Challenge: defend, with nonderivative models, a strong notion of genic cause. (..) Waters argues for a notion of causal ‘parsing’ to sustain the viability of some form of pluralism. (..) He thinks he has found an example in the case of hierarchical and genic selection. I think he has not. (..) George Williams advocated as rule of thumb: Do not look for higher-level information at all unless the genic level has been proven to be empirically inadequate. (..) the hierarchical views have developed approaches and methods for seeking out higher-level information (and they have been very effective at finding it), while the genic approaches have no such methods, making them epistemically and methodologically inferior. (..) I argue that without a distinct and independent genic causal level, there are no genuinely independent models being represented, and therefore, no real alternatives among which to choose. (..) Waters argues that we are compelled to accept pluralism because two or more different models can be constructed that represent the same selection process equally well. (..) Waters operationalizes the notion of ‘parsing causes’ by redrawing the conceptual division between selected domain and environment. (..) Waters’ account of ‘parsing causes’ must fall somewhere between the weak pluralism of relabeling and the strong pluralism of different causal interactions. (..) The key point, though, remains that the genic and genotypic models represent the same causal structure. (..) allelic models have never been shown to sustain a notion of genic cause that is not derivative, and nothing in Waters’ present paper successfully shows otherwise. |