The Units of Selection and the Causal Structure of the World

Genie selectionism holds that all selection can be understood as operating on particular genes. Critics (and conventional biological wisdom) insist that this misrep? resents the actual causal structure of selective phenomena at higher levels of biological organization, but cannot convincingly defend this intuition. I argue that the real failing of genie selectionism is pragmatic it prevents us from adopting the most efficient corpus of causal laws for predicting and intervening in the course of affairs and I offer a Pragmatic account of causation itself which ultimately bears out the claim that genie selectionism misrepresents the causal structure of selective contexts.