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Updated: May 11, 2026

Exploring the Role of Deontic Reasoning and World Knowledge in Wason´s Selection Task
Published on: July 22, 2025
Selection explanations of token traits
1Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706, USA. mcloone@wisc.edu
Abstract:
The "negative view" is the claim that natural selection cannot explain why a particular individual has one trait, rather than another. Here, I modify an example from Lewens (2001) to show that this claim is sometimes false. I then advance a variation on the negative view. It is the claim that selection at the organism level within a lineage cannot explain why a particular individual in that lineage has one allele, rather than another. This formulation better describes the explanatory role of selection.
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