… and Climbing Out Again
This chapter lists in brief some of the key claims for which the book has argued. It then provides a conclusion to the book, relating some of the book’s recurring themes to other debates in the philosophy of biology and sketching some directions for future work. The first theme is the relationship between statistics and causality, which is connected to the long-running clash between ‘statisticalist’ and ‘causalist’ interpretations of evolutionary theory. The second theme is the way in which inclusive fitness synthesizes the organism-centred and gene-centred perspectives on evolution, pointing the way towards a Hamiltonian approach to culture that may offer a novel synthesis of agent-centred and meme-centred approaches to cultural change. The third theme is the conceptual connection, due to the importance of horizontal transmission in both cases, between genetic evolution in microbes and cultural evolution in humans.