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Jerry Fodor, on Why Pigs Don't Have Wings
May 6, 2008 7:08 AM Subscribe

Rutgers professor of philosophy Jerry Fodor created a bit of a stir last October when he wrote an article for the London Review of Books arguing that natural selection may not be such a great theory after all, and that a "major revision of evolutionary theory... is in the offing." Not many fellow philosophers and academics agree, it seems. Fodor responds to his critics here and here. Six months later, it's still not entirely clear whether his argument is, as Justin E.H. Smith put it, "irresponsible and stupid or so subtle that none of his adversaries, defending a status quo interpretation of the theory of natural selection, have been able to get it yet."
posted by decoherence (142 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite

The article's intro doesn't exactly suggest that he really understands the gene centric model. That almost surely means he is beating old issues that evolutionary biologists have long since handled. Otoh that does not mean that all philosophers who claim to use ideas from evolutionary biology understand said issue.
posted by jeffburdges at 7:21 AM on May 6

Can't judge the quality of his argument - but he doesn't seem to know too much about frogs.
posted by speug at 7:32 AM on May 6

My impression of his argument is that he doesn't truly understand evolution, and he's getting confused on the whole idea of nature "selecting" traits, and just can't get around that word. His proposed mechanism of "channeling" strikes me as woefully naive about how natural selection already encompasses such processes. And other than that, he proposes no other alternatives to NS. I think it is telling that he imagines thusly:

But that leaves it open that channelling might be one among many mechanisms by which phenotypes express endogenous structure, and which, taken together, account for (some? many? all of?) the facts of evolution

"All of?" How could that possibly be true? 'Channeling' alone can only explain why some phenotypes are not feasible in the context of existing organisms, unless he would propose that the rest is randomness. This piece strikes me as a rather well-worded mess of the type that philosophers often get themselves into.

I haven't yet read the reactions and responses to critics, someone please let me know if there's any point.
posted by Edgewise at 7:40 AM on May 6

Hmm, should read my own quote better...he did refer to "many mechanisms...taken together". Well, without proposing those mechanisms or pointing to other proposals, it still leaves me shrugging.
posted by Edgewise at 7:41 AM on May 6

Professor of um philosophy eh.....
posted by zeoslap at 7:46 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

I looked the article over, trying to find out how "competition" doesn't result in "dominance".

Sure, there are semantic questions over "what" dominates (animal or trait) and what the "period" is for competition that results in a population growth (selection by nature), but those aren't real obsticles to the theory.

I didn't find any real questions though, just a lot of wordy misdirection.
posted by ewkpates at 7:50 AM on May 6

People with something valid to say about modern evolutionary theory (A) shouldn't be doing it in a publication entitled the London Review of Books and (B) shouldn't be calling the modern researcher in the field of evolutionary science a "darwinist".

The former shows that you don't have any standing in the community of biological sciences (wikipedia confirms that he's a "philosopher and cognitive scientist", not a biologist), and the latter shows that you are trying to use language to keep your readers from thinking clearly, and particularly to keep them from separating what they've heard Darwin wrote long ago from what the current state of the science is.
posted by jepler at 7:52 AM on May 6 [5 favorites]

He's a philosopher; why should a biologist (or anyone else, really) care what he has to say about evolution?
posted by languagehat at 7:52 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

Fodor, eh? So are we all going to evolve into carburetors?

Yes, I know about Meaning Postulates. It's still funny.
posted by dmd at 7:53 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

When I have questions about evolution, I stroll over to my local university and knock on some doors in the philosophy department.

Likewise, if I have a medical question I'll ask my mechanic and if I need financial advice I'll talk to a street musician.
posted by device55 at 7:55 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

After poring over the article and the various follow-ups, my own sense is that Fodor's argument may be more directed toward the theory of natural selection as as a scientific theory per se, rather than the actual biology behind it. He thinks any good scientific theory should be able to explain the relevant counterfactuals -- what would have happened is such-and-such had been the case. Natural selection can't do that (which is what Fodor is getting at with the various polar bear and fox examples), so it's not a good scientific theory. Lack of ability to explain counterfactuals, I think, also implies lack of predictive power, in which case Fodor's argument reduces to the old Popperian claim that a good scientific theory needs to be able to make predictions. In other words, the theory of natural selection is not so much false as it is vacuous, and perhaps tautological.

The stuff about endogenous variables, channeling, evo-devo, etc., is largely irrelevant to his main point of showing that the theory of natural selection is not a good scientific theory. It seems like he's just venturing alternatives which might supply the basis for "better" scientific theories. Fodor really doesn't do himself any favors by conflating terms and not making clear exactly which claims he's disagreeing with.
posted by decoherence at 7:58 AM on May 6 [8 favorites]

Simply as an aside: so too is Daniel Dennet "nothing but a philosopher." Are only certified biologists allowed to comment with some authority upon evolution? As for publishing in the London Rev:
in addtion to his 14 (!) books, here is a list of articles published in scholarly journals
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/Fodor/cv.html
posted by Postroad at 8:00 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

Thanks for the explanation decoherence, that totally helped me make sense of what is going on here!
posted by iamkimiam at 8:01 AM on May 6

Sheesh. Somebody needs to learn some basic probability.
posted by erniepan at 8:05 AM on May 6

Article: This picture – that our minds were formed by processes of evolutionary adaptation, and that the environment they are adapted to isn’t the one that we now inhabit – has had, of late, an extraordinarily favourable press.

That's a good point. And if I were Fodor, a successful, well-connected, articulate Professor of Philosophy and Psychology, seeing all the sociobiologists getting all the press and the money, I'd probably be a bit cross and go on the offensive too. After all, if they get all the resources, who will mate with me?
posted by alasdair at 8:20 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Lack of ability to explain counterfactuals, I think, also implies lack of predictive power...

I don't think so. I think that evolutionary theory could make limited predictive claims in certain situations. In general, if a condition exists that causes individuals with a certain trait to frequently die before reproduction, that trait will be selected against, whether or not the condition was intentional.

If Fodor is trying to say that NS lacks the rigor of a strong scientific theory, he may have a point. But he seems to be implying quite a bit more when he says:

So what’s the moral of all this? Most immediately, it’s that the classical Darwinist account of evolution as primarily driven by natural selection is in trouble on both conceptual and empirical grounds. Darwin was too much an environmentalist. He seems to have been seduced by an analogy to selective breeding, with natural selection operating in place of the breeder. But this analogy is patently flawed; selective breeding is performed only by creatures with minds, and natural selection doesn’t have one of those.

And can someone explain this to me?

The alternative possibility to Darwin’s is that the direction of phenotypic change is very largely determined by endogenous variables.

Sounds like doublespeak to me; I don't see how evolution is excluded from "endogenous variables". I hate the way that philosophers talk, sometimes.
posted by Edgewise at 8:21 AM on May 6

Err, not evolution so much as natural selection...
posted by Edgewise at 8:22 AM on May 6

Lots of arguments from (lack of) authority in this thread. The critiques based on his actual claims and how they match fact are more interesting.
posted by DU at 8:22 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]

He's a philosopher; why should a biologist (or anyone else, really) care what he has to say about evolution?

Because disciplines help inform each other. There are questions of philosophy that happen in just about any discipline, whether people are aware that they are doing it or not. This type of integration cross-pollination happens between most disciplines, actually, as none are really done in a vacuum (which is a good thing). The bigger question is whether or not the philosophy is done well, and should be judged on those merits, and not whether or not biologists should be thinking about questions of philosophy.
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:30 AM on May 6 [5 favorites]

This thread is going worse than I'd expected, to the point where if it were a class I'd be asking for a show of hands on who'd actually done the reading. I know we're more used to defending evolution against fundamentalist wackos than serious philosophical arguments, but the difference ought to be obvious, and the territorial nonsense about Fodor being "just" a philosopher and hence unqualified to comment on biology (even if he's raising, you know, philosophical objections) does no one any favors. It'd be fair enough to accuse him of needless pot-stirring, or missing some technical details, but not of total ignorance or professional trespass.

Fodor's point in the briefest form possible, I think, is that we don't account for the weakness of the logical connection between traits' adaptivity and their having evolved: to travesty his point, the inference in "polar bears' white coats camouflage them AND THEREFORE must have been selected by evolution" has some uncomfortable similarities to tautology or just-so story when we consider that coat whiteness might accidentally happen to co-vary with some other characteristic in the best-adapted bears. I share with most or all of the respondents, and surely with Fodor himself, the certainty that this criticism must be missing something important; to my mind the letter by Coyne and Kitcher ("and" link) does the best job marshalling evidence that actually bears on the point.
posted by RogerB at 8:35 AM on May 6 [6 favorites]

languagehat: He's a philosopher; why should a biologist (or anyone else, really) care what he has to say about evolution?

