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Who Got What Wrong? Fodor and Piattelli on Darwin: Guiding Principles and Explanatory Models in Natural Selection

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Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are a priori (a trait shared with few other theories). We argue that NS provides perfectly bona fide adaptive explanations of phenotype evolution, unified by a common natural-selection guiding principle. First, we introduce the debate and reply to F&PP’s main argument against NS. Then, by reviewing different examples and analyzing Fisher’s model in detail, we show that NS explanations of phenotypic evolution share a General Natural Selection Principle. Third, by elaborating an analogy with CM, we argue against F&PP’s claim that such a principle would be a mere truism and thus explanatorily useless, and against Sober’s thesis that NS models/explanations have a priori components that are not present in CM and other common empirical theories. Irrespective of differences in other respects, the NS guiding principle has the same epistemic status as other guiding principles in other highly unified theories such as CM. We argue that only by pointing to the guiding principle-driven nature that it shares with CM and other highly unified theories, something no-one has done yet in this debate, one can definitively show that NS is not defective in F&PP’s sense: in the respects relevant to the debate, Natural Selection is as defective and as epistemically peculiar as Classical Mechanics and other never questioned theories.

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Notes

  1. Cf. e.g. Block and Kitcher (2010a, b), Coyne (2010), Dennet (2008), Futuyma (2010), Godfrey-Smith (2008, 2010), Lewontin (2010), Midgley (2010), Okasha (2010), Papineau (2010), Shapin (2010), and Sober (2008b, 2010).

  2. F&PP trace the phenomenon back to the arch-spandrel example in Gould and Lewontin (1979). Although the arch-spandrel example is a case of trait free-riding (an adaptive trait correlated with another non-adaptive one, like the mouth-chin case, cf. Gould 1977; Lewontin 1978), the discussion moves to the blood-pumping vs noise-making kind of example, which is a case of function or effect free-riding (an organ with an adaptive effect that is accompanied by another non-adaptive effect, cf. Gould and Vrba 1982, for these cases). Though the two cases differ in some important aspects, we, like F&PP and others in this debate, will treat them here as equivalent in the respects relevant to this discussion, because both require appropriate counterfactuals: “if organism O had trait t 1 but not trait t 2, it would have had, in environment E, the same reproductive success” and “if trait/organ t performed action a 1 but not action a 2, individuals with t would have had, in environment E, the same reproductive success”.

  3. Godfrey-Smith (2008) seems not to agree that the difference of/for needs counterfactual differences: “we might make sense of the distinction between T 1 and T 2 using counterfactuals, but this is not the only way. An inspection of the character of the causal processes themselves may suffice to show that T 1 is causally salient while T 2 is not” (Godfrey-Smith 2008, p. 39). We believe that if T 1 is causally salient and T 2 is not then there is one counterfactual (e.g. PUMP) which “obtains” in nature and other counterfactual (e.g. NOISE) which does not. In this minimal sense we think that the distinction of/for amounts to counterfactual differences. There may be other, stronger sense in which Godfrey-Smith is correct.

  4. The previous three are, we think, clearly flawed, and, more importantly, they do not specifically involve NS. If they were valid they would undermine any theory that studies non-intentional objects and nevertheless uses counterfactuals (i.e. at least the whole of physics, chemistry, and biology): (1) “How could selection be sensitive to the consequences of counterfactually removing t but not t′ if, in point of fact, neither t nor tactually is removed? The answer is that it couldn’t” (F&PP, p. 112); (2) “Actual causal relationships are not sensitive to counterfactual states of affairs: if it wasn’t the case that A, then the fact that its being A would have caused its being B does not explain its [actual] being the case that B” (F&PP, p. 114); (3) “only minds are sensitive to distinctions among counterfactuals […] counterfactuals have their effects…only via the meditation of minds […] and Mother Nature has no mind” (F&PP, p. 116).

  5. Somebody could disagree regarding 1, e.g. no need of counterfactuals for the distinction of/for (cf. Godfrey-Smith 2010, last note); or regarding 2, e.g. if one buys counterfactual-supporting singular causation without laws. Although we believe that the difference of/for is related to counterfactual differences, and that counterfactual differences are grounded in nomic generalizations in the minimal sense of “counterfactual-supporting generalizations”, we do not want to enter into these issues now. In any case, we concede F&PP 1 and 2 so that, if our response works with these concessions, it would also work without them.

