Causation and Explanation in Biology

Immunology is a notoriously complex field with a distinct vocabulary and concepts. Yet immunologists regularly and effectively collaborate with other researchers, notably clinicians and experts in population health. How does this work? This paper proposes a multifaceted answer. Immunology exhibits three features that support collaborative research without a shared vocabulary and concepts: a multifaceted target of inquiry, therapeutic aspirations, and a clear interdisciplinary pathway. Building on these features, I sketch a general account of “low-effort interdisciplinarity” and connect this result to recent work on population health. I conclude by discussing the broader significance of low-effort interdisciplinarity.

The concept of scaffold is widespread in science and increasingly common in evolutionary biology (Chiu and Gilbert 2015; Love and Wimsatt 2019; Black et al. 2020). While this concept figures in causal explanations, it is far from clear what scaffolds are and what role they play in those explanations (Charbonneau 2015). Here we present evolutionary scaffolding explanation as a distinct type of explanatory strategy, distinguishing it from other types of causal explanation in evolutionary biology. By doing so, we clarify the meaning of “scaffold” as a causal concept and its potential contribution to accounts of evolutionary novelty and major transitions.

Reciprocal causation is the view that adaptive evolution is a bidirectional process, whereby organisms and environments impinge on each other through cycles of niche construction and natural selection. I argue, however, that reciprocal causation is incompatible with the recent view that natural selection is a metaphysically emergent causal process. The emergent character of selection places reciprocal causation on the horns of dilemma, and neither horn can rescue the causal interdependency between selection and niche construction. Therefore, I conclude that proponents of reciprocal causation must abandon the claim that the process of natural selection features in cycles of reciprocal causation.

Organisms use cues differently as they navigate their environments. One distinction researchers use to characterize differences between cues is the distinction between proximal and distal cues. The standard way of thinking about this distinction involves thinking of distal cues as beyond an experiment apparatus and proximal cues as within that apparatus. I argued that there is a problem with thinking about the distinction this way; there are no proximal or distal cues in natural environments and so the cues are not explanatory of behaviors in those environments. Then, I recommended a new way of thinking about the distinction.