If he has a point, ideally anyone who's interested in biology should care.

Having read that, I'm not sure if he has a point or not. It reads a lot like the last paper written during a three-day finals all-nighter. It may have a point, but I'll be damned if I can figure out exactly what it is. I'd like to thank decoherence for making Fodor's argument more coherent.
posted by Kattullus at 8:35 AM on May 6

decoherence, lol. Evolutionary theory is mostly a law derived from mathematics, which doesn't mean tautological. Real evolutionary biologists are quite successfully using evolutionary theory to predict present day stuff in epidemiology, ecology, etc. and even software development.

Cute fact : A species gender ratios are exactly determined by the nature of it's genetic contributions from parents, i.e. diploid males leads to 1:1 while haploid males leads to 2:1.
posted by jeffburdges at 8:36 AM on May 6

He's a philosopher; why should a biologist (or anyone else, really) care what he has to say about evolution?

I think this is a bad way to talk. Some of the most interesting ideas of the twentieth century were produced by cross-field pollination--Thomas Kuhn, for example, was a scientist before he revolutionized the philosophy of science. The rigid contemporary barriers between academic fields are the largely arbitrary product of fanciful 17th and 18th century diagram-drawing. There's no need to reify them. Either respond concretely to his argument--presumably an easy matter for the Golgi-juggling savants that fill biology departments everywhere--or accept that he might have a point after all. Arguments from authority do not uphold the prestige of science.

I suspect, though, that this thread won't be the place for a constructive discussion. People here are instinctively allergic to anything that even vaguely smells of a challenge to evolution--because of the Intelligent Design "controversy," I guess.
posted by nasreddin at 8:46 AM on May 6 [7 favorites]

I managed to make my way through most of the dense verbal undergrowth of Fodor's original article.

Where he points out that recently, some scholars have been falling all over themselves trying to explain everything in human nature as being direct results of some specific evolutionary advantage... he's right on. 'We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the gatherers (and/or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer offspring)’. This is middle-school crap; I completely agree that this sort of conclusion is sloppy, insufficient and useless. What, are we going to write better songs now?

But I think his main argument goes off the rails quite early. He just doesn't get "selection"; he doesn't seem to realize that selection pressures on humans have just about been eliminated (give or take the occasional genocide or famine in the last few millenia), and the example of domesticated foxes is a problem of unsophisticated breeding, not failure of a mechanism of natural selection.

The analogy between natural selection and architecture is amusing but lame.

Nice try, though, and worth it if it stops people from grasping at such pathetic leaps of logic like the "singing" theory above, or drives a stake into the argument that a godless universe somehow causes an irreversible fall into materialism and lack of free choice.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:48 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

For example, nobody, not even the most ravening of adaptationists, would seek to explain the absence of winged pigs by claiming that, though there used to be some, the wings proved to be a liability so nature selected against them. Nobody expects to find fossils of a species of winged pig that has now gone extinct. Rather, pigs lack wings because there’s no place on pigs to put them. To add wings to a pig, you’d also have to tinker with lots of other things. In fact, you’d have to rebuild the pig whole hog: less weight, appropriate musculature, an appropriate metabolism, an apparatus for navigating in three dimensions, a streamlined silhouette and god only knows what else; not to mention feathers. The moral is that if you want them to have wings, you will have to redesign pigs radically. But natural selection, since it is incremental and cumulative, can’t do that sort of thing. Evolution by natural selection is inherently a conservative process, and once you’re well along the evolutionary route to being a pig, your further options are considerably constrained; you can’t, for example, go back and retrofit feathers.

Now substitute "dinosaur" for "pig".

I predict his argument will not survive.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:50 AM on May 6 [4 favorites]

Fodor's argument may be more directed toward the theory of natural selection as as a scientific theory per se, rather than the actual biology behind it.

Agreed. I think the real issue here is that Fodor believes NS doesn’t account for all the demands placed on what should be a cognitive adaptation in the modern age. Well, no shit. Fodor isn’t attempting to cover science with philosophy and indeed, he doesn’t offer any alternatives either. I don’t know if this article really gets us anywhere but regardless, it was a fun read (It’s been since college since I read any Fodor). Thanks for the link.
posted by tiger yang at 8:52 AM on May 6

This thread is going worse than I'd expected, to the point where if it were a class I'd be asking for a show of hands on who'd actually done the reading.

It is a pretty long read. It's always much easier to critique straw men and repeat the party line (not that anyone here would do that).
posted by SpacemanStix at 8:52 AM on May 6

The analogy between natural selection and architecture is amusing but lame.

You are aware that the paper referred to in the article is one of the seminal classics of evolutionary biology, yes?
posted by nasreddin at 8:53 AM on May 6

I dont really understand the intuition behind the argument from authority that often occurs in these sorts of debates in reference to philosophers. What activity does a 'scientist' engage in that gives them magical authoritative comprehension of a field over a philosopher? The only difference between a philosopher's work and a scientist's work is afaik grunt work: scientists in addition to the conceptual analysis and synthesis philosophers engage in, also have to gather data and statistically analyze it. Then they present the results of this data analysis for anybody (including philosophers) to examine. So unless there is something special about wearing a white coat in a lab to gather data that gives one a deeper grasp of his field of study than just keeping abreast of the results, the 'philosophers r stupid lol' argument is entirely unmotivated.
posted by norabarnacl3 at 8:56 AM on May 6

Re the musical thinking thing. I sort of like just so stories. But you can't take them seriously. Maybe the emphasis should be on the "stories". They're basically evolutionary (hard) science fiction. They tell a story that uses and is consistent with the theory. But they're fiction (speculation.)
posted by Wood at 9:00 AM on May 6

Well, to tackle some form of his misconception, I think this is an excellent example of what happens when educators focus on the grand narrative view of Evolution rather than the mechanism. Some of his issues are dealt with simply by quantitative genetics. For example:

The same applies to Tim Lewens’s line of thought. The selection of colour in polar bears can’t be contingent on such counterfactuals as: ‘what if one dyed their fur green?’ In fact, it can’t be contingent on any counterfactuals at all. We can apply the ‘method of differences’ to figure out what colour evolution made the polar bear; but selection can’t apply the method of differences to figure out what colour to make them. That’s because we have minds but it doesn’t.

He's partly right here, but for almost all phenotypes across a population you will have a range of values. Some bears are brown, some are tan, and some are cream. What natural selection tends to do is clip off the edges of the range. If one edge is clipped more than the other, the central tendency of the range will gradually shift over many generations to a point of equilibrium where the selective pressure doesn't exist.

Which leads to a more precise statement of natural selection than what is commonly understood or discussed: differential reproductive success across a range of phenotypic variance within a population results in a change in central tendency for that range over multiple generations. The trouble with this definition is that it's hard to talk about it to someone without at least a basic understanding of statistics.

I said that metaphors like ‘evolution selects for what Mother Nature intends it to’ have to be cashed. The rules of the game require respectable adaptationists to give an account of selection-for that doesn’t appeal to agency.

His main complaint seems to be that in the process of trying to express a quantitative theory, that sometimes biologists get sloppy and use ambiguous language that looks to him like an appeal to agency. This is certainly the case. It's difficult to talk about quantitative genetics without using nice comforting narrative language with ambiguities like "selected for" or "function." The same holds true with many casual explanations of physical phenomena such as freezing ice for example. We say things like, "cold water forces water to freeze" rather than more accurate descriptions of energy states across the population of water molecules.

His other big concern strikes me as someone irrelevant, that we can't really say which phenotype is being selected when there appears to be a linkage between phenotypes. The answer is that this is a question that has concerned evolutionary biologists for some time now, but the underlying mechanism that differential reproductive fitness over a range of phenotypic variance results in a shift in central tendency over generations is still likely the underlying mechanism no matter which phenotype is shifting.

decoherence: He thinks any good scientific theory should be able to explain the relevant counterfactuals -- what would have happened is such-and-such had been the case. Natural selection can't do that (which is what Fodor is getting at with the various polar bear and fox examples), so it's not a good scientific theory.

