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Peter Godfrey-Smith (1965–)

Godfrey-Smith turned the question “does this evolve by natural selection?” from a yes-or-no into a matter of degree. A Darwinian population, on his account, is any collection of things with the capacity to undergo evolution by natural selection, and such populations differ along measurable dimensions: how faithfully traits are inherited, how smoothly fitness varies with character, how far reproductive differences depend on what an individual is rather than where it happens to be. Paradigm cases sit high on all of them; marginal cases sit low on some; and the interesting questions of evolutionary theory, from the units of selection to whether culture evolves, become questions about where a given population sits in that space. He built the framework against the replicator picture of Dawkins and Hull, and he has since carried the same evolutionary sensibility into the philosophy of mind, where his work on cephalopods asks what a second, independent evolution of complex nervous systems tells us about minds in general.

Peter Godfrey-Smith was born in Sydney in 1965. He took his first degree at the University of Sydney and a PhD at the University of California, San Diego, in 1991, under Philip Kitcher, with a dissertation on teleonomy and the philosophy of mind. He taught at Stanford from 1991 to 2003, then divided his time between the Australian National University and Harvard before becoming professor of philosophy at Harvard in 2006. In 2011 he moved to the Graduate Center of the City University of New York as Distinguished Professor, and since 2015 he has been professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection won the Lakatos Award in 2010, and he was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.

Key concepts

The environmental complexity thesis. His first book, Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature (1996), proposed a single functional account of cognition: the function of cognition is to enable the agent to deal with environmental complexity. Mind is explained from outside in, by the structure of the environment an organism has to cope with, and the thesis places the philosophy of mind inside the general pattern of externalist explanation in biology, where features of organisms are accounted for by features of the world they live in. It set the direction the later work on animal minds would follow.

Darwinian populations. Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) begins from the classical recipe for evolution by natural selection, Lewontin’s three conditions of variation, heredity and differential fitness, and argues that the recipe is necessary but not sufficient, and that treating it as a definition hides how much the dynamics change as its ingredients vary. In its place he offers a population and a space. A Darwinian population is a collection of things that can undergo evolution by natural selection; a Darwinian individual is a member of one. Populations are located along parameters, the three most important being H, the fidelity of heredity, C, the continuity or smoothness of the fitness landscape, and S, the degree to which differences in reproductive success depend on an individual’s intrinsic character rather than its circumstances. Paradigm Darwinian populations occupy the high corner on all three. Move toward low H and heredity collapses into error catastrophe; toward low C and the landscape becomes too rugged for adaptation to climb; toward low S and what looks like selection is drift by another name. The framework replaces the question of whether something is a Darwinian population with the question of how paradigmatic a one it is, and handles the major transitions, the levels-of-selection debate and the limits of selfish-gene and memetic thinking as movements within one space.

Reproducers, not replicators. The book’s second argument is against the replicator as the unit of evolutionary theory. Genes, he argues, are not the stable copying units the gene’s-eye view requires: crossing-over does not respect their boundaries, and they are late-comers, products of measures cells evolved to suppress conflict within the chromosome. What evolution needs is not replication but reproduction, and reproduction comes in kinds. Simple reproducers make more of themselves with their own machinery, given energy and materials, as a bacterial cell does. Collective reproducers are made of parts that can themselves reproduce, largely on their own resources: organisms like us, colonies, herds, lichens. Scaffolded reproducers depend entirely on external machinery, as viruses depend on cells. The taxonomy lets the theory say which entities are Darwinian individuals in their own right and which reproduce only by courtesy of something else, and the scaffolded category is the one he applies to cultural evolution.

Culture as marginal. Where memetics and universal Darwinism see culture as a second Darwinian realm, Godfrey-Smith places it at the margins of the space. Two features push it there: asymmetric power relations among people, which make reproductive success depend on position rather than intrinsic character and so lower S; and the deliberate manipulation of what is transmitted, which lowers H. His conclusion is stated plainly: Darwinism is not likely to unify and transform the social sciences. This is a placement, not a denial that cultural change can be modelled populationally: in the same space he uses for everything else, it says how much of the Darwinian apparatus the cultural case can carry.

The other evolution of mind. Other Minds (2016) turns to the cephalopods, whose complex nervous systems evolved independently of the vertebrate line from a common ancestor that was little more than a worm. The octopus, with more neurons in its arms than in its brain, is a distributed form of mind built on embodied engagement rather than central control, and Godfrey-Smith reads it as the nearest thing to meeting an intelligent alien. Metazoa (2020) widens the argument to animal life as a whole, treating subjective experience as something that arose gradually in bodies that sense and act, rather than as a threshold crossed once, and Living on Earth (2024) extends it to life’s remaking of the planet it evolved on.

Where Godfrey-Smith stops

The space of Darwinian populations is scoped to populations whose members reproduce, and its parameters measure the shape of that reproduction. What falls outside that scope, the framework does not address, and it does not say what to call a case that scores low on every axis.

The gradient also leaves the borders as open as it found them. To say that culture is marginal is to place it, not to settle whether marginal cases are evolution in a weaker sense or something else that shares a family resemblance, and the dual-inheritance theorists he engages have taken the same placement as a reason to keep modelling. The framework tells you where a case lies; what to call it there is a further decision it does not force.

Key works

See also: Evolution · The criterion · Lewontin · Dawkins · Hull · Dennett · Sober · Kitcher · Maynard Smith · Darwinism · Cultural extensions of Darwinism