Essays on evolution and explanation

Does science ever explain natural phenomena by citing something other than the causes of those phenomena? What role, if any, does mathematics play in the explanation of natural phenomena? How do natural selection and the other components of evolution explain changes in the genetic constitution of populations? These three questions form the core of my dissertation.;In chapter 1, I defend the view that event-explanation requires citing a dependence relation that holds between the event to be explained and the event that explains it. I argue that the pragmatic nature of explanation entails that non-causal explanation is possible and that the existence of several non-causal dependence relations that can ground non-causal explanations entails that non-causal explanation is not just possible but actual.;In chapter 2, I consider the claim that mathematics plays an essential role in the explanation of physical phenomena. In particular, I consider two putative cases of mathematical explanation of biological phenomena: the explanation of the hexagonal structure of honeycomb cells by appeal to the honeycomb conjecture and the explanation of the length of periodical cicadas' life-cycles by appeal to number-theoretic facts about prime numbers. I argue that both examples fail to show that mathematics plays an essentially explanatory, as opposed to merely representational or instrumental, role in these examples.;In chapter 3, I develop and defend the force-interpretation of evolutionary biology as the most plausible interpretation of the ontological and explanatory structure of evolutionary biology. In doing so, I defend the force interpretation against several objections; in particular, I argue that the arguments for the statisticalist view of evolutionary theory (i.e., the view that natural selection and drill are not causes of evolution but mere statistical aggregates of individual-level events) fail to establish it as a plausible contender to the causal view of natural selection.