  6. Part of the huge debate on laws in biology depends on what one understands by “law” (cf. e.g. Brandon 1997, Elgin 2003, Sober 1997, Rosenberg 1994). Here we make a minimal reading, i.e. principles or regularities with counterfactual force, which is all we need here. In the F&PP debate, almost all parties agree that the distinction selection of/for is causal, because properties selected for are causally efficacious for differential reproduction but free riders are not, and also that this causal distinction needs counterfactual differences. To avoid opening another front, we will not emphasize this causal reading of the counterfactual differences [with which we agree in this case, cf. Martínez and Moya (2011), for a recent discussion]; all we need for the point at stake here is the acceptance of regularities with counterfactual force in NS, irrespective of whether this modal force is, in turn, explained in causal or other terms. This minimal characterization of laws as counterfactual-supporting facts is similar to the one defended in Dorato (2012), and it is also compatible with some current proposals about laws in biology in particular, such as the “paradigmatic” (Carrier 1995) and “pragmatic” (Mitchell 1997) ones.

  7. That natural selection always operates through environmental pressures, what Darwin labeled “the struggle of life”, is correctly emphasized by Lennox and Bradley (1994) against more liberal readings, e.g. Lewontin’s, which include in natural selection any (non-random drift) cause of differential reproduction.

  8. Here, and henceforth, we use “function” in a neutral way, simply as a common label for things like eating, escaping predators, attracting sexual partners, etc. We do not want to engage in the debate regarding the use of a technical notion of function in biology in general and in evolutionary biology in particular. Nothing in what follows hinges on which position one sides with in the function-debate.

  9. Cf. also Sober (2010). For the historical version cf. Fisher (1930); for Fisher’s sources, such as Darwin (1871) and Düsing (1884), cf. Edwards (1998, 2000).

  10. This version suffices for our present concerns. For a detailed discussion of a NS general principle, see, e.g., Sober (1984, 1993), Brandon (1982, 1996), Kitcher (1993, § 2.4), Rosenberg and McShea (2008), Ginnobili (2010); we will discuss NSGP in more detail in the next section.

  11. For our present exemplification concerns, it does not matter that this model’s simplicity makes it not very successful when applied to real populations. The analysis of other more complex, and empirically better suited models (e.g. the Rosenzweig–MacArthur model) would lead to a similar structure.

  12. The first reference is probably Mivart (1898, p. 272). The charge has been recurrent, and made even by prominent philosophers of science, for example Popper (1963, “as tautological”; 1972, 1976, as “unfalsifiable metaphysical program”). Cf., e.g., Sober (1984, Chap. 2), Rosenberg (1985, Chap. 5.2), and Lennox (2001) for discussion and references on different aspects of this issue.

  13. Of course CM aims to (and in fact does) explain the pen’s trajectory in terms of the hand’s trajectory (and some auxiliary assumptions). But it does not aim to explain the intentional movement of the hand/arm itself, or to be more precise, to explain the neural event (which bio-mechanically explains the movement of the hand/arm) in terms of subject’s intentions. Whether materialism is true is an open issue; and even if, as we think, intentionality is ontologically reducible to, or at least supervenient on, physicality, it does not follow that intentional explanations reduce to physical explanations. Thus to exclude intentional movements from CM’s explanatory scope does not require granting the existence of “magic powers” or the like (we thank an anonymous referee for asking for a clarification on this point).

  14. Trait-evolutions with direct human breeding intervention count as selection explananda, but of artificial selection rather than natural selection; one could include them in NS if, as we think we should, one includes intentional human intervention of this kind as a possible “natural” selective pressure among others, but we cannot discuss this independent issue here.

  15. For a standard and totally precise exposition, and application to CM, thermodynamics and other theories cf. Balzer et al. (1987). For a more informal presentation, see Moulines (2002). The program originates in Sneed (1971), and Kuhn (1976) acknowledges that it is the approach that captures his proposal best.

  16. This term is Moulines’ (1984); Kuhn uses “quasi analytic” (Kuhn 1976), Díez (2002) “concept-constitutive” and Lorenzano (2006) “synthetic a priori” (also used in Kuhn 1990). If one thinks that guiding principles are constitutive of the content of theoretical concepts, then such principles are obviously connected with the analytic/synthetic distinction. Important as this issue is, it is independent of F&PP’s case, for it applies equally to NS and to CM; for reasons of space we cannot discuss it here (see references in this footnote for a discussion).

