Current science; fallacious thinking (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 14, 2017, 01:08 (2536 days ago) @ David Turell

Jerry Fodor and the fallacies in Darwin theory. Fodor was an atheist:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/jerry-fodors-enduring-critique-of-neo-Darw...

"Fodor first made his name at M.I.T., in the sixties and seventies, by pioneering a theory of the mind. He offered an updated version of what is sometimes called, in philosophy survey courses, rationalism. He didn’t think it was possible that we started our lives as blank slates and acquired, through experience alone, our mental repertoires; combining aspects of Chomsky’s theory of linguistic innateness with Turing’s insights into mathematical computation, he argued that there had to be a prior, unacquired “language of thought”—the title of his career-making book—out of which everyday cognition emerges.

***

"Fodor thought that the neo-Darwinists had confused the loyalty oath of modernity—nature is without conscious design, species evolve over time, the emergence of Homo sapiens was without meaning or telos—with blind adherence to the fallacy known as “natural selection.” That species are a product of evolutionary descent was uncontroversial to Fodor, an avowed atheist; that the mechanism guiding the process was adaptation via a competition for survival—this, Fodor believed, had to be wrong.

"Fodor attacked neo-Darwinism on a purely conceptual and scientific basis—its own turf, in other words. He thought that it suffered from a “free rider” problem: too many of our phenotypic traits have no discernible survival value, and therefore could not plausibly be interpreted as products of adaptation. “Selection theory cannot distinguish the trait upon which fitness is contingent from the trait that has no effect on fitness (and is merely a free rider),” he wrote. “Advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, natural selection can’t be a general mechanism that connects phenotypic variation with variation in fitness. So natural selection can’t be the mechanism of evolution.”

***

"Fodor was interested in how the distinction between an adaptation and a free rider might apply to our own behavior. It seems obvious to us that the heart is for circulating blood and not for making thump-thump noises.... did not believe this for was defensible, either, but that is for another day.) Pumping is therefore an “adaptation,” the noise is a “free rider.” Is there really a bright sociobiological line dividing, say, the desire to mate for life from the urge to stray? The problem isn’t that drawing a line is hard; it’s that it’s too easy: you simply call the behavior you like an adaptation, the one you don’t like a free rider. Free to concoct a just-so story, you may now encode your own personal biases into something called “human nature.”

***

"When I reread “What Darwin Got Wrong,” there were two sentences that I paused over longest. “What trait did evolution select for when it selected creatures that protect their young? Was it an altruistic interest or a selfish interest in their genes?” The oddity is asking the question in the first place. What sort of creature is it, after all, that must first ideate its own function before being able to fulfill it? ...Neo-Darwinism “affronts a robust, and I should think salubrious, intuition that there are lots and lots of things that we care about simply for themselves.”

***

"He was a naturalist, and he believed that with a proper understanding of Darwin we would never ask nature to tell us who or what to be. “We are artifacts designed by natural selection,” Daniel Dennett wrote, to which Fodor said no. “Darwin’s idea is much deeper, much more beautiful, and appreciably scarier: We are artifacts designed by selection in exactly the sense in which the Rockies are artifacts designed by erosion; which is to say that we aren’t artifacts and nothing designed us. We are, and always have been, entirely on our own.'”

Comment: As is obvious, like Fodor I'm not convinced natural selection is of any importance in the process of evolution. It does not explain our brain, as one paramount example.