On the morning of October 2, 1836, a 27-year-old naturalist stepped off a ship at Falmouth after nearly five years at sea and went straight home to bed. Charles Darwin had circumnavigated the globe aboard the HMS Beagle, filling notebooks with observations that would eventually detonate one of the greatest intellectual explosions in human history. But the explosion took time. Darwin sat on his theory of natural selection for more than twenty years, refining it, testing it, and quietly dreading its implications, before a letter from a young naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who had independently arrived at the same idea, forced his hand. He published On the Origin of Species in 1859 in a state of what he called "one long argument," half-convinced it would be dismissed, half-aware it could not be. The first edition sold out on the day of publication. Within a decade, the idea that all living things were connected by common descent and shaped by the blind pressure of selection had begun its transformation from scientific hypothesis into the organizing framework of modern biology. Darwin himself, by then a semi-reclusive invalid in the English countryside, seemed almost surprised by what he had started.
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) did not merely advance biology. He handed humanity a new way of understanding itself, one that was thrilling, humbling, and deeply unsettling in equal measure. His theory of natural selection, laid out in On the Origin of Species in 1859, replaced the comforting idea of purposeful design with something stranger and more vertiginous: the notion that the staggering complexity of life, including human life, was the product of blind variation and the ruthless arithmetic of survival. For over a century, that framework has dominated biological thought with a comprehensiveness rarely matched in the history of science, absorbing new findings in genetics, molecular biology, and paleontology without losing its essential shape.
Yet the very completeness of Darwinism's triumph has, for some thinkers, become a reason for suspicion. When a theory explains everything, the philosopher's instinct is to ask whether it genuinely explains anything, and nowhere has that instinct been applied more pointedly than in questions about the evolution of the mind. How did cognition arise? Can natural selection, a mechanism defined by reproductive advantage, truly account for the architecture of human thought, its capacity for language, abstraction, mathematics, and meaning? These are not questions biology alone can answer, and they have drawn some of philosophy's sharpest minds into direct confrontation with Darwin's legacy.
None has entered that confrontation more provocatively than Jerry Fodor, Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, whose landmark works, including The Language of Thought and The Modularity of Mindhave spent decades challenging the orthodoxies of cognitive science from the inside. In his controversial book What Darwin Got Wrong, co-authored with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Fodor trains that same restless skepticism on evolutionary theory itself, arguing that natural selection cannot adequately explain how the mind came to be structured as it is. It is a bold and deliberately provocative intervention, and it arrives from a thinker with both the philosophical credentials and the intellectual appetite to force the argument to its limits. In this interview, Fodor reflects on Darwin's genius, the boundaries of selectionist explanation, and why the most important questions about the mind remain, stubbornly, open.
Charles Carlini: A few years ago, you caused a stir in the pages of the London Review of Books with an article entitled "Why Pigs Don't Have Wings" by attacking the concept of "natural selection" in evolutionary theory. Your article drew heavy criticism from many of your colleagues. What was the genesis of your doubts about Darwin's theory?
Jerry Fodor: I've had my doubts about aspects of Darwin's account of natural selection for some time; many of them are concerned with the implications of Darwinism for the psychology of cognition. For one thing, the resemblance to Skinnerian Learning Theory troubled me. If, as practically everyone now agrees, gradualism about learning doesn't work, why would one expect gradualism about evolution to do so? For another, I can't imagine a gradualist account of the evolution of complex, interdependent, and frequently gratuitous psychological structures like a speaker/hearer's internal representation of the grammar of his language. If there's anything that looks like saltation, it's language. For a third thing, I'm appalled by the consequences of applying the adaptationist thesis that phenotypic traits must have been selected-for some or other function they performed in the environment of selection: (Writing “The Tempest” was a reproductive strategy, and so forth). I've been told very often that if I don't believe Darwin on natural selection, it must be because, deep down, I believe in God. But I don't, and it isn't. (Also, I'm automatically suspicious of anything that everybody believes.)
CC: Has your viewpoint changed or evolved, in light of the criticism it has received for your earlier expressions of it, now that it has been more fully developed in your new book “What Darwin Got Wrong?”
JF: No. The criticisms I've seen have been mostly fatuous; a substantial minority haven't even managed to get straight on what my argument is supposed to be; in particular, on why the intensionality of 'select-for' plays such a central role in it. But I suppose things will catch up sooner or later. I'm not in a rush.
CC: What is the main thrust of your argument against natural selection?
