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    The McMaster Department of Philosophy has now put together the following notice commemorating Barry: Barry Allen: A Philosophical Life Barry…

Dupre on “What Darwin Got Wrong” Got Wrong

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–SEE UPDATES, COMMENTS NOW INVITED

He joins the chorus.   If anyone competent in the philosophical and scientific issues has had anything favorable to say about the argument of this book anywhere, please send me a link.

UPDATE:  A couple of readers have already flagged the review by the biologist Richard Lewontin, the arch anti-adaptationist, as being somewhat more favorable than others, but I have not had a chance to read it yet myself.

ANOTHER:  Mohan Matthen, a philosopher of biology at the University of Toronto, writes:

Lewontin's review of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini in the New York Review of Books is perhaps the most sympathetic response by a competent biologist or philosopher of biology.

 

I assume that one reason why Lewontin is sympathetic to Fodor is that Fodor cited anti-adaptationism when he initially started in on his opposition to the use of the theory of natural selection in philosophical psychology.  (He and Chomsky got attacked by Pinker for this.)  But adaptationism (which, in one form or another, is very widely accepted among biologists) is a much more committed position than the Theory of Natural Selection: you can reject the former and accept the latter, and this is what Gould and Lewontin actually did.  (Their Spandrels paper certainly did not say that Darwin's use of natural selection was fundamentally mistaken.)  However that may be, Lewontin seems not to take strong exception to the fact that Fodor is not just anti-adaptationist, but opposed to most of the work that TNS does in biology.

 

Lewontin attributes to Fodor the view that natural selection is not an entity that causes evolutionary change.  He is sympathetic to what he takes to be Fodor's stand against the reification of natural selection — he denies, and he thinks that Fodor also denies, that natural selection is a cause of evolutionary change in the way that gravitation is a cause of planetary motion.  (Ironically, a stand against this sort of reification is one of the pillars of the "statistical interpretation of natural selection", which has been advanced in recent years by Denis Walsh, André Ariew, and myself.  We are against reifying natural selection, but just for the record, we are strong proponents of TNS!)  However, this is not what Fodor is on about.  Fodor's view is that there is no such thing as selection-for — he thinks that it is incoherent, for example, to say that the heart was selected for its pumping action, but not selected for making rhythmic noises.  Lewontin seems to have missed this point, or to have been blinded to its silliness because of a superficial similarity to the anti-adaptationist programme.

I invite comments from others well-informed about these issues; ALL COMMENTS MUST INCLUDE A FULL NAME IN THE SIGNATURE LINE as well as a valid e-mail address.  Comments may take awhile to appear, so submit your comment only once.

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11 responses to “Dupre on “What Darwin Got Wrong” Got Wrong”

  1. John Dupre

    It's worth noting that there isn't just one argument in the Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini book. The very silly one, which has understandably dominated discussion of the book, is the one to the conclusion that natural selection is an incoherent concept. Most of the book, however, is devoted to some perfectly sensible arguments to the effect that evolution is a historical process subject to many causal influences, and that natural selection is just one of these. Mary Midgley, writing in the Guardian, seems to have liked this thesis so much that she managed entirely to miss the silly thesis. Lewontin, as I read his review, managed to read the silly thesis as empirical rather than conceptual, and provided some characteristically compelling examples to show just how difficult it is to distinguish empirically between correlated candidate causes of fitness difference. Unfortunately this isn't what Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini are really saying.

    The pity about all this is that most of the book is saying something plausible and important. But it would be much better, especially for the non-expert reader, to encounter this without having to navigate around a mountain of nonsense in the middle of the exposition.

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  2. Jonathan Birch

    It's a book of two halves. The first downplays the significance of selection as a cause of evolutionary change, while the second attacks the coherence of "selection for". It's almost irresistible to attribute the sensible first half to Piatelli-Palmarini and the silly second half to Fodor, bearing as it does so strong a resemblance to his 2008 paper "Against Darwinism".

    It's reasonable that philosophical attention has focussed almost exclusively on Fodor's half, because this is by far the more contentious of the two. But I can see why Lewontin, as a biologist, is more interested in the empirical arguments of the first half.

    Have the philosophical reviews been too harsh? No. They haven't been harsh enough. They haven't drawn attention to the strangest thing of all about "What Darwin Got Wrong", viz. that Fodor at no stage gives a convincing impression that he understands, at an elementary level, what the process of evolution by natural selection actually involves. On the contrary, his master argument against the coherence of "selection-for" seems to rest on a basic misunderstanding of the process.

