Janella Baxter (University of Pittsburgh)
The causal selection debate in the philosophy of biology literature has to do with the underlying justification for why biologists single out some causal variables rather than others in explanation. Loss of function studies are a central experimental approach to many areas of contemporary biology from which many gene-centered explanations are derived. Philosophers working on the causal selection debate have offered several accounts of what justifies the causal selection of genes in biological explanation -- namely, causal specificity and actual difference making. In this paper, I argue that neither view adequately captures the rationale for why biologists single out genes in loss of function studies. Causal specificity, as the literature has defined it, is not explanatorily relevant for loss of function studies and the actual difference making account cannot distinguish between actal difference making approaches researchers regard as illuminating from ones they don't. I offer a more nuanced account of the types of actual difference making techniques biologists employ in loss of function studies to better accommodate the causal reasoning at play in this area of research.
