by Matthew Cobb
This morning’s edition of the Times Literary Supplement plopped through my letter-box this morning, containing a review of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong by Samir Okasha, Professor of the Philosophy of Science at the University of Bristol. The review isn’t available on-line for the moment, and is extremely long – and thorough and fair. The final paragraph – transcribed by my own fair fingers – will give you a flavour of the thing:
“The upshot of all this is that their critique of neo-Darwinism comes to nothing. The biological discoveries they take to refute the neo-Darwinist theory do not do so; they are easily accommodated by it. The notion of adaptation is in perfectly good shape; the distinction between selection-for and free-riding is just the ordinary distinction between causality and correlation. Evolutionary biology is not ‘logically flawed’, and is not a mere collection of historical narratives, but rather a science that produces genuine causal explanations, and indeed one of the most successful sciences we have. What Darwin Got Wrong makes for entertaining and engaging reading, but is the sort of thing that gives philosophy of science a bad name.”
[EDIT: The full review is now available on-line here; however, it’s subscription only. I’ve asked the folk at the TLS to make it available to everyone, and they’re thinking about it… I’ll keep you informed. I also fixed Piattelli’s name which was inadvertently misspelled – my apologies. MC]
I was a bit disturbed to see this title shelved with the science books at a local bookstore.
Not surprised though when it turned out they did not have in stock a copy of either WEIT or Letters to a Christian Nation.
Of course, I would lobby for housing all the Bibles with the mythology volumes, but it would only upset people to no end. Still, What Darwin Got Wrong does belong more with the faith based texts.
I would ask what-who actually- gives POS (phil of science) a good name today? Timeless old timers like H Weyl did for me.
Well, actually, Samir Okasha is a pretty damned good example of first rate philosophy of science, these days.
“I sometimes wonders what’s the point of philosphers, and then I remember Dan Dennet”
Richard Dawkins.
oops, that should be ‘wonder’ of course.
Artikat, I find Susan Haack’s books to be very good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Haack
Of course, I havent read Dr Haack. I dont argue there are others that inspire with their analyses of ‘stuff’. It is just that Dr Weyl comes from ‘within” science, as opposed to someone that comes from ‘without’. And not arguing that the latter may end with a lesser quality argument, not at all.
Haack is also very good. In fact, for what it’s worth, I think there is now a great amount of really good work in POS.
A lot of the folks at Pittsburgh are completely first-rate. Mark Wilson, for instance.
Philip Kitcher, too, although he and Block have already weighed in on this.
What a wonderfully written paragraph that is by Samir Okasha.
If further evidence is necessary, Elliott Sober has posted a critique of Fodor’s selection-for/selection-of argument. Someone was asking about a current philosopher of science? It’s hard to top Sober.
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/sober/Fodor%20%20and%20Piatelli-Palermini%20march%2012.pdf
Matthew, you came within an inch of renaming Piattelli-Palmarini as “Piattola”, i.e. “crab louse”. I assume it was accidental…
Sadly yes, it was an accident!
I would put this book in with Darwin’s black box and shove it in the religion section where it belongs.
Why ‘religion’?
Why not ‘fiction’ or ‘philosophy’?
In the above mentioned article, Samir Okasha writes “For this process (natural selection) to work, a continual supply of phenotypic variation is needed, but where does it come from? The standard answer is that phenotypic variation arises from underlying genetic variation, and the latter is continually produced by two processes: recombination and mutation.” My burning question, which I would realy like to pose to Jerry Coyne, is selection working on recombination (without mutation) and how important is it compared to mutation in the big picture–for example in speciation? Or is it, down to the core, mutation that is propelling evolution? And is this a reasonable question?
Can’t get this question out of my mind and can’t find a good answer!