximate causes to evolutionary explanations. I argue that neither is plausible given the text and Mayr’s philosophical aims, namely, to argue that evolutionary biology cannot be reduced to either the physical sciences or to other areas of biology. Through a reconstruction of Mayr’s anti-reductionist argument, I develop an interpretation according to which the proximate–ultimate distinction marks two ways that teleological reasoning can be naturalistically grounded in biology, corresponding to Mayr’s distinction between teleonomic and adapted systems. Mayr distinguishes reduction, which the proximate–ultimate distinction is meant to block, from analysis, through which he allows that proximate causes, causes that are neither proximate nor ultimate, and chance can all contribute to evolutionary explanations. I conclude by suggesting some ways in which the interpretation defended here reframes our understanding of Mayr’s disagreements with some evolutionary-developmental biologists. (shrink)

Thought experiments de facto play many different roles in biology: economical, ethical, technical and so forth. This paper, however, is interested in whether there are any distinctive features of biological TEs as such. The question may be settled in the affirmative because TEs in biology have a function that is intimately connected with the epistemological and methodological status of biology. Peculiar to TEs in biology is the fact that the reflexive, typically human concept of finality may be profitably employed to (...) discover mechanical-experimental causal relations in all living beings—with the obvious caveat that we do not hypostatise and interpret this concept as an ontological quality, since this would land one in an implicitly animistic, pre-Galilean view of nature. From a methodical point of view, the concept of finality is an essential assumption as well as a powerful heuristic tool in the practice of biology, that is, in the investigation of living beings in an intersubjectively testable and reproducible way. (shrink)

Ernst Mayr’s concept of dual causality in biology with the two forms of causes continues to provide an essential foundation for the philosophy of biology. They are equivalent to functional and evolutionary causes with both required for full biological explanations. The natural sciences can be classified into nomological, historical nomological and historical dual causality, the last including only biology. Because evolutionary causality is unique to biology and must be included for all complete biological explanations, biology is autonomous from the physical (...) sciences. (shrink)

The validity and utility of the proximate-ultimate distinction in biology have recently been under debate. Opponents of the distinction argue that it rules out individual-level organismic processes from evolutionary explanations, thereby leading to an unfounded separation between organismic causation and evolutionary causation. Proponents of the proximate-ultimate distinction, on the other hand, argue that it serves an important epistemological role in forming different kinds of explanation-seeking questions in biology. In this paper we offer an interpretation the proximate-ultimate distinction not only as (...) a means of forming explanation-seeking questions, but also as a distinction that can help highlight the way in which individual-level organismic processes can be evolutionary causes. We do this by interpreting the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes as a distinction between structuring and triggering causes. (shrink)