March 16, 2010
Philosophers Rip Darwin
From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Last year was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The anniversary was marked by conferences the world over. I will not tell you how many I attended; ecologically sensitive readers of The Chronicle might start whining about carbon footprints and that sort of thing. Let me just say that I found myself going no fewer than three times through the Quad City International Airport, in Moline, Ill. Moline!
I mention this as background to the publication of a new book by Jerry A. Fodor, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona. The title of the book, What Darwin Got Wrong (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells you their opinion of the old English naturalist and of his theory of evolution through natural selection. If Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini were an isolated case, one could dismiss their book with a grimace (if you were a biologist), or welcome them with a cheer (if you were a creationist). But in the philosophical community, there is an increasingly vocal cadre of eminent philosophers harboring doubts about Darwin. To understand their critique, we must first put the clock back a year, to the beginning of the celebrations.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 06:39 AM | Permalink
Comments
Wait? Nagel and Plantinga (and Fodor)? That's it? I've seen some increasingly vocal cadres in my time, and these do not a cadre make. I mean, Plantinga's argument is ancient by now, anyway (considerably ancient given its pedigree in the writings of CS Lewis). Is this just another attempt by the press to suggest widespread controversy regarding Darwinism where there really is none? I would guess that a poll of academic philosophers would turn up support for naturalistic evolution in the high nineties.
Posted by: Vesuvium | Mar 16, 2010 7:36:10 AM
Ah yes, Jerry again.
Maybe we could get Orr to do a review?
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 16, 2010 11:32:02 AM
Should I just copy-and-paste the comment I made to the previous review of these books?
Again: notice the total lack of engagement with the actual arguments made by Nagel and Fodor. Notice that Ruse's sole, solitary point made against those two is that they don't "read the science". Notice that he illegitimately lumps them in with Platinga (of all people!) in order to justify associating them with Intelligent Design (something which is utterly laughable in both cases).
Most comically, note the insinuation that Fodor does not want a "naturalistic explanation of mind"... that's right, folks, Jerry Fodor, the guy who invented the modularity theory of mind.
The subtle message: if you're not a Darwinian, you're not a scientist, therefore you must be against science. Anyone recognize that mode of argument, perhaps coming from a recent president of the United States?
I say again: intellectual polarization is bad for everyone involved. Darwin has far better defenders than this, people who both recognize the cogency of Fodor and Nagel but who also think they are deeply mistaken (and can tell you exactly why).
Ruse's only accomplishment, on the other hand, is to perpetuate the blind trench warfare that characterizes much of our current intellectual landscape. The reason we engage with actual arguments is to avoid precisely this.
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Mar 16, 2010 12:59:57 PM
"Notice that Ruse's sole, solitary point made against those two is that they don't "read the science"."
Once you've made that point, is there really anything more to say?
If you ever again feel the temptation to use "Fodor" and "cogent" in the same sentence, I'd encourage you to read this review first.
Posted by: billy | Mar 16, 2010 1:46:59 PM
@Billy - that's a great review, but notice Block and Kitcher do exactly what Nick recommends: they actually do engage with Fodor's and Piatelli-Palmarini's arguments, showing which premises are false and which conclusions don't follow.
Posted by: Adam | Mar 16, 2010 2:22:49 PM
Well, apparently I do have to do this:
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/03/what-darwin-got-wrong.html
Posted by: Nick Smyth | Mar 16, 2010 2:44:33 PM
There seems to be quite an interesting discussion of this on John Wilkin's blog.
Posted by: Antiquated Tory | Mar 16, 2010 4:12:04 PM
Adam: I agree, but I don't think Ruse's goal was a detailed smackdown of Fodor. Instead it was just an overview of where the (philosophical) critics of evolution stand today.
Nick: I know! The question that you didn't answer there is why you don't consider the matter "definitively settled". (Block and Kitcher's review was on 3QD way back in February, by the way.)
Posted by: billy | Mar 16, 2010 4:30:14 PM
What do you get when authors who know nothing about genetics and evolution write about genetics and evolution?
"This is what makes Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's ideas so embarrassingly bad. They seem to know next to nothing about genetics, and so when they discover something that has been taken for granted by scientists for almost a century, they act surprised and see it as a death-stroke for Darwinism. It's rather like reading about the saltationist/biometrician wars of the early 1900s, when Mendel was first rediscovered and some people argued that the binary nature of the 'sports' described in analyses of inheritance meant the incremental changes described by Darwin were impossible. The 'problems' were nonexistent, and were a product merely of our rudimentary understanding of genetics — it was resolved by eventually understanding that most characters of an organism were the product of many genes working together, and that some mutations do cause graded shifts in the phenotype.
Here, for instance, is one of their astonishing revelations about the nature of inheritance:
Darwinists say that evolution is explained by the selection of phenotypic traits by environmental filters. But the effects of endogenous structure can wreak havoc with this theory. Consider the following case: traits t1 and t2 are endogenously linked in such a way that if a creature has one, it has both. Now the core of natural selection is the claim that phenotypic traits are selected for their adaptivity, that is, for their effect on fitness. But it is perfectly possible that one of two linked traits is adaptive but the other isn't; having one of them affects fitness but having the other one doesn't. So one is selected for and the other "free-rides" on it.
That is so trivially true that it is a good point to make if you are addressing somebody who is biologically naive, and I think it is a valuable concept to emphasize to the public. But this is Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini chastising biologists with this awesome fact as if we've been neglecting it. It's baffling. Linkage is a core concept in genetics; Alfred Sturtevant and Thomas Morgan worked it out in about 1913, and it's still current. The genographic project, which is trying to map out the history of human populations, uses haplotype data — clusters of alleles tend to stay clumped together, only occasionally broken up by recombination, so their arrangements can be used as markers for geneology. The default assumption is that these sets of alleles are not the product of selection, but of chance and history!"
Posted by: Dave Ranning | Mar 17, 2010 1:21:00 AM
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