Abstract
Philosophical discussions of causal faithfulness have been predominantly situated within the social sciences—the traditional domain of application of the causal modeling techniques it attends. Recently, there has been increasing interest in applying such techniques to uncover causal relationships in biological systems. In this paper, I consider the extent to which faithfulness is a reasonable assumption in biological contexts and the problems that may results from relying on techniques that assume it. This discussion illuminates not only issues that may arise in causal modeling in biology, but also issues more generally relevant to understanding causal complexity in biological systems.
