ABSTRACT
Adaptationist approaches in evolutionary ecology often take it for granted that natural selection maximizes fitness. Defenders of fitness maximization are often motivated by a desire to defend adaptationist, optimality-based approaches in evolutionary ecology of the sort. Any maximization principle, to be worthy of the name, must spell out what is meant by a fitness maximum, and must assign a special status to such a point in the dynamics of evolution by natural selection. The adaptive landscape metaphor combines two seductive ideas about the dynamics of evolution by natural selection: an idea about equilibrium and an idea about change. From Wright onwards, defenders of MAX-B have often cited R. A. Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection (Fisher 1930, 1941) in support of their claims, even though Fisher himself never regarded the theorem as a maximization principle (Edwards 1994). This chapter discusses Formal Darwinism in greater mathematical detail.