Well, here I disagree. We can address the purple polar bear case by comparing it to another example where there are extreme outliers for a phenotype: natural albinos. The quantitative theory of natural selection predicts that extreme outliers have poor reproductive fitness and rarely survive to produce a second generation. And this seems to be the case with most natural albinos.

jeffburges: Evolutionary theory is mostly a law derived from mathematics, which doesn't mean tautological.

No, it is not a "law" in either the scientific or the mathematical sense of the term. And it's based on two other important bodies of knowledge aside from mathematics. Cut out either genetics or natural selection, and you end up with bullshit like Memetics.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:01 AM on May 6 [8 favorites]

What activity does a 'scientist' engage in that gives them magical authoritative comprehension of a field over a philosopher? The only difference between a philosopher's work and a scientist's work is afaik grunt work

And that "grunt work" gives them the kind of grasp of detail and nuance, and of how things fit together, that is impossible for an outsider. I'm sympathetic to the "Renaissance man" ideal, and I wish it were possible for amateurs to make important contributions today, but there's just too much science, and it's too specialized, for even an intelligent outsider who spends a fair amount of time reading the literature to have much of a shot at it.

I've been reading Nabokov's autobiography, and I just got to the part where he takes a swing at natural selection. Now, Nabokov was not just a great writer but an enthusiastic and lifelong lepidopterist who was hired by a natural history museum to classify their holdings, knew as much about certain kinds of butterflies as anyone in the field, and published papers; nonetheless I just smirked and said "Nice try, Volodya." It's not a matter of everybody sticking to their last, it's a matter of what it takes to do science.
posted by languagehat at 9:08 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

n3 What activity does a 'scientist' engage in that gives them magical authoritative comprehension of a field over a philosopher?

Well, I think in this case, biologists often wrestle with the actual quantitative implications of a theory rather than just the narrative "just so stories" that appear to concern Fodor.

The "just so stories" of things like camouflage, pigmentation and mimicry are key issues of considerable research and debate in biology. But there is no reason to assume at this time that the driving mechanism behind those traits didn't involve differential reproductive fitness on a range of phenotypic variance resulting in a shift in central tendency over multiple generations. The debate is over which phenotypic factors are most important and how.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:11 AM on May 6

> The analogy between natural selection and architecture is amusing but lame.

> You are aware that the paper referred to in the article is one of the seminal classics of evolutionary biology, yes?

To be honest, no, but ALL analogies break down at some point. In reference to Fodor's article, I think the column of the analogy isn't up to supporting the load of his particular point. (to continue the architectural thing)
posted by Artful Codger at 9:13 AM on May 6

There couldn't be a science of the human condition

Oh, crap. Time to throw in the towel, career-wise.
posted by solipsophistocracy at 9:14 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

The 3Quarksdaily link (Justin Smith) is a great read, and I think does a good job of extracting the value and the problems in Fodor's thinking. It even has good comments.

There is a very good point raised that Darwin's original work and label of "natural selection" is a metaphor which is tied to something we can all understand, selective breeding.

This metaphor implies intent (and design) in an unguided process, and the metaphor has stuck so hard that generations of people assume "evolution" = "progress" or at lease "purposeful".

This is a valid critique, however (based on Smith's piece and the comments) Fodor seems to incorrectly equate the metaphor with the theory of natural selection and therefore runs into all sorts of problems.

On a different note, I'm as guilty as the next when snarking about philosophers minding their own business...but to address the accolades of 'cross pollination' and collaboration between disciplines...that only works when those that are dipping their stamen into the pollen have actually done their homework. Fodor has not done his homework.
posted by device55 at 9:20 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

It's not a matter of everybody sticking to their last, it's a matter of what it takes to do science.

There are questions of science, however, that aren't a matter of doing science. These are the questions that philosophy of science addresses, and they are questions that are more publicly owned and accessible.
posted by SpacemanStix at 9:24 AM on May 6

Or to make an analogy. There are two types of theories in science, the broad overarching theories of mechanism, and some specific theories of dynamics for a limited set of cases. So for example, in astronomy there is a grand theory of General Relativity which provides a general rule for how gravity should work, and a fair number of petite theories for special cases: solar systems, moons, tidal locking, galaxies, black holes, planetary nebula.

Likewise, we have a theory of evolution which states that differential reproductive success over a range of phenotypic variance leads to changes in central tendency over time.

Then we have a large number of petite theories: camouflage, reproductive strategy, gender, mimicry, parasite-host interactions, loss of organ function (such as in cave populations), invasive species, mutualism, sexual selection, and so on and so forth. The debate about these petite theories seems to be pretty close to the issue that Fodor sees as important, it is hard to determine what weight to give to which phenotypic variable.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:28 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

My impression is that Fodor makes the logical mistake of drawing a distinction between natural selection and randomness. His arguments make that a priori assumption. He does not see that natural selection is random, and has produced individuals who see themselves as "special" because it helps them form bonds and survive. If humans did not exist, it is quite possible that intelligent reptiles would roam the earth, see themselves as "chosen", build churches, and contend that apes could never fly.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:29 AM on May 6

"He's a philosopher; why should a biologist (or anyone else, really) care what he has to say about evolution?"

I think this is a bad way to talk. Some of the most interesting ideas of the twentieth century were produced by cross-field pollination--Thomas Kuhn, for example, was a scientist before he revolutionized the philosophy of science. The rigid contemporary barriers between academic fields are the largely arbitrary product of fanciful 17th and 18th century diagram-drawing. There's no need to reify them. Either respond concretely to his argument--presumably an easy matter for the Golgi-juggling savants that fill biology departments everywhere--or accept that he might have a point after all. Arguments from authority do not uphold the prestige of science.

I'd take this a step further and assert that science is inseparable from philosophy, and essentially impossible - except in a limited Kuhnian placeholding sense - without it. Science as an activity depends on conceptual systems that constantly need to be retheorized; even if it's a scientist who's doing the conceptualizing, the act is philosophical. Ideally, I suppose, this philosophy would be undertaken by practicing scientists - like Hertz's work on mechanics, which, not all that incidentally, was a direct inspiration for Wittgenstein's Tractatus - but there's absolutely nothing in principle preventing a philosopher like Fodor from making a contribution to the development of evolutionary theory, even if he seems, at times, to barely understand the science as it's practiced. All he needs is a firm grasp of the philosophical problems embedded in the theory, and a willingness to examine them.
posted by dyoneo at 9:41 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]

KirkJobSluder said what I was going to say about Fodor's confusion better than I would have.

About cross-pollination between philosophy and science: sometimes it's very productive, and sometimes you get eugenics. Just saying.
posted by rusty at 9:47 AM on May 6

So unless there is something special about wearing a white coat in a lab to gather data that gives one a deeper grasp of his field of study than just keeping abreast of the results, the 'philosophers r stupid lol' argument is entirely unmotivated.

When scientists get slapped by reality it focuses attention in a way that simply doesn't happen to philosophers. I think of most philosophy as being like a programmer who doesn't ever have to run their code. Scientists run their code and eventually it all comes up buggy.
posted by srboisvert at 10:13 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." -- Frank Zappa

The reason people are beating on Fodor for his philosophy connection is not that the study of Philosophy makes one incompetent to comment on other fields, but rather that his particular attachment to writing about things in philosophical terms makes his commentary highly suspect.

It's as if he wanted to address the existence of transcendental numbers and proceeded to make arguments about difficulty of proving their nature, the utter impossibility of experimentally demonstrating their infinite precision, and layered the whole thing with meta-commentary about the multiple levels of meaning of the word "transcendental".

It would be a lovely conceptual paper, but the mathematicians who read it would be left completely cold. "That isn't how one addresses mathematical issues", they'd say. "There is a common mathematical language, one that expects rigorous proofs written in mathematical terms. If this person doesn't even speak the language of mathematics, why should we take any of their writing seriously?"

The natural sciences have a similar language, and this article presents a similar issue. Fodor attempts to say . . . well, something . . . about the inadequacy of natural selection, but uses the language and approach of a philosopher to say it. The natural scientists are not impressed.

Fodor set out to dance about architecture. That's fine -- it doesn't necessarily invalidate his architectural theories -- but if he's expecting real architects to be chomping at the bit to interpret his dancing and respond in kind, he's in for a very long wait.
posted by tkolar at 10:16 AM on May 6 [5 favorites]

Great post: A+

Discussion started of weak, but picked up near the end: B+

Anyway, my two cents are that it's important not to dismiss Fodor's points so quickly. Very quickly, his two broad points (the conceptual and empirical problems) are best characterized in the former by the fact that evolution indeed doesn't select unique phenotypes, and in the latter, that evolution is evolutionary, and not revolutionary. It's very hard to imagine how to evolve new abilities when the road to that new ability is one of low survivability.

