August 19, 2010
IT'S NOT THAT THEY'RE RIGHT ABOUT NATURAL SELECTION THAT'S THE PROBLEM...:
Mindless Evolution: A provocative new book challenges a key element of Darwinian orthodoxy. (Simon Conway Morris, August 17, 2010, Big Question)
[I]f Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are in any way correct, not only do cherished notions of adaptation crash to the ground, but the entire Darwinian edifice begins to totter. Hence the uproar. My own concern is that, quite unwittingly, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini have dragged in a Trojan Horse that will give comfort to exactly the wrong people.Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini accept without reservation the realities of evolution, but (like many previous critics) they reject Darwin’s effort in the Origin to conflate natural selection with the sort of artificial selection practiced in animal breeding. The latter only works because the breeder knows exactly what characteristic he wants to select — that is, evolution occurs by a conscious choice. This is not possible in natural selection, as Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini emphasize, rejecting the familiar trope of evolution as the Blind Watchmaker. Indeed, as they see it, the difficulty with natural selection revolves precisely round Darwin’s metaphor of agency. In their view, to speak of “selection for” something presupposes that we know what that something being selected actually is. This may seem like hair-splitting. After all, isn’t it obvious that organisms are adapted, often beautifully so, to their environments? According to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, this is to put the cart before the horse.
They begin with an intriguing comparison of natural selection and the now-exploded concept of behaviorism, the brainchild of B.F. Skinner. Both schemes draw on the same framework of argument. In behaviorism, nature provides a random selection of possibilities (stimuli), of which those that are favorable are selected (responses). Once started, the vehicle described by both behaviorism and Darwinism careers off, effectively in any direction so long as it is adaptively beneficial.
Behaviorism met its end when it became self-evident that it was a fiction, unable to address either mental states or intentionality. And this is exactly where the close parallel with natural selection is most telling, at least according to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini. If the parallel was exact then Darwinism could only explain evolutionary change by invoking mind-like agency, which is simply inadmissible. As they say, “the cost would be catastrophic," suggesting, as it does, the very sort of divine intervention that Darwin believed he had made totally unnecessary. [...]
From their perspective, the last 150 years of research in the biological sciences has been little more than glorified natural history, boiling down to the banal observation that if an organism didn't work, it wouldn’t be here to boast about its adaptive credentials. This is difficult to buy, but it does not mean that there is no common ground between the authors and more conventional Darwinians. After all, nobody in this dispute doubts the reality of evolution.
...it's that everyone else is right about it too.
