Yesterday evening, PZ Myers shared with us some of his email (2,000 messages a day, after excluding spam) to illustrate the variety of personae who feel compelled to rant against evolution (sorry, “Darwinism”). As he pointed out, some of them are clearly bright, thinking individuals who are spectacularly ill-informed, having been fed a diet of religious nonsense in their homes, churches, and (illegally but inevitably) schools. The other half are just plain whacko, some of them dangerously so.
But there is another group of antievolutionists that it’s worth noting. It may be numerically tiny, but they tend to punch above their weight. I’m referring to a small group of academic philosophers, of whom the most vocal is undoubtedly Jerry Fodor. 3 quarks daily just reported on an exchange in the latest issue of Mind & Language in which Fodor makes a fool of himself and Dan Dennett and others pile on to show him up. Dan’s piece is quite devastating: Fodor’s argument, according to Dan…
… has the startling conclusion:
Contrary to Darwinism, the theory of natural selection can’t explain the distribution of phenotypic traits in biological populations.
Now this really is absurd. Silly absurd. Preposterous. It is conclusions like this, built upon such comically slender stilts, that give philosophy a bad name among many scientists. Fodor’s argument really does follow from his premises, though, so far as I can see, so I am prepared to treat it as a classic reductio. A useful reductio, as we all learned in our first logic course, has just one bad premise that eventually sticks out like a sore thumb, but in this case we have an embarrassment of riches: four premises, all of them false. I will leave as an exercise for the reader the task of seeing if any presentable variation of Fodor’s argument can be constructed in which some or all of these are replaced by truths.
Dan concludes by pointing out the damage that Jerry’s kind of nonsense can do:
I cannot forebear noting, on a rather more serious note, that such ostentatiously unresearched ridicule as Fodor heaps on Darwinians here is both very rude and very risky to one’s reputation. (Remember Mary Midgley’s notoriously ignorant and arrogant review of The Selfish Gene? Fodor is vying to supplant her as World Champion in the Philosophers’ Self-inflicted Wound Competition.) Before other philosophers countenance it they might want to bear in mind that the reaction of most biologists to this sort of performance is apt to be—at best: ‘Well, we needn’t bother paying any attention to him. He’s just one of those philosophers playing games with words’. It may be fun, but it contributes to the disrespect that many non-philosophers have for our so-called discipline.
And he’s right. Science needs the philosophers of science, to remind them of the epistemological underpinnings of the discipline, and to police the boundaries between science and metaphysics. Of course there are some philosophers who misread the zeitgeist and try to maintain a philosophical stake in a scientific debate. ((For a good example of this, I recommend a brief dip into the recent collection “Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind”. But please keep it brief.)) But I think they are in a minority.
In addition to Dan’s piece, there are useful perspectives from Peter Godfrey-Smith and Elliott Sober. (The other article cited, by Kirk and Susan Schneider, addresses a completely different aspect of Fodor’s work.)
P.S. Iain commented that the links I provided don’t work for him. If you run into problems, I suggest that you click through to the 3quarks piece and link from there.