These are good points, and from what I understand, biologists of various strains wrestle with these questions all the time. There are fascinating mechanisms of evolution that biologists have found that promote 'good' evolution, and help overcome problems like these.

What I think Fodor is missing, insofar as he wants to argue that adaptation is insufficient, is that I suspect most biologists would broadly agree (even if they would take issue with his tone). The study of evolution is a science, and so of course the theory is insufficient. If it weren't, it wouldn't be science anymore, but simply fact. What Fodor needs to claim is that its bad science, and this he hasn't really shown.
posted by Alex404 at 10:18 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

dyoneo: Science as an activity depends on conceptual systems that constantly need to be retheorized; even if it's a scientist who's doing the conceptualizing, the act is philosophical.

Well certainly, however when philosophers wade into a discussion about a scientific theory without really understanding the conceptual basis behind it, you often end up with a bunch of gibberish.

Both Relativity and Natural Selection are quantitative theories that require a more than casual understanding of mathematics to really understand. So we use metaphor, analogy, and narrative in talking about those theories. The trouble comes in philosophers point to the metaphor, analogies and narratives and point to artifacts of the messy linguistic wrapper as implications of the theory.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:21 AM on May 6

I wonder if his comments could be inspiring some of the much less educated ones I've seen recently comparing human evolution to animal breeding.
posted by ASterling at 10:35 AM on May 6

Philosophers have a long history of helping science. Many basic sciences started as philosophy with Aristotle. More recently, Karl Popper has helped science with the principle of falsifiability. I think Dan Dennett is doing very good work for the sciences today.

I have a lot of problems with Fodor's argument. In general I think he's splitting hairs to make a couple principled points. But those principled points don't really do the damage he claims.

Take the example of the foxes bred for tameness who became floppy-eared. Here's a possible explanation (which may or may not be true, but it's plausible): The genes associated for tameness are linked to genes for floppy ears. The linkage of these genes could be their physical proximity on the chromosome. Or they could be linked by the activation mechanisms within the chromosome (linked in the genetic logic space, to make a computer analogy). This possible explanation assumes that tameness and floppy ears have their genetic source pre-existing in the foxes' genomes. Maybe these characteristics were prevalent in the foxes' pre-carnivorous ancestry.

When humans artificially selected for tameness, the "tameness genes" were activated -- kind of "off the shelf." In this case, yes, the phenotypes for floppy ears came along for the ride.

If this is the case, Fodor might argue that the ridership of the floppy ear genes goes against selection theory. Endogenous (that is, coming from within the organism) traits are showing up which were not directly selected. Fodor seems to think this is a huge problem for selection theory. I don't.

Selection uses what's available. It's inelegant. And on the genetic level, we have loads of free-riders -- as explained well in selfish gene theory. I'm surprised Fodor does not address selfish gene theory and focuses instead on selection of traits vs selection of organisms.

I met Fodor once, around 1990. He spoke to my cognitive science class about his problems with connectionist architectures. He pointed out that in principle, any function that can be performed by a connectionist computer architecture can be simulated by a serial architecture. He added that there are some functions connectionist architectures can't do (involving systematicity).

After class, I spoke with him. My argument was that connectionist architectures are much more efficient at some tasks than serial machines. He agreed about the efficiency, but said that in principle, serial could do anything connectionist. I'm pragmatic. I think efficiency is valuable in principle.

In these cases, I think Fodor is refining an idea down to a logic that is unnecessary and arbitrary. Like a straw man, but in this case, he is making straw skeletons.
posted by McLir at 10:40 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
posted by Flunkie at 10:42 AM on May 6

Uh, folks? Why so surprised at the philosopher-hate from science people? By definition Philosophy doesn't produce falsifiable hypotheses. And is therefore useless. Considering how much time working scientists must waste fighting to exclude untestable, ignorant criticism, you shouldn't be surprised in the least at a hostile reception.

If you had actually read any work in the philosophy (or history) of science, you would know that in a large number of cases science doesn't produce falsifiable hypotheses either--and that these cases are an integral and unavoidable part of normal scientific practice. (Not to mention that astrology also produces as many falsifiable hypotheses as you would like, and provides admirably complete methodology and documentation).

Furthermore, the idea that science produces falsifiable hypotheses is itself a product of the philosophy of science which has been internalized and interpreted as "natural" by scientists. The fact that you are some sort of Two Cultures mouthbreather does not excuse you from culpability for not following the literature--at least to a degree sufficient to claim your own soapbox.
posted by nasreddin at 10:47 AM on May 6 [7 favorites]

My impression is that Fodor makes the logical mistake of drawing a distinction between natural selection and randomness. His arguments make that a priori assumption. He does not see that natural selection is random, and has produced individuals who see themselves as "special" because it helps them form bonds and survive.

Fodor appears to be making just such a sharp conceptual distinction between "selection" and "randomness," and therein lies the problem: is this problem just in Fodor's mind, or is it reflective of a real problem?

As decoherence states above, In other words, the theory of natural selection is not so much false as it is vacuous, and perhaps tautological.

Is this merely b/c, as arftful codger states, ALL analogies break down at some point, or is it because natural selection is empirically deficient in some way?

In the absence of the notions of genetic probability and environmental fitness, the apparent conceptual contradiction of a process that is both selective and stochastic is indeed a problem. For Fodor, "naturalizing" selection begs the question, but it's really the question of naturalizing probability and adaptation that is more important.

Natural selection, if taken independently of the concepts of probability and fitness constraints, is at best semi-coherent. Another way of saying this is that natual selection is a semi-random process, not a wholly random process: due to the localized "channelling" Fodor describes, evolutionary change does not have to be reinvented each and every time it occurs.

Fodor mistakes, it seems to me, what he sees as an ontological problem, with what is in fact an informational problem. The informational interface between genetic heritability, environmental constraints, and probability is the triadic conceptual prism through which natural selection should be viewed. Evolution is not a dialectic between "pure chance" and "pure selection." Natural selection has short-term teleometric constraints built into its process, but not long term cosmic principles.

If one sees, via a kind of evolutionary pragmatics, that both genes and environment have bioinformational and biometric value in the process of natural selection, and if one posits an a priori probability through which terrestrial life is even possible to begin with, then one escapes drawing false dichotomies between "selection" and "randomness" as if they were conceptual absolutes (which they are not). Fodor thinks he has found a wedge in the crack of natural selection as a coherent theory, but it seems more than likely that the crack is already accounted for in the actual way in which evolution takes place in the actual world.
posted by ornate insect at 10:55 AM on May 6

I forgot to mention in my response above that Fodor is a heavy-hitter. Even though I disagree with him on this, he's worth paying attention to. Despite his brilliance, his argumentative style is very round-about and difficult to read. Alas readable philosophers are rare.
posted by McLir at 11:04 AM on May 6

I think this post is missing some context -

Cognitive science is interdisciplinary and philosophers have made significant contributions to the study of the mind (e.g. Philosophy of Mind debates)

Fodor has been active as a cognitive scientist for quite some time

Fodor has been debating others about the nature of the mind (e.g. Pinker) for quite some time

This is broadening of an earlier argument about the mind and evolutionary psychology, and is an extension of an earlier debate (with Pinker for one).

My read has been that Fodor is saying that it is *not appropriate to invoke natural selection as an evolutionary rationale for types of human behavior* - and this is directed at Pinker - for example, this quote from Fodor:

"The literature of Psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalisation: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature’s behaviour is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalise the behaviour if it were the creature’s motive. Pinker’s book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start. … [H]ere he is on why we like to read fiction: ‘Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?’"

Fodor is saying it isn't appropriate to rationalize the reasons for our exhibiting behavior in this way - here, the reason due to natural selection of *why we like to read fiction* - to finish the quote:

"Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having 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? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance."

This just seems to be Fodor striking at the *use* of natuaral selection (in evolutionary psychology) at its core, and is just an extension of his prior debates (with Pinker and others)

For example, from the first link: "Science is about facts, not norms; it might tell us how we are, but it couldn’t tell us what is wrong with how we are. There couldn’t be a science of the human condition." Fodor is saying we can't use / it's not appropriate to invoke natural selection to try to explain why we end up being miserable sometimes, or depressed - even though others (Pinker) invoke natural selection to try to explain a host of other human behaviors. Note that Fodor doesn't argue against inheritance / genetics / phylogeny, rather he argues against assigning a cause (natural selection) to specific human behaviors.

