I would like to begin by congratulating Kantian Naturalist on his recent post, Solving Wallace’s Problem and Resolving Darwin’s Doubt, which squarely faces the epistemological issues raised by Darwin and Wallace, regarding the reliability of human knowledge. In this post, I’d like to explain why I don’t think Kantian Naturalist’s statement of the problem quite gets it right, and why I believe the solution he puts forward is a flawed one.
Wallace’s problem
Let’s begin with Wallace’s difficulty, which he discussed towards the end of his review of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Elements of Geology, which was published in the April 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review. On page 392 of the review, Wallace expresses his astonishment at the fact that people in all ethnic groups have brains with virtually identical capacities, regardless of their level of intellectual development: “Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.” Wallace rhetorically asked: “How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond the needs of its possessor?” Wallace applied the same argument to the organs of speech, remarking that “among the lowest savages with the least copious vocabularies, the capacity of uttering a variety of distinct articulate sounds, and of applying to them an almost infinite amount of modulation and inflection, is not in any way inferior to that of the higher races.” Once again, the level of development struck Wallace as biologically superfluous: “An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor.” Wallace proposed that just as man has “directed the action of the laws of variation, multiplication, and survival, for his own purposes” when artificially breeding crops and domestic animals, so too, a Higher Intelligence has “guided the same laws for nobler ends… in the development of the human race.”
It is worth noting that the foregoing argument of Wallace’s is a purely biological argument: natural selection lacks foresight, and is therefore unable to account for the development of an organ which will be biologically advantageous in the future, but which (he believed) confers no advantage at present, in many human societies. This argument is quite distinct from Wallace’s philosophical argument, made in the same review: “Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life.” The laws of Nature could generate complex bodies through the process of natural selection, but these laws “cannot even be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with consciousness.” (I am reminded here of Thomas Nagel’s claim, in his now-famous paper, What is it like to be a bat?, that “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.”) Nor can any law of evolution account for “the moral and higher intellectual nature of man,” in Wallace’s view.
If we examine Wallace’s biological argument, we find that it was answered fairly comprehensively by Thomas Henry Huxley in his 1871 essay, Mr. Darwin’s Critics. First, Huxley pointed out that the so-called “savage” races faced cognitive challenges far more formidable than those faced by people living in “advanced” societies:
…[C]onsider that even an Australian [Aborigine] can make excellent baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and beautifully balanced spears, that he learns to use these so as to be able to transfix a quartern loaf at sixty yards; and that very often, as in the case of the American Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which a well-trained European finds it difficult to master: consider that every time a savage tracks [176] his game he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation to a man of science, and I think we need ask no further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains. In complexity and difficulty, I should say that the intellectual labour of a “good hunter or warrior” considerably exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman.
Additionally, Huxley contended that there was a strong selective effect favoring individuals possessing “intellectual or aesthetic excellence,” even in the most technologically backward societies:
The savage who can amuse his fellows by telling a good story over the nightly fire, is held by them in esteem and rewarded, in one way or another, for so doing–in other words, it is an advantage to him to possess this power. He who can carve a paddle, or the figure-head of a canoe better, similarly profits beyond his duller neighbour. He who counts a little better than others, gets most yams when barter is going on, and forms the shrewdest estimate of the numbers of an opposing tribe… If we admit, as Mr. Wallace does, that the lowest savages are not raised “many grades above the elephant and the ape;” and if we further admit, as I contend must be admitted, that the conditions of social life tend, powerfully, to [179] give an advantage to those individuals who vary in the direction of intellectual or aesthetic excellence, what is there to interfere with the belief that these higher faculties, like the rest, owe their development to natural selection?
