Friday, October 12, 2007
Just So You Know....
.... here's another brilliant article by one of my heroes, Jerry Fodor. This time he knocks down Darwin. Fodor is known by those who - amiably - oppose him as a trampoline. Jump on him and he just flings you back into the air. My kind of guy.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
quite good. apart from the opera - give me the bow and trug any day.
ReplyDeleteKnocks down Darwin? Read more like someone desperately wanting to sell an upcoming book. Fodor creates a strawman of a guy who has been dead for more than 100 years and cuts down a theory that all evolutionary biologists know is only part of the story. Evolution is a fact and natural selection is one theory of how evolution occurs. Natural selection is, no doubt, part of the story but no one really believes it is the complete story.
ReplyDeleteDawkins does.
ReplyDeleteI doubt that is true since Dawkins believes that natural selection occurs at the level of the gene and there are plenty of genes that do nothing except survive. Dawkins knows full well that there are plenty of genes that simply get carried along because they have attached themselves to useful genes. This fits in perfectly with Fodor's writing about spandrels and arches.
ReplyDeleteJust to be a little more specific about how Fodor misses the point. He says that when you breed for tameness in foxes, you get a whole bunch of other traits. like curly tails, that you really weren't looking for. They come along for the ride. But Dawkins would tell you that you are looking at the wrong thing. Natural selection doesn't work at that level. Natural selection works at the level of the gene. And the gene for tameness may carry along a whole bunch of other things, like curly tails, that you didn't plan on getting.
ReplyDeleteImagine this scenario... why do humans get Alzheimer's? Why didn't natural selection breed it out? There are probably two good reasons. First, most people who get Alzheimer's are beyond breeding age so they are no longer involved in natural selection. But second, perhaps the gene that carries Alzheimer's is attached to another gene that carries a good trait (lets say a bigger brain) so that the damage done by a few breeding age people getting Alzheimer's is overwhelmed by the selective advantage of the bigger brain.
So both neutral and bad traits can be explained by the environmental advantage of the genes they are attached to. Fodor misses this completely and instead talks about flying pigs.
So both neutral and bad traits can be explained by the environmental advantage of the genes they are attached to.
ReplyDeleteAnd good traits too, of course. Which is why the theory of natural selection ends up one big tautology. Nature selects for survivability (fitness) and the proof of this is that some traits (or genes) survive and some don't.
So both neutral and bad traits can be explained by the environmental advantage of the genes they are attached to. Fodor misses this completely and instead talks about flying pigs.
ReplyDeleteisn't that what he said - spandrels and arches?
Dawkins accepts that not all evolution is due to natural selection. He accepts that some evolution occurs due to 'genetic drift':
ReplyDelete"There is also a 'random' evolutionary process called genetic drift, which is the genetic equivalent of coin-tossing. Genetic drift leads to unpredictable changes in the frequencies of genes that don't make much difference to the adaptation of their carriers, and can cause evolution by changing the genetic composition of populations. Many features of DNA are said to have evolved by genetic drift. Evolutionary geneticists disagree about the importance of selection versus drift in explaining features of organisms and their DNA. All evolutionists agree that genetic drift can't explain adaptive evolution. But not all evolution is adaptive."
I thought so Ian, but it was rough sledding for this dedicated non-scientist, particularly as it was first thing in the morning when I read it.
ReplyDeleteYes, Ian, but he is denying that this is accepted by evolutionists. He is trying to make it sound like he is writing something revolutionary, against the accepted wisdom. Perhaps he does have something to say but he didn't say in this poorly written article.
ReplyDelete