This is more an attack on the *use* of natural selection in evolutionary psychology to infer the cause of specific behaviors:

"Evolutionary psychology ... attempt(s) to explain why we are so-and-so by reference to what being so-and-so buys for us, or what it would have bought for our ancestors. ‘We like telling stories because telling stories exercises the imagination and an imagination would have been a good thing for a hunter-gatherer to have.’ ‘We don’t approve of eating grandmother because having her around to baby-sit was useful in the hunter-gatherer ecology.’ ‘We like music because singing together strengthened the bond between the hunters and the gatherers (and/or between the hunter-gatherer grownups and their hunter-gatherer offspring)’. ‘We talk by making noises and not by waving our hands; that’s because hunter-gatherers lived in the savannah and would have had trouble seeing one another in the tall grass.’ ‘We like to gossip because knowing who has been up to what is important when fitness depends on co-operation in small communities.’ ‘We don’t all talk the same language because that would make us more likely to interbreed with foreigners (which would be bad because it would weaken the ties of hunter-gatherer communities).’ ‘We don’t copulate with our siblings because that would decrease the likelihood of interbreeding with foreigners (which would be bad because, all else being equal, heterogeneity is good for the gene pool).’ I’m not making this up, by the way. Versions of each of these theories can actually be found in the adaptationist literature. But, in point of logic, this sort of explanation has to stop somewhere. Not all of our traits can be explained instrumentally; there must be some that we have simply because that’s the sort of creature we are. And perhaps it’s unnecessary to remark that such explanations are inherently post hoc (Gould called them ‘just so stories’); or that, except for the prestige they borrow from the theory of natural selection, there isn’t much reason to believe that any of them is true."

It causes me some concern that replies directed at Fodor are not cutting him some slack. Imagine the claims in the quote above were made about physical charactisics instead on mental / psychological ones. Imagine scientists were inferring causality due to natural selection for things like why we have *five* fingers (why not six?) or *two* lungs (why not one?) but only *one* heart (why not two?), etc. This is about whether it is appropriate to invoke natural selection to explain the cause of some aspect of our condition, not an attack on evolution in general.
posted by mahniart at 11:19 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]

mahniart: My reading of the article, especially after reading his two responses, is that he is jumping off from a critique of evolutionary psychology (which I certainly support that effort) to a critique of Natural Selection in general. Otherwise, extended arguments about pigs, foxes and polar bears are non-sequitors.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 11:27 AM on May 6

languagehat: It's not a matter of everybody sticking to their last, it's a matter of what it takes to do science.

True, but sometimes amateurs can make, even in this day and age, important contributions to science. And, as mahniart points out, Fodor is hardly an amateur. That's not to say he's right (I don't have the expertise to judge it).
posted by Kattullus at 11:28 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

But natural selection, since it is incremental and cumulative, can’t do that sort of thing

I stopped reading right there. If you purportedly believe in evolution but then through that phrase around, you obviously have no bloody idea what you're talking about. But natural selection DID 'do that sort of thing' in multitudes of organisms many different times over.
posted by ZaneJ. at 11:31 AM on May 6

mahniart--In the London Review article linked to, Fodor is making claims about the conceptual and empirical coherence of natural selection as a theory. His view is that there are conceptual and empirical cracks in certian key aspects of natural selection, and his argument encompasses much more than just "evolutionary psychology." For instance, he spends a great deal of time on phenotypes and how they are selected: white polar bears, curly tailed foxes bred for tameness. So while I don't disagree that his earlier debates about cognitive science and evolutionary psychology are important, the fact is that his article is aimed at natural selection as a whole. (The question for me becomes one of distinguishing what is empirical from what is conceptual in his argument, and furthermore in distinguishing what is conceptually valid from what is merely conceptually confused.)
posted by ornate insect at 11:31 AM on May 6 [1 favorite]

John Ruskin was apparently unable to consummate his marriage to Effie Gray, one of the beauties of her day, because years of contemplating the glories of the female form as embodied in classical sculpture had left him completely unprepared for the discovery on his wedding night that women have pubic hair.

Jerry Fodor seems to have been similarly unhinged and rendered incapable of coming to an understanding of modern evolutionary theory by the fact that natural selection in eukaryotes is now formulated in terms of DNA, which makes up genes, that are in turn segregated into varying numbers of usually paired chromosomes able to exchange material during meiosis, so that genes assort completely independently only if they are on separate chromosomes, and are very hard indeed to pry apart if they are close together on the same chromosome.

Otherwise, how are we to account for his astonishing and utterly pathetic failure to grasp the idea of linkage?

On the one hand, foxes that were bred for tameness also tended to share a number of other phenotypic traits. Unlike their feral cousins, they tend to evolve floppy ears, brown moulting, grey hairs, short curly tails, short legs and piebald coloration (in particular, white flashes).
...

But the ancillary phenotypic effects of selection for tameness seem to be perfectly arbitrary. In particular, they apparently aren’t adaptations; there isn’t any teleological explanation – any explanation in terms of fitness – as to why domesticated animals tend to have floppy ears. They just do.

Effie Gray annulled her marriage to Ruskin-- after five years she was still a virgin-- and went on to marry painter John Millais and have eight children by him. Ruskin suffered a nervous breakdown when his suit of teenaged Rose La Touche was opposed by her parents, who had the wisdom to ask Effie what she thought of the idea, and he seems to have died a virgin.

On the basis of this essay, I expect Fodor's innocence to be equally invincible.
posted by jamjam at 11:38 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]

jamjam--women have pubic hair?
posted by ornate insect at 11:40 AM on May 6

The fact that you are some sort of Two Cultures mouthbreather does not excuse you from culpability for not following the literature--at least to a degree sufficient to claim your own soapbox.

Exactly, exactly. Even geniuses, though, are prone to the kind of stupefying ignorance shown in this thread towards philosophy of science — hence Richard Feynman: "Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." The fact that sdodd doesn't understand what philosophy of science is, and that languagehat condescendingly imagines philosophy's contribution to science to be that of an "amateur outsider", and that even Feynman (Feynman!) couldn't think outside his discipline sufficiently to understand the value of subjecting it to philosophical analysis... this is all proof of the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach. Science is too important to be left to scientists.
posted by game warden to the events rhino at 11:41 AM on May 6 [3 favorites]

game warden to the events rhino--I've seen a variation on that quote by Feynman that runs "aesthetics is as useful to artists as ornithology is to birds," and will now have to google to see which quote came first, etc.
posted by ornate insect at 11:44 AM on May 6

he starts out on a decent path in the early early introduction and he quickly devolves into a semantic and grossly simplified understanding of modern evolutionary theory.

this is a man looking for a proverbial fight as a way to boost his book sales: Finally, Coyne and Kitcher ask how anything but adaptationism can explain the match between a creature’s phenotype and its ecology. This question is entirely pertinent. But they will have to read about it in Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini (forthcoming).

indeed his lack of understanding of modern genetics appears to be the source of his purported "incoherence" within Natural Selection: Their second claim is that there is no incoherence (or, anyhow, none of the sort that I alleged) in selection theory as correctly understood. They don’t, however, say what the correct understanding is. Rather, they offer some potted polar bear history: ‘White polar bears . . . more camouflaged than their brown confrères, were better at sneaking up on seals, were better fed and left more offspring.’ I don’t know whether this story is true (neither, I imagine, do they), but let’s suppose it is. They ask, rhetorically, whether I think it’s incoherent. Well, of course I don’t, but that’s because they’ve somehow left out the Darwin bit. To get it back in, you have to add that the white bears were selected ‘because of’ their improved camouflage, and that the white bears were ‘selected for’ their improved camouflage: i.e. that the improved camouflage ‘explains’ why the white bears survived and flourished. But now we get the incoherence back too. What Darwin failed to notice (and what paradigm adaptationists continue to fail to notice) is that the theory of natural selection entails none of these. In fact, the theory of natural selection leaves it wide open what (if anything) the white bears were selected for. Here’s the argument. Consider any trait X that was locally coextensive with being white in the polar bear’s evolutionary ecology. Selection theory is indifferent between ‘the bears were selected for being white’ and ‘the bears were selected for being X.’ What’s ‘incoherent’ is to admit that the theory of natural selection can’t distinguish among locally coextensive properties while continuing to claim that natural selection explains why polar bears are white. Do not reply: ‘But it’s just obvious that, if the situation was as Blackburn et al describe, then it was the whiteness of the bears that mattered.’ The question is not what is obvious to the theorist; the question is what follows from the theory. Why is it so hard to get this very rudimentary distinction across?