In my humble opinion, Huxley got the better of Wallace in this exchange, leaving Wallace’s argument from the alleged surplus capacity of the human brain in tatters. I am therefore utterly mystified at Kantian Naturalist’s assertion, in his post, that the answer to “Wallace’s problem,” as he calls it, required not only a philosophical revolution (viz. the notion that language is logically prior to thought, and not merely the vehicle by which thoughts are communicated), but additionally, scientific developments in the fields of “niche construction theory, embodied-embedded cognitive science, comparative primatology, and paleoanthropology (none of which were available to Wallace or Darwin).”
As we saw above, Wallace’s philosophical argument against the mind being a product of natural selection rested on the claim that there was a sharp discontinuity between conscious and unconscious creatures, and between humans, with their moral and intellectual capacities, and other animals, which lacked these capacities. Once again, we find that replies were forthcoming from the scientific community, even back in Wallace’s day. In his work, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1st edition, 1871), Charles Darwin argued that the difference between man and the apes was one of degree rather than kind, and that it was dwarfed by the far greater differences in mental capacities between apes and the “lower” animals:
If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be clearly shewn that there is no fundamental difference of this kind. We must also admit that there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man; yet this immense interval is filled up by numberless gradations. (Chapter II, p. 35)
Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. (Chapter III, p. 105)
…[T]he mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom, as will perhaps be best illustrated by comparing the mental powers of two insects, namely, a coccus or scale-insect and an ant, which undoubtedly belong to the same class. The difference is here greater than, though of a somewhat different kind from, that between man and the highest mammal. (Chapter VI, p. 186)
On the whole, the difference in mental power between an ant and a coccus is immense; yet no one has ever dreamed of placing them in distinct classes, much less in distinct kingdoms. No doubt this interval is bridged over by the intermediate mental powers of many other insects; and this is not the case with man and the higher apes. (Chapter VI, p. 187)
I therefore cannot concur with Kantian Naturalist’s assessment that “[w]hereas Darwin thought there was continuity between humans and non-human animals, his evidence is primarily about emotional displays, rather than the genuinely cognitive discontinuity.” Indeed, chapters II and III of Darwin’s Descent of Man can be described as a systematic attempt to prove that the moral and intellectual difference in capacity between man and the other animals is merely one of degree, rather than kind. As a dualist, I am not at all persuaded that the attempt works. But if I were asked who got the better of the exchange between Darwin and Wallace on this point, I would have to say: Darwin.
Notwithstanding this admission on my part, I would like to point out that oft-repeated claims of a cognitive continuum between man and the other animals rest on faulty science. Unfortunately, in Darwin and Wallace’s day, the scientific experiments lending support to the hypothesis of human uniqueness had not yet been performed. Three years ago, I presented the evidence for human uniqueness in a series of essays on Uncommon Descent, which readers are welcome to peruse at their own leisure:
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part One)
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part Two)
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part 3(a))
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part 3(b))
As Kantian Naturalist correctly points out, Wallace wasn’t the only one with doubts. It turns out that Darwin had doubts of his own about the reliability of human cognition, and it is to these that I now turn.
Darwin’s Doubt
Here’s how Kantian Naturalist summarizes Darwin’s “horrid doubt”:
A closely related problem, however, was squarely faced by Darwin: the question, nicely phrased in his famous letter to Asa Gray, as to whether it is plausible to think that natural selection can have equipped a creature with a capacity for arriving at any objective truths about the world. (It is not often noted that in that letter, Darwin says that he believes in an intelligent creator — what is in doubt is whether natural selection gives him reasons to trust in his cognitive abilities.)
These two questions, Wallace’s Problem and Darwin’s Doubt, are two sides of the same coin: if natural selection (along with other biological processes) cannot account for the uniquely human ability to grasp objective truths about reality, then we must either reject naturalism (as Wallace did) or question our ability to grasp objective truths about reality (as Darwin did).
Call this the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism. Can it be solved? If so, how?
It appears that Kantian Naturalist is referring to Darwin’s letter of May 22, 1860 to the American botanist Asa Gray (1810-1888), in which Darwin affirms that, although he does not believe in the necessity of a design in nature, he finds it difficult to believe that everything is the result of “brute force.” After tentatively suggesting that everything results from “designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance,” Darwin concludes by saying that the whole subject of God’s existence and nature is “too profound for the human intellect.”
