On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution
July 21, 2009
I would like to invite discussion on my paper, On Fodor on Darwin On Evolution [or PDF], which is a critique of Jerry Fodor's Hugues Leblanc Lectures at UQAM on "What Darwin Got Wrong" (Fodor, forthcoming; Fodor&Piatelli-Palmarini).
Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor’s skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus argument” -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the “concepts” underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be “endogenous,” rather than evolved or learned.
http://philpapers.org/browse/38/thread.pl?tId=202
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Comments
Fodor
July 23, 2009 by Anonymous, 17 weeks 2 days ago
Comment id: 38243
I haven't read Fodor's paper, but it sounds like dreary old stuff.
May or may not be relevant, but I wrote a post on gnxp a few years ago:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/11/is-natural-selection-tautology.php
"Fodor thinks, must be “endogenous,” rather than evolved or lear
July 23, 2009 by Anonymous, 17 weeks 2 days ago
Comment id: 38245
I looked up the word Endogenous which means.
1: growing or produced by growth from deep tissue
2 a: caused by factors inside the organism or system b: produced or synthesized within the organism or system
Evolve means:
1: emit
2 a: derive, educe b: to produce by natural evolutionary processes c: develop, work out
intransitive verb
: to undergo evolutionary change
Not to undermine his work but they are kind of the same. Evolving takes place because their enviroment changed so the species endogenous. When you think about it in real terms. It would be like a person deciding they need to move because they had children and need space, or in this case an animal that lived in a rainy area of Africa and then over a course of years, Africa dried up so the animals evolved so that they could survive in their eniviroment. In many ways you can not have one without the other. If our enviroment stayed the same and never changed, their really would not be a need for animals or humans / nonhuman primates to change.
Information transmission.
July 28, 2009 by Anonymous, 16 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 38437
You'd get a hell of a lot more commentary if you'd drop the PDF crap and just post a link, or even better, stick it right in here, properly set up in HTML. Now maybe I'll fire up Adobe Reader, adjust it for readability, if possible, and maybe come back.
HTML version
July 29, 2009 by Stevan_Harnad, 16 weeks 3 days ago
Comment id: 38457
Apologies. You're right. Here's an HTML version:
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17274/2/fodorcomm.htm
I will now also change the main link to point to the HTML version rather than the PDF version.
This cannot be settled by a dictionary
July 23, 2009 by Stevan_Harnad, 17 weeks 2 days ago
Comment id: 38246
What Fodor means by "endogenous" is something that is somehow part of the structure of the organism, yet (1) neither as a result of environmental influences and learning (2) nor as a result of evolution (random genetic variation and selective retention based on reproductive success), (3) nor as a result of logical or mathematical necessity. He thinks "concepts" (or rather their neural substrates) are "endogenous" in this sense. (I have dubbed this the "Big Bang Theory of the Origin of Concepts.")