He's making a semantic argument using overly flamboyant language (as philosophers are wont to do) and, as scientists are wont to do, i believe, very smart people like Jerry Coyne et al are picking particular bits to critique because they are not philosophers and have "better things to do" with their time than getting into an intellectual pissing match. Fodor isn't lambasting the theory of natural selection he seems to be failing to accept the constraints that genetics places on natural selection and thus calls this "incoherence" within the theory.

Fodor's academic preening is ghastly and only serves to provide creationists with greater fodder in their endeavors to discredit modern evolutionary theory.
posted by wantwit at 11:47 AM on May 6

From Katullus's wikipedia link on Lorenzo's oil: The clinical studies of LO have been criticized because, for ethical reasons, they did not compare treatment with placebo control groups.

Yes, it is very ethical to give dangerous treatments to sick people without being able to determine whether they provide benefit or not, because our a priori knowledge is perfect and so doing randomized studies is just an unethical waste of time. It's not like the special diet or the selection factors used as indications could responsible for the apparently better outcomes. No, it must be the oil, otherwise the movie of the week would have no hero.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:49 AM on May 6

Fodor's academic preening is ghastly and only serves to provide creationists with greater fodder in their endeavors to discredit modern evolutionary theory.

Gratuitous bolding and hyperbole aside, please stop poisoning the well with references to the creationists. They have absolutely nothing to do with this debate.
posted by nasreddin at 11:54 AM on May 6 [2 favorites]

More to the point of the post, the Fodor's article is rife with his contempt for the idea that environments shape phenotypes. I'd say his main tool of criticism is scorn, not logic. "How could anything that biologists are so attached to and put some much faith in be all that good?" The implication that the only reason biologists cling to evolution is because it just seems necessary is a sort of meta-critique. But, yes, scientists are quite in love with theories that explain and predict. The bizarre thing is that Fodor seems to believe evolution has no predictive value! I think we can pretty much demonstrate evolution in the laboratory, albeit with micro-organisms, not with large mammals. Nonetheless, he ignores this fact in his rush to weaken the reader's appreciation for the theory.

The guy ought to find another hobby horse. This one's a little rickety.
posted by Mental Wimp at 11:58 AM on May 6

Fodor's academic preening is ghastly and only serves to provide creationists with greater fodder in their endeavors to discredit modern evolutionary theory.

Oh, for fuck's sake. Darwin provides creationists with fodder in their endeavors to discredit modern evolutionary theory. Nature provides creationists with fodder in their endeavors to discredit modern evolutionary theory. Getting up in the morning and drinking a cup of coffee provides creationists with fodder in their endeavors to discredit modern evolutionary theory. The sincere philosophical questioning of a man who obviously believes in evolutionary theory is not some kind of perfidious betrayal of all that is good and secular.
posted by dyoneo at 12:00 PM on May 6 [5 favorites]

True, but sometimes amateurs can make, even in this day and age, important contributions to science.

No offense to you or the Odone's, but stumbling on a product that may be useful to the treatment of a disease is not doing science. If I set my microwave in some weird way and caused a reaction that turned out to be a harbinger of a whole new way of harnessing energy, that would be great, but it wouldn't make me a scientist, or someone whose opinions about science are worth paying attention to.

languagehat ~~condescendingly~~ accurately imagines philosophy's contribution to science to be that of an "amateur outsider"

FTFY.

Science is too important to be left to scientists.

Translation: We philosophers need grant money, dammit!
posted by languagehat at 12:01 PM on May 6

The bizarre thing is that Fodor seems to believe evolution has no predictive value! I think we can pretty much demonstrate evolution in the laboratory, albeit with micro-organisms, not with large mammals.

Like Katullus, I'm not qualified to judge Fodor's correctness, but this is a pretty glaring misrepresentation of his argument. He's not opposing evolution. He's opposing a particular account of natural selection, and he's not the first person (including mainstream scientists) to have done so.
posted by nasreddin at 12:03 PM on May 6

mental wimp--I think Fodor appreciates the fact that environments shape phenotypes, but does not feel the logical necessity of that "shaping" has been adequately explained. He thinks that to say environments "shape" something is to invite a causal mysterium, and in this his argument is very Humean. In fact, it may be that it's just Hume's skepticism about causality as logical inference applied to the theory of natural selection--although Fodor insists his argument is not epistemological, but genuinely substanitive.
posted by ornate insect at 12:05 PM on May 6

KirkJobSluder / ornate insect: I agree, the argument has expanded a critique of natural selection (and how it is used at times to explain *specific* behaviors / the motives of specific traits). I think it's important to look at what has happened to get him to arguing this point. Pinker's books have been a real catalyst and it's important to look at the claims Pinker has made to see why Fodor would be arguing against them (especially since they do have some common theories about the mind).

Let's say scientist A says "the mind has these properties", scientist B says "the mind has these properties, and the reasons these properties have come into existence is X, Y, and Z", scientist A says "you can't prove that it is for those specific reasons", scientist B says "there is a general theory that supports my claims in general for the reasons for existence of these types of properties", so scientist A says "the general theory is not a good theory if it can be used in such a way / if the specific claims you make cannot be tested".

jamjam: I think arbitrary effects of natural selection due to linkage *helps* his argument. Scientist B says "property Q has been selected for because of reason X", scientist A points out that "selection for property R results in additional arbitrary properties S, T, and U" - and that "one can not prove that property Q did not result as an arbitrary property of selection for property P". Linkage *hurts* assigning cause for the selection of traits.
posted by mahniart at 12:06 PM on May 6

SCIENCE: It works, bitches!
posted by sdodd at 12:06 PM on May 6

The sincere philosophical questioning of a man who obviously believes in evolutionary theory is not some kind of perfidious betrayal of all that is good and secular.

i never said it was a betrayal so don't put words in my mouth. all i did was state the obvious. What is perfidious is how grossly out of touch he is with evolutionary theory. Let this be a lesson to all of us biologists to not "distill" the modern synthesis too much. He's trying to sell a book...i think philosophers should have to file whether or not they have "no competing interests" in the outcomes of their "research" when they publish much like scientists have to announce this these days for scientific integrity.
posted by wantwit at 12:07 PM on May 6

jamjam: I think arbitrary effects of natural selection due to linkage *helps* his argument. Scientist B says "property Q has been selected for because of reason X", scientist A points out that "selection for property R results in additional arbitrary properties S, T, and U" - and that "one can not prove that property Q did not result as an arbitrary property of selection for property P". Linkage *hurts* assigning cause for the selection of traits.

but that's my point mahl is that modern evolutionary theory that is constrained by linkage and our understanding of genetics IS consistent with what he calls "incoherence" but it's only incoherent if you don't understand MODERN biology.
posted by wantwit at 12:09 PM on May 6

i never said it was a betrayal so don't put words in my mouth. all i did was state the obvious. What is perfidious is how grossly out of touch he is with evolutionary theory. Let this be a lesson to all of us biologists to not "distill" the modern synthesis too much. He's trying to sell a book...i think philosophers should have to file whether or not they have "no competing interests" in the outcomes of their "research" when they publish much like scientists have to announce this these days for scientific integrity.

Dude, shut up. Jerry Fodor is one of the most important living analytic philosophers, and I'm sure he doesn't care about selling any more books. This is a cowardly and contemptible way to argue.
posted by nasreddin at 12:11 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Mental Wimp: Yes, it is very ethical to give dangerous treatments to sick people without being able to determine whether they provide benefit or not, because our a priori knowledge is perfect and so doing randomized studies is just an unethical waste of time.

You're aware that the study you're talking about was conducted by doctors, not Mr. and Mrs. Odone? Now, whether Lorenzo's Oil turns out to be a blind alley in the search for a cure for adrenoleukodystrophy (which it may not be, as the Wikipedia summary of the current state of research points out: "recent studies by Dr. Hugo Moser have found evidence that use of the oil by asymptomatic patients may delay the onset of symptoms significantly"), my point was that in this well-known case amateurs made a valuable contribution to a valuable contribution to medical science.

languagehat: stumbling on a product that may be useful to the treatment of a disease is not doing science

Okay, I'm relying on the second hand retelling of the story of the Odones, but it was from a neuroscientist who's working on coming up with treatments for a similar condition in children, for what that's worth...