However, the phrase “Darwin’s horrid doubt” comes from Darwin’s 1881 letter to William Graham, in which he wrote:
…I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
As the Australian philosopher John S. Wilkins points out in a 2010 essay titled, You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals on his blog, Evolving Thoughts, Darwin’s doubt had nothing to do with how we are able to grasp objective truths about the world:
First, let’s dispose of one point: Darwin’s Monkey Mind Puzzle was not aimed at debunking our knowledge of the natural world. He did not admit a fatal flaw in his own metaphysics or epistemology…
Darwin’s “horrid doubt” is whether we can know anything about God, not the world…
The same remarks apply to Darwin’s 1860 letter to Asa Gray: here, once again, Darwin suggests that the human mind is liable to err when it engages in abstruse theological reasoning. Nowhere, however, does he express doubts about the reliability of our reasoning processes, when applied to the natural world.
Our knowledge of the external world: problem solved?
In his 2010 essay, You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, philosopher John S. Wilkins addresses the question of whether Darwin’s theory supplies sufficient warrant for our belief that our scientific theories (including the theory of evolution) truly describe the world. He concludes that it does, because our theories are carefully constructed on the basis of our observations of not only near objects, but also increasingly distant ones, enabling us to gradually extend the scope of our generalizations:
So to the main point: if evolutionary theory is true, then are we blocked from thinking that it is true? Clearly not. If it is true then there is no contradiction with our beliefs being formed on the basis of evolutionary processes also being true…
When true beliefs are causally relevant to fitness, then we might expect organisms, including those endowed with monkey minds, to be able to track truth. Species that have nervous systems respond to environmental cues that are highly relevant to their fitness: von Uexküll called this the Umwelt. The world of primate common sense is our Umwelt.
Scientific theories bootstrap on this Umwelt; we begin by testing distal claims by ordinary observation, and then extend our theoretical reach by increasingly theoretical, but tested and grounded in our Umwelt, observations, as Ian Hacking argued in Representing and Intervening. Science tracks truth because it is able to rely on some degree of truthlikeness for the observational reports that we can generate in our protoscience.
However, I don’t think this answer will do. The problem with this view is that it assumes that as we refine our observations, we will eventually be left with a single theory which leaps out at us, as it were. In reality, this never happens. Scientists have no way of showing that a given theory is the only way of explaining our observational data. There are always choices to be made between rival theories that can account for the same data, and quite often they are made on aesthetic grounds: we tend to prefer simple, elegant theories. But as Oscar Wilde wittily observed, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Our preference for simplicity, elegance and ease of comprehension is a human projection on Nature – one which would make no sense unless we assumed that Nature was designed to be comprehensible, as many theists do. If an atheist wishes to refrain from making this assumption, then it seems to me that an anti-realist view of scientific truth is the only logical alternative. On this view, we should not say that unobservable or theoretical entities actually exist, but merely that they are useful constructs for helping us to make predictions about future observations. But if that’s correct, then is macroevolution real? Hmmm.
To sum up: it seems to me that Darwin’s theory of evolution gives us good reason to believe in the predictions made by our scientific theories, but little reason to believe that those theories are objectively true, insofar as they postulate theoretical entities which go beyond the limit of our observations. All we can say is that science works.
So, what about Kantian Naturalist’s solution to the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism?
Kantian Naturalist thinks he can solve what he refers to as the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism, by a two-step process, which he helpfully explains in a comment on his post:
There are two distinct moves here.
The first is a philosophical move, in which we see language as underpinning and making possible, both in evolution and in development, abstract thought, symbolic communication, self-consciousness, and objectivity. (That’s what I’m calling ’embodied discursive pragmatism’.)
The second is a scientific move, in which we understand how language is a result of evolution (more precisely: the co-evolution of language and human cognition).
