Bleg: Fodor and Darwinism

You can check out a draft of the paper from his website. I should confess that I haven't had time to read it either. For those who have the time, now they also have the link...

I think there might be some effort to overhype the event and Fodor's argument. He's not about to give up on being an atheist, and he's not giving up on evolution. If you skip ahead to the conclusion here is what you get:

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.

Thanks Matt, interesting.

"Bitter" would seem to be the opperative word...

I was just looking at his stuff on this a couple days ago, after reading this Language Log discussion of what different people call Darwinism. My sense is that the view Fodor is opposing is Dawkins' self-gene approach. This is the key sentence among the quotes given in that post:

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.

One way to think of this is that Fodor opposes explanations of why animals do something in terms of positing some desire in them corresponding to a drive to reproduce or survive. Reading such desires or drives into animal behavior when there's no evidence for such a thing is wrongheaded. We don't want to die, but mere survival doesn't explain everything about what we like, and there's no deep drive to reproduce. What there is is a desire for sexual pleasure and in higher animals a desire for relationships with the opposite sex.

If you try to explain why humans appreciate music by saying that we want to impress people of the opposite sex, and appreciating music makes us look smart, thus making us more likely to reproduce, most people would think you're nuts. We like music because it sounds good to us. If it has the benefit, it might explain why people who like music survive. But that's not the reason we do it.

So the key is that we simply don't do thinks with a teleological goal of adapting, surviving, or reproducing. The selfish-gene thesis is false. At best it's a poor metaphor for the fact that those who are adaptable and fittest will survive. Dawkins seems to talk as if it's more than a metaphor and that it actually gets at some deep explanation of species behavior, and Fodor is calling him on it.

You guys are awesome! The more people who reject the "just so" stories the better. For the record: I accept the thesis of common ancestry of humans and other higher primates (or at least I have no theological objection to it whatsoever). However, it seems that Fodor's admissions do *somewhat* (I won't attach a degree for now) undercut the case for a *naturalistic* explanation of the ascent of man. The line of reasoning I have in mind goes something like this:

1. The fewer the plausible naturalistic mechanisms for ascent, the more plausible supernaturalistic mechanisms look.
2. Fodor removes a (prima facie) plausible naturalistic explanation.
3. Thus Fodor increases the plausibility of supernaturalistic mechanisms.

That's not quite right, but hopefully suggestive of the line of reasoning I have in mind. It assumes that one is not already massively convinced that naturalism (whatever it turns out to be) *must* be true, and it glosses over the possibility of large differences in the plausibility of alternatives. I only have time for one attempt at improvement.

1. The naturalistic mechanisms which Fodor attempts to undercut were major players as candidates for key mechanisms of the ascent of man.
2. If 1, then if Fodor is successful then naturalism has lost serious ground.
3. So if Fodor is successful, then naturalism has lost serious ground.

If those mechanisms were Dawkins-style just-so stories, then things weren't too good to start with, but perhaps there were more serious targets.

So it seems to me that Fodor might be running two issues together in his quote above. That is, it sounds as though he thinks that common ancestry is somehow probabilistically related to design (?!). The following seems like a fair paraphrase: "I've said nothing to raise doubts about common ancestry and so I've said nothing to raise the hopes of the godfolk." This is not *required* by the text, but sequential statements are often indicative of a train of thought. He must think there's *some* relation at any rate or their juxtaposition makes no sense.

Furthermore, as I've suggested above, he seems to ignore the fact--and I think it is a fact--that a scarcity of naturalistic mechanisms of evolution *do* bear favorably on the thesis that evolution is guided by supernatural influences.

Now, naturalism is really more of a stance or attitude, so perhaps the function of the speech is just to declare his stance: he's *committed* to naturalism and so, for him, the absence of an explanation of how evolution happened without help does not affect his credence functions w.r.t. naturalism. Fair enough, but to those of us for whom it's a live question intellectually I take it that we are free to draw different conclusions from his work...even conclusions which might further embitter him.

Interestingly, if one reads the paper, one gets the hint of the idea that there is a way of rescuing Darwinism, viz., by being a theist.

In fact, I think one can turn this into a neat argument for theism. If Fodor is right, atheistic Darwinism fails. But theistic Darwinism could still succeed--it is clear that Fodor does not think his arguments question that. All the reasons we previously had for thinking Darwinism to be a highly explanatory theory that elegantly unifies biology continue to hold after Fodor's critique--except that now they only hold of theistic Darwinism. Thus, all the empirical reasons that we had to accept Darwinism now transfer into reasons to accept theistic Darwinism. If we were in a position to know Darwinism to be true were this issue about selective explanation to be resolved, we are now in a position to know theism to be true.

Daniel Dennett's reply to Fodor is here:

http://scienceblogs.com/omnibrain/upload/2007/03/fodorondarwinism3b.pdf

You also might want to check out this discussion.