From what I understand the Odone's reviewed the existing literature, did some experiments on themselves until they'd found a mixture that did what they wanted it to do, and then gave this to a doctor who ran studies and found the mixture, dubbed Lorenzo's Oil, to be effective in treating adrenoleukodystrophy. They got no funding, but sympathetic scientists gave them access to the equipment and materials they needed. You may have a stricter definition of science than myself, but I think this counts.
posted by Kattullus at 12:14 PM on May 6

Regarding the persistant myth on this thread that the real problem here is that Fodor is not a working biologist, it assumes that if we just left science to scientists, there would be no fundamental disagreement! Yet if one studies the history of (not the philosophy of) science, one sees that this notion of unconflicted, uncontested mutual agreement between and among scientists is little more than a fanciful fiction. Indded, scientific disagreement (either macro/theoretical or micro/applicable) is the engine that keeps it relevant and interesting.

Furthermore, no less than Einstein chose to keep himself engaged with philosophers of science (many of whom, like Mach, Popper, Polanyi, Carnap, had backgrounds in science and especially mathematics).
posted by ornate insect at 12:17 PM on May 6 [2 favorites]

Dude, shut up. Jerry Fodor is one of the most important living analytic philosophers, and I'm sure he doesn't care about selling any more books. This is a cowardly and contemptible way to argue.

if there's something that i've learned from inside academia is that academics constantly struggle for their continued relevance and rarely fade gracefully. I have no doubt he's a smart man; but my implicit point still stands; thank you for attacking not my point but the "disrespect" that my point impressed upon you.

this was my argument, nasreddine: What is perfidious is how grossly out of touch he is with evolutionary theory. Let this be a lesson to all of us biologists to not "distill" the modern synthesis too much. The rest was my impression considering he's not a buffoon who would start a fire just to start a fire.
posted by wantwit at 12:24 PM on May 6

It's interesting to me that we'll often hear scientists telling philosophers to STFU about science, as they obviously aren't well versed enough to do so; but we don't hear many philosophers responding similarly about how scientists play around with (or outright ignore) philosophical implications all the time without really having a clue as to what they are doing.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:29 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

but my implicit point still stands; thank you for attacking not my point but the "disrespect" that my point impressed upon you.

Next time, if you would like to argue a point, I would recommend not surrounding it with irrelevant personal attacks and vaguely accusatory handwaving.
posted by nasreddin at 12:30 PM on May 6

wantwit: What is amusing is how grossly out of touch you are with the status of Fodor in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Say what you will about his article in LRB, but he is in no way struggling for continued relevance nor does he need to sell books.
posted by tractorfeed at 12:32 PM on May 6

game warden to the events rhino: On the other hand, Feynman was perfectly happy to give a nod to philosophy on other things.

But, the field has such a high bullshit to wisdom ratio that the everyday average person involved in research is best served by waiting for the once-a-generation gem to trickle into the discourse. And you know, I got piled on with a whole bunch of the best writing in that topic, and it really had no practical influence on the way I constructed my research. The biggest change is an open door for disciplined qualitiative research and grounded theory in some fields.

mahniart: But you know something, evolutionary biologists are quite aware of the fact that they are working with organisms with complex internal genetic linkages acting a constantly changing dynamic environment. But there is no evidence to date that some other mechanism other than differential reproductive success across phenotypic variance within a population resulting in changes in phenotype frequencies over generations is driving the observed phenomena.

ornate insect: Regarding the persistant myth on this thread that the real problem here is that Fodor is not a working biologist, it assumes that if we just left science to scientists, there would be no fundamental disagreement!

Well, I agree that the real problem here isn't that Fodor is not a working biologist. The problem to me at least is that Fodor is arguing on the basis on the basis of the metaphors and narratives we use to communicate about natural selection in publications like the London Review of Books and not about the quantitative models that emerged from the grand synthesis of the early 20th century. In many ways, it feels like he's arguing against a 19th century version of the theory.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:38 PM on May 6

That article is difficult to follow. I'll have to read it later. The thing that really confuses me is how it came to be in a review of books-- is this typical? I just had a different impression of them from my admittedly very limited experience with them.
posted by Tehanu at 12:38 PM on May 6

This is about whether it is appropriate to invoke natural selection to explain the cause of some aspect of our condition, not an attack on evolution in general.

The tl;dr crowd is really ruining this thread. I think it's important to note that evo-psych is his principle adversary here, which is a field with a depressing lack of data-hounds, lab-coats, and reality-confronters.
posted by anotherpanacea at 12:42 PM on May 6

spacemanstix--Mary Midgley is one philosopher who has spent considerable time detailing the ways in which some scientists and some philosophers have sometimes mistaken scientism (the view that science is omnicompetant to all questions) for actual science. (She sees sociobiology as an especially contested area for this kind of confusion on all sides, as it seems to assume the line between the social/cultural and the biological/natural is either irrelevant or that the former is always easily conceptually subsumed in the latter; but that's too big a topic to go into here.)
posted by ornate insect at 12:43 PM on May 6

it assumes that if we just left science to scientists, there would be no fundamental disagreement! Yet if one studies the history of (not the philosophy of) science, one sees that this notion of unconflicted, uncontested mutual agreement between and among scientists is little more than a fanciful fiction.

It assumes no such thing. Of course scientists disagree, and of course that's how science progresses. That doesn't mean nonscientists disagreeing with scientists have the same standing.

All you "Fodor doesn't need to sell books" people are protesting too much. Of course he's interested in selling books; that in no way negates his possible contributions or diminishes his standing. No matter how rich people get, they still want more money, and no matter how famous and well respected scholars become, they still want to be relevant and sell books.
posted by languagehat at 12:50 PM on May 6

Quotes from Fodor, hopefully distilling his critique, and hopefully illustrating that he isn't outright rejecting evolution / Darwinism:

"Certainly I have no objection to the form of its argument: If there are few or no examples of laws of selection on offer, that could be because there are few or no such laws; or it could be that, there are lots and lots of them but we aren’t smart enough to find them out. And it’s quite true that I disapprove, vehemently, of arguments that purport to draw metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises. Still more vehemently do I disapprove of ignoring what otherwise seems to be successful science on the grounds of merely philosophical scruples.

On the other hand, it’s crucial in the present case not just that there are bona fide successful adaptationist explanations, but also that such explanations are bona fide nomological. If they aren’t, then the success of the explanations is not a reason to think that there are laws of selection. In fact, I’m inclined to think that explanations of phenotypes in terms of their selection histories generally aren’t nomological and that they don’t claim or even aspire to be. What they are is precisely what they seem on the face of them; they’re historical explanations."

...

"Many paradigm scientific theories are, I think, best understood as historical narratives;
Consider, inter alia: theories about lunar geography, theories about why the dinosaur became extinct, theories about the origin of the Grand Canyon, or of the Solar System or, come to think of it, of the universe. All these projects (and, surely many others) are post hoc searches for chains of sufficient causal conditions whose satisfaction would explain the occurrence of the event in question. If I’m right, theories about how heritable traits evolve are also of this kind.

That’s really just to say that the various mechanisms of adaptation don’t themselves constitute a natural kind for purposes of evolutionary explanation; not, at least, if the model for explanation is subsumption under nomologically necessary generalizations. But if there are no nomologically necessary generalizations about the mechanisms of adaptation as such, then the theory of Natural Selection reduces to a banal a truth: `If a kind of creature flourishes in a kind of situation, then there must be something about such creatures, (or about such situations, or about both) in virtue of which it does so.’ Well, of course there must. Even Creationists agree with that.

None of this should, however, lighten the heart of anybody in Kansas; not even a little. In particular, I’ve provided not the slightest reason to doubt the central Darwinist theses of the common origin and mutability of species. Nor have I offered the slightest reason to doubt that we and chimpanzees had (relatively) recent common ancestors. Nor I do suppose that the intentions of a designer, intelligent or otherwise, are among the causally sufficient conditions that good historical narratives would appeal to in order to explain why a certain kind of creature has the phenotypic traits it does (saving, of course, cases like Granny and her zinnias.) It is, in short, one thing to wonder whether evolution happens; it’s quite another thing to wonder whether adaptation is the mechanism by which evolution happens. Well, evolution happens; the evidence that it does is overwhelming. I blush to have to say that so late in the day; but these are bitter times."