Kantian Naturalist’s philosophical claim that language is logically prior to abstract thought has attracted a lot of criticism, most of which I think this is unjustifiably harsh. Having studied Wittgenstein’s thinking in some depth at university, I can appreciate Kantian Naturalist’s insistence that language and thought are inter-twined. While I would not say that the former precedes the latter, I would wholeheartedly agree with Kantian Naturalist’s rejection of the naive view that language is merely a vehicle or tool for expressing our thoughts.
Instead, my criticisms will be directed at Kantian Naturalist’s scientific claim that the origin of language can be understood in evolutionary terms: in particular, that niche construction theory may have driven the evolution of language and shared intentionality.
…[T]he construction of a uniquely hominid niche involved obligate cooperative extractive foraging. While extractive foraging is common in primates, and many great apes use tools to extract foods from their environments, humans are cooperative in extractive foraging (and must be so). Adequate provisioning requires that everyone in the group who is able to contribute will in fact contribute to the provisioning of everyone else, through division of labor that involves hunting and scavenging; setting traps for small animals; gathering nuts, seeds, berries and herbs for foods and medicines; cleaning and cooking food, making clothing, weapons; transmitting to future generations the knowledge of how to do all these things through active teaching.
Obligate cooperative foraging involves two important cognitive transformations: displaced reference and joint intentionality. Displaced reference, which put hominids on the road to language, is the capacity to communicate about objects and events that are not perceptually present to (at least) the hearer. Joint intentionality is the ability for two creatures to take an object as their shared object of attention, to know of the other creature that it is also attending to that object and to want them to do so, so that the two creatures can coordinate their actions in order to succeed at a task that neither of them could accomplish alone (or which would take much more time or energy to do so).
Frankly, I don’t buy this story, for several reasons.
First, arguing that language would have been beneficial to human survival, if it arose, fails to explain how it arose. “Why” is not the same thing as “how.” I was shocked to see so many commenters fall into this teleological mode of explanation. Here’s a case in point:
Social groups need to communicate. In a forest niche, vocal communication has advantages over visual communication and signalling.
I could just as well argue that telepathy has great advantages over vocal communication, but that wouldn’t explain how it evolved. In fact, it wouldn’t even tell us whether telepathy could have evolved. We need a mechanism.
Second, there are plenty of animals which engage in niche construction (e.g. beavers), co-operative hunting (e.g. lions) and extractive foraging (e.g. chimps), without the benefit of language. I’m not at all convinced that a lifestyle combining these various behaviors (such as that of our hominin ancestors) would have necessitated the use of language, either. I don’t see why we need language for “gathering nuts, seeds, berries and herbs for foods and medicines,” or for “cleaning and cooking food.” As for cultural transmission of skills to future generations, this is something we observe in non-human animals as well. Making clothing is unlikely to be what necessitated the use of language, as clothing is a relatively recent invention, probably coinciding with the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa, around 200,000 years ago. Language, on the other hand, probably goes back at least to the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man, as Dan Dediu and Steven Levinson have argued at length in their article, On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences (in Frontiers in Psychology, 4:397. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397):
The Neandertals had a complex stone tool technology (the Mousterian) that required considerable skill and training, with many variants and elaborations (see Klein, 2009: 485ff). They sometimes mined the raw materials at up to 2 meters depth (Verri et al., 2004). Their stone tools show wear indicating usage on wood, suggesting the existence of a wooden material culture with poor preservation, such as the carefully shaped javelins made ~400 kya [about 400,000 years ago – VJT] from Germany (Thieme, 1997). Tools were hafted with pitch extracted by fire (Roebroeks and Villa, 2011). Complex tool making of the Mousterian kind involves hierarchical planning with recursive sub-stages (Stout, 2011) which activates Broca’s area just as in analogous linguistic tasks (Stout and Chaminade, 2012). The chain of fifty or so actions and the motor control required to master it are not dissimilar to the complex cognition and motor control involved in language (and similarly takes months of learning to replicate by modern students).
