{"id":9023,"date":"2017-12-17T11:43:26","date_gmt":"2017-12-17T11:43:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=9023"},"modified":"2017-12-17T11:43:26","modified_gmt":"2017-12-17T11:43:26","slug":"fodors-critique-of-neo-darwinism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2017\/12\/fodors-critique-of-neo-darwinism\/","title":{"rendered":"Fodor\u2019s critique of neo-Darwinism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The philosopher Jerry Fodor (1935-2017) has just died.
\nHere<\/a>\u00a0is a brief reprise by Stephen Metcalfe in The New Yoker of Fodor\u2019s compelling critique on modern Darwinism. \u00a0For some reason, Fodor was ostracised by many philosophers and biologists for this critique.
\nAn excerpt:<\/p>\n

\u201cNeo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic,\u201d he wrote in \u201cWhat Darwin Got\u00a0Wrong,\u201d co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive\u00a0scientist, and published in 2010. \u201cIt goes literally unquestioned. A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.\u201d Fodor thought that the neo-Darwinists had confused the loyalty oath of modernity\u2014nature is without conscious design, species evolve over time, the emergence of Homo sapiens was without meaning or telos\u2014 with blind adherence to the fallacy known as \u201cnatural selection.\u201d That species are a product of evolutionary descent was uncontroversial to Fodor, an avowed atheist; that the mechanism guiding the process was\u00a0adaptation via a competition for survival\u2014this, Fodor believed, had to\u00a0be wrong.
\nFodor attacked neo-Darwinism on a purely conceptual and scientific basis\u2014its own turf, in other words. He thought that it suffered from a \u201cfree rider\u201d problem: too many of our phenotypic traits have no discernible survival value, and therefore could not plausibly be interpreted as products of adaptation. \u201cSelection theory cannot distinguish the trait upon which fitness is contingent from the trait that has no effect on fitness (and is merely a free rider),\u201d he wrote. \u201cAdvertising to the contrary notwithstanding, natural selection can\u2019t be a general mechanism that connects phenotypic variation with variation in fitness. So natural selection can\u2019t be the mechanism of evolution.\u201d
\n\u201cWhat Darwin Got Wrong\u201d was greeted with dismissive howls\u2014and it\u00a0is possible Fodor got the biology wrong. \u00a0But he got the ideology exactly\u00a0right. Fodor was interested in how the distinction between an adaptation and a free rider might apply to our own behavior. It seems obvious to us that the heart is for circulating blood and not for making thump-thump noises. (Fodor did not believe this for was defensible, either, but that is for another day.) Pumping is therefore an \u201cadaptation,\u201d the noise is a \u201cfree rider.\u201d Is there really a bright sociobiological line dividing, say, the desire to mate for life from the urge to stray? The problem isn\u2019t that drawing a line is hard; it\u2019s that it\u2019s too easy: you simply call the behavior you like an adaptation, the one you don\u2019t like a free rider. Free to concoct a just-so story, you may now\u00a0encode your own personal biases into something called \u201chuman nature\u201d.
\nOnce you\u2019ve made that error, the nonfiction best-seller list is yours for the asking. Everyone loves a mirror disguised as a windowpane: you tell whatever story your readership wants to hear, about whatever behavior it wants to see dignified. So the habits of successful people have been made, over the past thirty years, into derivatives of the savannah and the genetic eons, and \u201cnatural selection\u201d has been stretched from a bad metaphor into an industry. Nobody was better at exposing this silliness than Fodor, whose occasional review-essays in the L.R.B. were masterpieces of a plainspoken and withering sarcasm. To Steven Pinker\u2019s suggestion that we read fiction because \u201cit supplies us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday,\u201d for instance, Fodor replied, \u201cWhat if it turns out that,\u00a0having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world?\u201d
\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bibliography<\/strong>:
\nStephen Metcalf [2017]:\u00a0Jerry Fodor\u2019s Enduring Critique of Neo-Darwinism. The New Yorker.\u00a0December 12, 2017.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The philosopher Jerry Fodor (1935-2017) has just died. Here\u00a0is a brief reprise by Stephen Metcalfe in The New Yoker of Fodor\u2019s compelling critique on modern Darwinism. \u00a0For some reason, Fodor was ostracised by many philosophers and biologists for this critique. An excerpt: \u201cNeo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic,\u201d he wrote in \u201cWhat Darwin Got\u00a0Wrong,\u201d co-written with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71,74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-science","p1","y2017","m12","d17","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9023\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}