Culture

uthors: Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Parmarini
Publisher: Profile
(3/5)

 
 
Let’s get this straight: Fodor and Piattelli-Parmarini (F&PP) are not creationists; they are atheists through and through. They don’t deny that species are descended from other species; their argument is over how this happened. Neo-Darwinians think that evolution occurred by ‘natural selection’ (NS): Populations (e.g., species) evolve because their members vary on heritable traits, which lead to differential reproductive success. F&PP’s charge is simple: this ain’t how populations evolve. Their argument is less simple, and consists of empirical and conceptual objections.
The empirical objection is intended to dethrone the idea that most biological traits are selected for in this way. Instead, they appeal to a slew of non-adaptationist factors (e.g., genetic drift, frequency dependent selection, free-riding, internal constraints. By the way, they do a great job summarising the research on these to a lay audience). But we’ve known about all this for decades. They’re right that NS isn’t the only evolutionary player, but this is an uninteresting claim. More interesting is their assertion that NS is at best a minor player, but this assertion is unsurprisingly unsubstantiated, since it’s an empirical claim that’s still heavily under investigation. 
The conceptual objection is against NS’s central explanatory concept: ‘selection for’. According to neo-Darwinians, nature selected for the oxygen-bearing properties of haemoglobin, not its redness, even though these two properties always co-occur. F&PP argue that this is false, unless nature can tell these two properties apart, which they can’t, unless nature is an agent (which is absurd). But F&PP take things too literally. All neo-Darwinians mean is that the oxygen-bearing properties of haemoglobin (not its redness) caused increased reproductive success. Nature doesn’t have to know this for it to be the case, though scientists might want to know which properties of traits increase reproductive success (i.e., were selected for). So, the conceptual objection is interesting, but misled.
F&PP conclude their work by declaring that there are no laws in biology. Evolutionary explanations are historical explanations, not deductive-nomological ones. These are meant to be controversial claims, but they’re not. Evolutionary theorists have been saying this for decades. Once again, F&PP are right, but uninteresting.