JF: Mainly that neither biologists nor philosophers have faced the question: what's the relation between the claim that a certain trait has been selected and the claim that it has been selected-for (e.g., selected-for causing increased fitness.) As far as I can see, there is no serious discussion of this relation in the relevant philosophical or biological literature. (The currently favored suggestion that the relation is definitional only shows how desperate these straits have become.)
CC: Your book introduces several philosophical concepts, such as "intentionality," "intension," and "extension"—all of which play a significant role in pushing forward your line of reasoning against natural selection. Can you briefly explain how these terms function within the framework of your argument?
JF: Roughly (but close enough), intensional processes are ones that can apply differently in coextensive domains. The simplest examples are familiar from philosophical discussions: The heart makes heart-noises, and it pumps the blood. Making heart noise and pumping the blood are coextensive; whatever does either does both. But, presumably, the heart was selected-for being a blood pump, not for being a noisemaker. This illustrates both the intensionality of 'select-for' and the proximity of problems about natural selection to problems about natural teleology. Neither is understood, and the frequently encountered attempt to get them to take in one another's wash is hopelessly circular.
CC: You claim that the theory of natural selection doesn't provide law-like explanations in the way that, say, Newton's laws of motion do. How so?
JF: I don't think this is much in dispute, even among Darwinists. The point of laws is largely to support counterfactuals: If it's a law that As are Bs, then it follows (all else equal) that if something had been (/were to be) A, it would have been (/would be) B. There aren't any such counterfactual-supporting generalizations about, for example, which traits would be selected-for in which ecologies (except generalizations that are made up ad hoc and post facto.)
CC: You also assert that natural selection is statistical. What do you mean by this?
JF: I don't say any such thing. I say there is no such process as natural selection; that is a different matter entirely.
CC: Fellow philosophers Philip Kitcher and Ned Block have attacked your thesis in the Boston Review, saying that it is “biologically irrelevant and philosophically confused.” From a biological standpoint, they argue that you are out of touch with the practice of evolutionary biology concerning how claims about selection are used. And philosophically, they assert that you misconstrue “selection-for” as intensional when it is, under their reading, extensional. How do you respond to those charges?
JF: First, I'm not criticizing “the practice of evolutionary biology”; I'm criticizing the Theory of Natural Selection, which I'm inclined to think (contrary to the received opinion) actually plays no great role in the practice of evolutionary biology. Second, the claim that 'select for' is extensional is preposterous on the face of it. Block and Kitcher confuse the (correct) observation that claims like 'property P is (e.g., nomologically) connected to property Q' are extensional (in the sense that they remain true under substation of any terms that denote properties P and Q ) with the clearly false thesis that (to use their own example) 'the color of moth's wings is selected for matching the color of the background' is extensional. Consider the inference: 'the color of moths wings was selected-for matching the background; the color of the background is the color of Granny's dog; therefore, the color of the moth's wings was selected-for being the color of Granny's dog.' Nonsense. The crucial thing to notice is that what's relevant to the discussion of natural selection isn't the intensionality (or otherwise) of claims about relations among properties; it's the intensionality (or otherwise) of claims about relations among instantiations of properties. (Generally speaking, when you have to use heavy-duty (and highly tendentious) philosophical artillery to defend what purports to be an empirical theory, it's very likely that the theory you're defending isn't true.)
CC: If adaptationism fails, as you argue, to tell the whole story, then what would you suggest take its place?
JF: My guess is that there isn't any such thing as a (general) theory of evolution (just as, it turns out in Skinner's case, that there is no such thing as a general theory of learning.) Skinner and Darwin both made bad bets on what would prove to be natural kinds: Learning in Skinner's case, trait fixation in Darwin's. I expect that natural history is about as close as you can get to an empirical account of trait fixation; and it's more or less common ground that natural history takes things case by case and offers only explanations that are ad hoc and post hoc (as, indeed, does every other kind of historical explanation). I know that, for some reason, some biologists find this suggestion demeaning. Well, as Lewontin said in respect of a related issue: “Tough!”
CC: Did you feel at any time during the writing of this book that your book would be providing ammunition to the proponents of creationism or “intelligent design?”
JF: I'm not in the ammunition business. If silly people draw silly inferences from good philosophy (or from good science, for that matter), that's their problem, not mine. God provided us with tenure so we could do our best to say what's true. I'm doing my best.
CC: In the weeks since your book was released, it has been vehemently attacked from many quarters. From what you've read so far, what do you take to be the main point of divergence that these criticisms have taken against your stance?
JF: I doubt that there is a main point; just a lot of misreading and flawed dialectic, together with a substantial dollop of hysteria.
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