Saturday, March 20, 2010

Not so simple ...

... Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong.

As the comments indicate, this sort of article is simply beyond the pale. I'm sure my linking it to it will be thought the same. I do think it would have been nice to have cited what Dennett's reasons are for thinking as he does about Fodor's book, presuming Dennett offered any.

2 comments:

  1. There's a Guardian rebuttal of Oliver Burkeman by Nature editor Adam Rutherford: Beyond a 'Darwin was wrong' headline.

    Here's a quote from there as he sets up what really is an attitude pose versus a positional rebuttal:

    Of course, there are plenty of things that Darwin got wrong. That is the nature of science, and indeed good scientists love to be wrong. It means that the theory will subsequently be refined to be more right. Darwin knew, as does every subsequent evolutionary biologist, that natural selection is the major, but not the only contributing factor to evolution.

    Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini seem oblivious to this.


    First, he is careful, it seems, to say that the theory will be "more right" versus being less wrong, as if to lay a Jedi mind trick on his readers. The truth of the matter is both. There is rightness and wrongness, but new findings through scientific inquiry and testing will make a theory both less wrong and more right through time. In this sense, evolutionary theory as it is now known, is both wrong and right, and there is no need to slant the truth of it by ignoring that there is wrongness to it.

    The second sentence is one that, I think, editors pick up on: Rutherford asserts what Darwin knew. He says that Darwin knew "that natural selection is the major, but not the only contributing factor to evolution." But he says so without a citation, and importantly a citation within the time frame of Darwin's life. Here's what Darwin wrote: "Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification." (Why not quote it, then. Carelessness, it seems. But, hold that thought.)

    If he is trying to rebut Burkeman (versus arrogating credit for rebutting Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini), this is what Burkeman said, and more precisely:

    It would be jawdroppingly surprising, to say the least, were Fodor to be right. A safer, if mealy-mouthed, conclusion to draw is that his work acts as an important warning to those of us who think we understand natural selection. It's probably not a bankrupt concept, as Fodor claims. But nor should laypeople assume that it's self-evidently simple and exhaustively true.

    The irony in all this is that Darwin himself never claimed that it was. He went to his deathbed protesting that he'd been misinterpreted: there was no reason, he said, to assume that natural selection was the only imaginable mechanism of evolution.


    (cont . . .)

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  2. (cont. . .)

    There is attitude there from Burkeman, for instance when he uses the term "jaw-dropping". But he never says that natural selection is not a big player. In fact, what he said agrees precisely with what Ned Block and Philip Kitcher wrote in their article in the Boston Review, linked to, no less, within Rutherford's "rebuttal":

    Other critics—more sophisticated and scientifically informed—wonder whether natural selection explains as much about evolution as biologists commonly assert. They urge, for example, that causes other than natural selection (such as genetic drift) are important in explaining evolution. Or they argue—overemphasizing something all evolutionary biologists agree with—that natural selection operates against a background of constraints, perhaps stemming from features of genomes. Darwin himself was aware of these complexities about the role of natural selection, and throughout the Origin laments his own ignorance about the extent of that role and what alternative causes of evolutionary change there are. His awareness of how much he did not know led him to cautious formulations: for example, he writes, "Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification."

    Now back to Rutherford's rebuttal of Burkeman, the purpose of his article. He says:

    Take epigenetics – the idea that modifications to the structure of DNA changes its behaviour. As Burkeman points out, this is a new field, and its impact on biology has not yet been fully realised. However, nothing about it suggests that it doesn't fit within the existing framework of evolutionary theory. Burkeman cites a study (from my own alma mater) of Swedish boys whose lifespan was affected by the behaviour of their grandfathers. Although new for paternal inheritance, the paper itself describes the phenomenon as "well recognised". A metastudy of this "transgenerational" effect across many species concludes that the effect is universal. As ever, evolutionary theory needs refining, but does not need a revolutionary assault.

    What exactly does he mean by revolutionary assault? Are we to stop just short of a revolutionary assault and call the results of the study jawdropping maybe? Or is the study so very uninteresting and all in a day's work for the otherwise bored scientists looking unsuccessfully for a little amusement?

    On the score of this Oliver Burkeman versus Adam Rutherford arguments, I like Burkeman's attitude better. These findings coming out now, things that Darwin "lamented" not knowing about, as the Boston Review article says: "Darwin himself was aware of these complexities about the role of natural selection, and throughout the Origin laments his own ignorance about the extent of that role and what alternative causes of evolutionary change there are."

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