Jerry Fodor (Rutgers) wrote a little polemic against adaptationism in the London Review of Books a few weeks back. The core message--there is more to evolution than natural selection--is, of course, well-known (though he overstates that point, hence the ensuing controversy). Unfortunately, Fodor adopts the habit of the creationists of referring to "Darwinism" and "Darwinists," when there is no such thing and no such people; the creationists employ this rhetorical device to try to leave the impression that what is in fact an important scientific discovery is really just the "ideology" of a particular person, much like "Marxism" or "Freudianism" (creationists don't like Marx or Freud either). (It's an indication of the insidiousness of the creationist conmen that they've succeeded in getting a serious philosopher to unwittingly adopt their rhetoric.)
Fodor's polemic provoked various replies: Simon Blackburn and Tim Lewens, both of Cambridge, take issue with what Fodor thinks is a "conceptual" problem for the theory of natural selection, while Jerry Coyne (the biologist at the University of Chicago) and Philip Kitcher (the philosopher of biology at Columbia University) make a pretty good case that Fodor "seems to know nothing about the way the notion of natural selection has been used in evolutionary explanations for the past 148 years."
But the most amusing exchange is between Daniel Dennett (Tufts) and Fodor. Here is Dennett (a fan of evolutionary psychology, ergo of shameless adaptationism):
I love the style of Jerry Fodor’s latest attempt to fend off the steady advance of evolutionary biology into the sciences of the mind. He tells us that ‘an appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists’ are thinking seriously of giving up on the half of Darwinism that concerns natural selection. Did you know that? I didn’t. In fact, I wonder if the appreciable number is as high as one. Fodor gives no names so we’ll just have to wait for more breaking news....
I won’t bother correcting, one more time, Fodor’s breezy misrepresentation of Gould and Lewontin’s argument about ‘spandrels’, except to say that far from suggesting an alternative to adaptationism, the very concept of a spandrel depends on there being adaptations: the arches and domes are indeed selected for, and they bring spandrels along in their wake. No ‘perfectly reasonable biologist’ has claimed that the hugely various and exquisitely tuned sense organs of animals, or the superbly efficient water-conserving methods of desert plants, are spandrels, even if they spawn spandrels galore.
What could drive Fodor to hallucinate the pending demise of the theory of evolution by natural selection? A tell-tale passage provides the answer: ‘Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition.’ There can indeed be a science of the human condition, but it won’t tell us, directly, ‘what is wrong with what we are’. It can, however, constrain our ultimately political exploration of what we think we ought to be by telling us what is open to us, given what we are. Fodor’s mistake, which he is hardly alone in making, is to suppose that if our minds are scientifically explicable bio-mechanisms, then there could not be any room at all for values. That just does not follow, but if you believe it, and if you cherish – as of course you should – the world of values, then you have to stand firm against any physical science of the mind. It’s admirable, in a way, if you like that kind of philosophy. But it is better to repair the mistake; then you can have a science of the mind and values too. And you don’t have to misrepresent science out of fear of what it might be telling us.
Fodor's reply to Dennett:
Over the years, I’ve been finding it increasingly difficult to figure out which bits of Daniel Dennett’s stuff are supposed to be the arguments and which are just rhetorical posturing. In the present case, I give up. I’ll take it more or less paragraph by paragraph. Dennett speaks of the ‘steady advance of evolutionary biology into the sciences of the mind’. He provides no examples, however, and surely he knows that there is a considerable body of literature to the contrary. (See, for example, David Buller’s book Adapting Minds.) Even Dennett’s fellow-critics of my piece express, in several cases, attitudes towards the evolutionary psychology programme ranging from scepticism to despair: it’s a recurrent theme of theirs that Fodor is, of course, right about EP; but he’s wrong about natural selection at large....
Dennett can’t be bothered to correct my ‘breezy misrepresentation of Gould and Lewontin’. In fact, he can’t even be bothered to say what it consists in. That being so, I can’t be bothered to refute him.
‘The very concept of a spandrel depends on there being adaptations.’ This suggests that Dennett has utterly lost track of the argument. Of course the spandrels are free-riders on the architect’s design for the arches and domes. But the question I wanted to raise was precisely whether this account of selection-for can be extended to cases where, by general consensus, there isn’t any architect. In particular, I claim, Darwin overplayed the analogy between artificial selection (where there is somebody who does the selecting) and ‘natural’ selection (where there isn’t). How could anybody who actually read my article have missed this?...
Finally, Dennett says I am worried about preserving my values in the face of scientific reduction. Where on earth did he get that idea? I’ve spent more of my life than I like to think about arguing that ontological questions about reduction are neutral with respect to epistemological questions about intentional explanations....
Fodor's replies to the others are at the above link as well, though my sense is, overall, Fodor's rhetorical posturing is better (and more amusing) than his actual arguments. But Fodor is, as always, a good read!
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