Talk:What Darwin Got Wrong

The problem of "selection-for"
There is a very important difference between saying "the authors note that traits of an organism often come together" (my emphasis) and: "Because these traits come together," which comes after the 3 examples. The power of the examples breaks down if 'often' is allowed for, because it means the linkage of 2 traits T and T' is not necessary anymore. And, as I see it, Fodor's argument critically depends on the necessity of T' linked with T. In case of the spandrels it is the geometrical necessity. The spandrels are very important for building Fodor's argument: they are introduced at the beginning of chapter 6, that is the beginning of part Two.

Wikididact (talk) 08:29, 26 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The power of the examples breaks down if 'often' is allowed for


 * I think you've misunderstood the sentence I wrote. When I say "traits often come together" I mean that one can think of many examples of traits that always come together.


 * In other words it's often the case that two traits A and B always come together. Evercat (talk) 13:45, 26 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your reply. By the way: the page is a very good start. I think your phrase "it's often the case that two traits A and B always come together" is more precise. However, the statement looks like a quantitative estimation of the frequence of the phenomenon in organisms or in nature. And that is an empirical question, not a conceptual question. So, does Fodor say anything about the frequency in nature? If it is relatively rare, his argument would be insignificant. Even if it would be relatively common, it would still undermine the validity of Fodor's claim that natural selection can not be the mechanism of evolution. Wikididact (talk) 16:04, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

It's not my intention to show that Fodor's argument is significant; merely to describe what it is. But he does say "Once you've noticed that there are selection-for problems, you start to see them everywhere" (p109). Evercat (talk) 17:24, 26 March 2010 (UTC)

Tags
I've tagged the article as being almost-exclusively primary-sourced and for POV for relegating (seemingly pervasive) criticisms to the ELs. My intention is to do a substantial rewrite to base the article primarily on secondary sources. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 05:18, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * "POV for relegating (seemingly pervasive) criticisms to the ELs"


 * Interesting. I must be doing a good job when I'm accused of having the opposite POV to what I actually have... this seems to happen to me a lot in evolution articles; I was once accused of being a creationist. Evercat (talk) 11:34, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I would not consider giving no mention to the pervasive criticism of the book (as opposed to the prior article), other than listing some ELs, to be "a good job". YMMV. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 13:36, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * I mean I must be doing a good job of not POV pushing. Evercat (talk) 13:43, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Failing to see that your own viewpoint gets WP:DUE weight is likewise hardly "a good job" -- it just means that you don't even have the excuse of partisanship for why the article is biased. HrafnTalkStalk(P) 14:22, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * The article as I wrote it was hardly a glowing endorsement of Fodor and MPP. Evercat (talk) 14:43, 7 November 2010 (UTC)


 * Indented line

Hrafn seems to be in every single article critical of Darwinism and pushing a certain PoV. Interesting. Are there any positive opinions on the book? A quick gloss over the "reception" seemed to be all negative. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tembew (talk • contribs) 23:12, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Response to criticism
I'd be interested to know why F & P's responses to the criticisms have not been included in this article. For example, Coyne and Sober's reviews are discussed in the paperback edition of the book along with many other negative reviews. Why are these not mentioned? And why no mention of the positive reception the book received by many scientists (e.g. Noam Chomsky)?HyperEntity (talk) 19:05, 17 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Because nobody has yet added this stuff to the article. Evercat (talk) 18:10, 18 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Why not?HyperEntity (talk) 20:47, 20 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Do you have a source for that? It need not be online.  There are lots of other reviews around. I am not a dog (talk) 22:27, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Edited the Evan Thompson criticism as Thompson doesn't suggest any contradiction between the two parts of the book. Thompson says the two parts "don't complement" each other. This is not equivalent to arguing that the two parts contradict each other. The authors have both stated that the book is of two halves where acceptance of one half does not commit the reader to the acceptance of the other half. Thompson simply does not suggest there is a contradiction between the two halves.--47.55.140.95 (talk) 20:50, 15 May 2020 (UTC)

Relevance of this book to the Philosophy of Psychology
There should be something in this article about how the book fits into the big picture of Fodor's philosophizing.

Fodor was a nativist -- he believed that the human mind has important inborn traits, even innate ideas, and that empiricism has misstated facts by neglecting these. In mid 20th century terms this was the divide between Skinner and Chomsky. One generic weakness of this nativist position (for naturalists anyway) is that it requires a big gap in the evolutionary development of the human species, even a miraculous gap. Chomsky has been very clear that the acquisition of language abilities (if he is at all right about them) has to have been very recent and would be very difficult to account for on Darwinian grounds. So it is unsurprising that both Fodor and Chomsky had equivocal relations with Darwinism. They both want to be naturalists, but they both end up giving ammunition to the intelligent-design types, because the straightforward unproblematic way of accounting for the human mind is Skinner's way, which lends itself to adaptationism and gradualism (that is, to Darwinism) in evolution. Christofurio (talk) 12:51, 8 December 2017 (UTC)