Jerry Fodor, with his co-author Piattelli-Palmarini, wrote an article in the New Scientist to pre-defend their new book, What Darwin Got Wrong. Here is a comment I composed and posted on the NS site after reading the article:

This sounds like it’s all quite wrong. I can only imagine arriving at such conclusions by looking at too short time periods as your references, and by defining environment naively, i.e. by what you see when you look out the window. I’m looking forward to reading the book to see if there is an inkling of sense in the claims, but let’s take some of the claims in the article up for scrutiny first. (disclaimer: I cancelled my pre-order of the book already before I read this article, but may have to reconsider. Decent marketing.)

Natural selection is not a force, it is statistical. You may agree on that point. There is no machinery, there is no telos. Simple. The things that are likelier to exist from times T1 to T2  are the ones that we’ll be likelier to see around at time T3. In the biological sphere, this can be interpreted by concepts of fitness and “selection for” in order to get a few steps away from the apparent tautology.You mention internal, endogenous factors as if they were opposed to environmental factors. Right, if you look at one individual, or a short lineage of them, but Dr. Fodor, how did those endogenous factors evolve in the first place? Surely you are not carrying an essentialist  torch here? Genomic structure was selected for, and since its selection has influenced further evolution. History tends to build on past things.

The “from below” constraints are simple. Laws of physics and chemistry need to be mentioned as an endogenous factors? Surely you are trivialising your argument. Besides, the “from above” (“minimum energy expenditure, shortest paths…”) constraints are reducible to the “from below” constraints, so I can’t see you have an argument there.

The logical and rhetorical jump from “struggle for survival” (which is a dated concept even for the most hard-core Darwinists, as you might have noticed in the literature of the last 20 years) to pigs with wings is baffling, but let’s look at it. Selection happens on various levels. Not only are the phenotypes between individuals being selected for fitness, but inside the individuals as well: on the level molecules, genes, cells, organs, up to the level of groups and populations. They all have their own selection spaces, which you could call endogenous constraints, but clearly constraints that have been selected for naturally. It is highly likely pigs no longer have the selection space where there is a proximal “option” of growing wings. This is not to say that it is categorically impossible for pigs to evolve into beings with wings. It is just not within the current selection space. And actually, to play devil’s advocate, you could claim that the winged ones indeed did lose to wingless ones – and continue to lose this very moment, on various levels of selection. Any movement towards a variation with wings from this current point is more likely than not a disadvantageous move, and thus not selected for.

And finally, the correlated traits. If trait t1 is selected for but is piggy-backed by allegedly “non-adaptive” trait t2, then trait t2 is in fact well-adapted for survival into the future. Traits are not selected for their function, but their effect. And it doesn’t matter if it is a correlated genotype (genes determining eye color) or a phenotype (beaver dam building leads to birds nesting in felled trees dying) – the effect is correlated and may be collateral. Beavers are not selected for because they kill birds, but bird killing by beavers may well survive into the future. This is not a counter-example to natural selection: that’s why we have the concept of an extended phenotype.

Love the way you were able to say that NS is a “radically environmentalist theory”, don’t you? Almost sounds like you were trying to politicize the debate. But let’s not go there.

Anyway, doesn’t look too good. Really liked some of your stuff on consciousness, so hope you get back to that at some point. I’m sure you can cook up some scandalous book titles in that field as well!

Related articles

• What Darwin Got Wrong | Book review (guardian.co.uk)
• Evolution: The concept and how we talk about it (metamodern.com)
• Happy International Darwin Day! (wired.com)