Various accounts have been proposed of the nature of natural selection. Drawing on the natural selection schema developed by Skipper and Millstein (2005), Balorda and Šustar (2025) argue that certain steps of natural selection are better characterized as a pathway in Ross’s sense (2021). This paper argues that the proposal is problematic for two main reasons. First, an adequate account of natural selection should apply across the full range of selection cases, yet a pathway characterization along these lines faces systematic exceptions. Many cases of natural selection operate only within the interval from birth to adulthood, or only within the interval from adulthood to death or the end of the reproductive period, rather than both. Moreover, many cases of natural selection are not appropriately described as being driven by differences in organism environment interaction. Second, pathways require steps that are causally connected in the appropriate way. However, given how the steps under investigation are characterized, it is questionable whether there is a substantive causal relationship between them.