  17. We have avoided explicitly talking of “fitness” in the text (thus our use of the long winded “a trait performing better a function that is beneficial for reproduction”), for there is a huge discussion in the literature about different meanings of the term and its role in NS that is not essential for our debate and may cause confusion. But there is one important comment worth making here. This net-like guiding principle-driven picture of unified theories also helps to answer a recurrent question involving fitness in the philosophy of evolution, namely, how general fitness is related with specific physical traits and functions (cf. e.g. Rosenberg 1978, 1983; Sober 1993; Brandon 1990). We refer here to ecological fitness, not to statistical fitness characteristic of population genetics (this terminology is Rosenberg and Bouchard’s 2002, but the distinction is made by other authors using different terms; cf. Sober 1993; Matthen and Ariew 2002; Ariew and Lewontin 2004; Pigliucci and Kaplan 2006). The answer is that, in this net-like picture of NS, general ecological fitness is a general concept for the fact, stated by NSGP, that there is some ecological problem that is better solved with certain trait than without it, but it is in the particular specializations/applications of the principle that the specific functions and physical traits are mentioned. This structural answer seems to us clearer than other metaphysical ones in terms of supervenience (Rosenberg 1978; Sober 1993) or propensity (Brandon 1990). We thank S. Ginnobili for pointing out the connection to us and for proposing the structural, or meta-theoretical, solution.

  18. Brandon (1996, pp. 51–52); see also Brandon (1978, 1982); cf. McShea and Brandon (2010) for a different, and according to us less helpful, comparison to CM. For other references less similar to our Kuhnian-structuralist analysis but pointing also to the puzzling character of a NS general principle, cf. Sober (2008a, p. 47; 1993, p. 129), Kitcher (1982, p. 60), Resnik (1997, pp. 42–47), Rosenberg (1994, p. 122) and Endler (1986, p. 12).

  19. We want to thank an anonymous referee for this and the next objection.

  20. It is worth noting that, even if (though one could, cf. fn 14) one does not include artificial selection (which obviously makes predictions), NS does not make only retrodictions but anticipatory explanations also. For instance, NS makes general predictions such as that the color of prey mammals (with no strong dimorphism) will not differ greatly from the color of their environment. And it also makes other more specific predictions, both in the laboratory [e.g., for Lepidoptera—Kettlewell (1955, 1956)—and fruit flies—Maynard Smith (1993)] and in the field [e.g., the theory predicted an increase in the size of the beak of finches in a long drought season—Winer (1995), Grant (1999)—or the acquisition of resistance to treatments in viruses—Ridley (2004)]; we thank D. Blanco for these references. On the other hand, the greater number of post hoc explanations in NS has to do with the greater difficulty in predicting environmental changes and mutations. Moreover, the fact that an explanation is temporally posterior to the occurrence of the explanandum does not undermine per se the explanatory power of the adaptive mechanism, in the same way as the post hoc mechanical explanation of the elliptic orbit of the planets does not undermine the explanatory unified power of CM explanations.

  21. Yet it is not clear at all that NS applies to more varied natural kinds than CM: very different natural kinds have the functional property “adaptedness”, but for sure no less different natural kinds also have the functional property “mass”. If multiple realizability by different natural kinds were the problem, then every functional theory using multiple realizable properties would be unacceptable, a consequence that we do not believe Fodor would endorse.

  22. As Lennox emphasizes, NS “began life as the product of analogical reasoning [from artificial selection]. Sebright [in 1809] sees clearly that the natural processes he is describing will have the same effects as the breeder’s selection, but he is not about to describe those processes as selection processes. Darwin took that step.” (Lennox 2004, 3.2).

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Acknowledgments

We want to thank D. Blanco, A. Diéguez, M. García-Carpintero, S. Ginnobili, C. Hoefer, P. Humphreys, J. Lennox, M. Martínez, C.U. Moulines, E. Sober, the attendants of the LOGOS Seminar (Barcelona), the CPS Lunch Time Talks (Pittsburgh) and the IHPS Colloquium (Toronto), and an anonymous referee of this journal for comments and criticisms on previous versions of this paper. Research for this work has been supported by research projects FFI2008-01580/CONSOLIDER INGENIO CSD2009-0056 (Spain) and PICT2007-1558-ANPCyT and PIP-112-201101-01135-CONICET (Argentina).

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The title refers to the Sober–Fodor discussion in i-net (Sober and Fodor 2010).

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Díez, J., Lorenzano, P. Who Got What Wrong? Fodor and Piattelli on Darwin: Guiding Principles and Explanatory Models in Natural Selection. Erkenn 78, 1143–1175 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-012-9414-3

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