Additionally, a 2011 essay by Dietrich Stout and Thierry Chaminade, titled, Stone tools, language and the brain in human evolution (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 12 January 2012, vol. 367, no. 1585, pp. 75-87) lends support to the view that the Late Acheulean tools made by Heidelberg man required a high level of cognitive sophistication to produce, in addition to long hours of training for novices. This training would have included the use of intentional communication, which the authors characterize as “purposeful communication through demonstrations intended to impart generalizable (i.e. semantic) knowledge about technological means and goals, without necessarily involving pantomime.”
Third, I should point out that the evidence for the extractive foraging hypothesis is not terribly strong. Another popular theory is the social brain hypothesis, but that seems to have problems, too, as does the recent theory that cooking helped big brains evolve.
Finally, I’d like to draw readers’ attention to a quote from writer and columnist A. N. Wilson, a convert from atheism, who argued that materialist accounts of the origin of language are inherently inadequate, in a hard-hitting article titled, Why I believe again (New Statesman, 2 April 2009):
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.
It seems to me that Wilson’s remarks contain a lot of good sense. Language really is a miracle, which cannot be explained from the bottom up, naturally.
What do readers think?
I was objecting to KN calling it an analogy and that we are somehow stretching the analogy. Darwin certainly meant it as the direct term for the working mechanism of evolution. He never retracted it. And when the slogan “survival of the fittest” became current, he endorsed it. No analogies.
Erik,
“If you sincerely think evolution is true, then stop convincing people that it’s true. Go on and reproduce.” – Erik
Michael Behe, God bless his philosophically confused natural scientist soul, has apparently 9 children!
p.s. you’re not going to want to miss this, Erik
Erik,
Yes, Darwin in the end endorsed Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ phraseology, somewhat reluctantly as I recall from his autobiography. In the Anglo-American tradition of the discourse here, Erik, most posters have been obscured (willfully or not) from facing head-on the destruction that evolutionist ideological thinking has caused in SSH. And we’ve now got D.S. Wilson actually promoting a new revived ‘social Darwinism’!!!!! This was predicted. Some variants of transhumanism try to make ‘who (genetically) programs the fittest’ a measure of who will in their mortal coil ‘survive’ longer.
Why is this not seen as evidence against Darwinism?
It seems pretty obvious that smart people will on average have less children simply because there is choice involved. “Dumb” people by definition are not as good at making choices.
But for some reason we assume that in the past this as not the case. Why is that?
Bigger families were more desirable over all before the advent of a government old age safety net. But it seems to me dumb people should always be expected to have more children than is considered wise. It’s part of what it means to be dumb.
peace
That’s creationist thinking.
No, I’m not saying that you are a creationist. I’m saying that’s the kind of thinking that comes from the naive picture of evolution that creationists have. It doesn’t work that way.
Maybe try reading Gould’s “Spandrels” paper.
Not by me. I hold that scientific theories are neither true nor false.
Creationist thinking.
Yes, indeed, this is strong evidence against the ridiculous strawman version of evolution that creationists love to attack.
My claim is even stronger – it cannot work that way. You seem to agree. So what is that thing about creationist thinking you have there?
Is this supposed to explain how meaningless fluff makes perfect sense on evolution? Which statement in the paper are you appealing to?
None? Really? What do YOU look for in a mate?
Why should what be seen as evidence against Darwinism? What is this “problem” you are referring to? What are you calling “intelligence” (that you claim is not declining)? Is this something we measure at childbirth? In a word, what, exactly, is the argument you have in mind here?
What I see on this thread is a bunch of religious folks casting around wildly for some kind of weird argument against the completely obvious proposition that, with respect to surviving and having kids that survive, it’s better to be strong than weak, better to be fecund than fertile, better to be attractive than not attractive, better to be adaptable than not adaptable, better to be clever than a doofus.
