[SirLinksalot]

Jerry Alan Fodor (born 1935) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He is the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas.

Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini is professor of Linguistics & Cognitive Science at the University of Arizona whose field of study include Cognitive Science, language and mind, biological foundations of language and language evolution.

[Borges]

But for once Nietzsche is nowhere in sight

He's nowhere in sight in Wagner's other operas either which predated Nietzsche's writing.

[jbp1]

“So what’s the moral of all this? Most immediately, it’s that the classical Darwinist account of evolution as primarily driven by natural selection is in trouble on both conceptual and empirical grounds.”

blah blah blah .... WRONG..... enough already

things evolve, the better ones win, so please just get over it

[Eastbound]

"With the Hopes that our World is built on
they were utterly out of touch
They denied that the Moon was Stilton;
they denied she was even Dutch
They denied that Wishes were Horses;
they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market
Who promised these beautiful things.

("Gods of the Copybook Headings" -- R. Kipling)

[mysterio]

The classical Darwinist account of evolution is in trouble

No, not really.

[JMJJR]

But, but, but

[Greg F]

I wonder if anyone read this article that is attacking it. It was hard to get through because of poor writing but seems to make sense as far as its main point goes.

[r9etb]

Jerry Fodor is collaborating with Massimo Piattelli-Palamarini on a book about evolution without adaptation.

To put it cynically, that's probably the most explanatory line in the whole piece.

The problem I have with Fodor's discussion is that it's still stuck on a one-to-one correlation between "A Gene" and "A Trait," and other stuff can be explained away as a "free rider."

But if I read the articles properly, the Human Genome project has recently begun developing evidence to suggest that there is information above the level of genes, and information shared between genes.

Based on your handy post of Fodor's (and his partner's) bio, perhaps he's simply not up enough on current findings. At any rate, his dismissal of "adaptationism" as too simplistic seems a bit ironic, given his own discussion here.

[RightWhale]

• The answers that have been suggested so far have not been convincing.

  It's tough to answer a question that has not been properly asked. Once the question is right, it answers itself. So, what is the question?

[hellbender]

I'm not disputing evolution at all, but I find incredible this idea, which permeates the pop literature, that our traits were all selected to meet the needs of hunter-gatherer societies. Are we supposed to believe that the minds of Einstein, Newton, Darwin, J.S. Bach, etc. can all be explained that way? In much of the world, people have lived in civilized, settled communities for several thousand years. I think selection has continued throughout that period, and people whose brains were merely capable of stone-age culture were at a disadvantage even in the Middle Ages, when there was a lot of technology and sophistication to life (consider the enormous number of people with "vocational surnames" like Miller, Clark (clerk), -wright, etc.)

The enormous variety of dog breeds has been created in just a few hundred years. Why doesn't anyone consider that human beings have evolved any since the stone age?

[Physicist]

From the article:

What used to rile Darwin’s critics most was his account of the phylogeny of our species. They didn’t like our being just one branch among many in the evolutionary tree; and they liked still less having baboons among their family relations. The story of the consequent fracas is legendary, but that argument is over now. Except, perhaps, in remote backwaters of the American Midwest, the Darwinian account of our species’ history is common ground in all civilised discussions, and so it should be. The evidence really is overwhelming.

You did read the article, right?

[dalereed]

The wings kept breaking trying to get all that lard airborn and they gave up.

[TigersEye]

...selective breeding is performed only by creatures with minds, and natural selection doesn’t have one of those.

That one statement knocks this whole lengthy diatribe off its pins. All beings have minds that’s why they’re called sentient beings.