Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Go, Fodor

Thanks to Simon Oakes for sending me this quite brilliant refutation of his critics by my hero, the Trampoline Man, Jerry Fodor. The Darwinian fundamentalists and their fellow travellers have been called, by Dawkins I think, the 'brights'. How nice to see them put in their place by somebody much much brighter.

7 comments:

  1. Fodor is a brilliant man but I am a bit mystified by this spat. If I understand him, he is cross because a position on adaptationism that nobody holds seems to him to make no sense. Dawkins has repeatedly and at length explained that he does not hold it and that no other reputable evolutionary scientists hold it either (see The Blind Watchmaker, for example). Everybody agrees that some sort of 'spandrel' effect is in place in evolution and everybody seems to agree that there is a signifcant amount of 'genetic drift'. Nobody named in the letter thinks god has anything to do with it, least of all Fodor. So what is the hoo haa about? And why has Fodor started to refer to himself in the third person, which is a bit scary?

    'Brights' wasn't first committed by Dawkins. It may have been Dennett. Happily it seems to have died away, adapting poorly to its environment.

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  2. What I've come to realise is that there are really two spheres of evolutionary argument.

    The first sphere is the scientific investigation into how evolution might work.

    The second sphere is a whole bunch of god-botherers, poets, philosophers (and occasionally scientists) going on and on about how evolution makes them feel.

    Which is completely fine in itself, but it's so tedious that people who operate entirely in the second sphere keep thinking they have something to say about the first.

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  3. well, john m, the brights.net is top of the google search results for 'brights'.

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  4. well, john m, the brights.net is top of the google search results for 'brights'.

    Yes but nobody has ever met anyone who described themselves as a bright, have they? I mean, can you imagine?

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  5. ...it's so tedious that people who operate entirely in the second sphere keep thinking they have something to say about the first.

    Absolutely!

    Except of course - to paraphrase Daniel Dennet’s pronouncement on the >steady advance of evolutionary cosmology into the sciences of the mind< - that consciousness is no longer an observational means external to different bodies in space-time, but an inseparable property of space-time itself.

    But that’s quite another topic.

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  6. actually, I do know someone who is/was a member, john. that's how I know about the website. :)

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  7. I think Fodor's argument is weak.

    He thinks that if two traits are coextensive, it's meaningless to talk of one of them being selected. So, for example (this is Tim Lewens's example in the letters page), it would be meaningless to talk of polar bears being selected for white fur or warm fur. They have "warm-white fur" and that's all selection can act on.

    Absolute nonsense. Say there are two varieties of polar bear: one with warm-white fur and one with thin-black fur. One winter all the thin-black bears die. They died because their fur was too thin, not because it was too black, or because it was thin-black! The fur colour with which the fur thickness is coextensive is causally irrelevant.

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