    When Fodor thinks about natural selection, he envisages a filtering mechanism that scrutinizes traits for their contributions to ecological fitness and "selects for" the traits that make the biggest contribution, thereby ensuring that these traits increase in frequency. It’s pivotal to his argument that the “theory of natural selection” posits some kind of black-boxed filter that does the selecting: “If the distribution of traits is produced by filtering the output of a random generator, what is the filter? … We will argue that in fact [Evolutionary Theory] can offer no remotely plausible account of how filtering by natural selection might work” (p. 16).

    Fodor notes that, when one trait is coextensive with another, the filter needs some way of detecting their distinct contributions to fitness. But we can only resolve the components of fitness by evaluating counterfactuals, so how could a black-boxed filter do it? Only a mind, or perhaps a process governed by its own peculiar, counterfactual-grounding laws, could select for a trait without selecting for its correlate. An ordinary causal process cannot do that job.

    Whatever you make of this argument, Fodor is attacking a straw man. For in reality, biologists don't posit a black-boxed filtering mechanism called "natural selection". The idea of natural selection as an agent, "daily and hourly scrutinizing" traits for their contribution to ecological fitness, is metaphor. Darwin's insight was that differential reproductive success due to variation in heritable traits does the job all by itself: "natural selection" is merely a label for this process. There is no need for a further mechanism that "does the selecting".

    In this context, talk of “selection for” is a term of art with a simple definition. To say that a trait is “selected for” is just to say that the trait differentially causes reproductive success. Construed as such, it is obviously coherent.

    Fodor talks as if the workings of natural selection were an enigma to modern biologists. Evolutionary theory, we are told, “relies on an unexplicated notion of selection for” (p. xvii). It “does not articulate the mechanisms of the selection of heritable phenotypic traits; it couldn’t because there are no mechanisms of the selection of heritable phenotypic traits” (p. 114). I wonder if a few hours spent skimming through a textbook (Mark Ridley's "Evolution", for example) might have put these odd misconceptions to rest.

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  3. David Mathers

    I do think this whole fuss illustrates how politicised evolution has become in the US, because of the idiot creationists of course. I mean, yes I'm sure given the reaction its received from competent reviewers the book is pretty bad, or at least contains one very bad argument, but I highly doubt there would have been as much fuss over it if Fodor had written something silly about, say, conceptual issues in quantum mechanics. I doubt in particular that it would have been discussed again and again on this blog as some kind of intellectual scandal. After all, many distinguished academics write silly things outside their area of expertise in their old age, usually without attracting this much fuss, and more generally bad and confused arguments are pretty common. I'm not sure I like the idea that there's something especially reprehensible about making a mistake (even a mistake which could easily have been corrected with a bit more rigour and humility) about evolution simply because there a lot of right-wing religious idiots out there. This seem to distort some of the reviews from scientist who knew very little about the author's previous work into thinking that there must be some deep ideological motivation about protecting human 'specialness' and attacking scary ideas about 'reduction' and 'determinism' involved-something which would seem unlikely to anyone familiar with Fodor's pretty solidly naturalistic other work. I think it would be a shame if Fodor was remembered as 'that guy who said something silly about evolution' rather than as an excellent philosopher of mind, even if he only had himself to blame for it…

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  4. Mohan Matthen

    David Mathers is right. If Fodor had argued that it is contradictory to view simultaneity as relative, and wrote a book entitled "What Einstein Got Wrong", he wouldn't have attracted quite so much outrage. But surely the title of the book wasn't innocent: I can't believe that Fodor didn't mean to resonate with the religious right and to provoke naturalistic thinkers with this his earlier "Against Darwinism". As for being remembered as an excellent philosopher of mind, that will depend on the ultimate fate of his versions of modularity, the Language of Thought thesis, autonomy of psychology, methodological solipsism, etc. — basically, his work in the sixties and seventies. I can't help agreeing with Jonathan Birch, though, that out of respect for his still huge influence in philosophy of mind, the professional reviewers were more gentle than they might have been.

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  5. David Mathers

    To be fair, your probably right about the title probably being designed to attract exactly the kind of creationism-related controversy it has done. So the fault probably lies as much with Fodor as anyone else, but I still found the tone of outrage a bit much. I'm not sure that some of the reviews could have been THAT much harsher, they were all pretty damning of the argument. I suppose they could have gone a bit further into Haker/Williamson, McGinn/Honderich territory and that the book might (I say might since I haven't read it and wouldn't have enough competence in biology and philosophy of biology to asses it if I had) merit even harsher treatment than its received.
    Quite why Fodor should aim for such a reaction with the title is a bit of a mystery. Presumably he doesn't actually want to be associated with creationism, or to invite people to read his book as an attempt to attack naturalism.
    I'm not sure I agree either that someone has to be right to be an important philosopher of mind or that all of Fodor's best work was done in the 60s and 70s. If anything he carried on producing important stuff all the way into the early 90s.

