creators_name: Harnad, Stevan creators_id: harnad@ecs,soton.ac.uk type: preprint datestamp: 2009-04-12 22:24:38 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:57:21 metadata_visibility: show title: On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution subjects: phil-sci full_text_status: public keywords: adaptation, Chomsky, consciousness, counterfactuals, Darwin, evolution, fitness, Fodor, learning, lexicon, mind, natural selection, poverty of the stimulus, Skinner, Turing, underdetermination, universal grammar note: This is an essay on Jerry Fodor's Hugues Leblanc Lecture Series at UQAM on "What Darwin Got Wrong" abstract: Jerry 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) 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. date: 2009-04-12 date_type: completed refereed: FALSE referencetext: Blondin-Massé, Alexandre; Chicoisne, Guillaume, Gargouri; Yassine; Harnad, Stevan; Picard, Olivier; Marcotte, Odile (2008). How Is Meaning Grounded in Dictionary Definitions? In TextGraphs-3 Workshop - 22nd International Conference on Computational Linguistics Cangelosi, A., Greco, A. & Harnad, S. (2002) Symbol Grounding and the Symbolic Theft Hypothesis. In: Cangelosi, A. & Parisi, D. (Eds.) Simulating the Evolution of Language. London, Springer. Catania, A.C. & Harnad, S. (eds.) (1988) The Selection of Behavior. The Operant Behaviorism of BF Skinner: Comments and Consequences. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chomsky, Noam (1959) A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. Language 35 (1): 26-58. Chomsky, Noam (1980) Rules and representations. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3: 1-61. Darwin, Charles (1872) Origin of Species. London: John Murray Dawkins, Richard (1976) The selfish gene. Oxford : Oxford University Press Dawkins, Richard (1986) The blind watchmaker. New York : Norton Dennett, D.C. (1994) Cognitive Science as Reverse Engineering: Several Meanings of "Top Down" and "Bottom Up." In: Prawitz, D., Skyrms, B. & Westerstahl, D. (Eds.) Proceedings of the 9th International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. North Holland. Fodor, Jerry A. (1975) The language of thought. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Fodor, Jerry A. (forthcoming) Against Darwinism. Fodor, Jerry A. & Katz, Jerrold J. (Eds.). (1964). The structure of language. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Fodor, Jerry A. & Piatelli-Palmarini, Massimo (forthcoming) What Darwin Got Wrong. Fodor, Jerry A. & Pylyshyn, Zenon W. (1988) Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical appraisal. Cognition 28: 3 - 71. Harnad, Stevan (1976) Induction, evolution and accountability. In: Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech (Harnad, Stevan, Steklis , Horst Dieter and Lancaster, Jane B., Eds.), 58-60. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280. Harnad, Stevan (1994) Levels of Functional Equivalence in Reverse Bioengineering: The Darwinian Turing Test for Artificial Life. Artificial Life 1(3): 293-301. Harnad, Stevan (1996) Experimental Analysis of Naming Behavior Cannot Explain Naming Capacity. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 65: 262-264. Harnad, S. (2002a) Turing Indistinguishability and the Blind Watchmaker. In: J. Fetzer . Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Pp 3-18. Harnad, Stevan (2002b) Darwin, Skinner, Turing and the Mind. (Inaugural Address. Hungarian Academy of Science.) Magyar Pszichologiai Szemle LVII (4) 521-528. Harnad, Stevan (2005) To Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization. In Lefebvre, C. and Cohen, H., Eds. Handbook of Categorization. Elsevier. Harnad, Stevan (2008) Why and How the Problem of the Evolution of Universal Grammar (UG) is Hard. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31: 524-525. Harnad, Stevan (2008) The Annotation Game: On Turing (1950) on Computing, Machinery and Intelligence. In: Epstein, Robert & Peters, Grace (Eds.) Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and Methodological Issues in the Quest for the Thinking Computer. Springer Harnad, Stevan (2009) Cohabitation: Computation at 70, Cognition at 20. In: Essays in Honour of Zenon Pylyshyn James, William (1890) Principles of Psychology. Nagel, Thomas (1999) Reductionism and Antireductionism. In: Gregory R. Bock & Jamie A. Goode (Eds) The Limits of Reductionism in Biology. Novartis Foundation Symposium 213 Simon, Herbert Alexander (1996) The Sciences of the Artificial. MIT Press Skinner, B. F. (1957) Verbal Behavior. Appleton/Century/Crofts. Sperber, Dan & Nicolas Claidière (2006) Why Modeling Cultural Evolution Is Still Such a Challenge. Biological Theory 1 (1): 20-22. Strawson, Galen (2006) Why physicalism entails panpsychism. In: Galen Strawson. Materialism and other Essays. Oxfosd University Press. Turing, A.M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49 433-460 citation: Harnad, Stevan (2009) On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution. [Preprint] document_url: http://cogprints.org/6417/1/fodorcomm.rtf document_url: http://cogprints.org/6417/3/fodorcomm.pdf document_url: http://cogprints.org/6417/4/fodorcomm.htm document_url: http://cogprints.org/6417/5/fodor-harnad1.html