On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution: Invitation to Comment

Dear all, I've written a summary and critique of Jerry Fodor's critique of Darwin's principle of Natural Selection and posted it on CogPrints: http://cogprints.org/6417/ I've also launched a discussion Forum at Philpapers and invite discussion there: http://philpapers.org/browse/38/thread.pl?tId=202 (If you are not yet registered to Philpapers, it would be a good idea to register as this site is now on the way to becoming an important one for serious scholarly discussion of philosophical topics.) Best wishes, Stevan Harnad --- On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution http://philpapers.org/browse/38/thread.pl?tId=202 Stevan Harnad I would like to invite discussion on my paper, On Fodor on Darwin On Evolution, which is a critique of Jerry Fodor's Hugues Leblanc Lectures at UQAM on "What Darwin Got Wrong" (Fodor, forthcoming; Fodor & Piatelli-Palmarini, forthcoming). Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about "natural selection" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals ("If X had happened, Y would have happened") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with "artificial selection" by animal breeders was misleading, and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's "tautology," it had been believed that either (a) a god had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor's skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky's "poverty of the stimulus argument" -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the "concepts" underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be "endogenous," rather than evolved or learned.