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  6. David Wallace

    Contra some of what's been said, I think that it would have been a comparable intellectual scandal if Fodor wrote something comparably silly, and comparably visible to scientists, about quantum mechanics or relativity, and it would have been comparably embarrassing to philosophers of physics and comparably damaging to the already-shaky reputation of philosophy among scientists.

    The difference, presumably, is that in this case it's a political as well as an intellectual scandal. Academics (while of course having a right to say whatever they like) have a responsibility to consider the consequences of what they say and write, but to a very large extent even politically dangerous and damaging writing is justified if it's actually correct, or at least well-informed; conversely, the misdemeanour of saying something idiotic rises to a felony if saying that idiotic thing also has serious negative consequences.

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  7. Fritz Warfield

    Anyone who thinks it's an open question whether Fodor will be remembered as "an excellent philosopher of mind" either doesn't know the field all that well or is adopting standards by which Chisholm should not be remembered as an excellent epistemologist and Lewis should not be remembered as an excellent metaphysician.

    From my own past interactions with Fodor I suspect he'd prefer that, rather than treating him like an historical figure and/or talking about his age, people carry on the discussions where they might lead (harsh criticism and all). He has, you may have noticed, been willing to respond to critics. For example, the brief reply he and PP wrote to Godfrey-Smith seemed to engage relevantly right on the point at which they have taken the most criticism. Is that reply really incompetent?

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  8. Jonathan Birch

    Fritz Warfield asks whether Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's latest missive to the LRB is "really incompetent". I think the nicest way to answer that is with an analogy.

    At some point in his long and distinguished career, Fodor must have encountered a student who objected that the Language of Thought Hypothesis simply cannot be right, because, when we look inside the brain with MRI, we can *see* that there aren't any words in there. Fodor must know the frustration of trying to work out where to begin with a student whose misunderstandings are so basic.

    Someone needs to take Fodor aside and whisper politely that, to philosophers of biology, he is that student.

    According to Darwin, evolution is caused by differences in reproductive success due to variation in heritable traits. "Natural selection" is a slightly misleading label for this process. In the context of the theory, to say a trait is "selected for" is just to say it differentially contributes to reproductive success.

    If Fodor could grasp this, he would see why his book is so silly. Godfrey-Smith patiently tries to explain it to him in the current LRB. But I fear that nothing any of us say will be enough to elicit a retraction at this stage.

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  9. David Mathers

    Should philosophers actually care about 'the reputation of philosophy among scientists' as supposed to scientists opinions on matters about which they actually have training and expertise? I don't mean here that you can divide intellectual questions neatly into philosophical and scientific ones, or that you don't often need to know about the latest scientific results in order to work on a particular area in philosophy, but merely that I doubt that the average natural scientists knows very much about what's going on in philosophy (or history, or law, or economics)so its doubtful that there opinions on the state of the discipline deserve much epistemic weight. Equally, the hard sciences seem to make progress without much need for help from philosophers (there are exceptions to this I know), and so it doesn't seem a huge problem if their put off paying attention to philosophy because Fodor has given them an unrealistically bad picture of the discipline or something.

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  10. Mohan Matthen

    To be clear, I think that Fodor is an excellent philosopher of mind. I was just addressing the question about whether he'll be remembered — whether he'll be discussed in 2050, for example. I don't think his excellence guarantees that he will be. The field is in flux, and it's hard to say whether the Language of Thought thesis (for example) will retain its current importance. If the particular issues that Fodor contributed to cease to be discussed — maybe even as a result of his having advanced the state of play — he will not be much attended to. If that is the case, he'll be forgotten, but not because he wasn't important in his time.

    Is the F&P-P response to Godfrey-Smith "incompetent"? Well, it might not have been if it had been written in 1970, but as Godfrey-Smith points out in his reply, that particular argument has been shown ineffective again and again. One way of saying why — a variant of G-S's way — is that it neglects Sober's distinction between source laws and consequence laws.

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  11. David Wallace

    @David Mathers: insofar as a given bit of philosophy doesn't pretend to be interdisciplinary with any bit of science, then I guess it doesn't particularly matter. But lots of us do work that does aim to be interdisciplinary, to make contact with issues, and hopefully contribute to progress, in science. I work in philosophy of physics, and most of my reason for doing so is to apply a philosopher's toolkit to conceptual tangles in physics, in a way that makes some contribution to physics proper as much as to philosophy. Plenty of people in philosophy of language or mind or biology (Fodor himself, come to that) have a similar self-conception of their work.

    Insofar as you can't "divide intellectual questions neatly into philosophical and scientific ones", it follows that it's going to be harmful to answering those questions if people in philosophical and scientific disciplines don't talk to each other. And insofar as you "often need to know about the latest scientific results in order to work in a particular area in philosophy", it's very often easier if you can know about them via collaboration (formal or informal) rather than having to become a polymath.

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