MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--SEE UPDATES, COMMENTS NOW INVITED
He joins the chorus. If anyone competent in the philosophical and scientific issues has had anything favorable to say about the argument of this book anywhere, please send me a link.
UPDATE: A couple of readers have already flagged the review by the biologist Richard Lewontin, the arch anti-adaptationist, as being somewhat more favorable than others, but I have not had a chance to read it yet myself.
ANOTHER: Mohan Matthen, a philosopher of biology at the University of Toronto, writes:
Lewontin's review of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini in the New York Review of Books is perhaps the most sympathetic response by a competent biologist or philosopher of biology.
I assume that one reason why Lewontin is sympathetic to Fodor is that Fodor cited anti-adaptationism when he initially started in on his opposition to the use of the theory of natural selection in philosophical psychology. (He and Chomsky got attacked by Pinker for this.) But adaptationism (which, in one form or another, is very widely accepted among biologists) is a much more committed position than the Theory of Natural Selection: you can reject the former and accept the latter, and this is what Gould and Lewontin actually did. (Their Spandrels paper certainly did not say that Darwin's use of natural selection was fundamentally mistaken.) However that may be, Lewontin seems not to take strong exception to the fact that Fodor is not just anti-adaptationist, but opposed to most of the work that TNS does in biology.
Lewontin attributes to Fodor the view that natural selection is not an entity that causes evolutionary change. He is sympathetic to what he takes to be Fodor's stand against the reification of natural selection -- he denies, and he thinks that Fodor also denies, that natural selection is a cause of evolutionary change in the way that gravitation is a cause of planetary motion. (Ironically, a stand against this sort of reification is one of the pillars of the "statistical interpretation of natural selection", which has been advanced in recent years by Denis Walsh, André Ariew, and myself. We are against reifying natural selection, but just for the record, we are strong proponents of TNS!) However, this is not what Fodor is on about. Fodor's view is that there is no such thing as selection-for -- he thinks that it is incoherent, for example, to say that the heart was selected for its pumping action, but not selected for making rhythmic noises. Lewontin seems to have missed this point, or to have been blinded to its silliness because of a superficial similarity to the anti-adaptationist programme.
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