I mean, maybe there are arguments against this or that claim, this or that supposed mechanism made or posited by evolutionary biologists: I wouldn’t presume to know and would leave responses to the people here who do. But this stuff is just patently absurd.
Maybe it’s a few guys bemoaning the fact that, in spite of what ought to be considered obvious advantages, girls don’t seem to want them? I don’t know–I’m casting around myself for a reason for their behavior now, because their posts on this thread seem so nonsensical to me.
For us (namely gorgeous intelligent Westerners), “mate” these days doesn’t have the reproductive significance that it has in the rest of biosphere. How/why did we evolve to become like this?
Yes, it is obvious. However, it’s also obvious that the advantage is comparative or relative. Meaning, the infertile weak inadaptible doofuses MUST EXIST in order for the advantageous features to actually be advantageous. Therefore, I’d conclude, we will forever have infertile weak inadaptible doofuses and no amount of competitive evolution will eliminate them. What does the theory of evolution say on this point? Something about the survival of the fittest, does it not?
There are, basically, three positions here:
1. Those who insist that the human cognitive capacities that underlie art, religion, science, politics, and philosophy are so unique that natural selection cannot explain them, even if natural selection can explain some aspects of life (though the theists here are divided on that issue);
2. Those who insist that the the human cognitive capacities that underlie art, religion, science, politics, and philosophy are not really that unique, are different from those of other animals only by degree and not by kind, and in any event are the result of increased brain size, which is obviously adaptive;
3. Those who insist that the human cognitive capacities that underlie art, religion, science, politics, and philosophy are indeed unique relative to those of other animals (even relative to those of other primates), but that the ecological problems posed by cooperative extractive foraging offer a promising approach to understanding how those unique cognitive capacities evolved within a constructed niche that we can call “culture”.
That’s a nice summary, but what I’m scratching my head at is a fourth group that denies that there’s such a thing as natural selection at all. Never mind human cognitive capacities that underlie art, etc. This group says there’s no survival advantages conferred by strength, speed, fecundity, adaptability, attractiveness, cleverness, etc.
I mean it’s just too silly to even be contemplated for more than a second.
No, it doesn’t.
Different traits can contribute to fitness in different ways. A zebra that is somewhat slower than the rest of the herd, but also a bit more intelligent or with somewhat better hearing, can pass on its genes just as much as a zebra that’s less attentive but faster. The lioness will only catch the very slowest, least attentive animal (or oldest, or sickest, etc.). That leaves plenty of variation in the zebra population to be transmitted to the next generation.
As long as enough organisms with feature F can survive to reproduce, F will persist in the population, even if F is sub-optimal or if there’s another feature G which is a better adaptation.
Put otherwise: population genetics explains why animals never evolve perfect adaptations and why sub-optimal adaptations can often persist. On some versions of evolutionary theory, it is better to think about fitness in terms of satisficing rather than optimality. Which is exactly what one would expect from an unplanned process.
Well, unless everybody is identical there will be differences. Some will be stronger, some stupider, some more attractive, some slower, etc. Do you think Darwinism requires that if it were true, every member of every species would by October of 2016 have had to be exactly the same in every capacity as every other member of that species? What’s your basis for that theory?
Your answer completely sidesteps the main point. Consider walto’s specific example: infertile weak inadaptible doofuses. How do their traits contribute to their fitness?
It’s a continuum. For example, even some of the biggest doofuses here won’t go out and cast their votes for Trump.
My basis for it is the “survival of the fittest” claim. Either it means something or it doesn’t. My humble assumption is that it never meant anything and is best dropped from the theory completely. But when this point is dropped from the theory of evolution, it transforms the entire theory to something else. Namely, there will be no evolution in it anymore, except perhaps by redefining “evolution” to something like “change” or “struggle for survival” without any notion of fitness.
The argument is based on a ridiculously reductionist understanding (or misunderstanding) of evolution.
