02.05.09
Fodor on natural selection
Why pigs don’t have wings.
It is worth (re)reading this essay by Fodor on the issue of natural selection, from last year. Like any such essay it got so much distracting flack from Scienceblog types, followed by silence that the points made, as usual, never registered.
In fact, an appreciable number of perfectly reasonable biologists are coming to think that the theory of natural selection can no longer be taken for granted. This is, so far, mostly straws in the wind; but it’s not out of the question that a scientific revolution – no less than a major revision of evolutionary theory – is in the offing. Unlike the story about our minds being anachronistic adaptations, this new twist doesn’t seem to have been widely noticed outside professional circles. The ironic upshot is that at a time when the theory of natural selection has become an article of pop culture, it is faced with what may be the most serious challenge it has had so far. Darwinists have been known to say that adaptationism is the best idea that anybody has ever had. It would be a good joke if the best idea that anybody has ever had turned out not to be true. A lot of the history of science consists of the world playing that sort of joke on our most cherished theories.
That our minds are adapted to the Paleolithic is a half-truth and a confusion based on the standard Darwinian interpretation, which is speculative pseudo-science.
Any look at the eonic effect leaves us to wonder at the transformation of evolutionary consciousness we have witnessed, or not witnessed, in the past five to ten thousand years.