It's mainly about a piece of Fodor's in LRB, but it covers a lot of the same ground.

The comments at EvolutionBlog are perhaps the most instructive on how these things go. Watch as the settlers circle the wagons in defense. Funny how a guy can raise a worry about Evolution and suddenly he's excluded from the team as a heretic. As I pointed out above it's not as if Fodor wants off the E-Team. He doesn't think his argument should be a worry for Evolution in general. Imagine what our own field would look like if we had the same reaction every time a theist raised a problem for theism.

Regarding what Jeremy has said, I think there must be more to Fodor's argument than Darwinists possibly conflating ultimate and proximate causes. I just finished reading Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate, and he suggests not that we have aesthetic appreciation in order to reproduce, but that some of the faculties which allow us to have experiences of aesthetic appreciation have roots in our evolutionary fitness. I haven't read Fodor's article which is linked here (yet!), but I think that he classes Pinker among the "neo-Darwinists" with whom he disagrees, so there may be more to the stories given by Fodor's opponents than you have suggested.

Trent: This is somewhat off-topic, but since you say you have no theological objections to common descent, I wonder how you might incorporate the Fall. If we share a common ancestry with other primates, then there wouldn't be a point in our history where we were perfected beings who fell from Grace. One might say that the Fall story is really about our struggle to follow our "higher" nature or something similar, but I'm curious if you have some particular approach to the matter, if any.

David, I have no strong commitments on how to understand the Fall. C.S. Lewis discusses the Fall in the context of acceptance of common descent briefly in _The Problem of Pain_. I honestly don't recall if the following perspective is influenced by that or not, but I think not.

I think the key--as with any case of whatever non-historical genre you want to call much of Genesis--is to find what key truth is being expressed. I think the approach should be very similar to that of a parable. Here's my best guess on Genesis. The key truth is that the burdensome features of our world are a consequence of an angelic spiritual rebellion which spilled over into our world; one in which we end up freely participating. That's consistent with common descent. Not to different is that Adam and Eve represent the average individual for whom peace is within their grasp but who looses it through giving in to temptation. It's plausible that when Genesis was written (and a traditional date c. 1500 (as I recall) seems right to me) there was a relevant degree of prosperity (for that era) so that the average person could identify with this message. Or maybe Adam and Eve prefigure Israel itself. These are but the barest gestures toward interpretive schema, but hopefully they are suggestive of the kind of thing I think necessary and plausible to take Genesis as asserting important truth consistent with common ancestry.

Fodor recently published an interesting, middlebrow statement of his views at LRB online: Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/fodo01_.html

Here is some more critical discussion of Fodor on evolution.

Oops--here is a link to a critical discussion of Fodor. Disregard the post immediately above with the broken link.

There is a property P that is definitely had by all hitherto existing humans of reproductive age and definitely not had by all hitherto non-existing humans of reproductive age so that there have hitherto been no vague cases among humans of reproductive age. (E.g., P = being a primate and ending up in heaven, hell or limbo.) There have hitherto been only finitely many humans.

Hence, there is a finite set A of humans with the property that no member of A had any human parents and every human hitherto existing descends from at least one member of A.

I think it is clearly a part of the Christian Tradition to hold that each member of A was originally in communion with God and in a state of earthly bliss, without being subject to significant earthly sufferings like those of childbirth. Given what we know about the world's prehistory, the satisfaction of the latter condition almost surely involved some miracles.

I also suspect that it is more strongly a definitive part of Christian Tradition that A has precisely two members, one male and one female, and that all humans hitherto existing include these two members, as a couple, in their ancestry (see Pius XII's Humani Generis). Why? For one because Adam and Eve are taken by the Tradition to be types of Christ and of Mary, respectively. On the best theory of typology, typology is based in reality, not in descriptions of reality. (When x is a type of y, then x is an actual event or person, not a description of an event or person. Thus, the parting of the Red Sea can only be a type of baptism if the parting of the Red Sea actually happened.) For another, this seems to be a part of the common core of what all the Fathers derive from Genesis even when they interpret Genesis 1 non-literally (as, say, Augustine in his view that creation was instantaneous).

Sober also has a response to Fodor: Fodor’s Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism

http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/Fodor's%204%201%2007%20bubba%20meise%20against%20dar%20M&L.pdf

It seems to me that Fodor is denying something central to neo-Darwinism and that is the strict means to ends nature of life processes. The 4 Fs - feeding, fighting, fleeing and reproducing - are central to evolutionary processes and Fodore seems to be saying that there is more to life events than this. So there can be friendships, sex, communal relations, aesthetic enjoyment that are goods in themselves and not just as means to the 4 Fs.

But then what drives the evolutionary advancement if not organismal desires? I guess this is where the door is open to theistic explanations.