...

Please note that in the above, Fodor isn't attacking Big Bang Theory, I don't want to open another can of worms.
posted by mahniart at 12:51 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

kirkjobsludder: In many ways, it feels like he's arguing against a 19th century version of the theory.

I agree, and I think Fodor would agree. He seems to be saying the conceptual framework of natural selection, as traditionally conceived, is cracking under both conceptual and empirical developments. He thinks developments like evo-devo offer a possible new paradigmatic challenge to the existing conceptual framework, where otheres (like Dennett) seem to think they merely fill out and further validate the existing conceptual framework.

The danger for Fodor in saying that a paradigm shift may be at hand is that he also must acknowledge that we don't know enough yet to make out what this change will entail or include. In other words, his speculation may be necessary but premature, or unhelpful and too ambiguous to matter. Either way, only time will tell, as science requires experimentation, time and consensus-building. Maybe 100 years from know Fodor will be seen as a visionary or maybe he will be seen merely as a bit of a harmless crank on the topic of where theoretical biology is headed.
posted by ornate insect at 12:54 PM on May 6

My 12-year philosophical career started from Dennetian optimism to grudgingly agreeing more and more with Fodor in many of his main points (about concepts, atomist-not-nativist). His solutions are not real solutions, but he is great at digging out unpopular problems in popular theories. He is playing the historical role of philosopher as a gadfly and has done at least for cognitive science a great service by doing so. It is just like his style to go after evolution after so much of philosophy of mind has hand-waved evolution to explain whatever needs a proper reason to exist.

(I haven't read the article yet, but this thread looks very familiar; like mine and other students' first reactions when reading Fodor: Shut your smarmy mouth and let us do what we want to do and how we want to do it, we will find the solution if you just stop picking on us. It is a healthy response, but be prepared to like him eventually. He is one of the good guys.)
posted by Free word order! at 12:57 PM on May 6

ornate insect, undoubtedly there are good critiques going on. Thanks for sharing that. I was referring more to what seems to be a double standard in the discussion. Philosophers are told to keep their distance in the discussion on science because they are ill-equipped, while scientists are often running around acting as if the philosophy they are doing is just an innate part of the scientific process to begin with, or isn't important enough to engage at all. Most philosophers aren't trying to tell scientists to stop engaging philosophy, because it isn't their area of expertise; but rather, to become better at it in the context of their broader profession. Scientists too often have an elitist demeanor, while philosophers generally desire a smoother integration (as integration exists already, the question is whether or not scientists are doing it well). It's sociologically interesting, albeit frustrating.
posted by SpacemanStix at 12:59 PM on May 6

You're aware that the study you're talking about was conducted by doctors,

Kattulus, I wasn't snarking on your point, which I agree with. Lots of "amateurs" have contributed a great deal to science, not only in medicine, but in astronomy, biology, and chemistry, to name a few. And note that the PhD degree is a doctorate in philosophy for a good reason. Science is hanging around the lab, titrating fluids or reading a balance, but lies in the thought behind doing those things.

I just think that the whole Lorenzo's oil thing is really pretty unproven and was hyped up by the media for it's movie-of-the-week quality. Further, I'm not sure if the fact that doctors did the study is supposed to lend it credence or discredit it in your mind. If by doctors you mean physicians, well, they receive zero training in how to design, manage, or analyze studies, so I sorta look for ones conducted by professionals. With controls. Preferably randomized. With meaningful clinical endpoints. And valid statistical analysis. But, de gustibus non disputandum, 'n' all.
posted by Mental Wimp at 1:08 PM on May 6

From the point of view of a biologist, Fodor's article is pretty boring. It seems that he has arrived late to the party, and has rediscovered an obsolete notion of just-so-story "selectionism" that was pretty decidedly put to rest by Gould & Lewontin (and subsequent discoveries in molecular genetics) back when most modern biologists were still in kneepants. For some incomprehensible reason, Fodor has decided that natural selection equates to that kind of naive selectionism, and thus he insists that the way essentially all modern biologists understand evolutionary biology is not really natural selection, but presumably something else (although he doesn't seem able to quite figure out what). Perhaps this kind of semantic hair-splitting is the sort of thing that is of interest to philosophers and literary critics, but to a scientist it seems pretty pointless.

Natural selection favors genetic variations that results (through a complex process of development and interaction with the environment) in phenotypic traits that enhance the propagation of those genes. It seems that Fodor is upset that this does not allow one to definitively blame those aspects of the human condition with which we are presently upset upon a mismatch between the prehistoric environment and our current conditions. Well, no, it doesn't, but that isn't really what the theory is for, so Fodor comes across pretty much as a guy who is upset because a screwdriver doesn't make a very good chisel.

No, we don't yet know "How often does a phenotype carry information not about a creature’s environment but about aspects of its endogenous structure?" although from way that natural selection interacts with genetics and development, we would tend to guess, "almost always." This clearly is dissatisfying to Fodor. But to a scientist, the role of a theory is not to provide an explanation for everything that we might like to have explained, but rather to provide a framework for discovery. Whether evolutionary theory, in combination with a truly comprehensive knowledge of the developmental link between genotype and phenotype will someday enable us to answer questions like "Why does Mr. Fodor feel 'malaise'?" seems of little relevance, considering that we don't yet really understand development all that well yet, and won't anytime in the near future.
posted by trrll at 1:09 PM on May 6 [2 favorites]

Of course scientists disagree, and of course that's how science progresses. That doesn't mean nonscientists disagreeing with scientists have the same standing.

Nor do all "nonscientists" deserve equal standing; i.e. my appeal to authority here is that Fodor is an informed, scientifically minded, empirical, and even (for what it's worth) athiestic "nonscientist" who is critiquing what he sees as some flaws in the theoretical particulars of natural selection.

I realize this is a loaded topic in today's culture wars, and I happen to disagree with his critique, but at least in this case I do not think reflexively dismissing him outright helps the matter much.
posted by ornate insect at 1:14 PM on May 6

"Sheesh. Somebody needs to learn some basic probability.

Yeah, even Popper abandoned his strict falsifiability model later in his life and moved toward an embrace of probabilistic models which were at odds with the Vienna school.
posted by klangklangston at 1:17 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Next time, if you would like to argue a point, I would recommend not surrounding it with irrelevant personal attacks and vaguely accusatory handwaving.

nasreddine, i made no personal attack. i just noted that in his rebuttal to Jerry Coyne (1st rebuttal link) he mentioned that Jerry will have to wait until his book comes out "soon" (his own word(s)) to learn more of what he thinks. nothing i said was defamatory or hand-waving and you became very offended. i'm sorry for offending you but I'd do it again if i had to to get the point across. :)
posted by wantwit at 1:26 PM on May 6

SpacemanStix: It's interesting to me that we'll often hear scientists telling philosophers to STFU about science, as they obviously aren't well versed enough to do so; but we don't hear many philosophers responding similarly about how scientists play around with (or outright ignore) philosophical implications all the time without really having a clue as to what they are doing.

Well, granted I'm no longer a working scientist, but to me at least it's more an argument between wannabe's on both sides on metafilter.

That's not to say that there is not conflict out there. But Popper once upon a time made a similar claim that Evolution was teleological and non-falsifiable, and was forced to recant when he was politely told that he misunderstood the grand synthesis.

mahniart: But the problem is that he has his foot on both sides here. He wants to say on the one hand that evolution is partly right as a historical narrative, and on the other hand reject the mechanism entirely on philosophical grounds, while saying that rejecting good science on philosophical grounds is a bad thing.

And here he has the cart before the horse, because to an evolutionary biologist, the mechanism is strong while the individual histories are weak. And to beat that horse a bit deader, the mechanism is differential reproductive success across a range of phenotypes in a population result in changes in phenotype frequency in the population over multiple generations.

To pound the point home, Fodor keeps coming back to history, history, history. The theory of evolution is not about the fucking history. The history of pigs, foxes and polar bears is gravy.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 1:28 PM on May 6

I do not think reflexively dismissing him outright helps the matter much.

I'm not reflexively dismissing him outright; Fodor

Jerry Fodor, on Why Pigs Don't Have Wings May 6, 2008 7:08 AM Subscribe

Jerry Fodor, on Why Pigs Don't Have Wings
May 6, 2008 7:08 AM Subscribe