Active research

Dissertation: evolutionary mismatch

My in-progress dissertation is focused on the conceptual challenges surrounding evolutionary mismatch (henceforth "mismatch"), a putative set of biological phenomena which involve the consequences of rapid environmental change for organisms and populations. A simple way to understand mismatch: all life on earth, which is to say every biological lineage, has an evolutionary history of evolving in particular environments. Mismatch is concerned with the consequences which environmental change can inflict on organisms. Mismatch theorists are particularly interested in the negative consequences which can occur as a result of an environmental change---say, the arrival of a new predator species in the environment.

Mismatch is of particular interest in evolutionary medicine (EM), where it is explicitly characterized as one of the disease pathways investigated by practicioners and researchers in EM. My own interest in mismatch stemmed initially from research that has been done on the so-called "Paleolithic diet". Advocates for the Paleo diet typically argue that Westerners live in a radically different dietary environment than our foraging forebears. As a result of this dietary change, we deal with problems like obesity, diabetes, and so forth. The Paleo diet is not the only form of mismatch argument out there, however: mismatch hypotheses have been advanced for myopia, scurvy, rickets, breast cancer, anxiety, depression, autoimmunity, asthma, and a host of other conditions.

My dissertation will not be arguing for or against any particular mismatch hypotheses. Instead, I try to hash out some of the conceptual difficulties: what, actually, is mismatch? how ought we to characterize mismatch-relevant environmental change? how ought EM researchers to understand the interaction of health and evolutionary fitness? and so forth.

Much of my recent work has been on a definitional project: I argue, in short, that for a given organism O, there is a set of environments E in which the organism's fitness is maximized. In other words, there is a set of environments such that the organism's fitness is higher than in any other possible environments. To the extent that there is a discordance between the organism's actual environment and E, there is an evolutionary mismatch. This paper, titled "Stranger in a strange land: an optimal-environments account of evolutionary mismatch", has been published at Synthese.

At the moment, I am revising a chapter arguing that mismatch is most appropriately used as a research heuristic for discovering mechanistic explanations for particular negative health outcomes. There is a tension in many mismatch hypotheses: are they about reproductive fitness or health? The former is the proper object of evolutionary research; the latter is the proper obbject of clinical research. Fitness outcomes and health outcomes are not coextensive, which means we cannot simply talk about mismatch hypotheses as though they automatically include both. The project works to resolve this tension. I do not here attempt to resolve the question over how fitness and health interact.

I am also writing a paper which argues that environments ought to be seen as spatiotemporal trajectories along which organisms pass. By this, I mean that an environment is not a simple physical location but, rather, a set of external factors to which an organism is exposed over its life course---factors which affect its fitness, health, and development. Explicitly treating environments as trajectories sensititizes us to the relevance of external factors which organisms have previously encountered (but are not currently encountering), and to the relevatnce of future encounters.

Planned research

I have a couple of planned projects for post-dissertation work. One is focused on conceptual analysis of ecological traps. Ecological traps are, roughly, environments in which organisms are less fit than in their proper niche(s), but to which organisms are equally (or more) attracted. The term has been given some shape in the literature, but I think research would benefit form a more rigorous characterization. The other planned project deals with universal biology in the context of astrobiology: I look at how the basic Darwinian principles of natural selection might be reframed to give us a concept of selection which can generalize to radically different taxa in extraterrestrial life. Most importantly, I show how different accounts of evolutionary mismatch give us useful questions to ask as we start to think about universal biology.

Past research

My paper "Praise, blame, and demandingness" was published online in Philosophical Studies in November 2016 (assigned to Vol 174 Issue 7, July 2017). The paper develops a consequentialist view of the justification of praise and blame (taking note of similar views from Sidgwick to Kagan) and then uses it to show that intuitive worries about demandingness can be plausibly incorporated into consequentialism.