And that question seems to come from a ridiculously reductionistic idea about research papers.
Gould’s paper can be seen as an argument against that kind of ridiculous reductionism.
It does means something. It just doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Gould’s paper says, in a nutshell, “We welcome the richness that a pluralistic approach, so akin to Darwin’s spirit, can provide.” “Richness” here meaning admission of other explanations to variety of species besides the “adaptationist programme” (=focus on natural selection). Those other explanations include: (1) Genetic drift in spite of natural selection, (2) Darwin’s “correlation of growth”, (3) the decoupling of selection and adaptation, etc.
These are not explanations (i.e. they don’t answer Why?) but objective observations, requiring no theory of evolution. In fact, these observations have been fruitfully catalogued in pre-Darwin biology by von Baer, Linné, Goethe, et al, and post-Darwin biology has not contributed anything fundamental in this area. I don’t see how the article helps the theory of evolution specifically.
It’s a slogan.
They are really tilting at windmills in this thread, no?
Erik: My basis for it is the “survival of the fittest” claim. Either it means something or it doesn’t.
walto: It does means something. It just doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Neil Rickert: It’s a slogan.
Take your time to make up your minds.
You think it not meaning what you think it means is inconsistent with it being a slogan? One more confusion to add your pot on this thread.
If it’s a slogan with a meaning that is applicable to the theory of evolution, then Neil’s calls to non-reductive understanding of the theory of evolution is mere posturing. My charitable interpretation of the situation is that, even as a slogan, it cannot have the meaning YOU take it to have.
ETA: To clear up the mess, you’d need to reveal what, according to you, “survival of the fittest” means and in what particular way you think I misunderstand it.
So?
So?
Indeed.
I’m taking it as entertainment.
This seems to me to boil down to the claim that there are larger brains, therefore larger brains are obviously adaptive. But that is not at all “obvious.”
There are organisms without brains which seem to survive and reproduce just fine without any brain at all. There are organisms with rather small brains which seem to survive and reproduce just fine with a small brain.
Why are our brains bigger than they need to be for survival and reproduction? If you say that the human brain is the size it is for adapatationist reasons then why not just admit to being a pan-adaptationist?
Because the way I see it it’s one or the other, and therein lies the dilemma. It’s either an adaptation or it’s superfluous.
Mung,
That’s like asking, if each trait of every organism is adaptive, then why don’t all organisms have every trait?
As Neil says, it’s little more than a slogan, meaning, roughly, that all else equal, those plants and animals that are best adapted to their surrounding environments are most likely to survive and have offspring.
Some, like phoodoo, have claimed that it’s basically a tautology. That’s not quite right, but it clearly doesn’t say anything that anybody with sense should be disagreeing with. It’s about as obvious as anything can be WITHOUT being a tautology.
Still, you and others here seem to be resisting it: “Hey, there are lots of dumb and ugly people! How can that be if only the fittest survive?”
On the one hand, y’all say on the other that it’s trivially true; on the other, you insist it’s false. Please.
No, it isn’t like that at all.
Can you state a good reason why a large brain is obviously adaptive? Preferably one that doesn’t boil down to humans have large brains, therefore large brains are obviously adaptive.
Having no brain is obviously adaptive. Having a small brain is obviously adaptive. Pretty much every trait must be there for adaptive reasons, else it would not be there. Why not become a pan-adaptationist?
I have no idea what you are referring to here. You’ll have to elaborate if you actually want an answer.
Ok. Of course you could actually take some courses in physiology, zoology, molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and similar and actually find out if your hypothesis is valid. There’s plenty of research on that very subject already, so you really don’t have to assume how it came about in the absence of actual understanding. But hey…I understand that simply offering your own ideas from the sidelines is a heck of lot easier than finding out how things actually work and occur. It’s not like the people who know how the bladder evolved are going to care what you think.
Earthworms and most caterpillars have very little control over their excretions. Outside of placental mammals, there are few animals that store their waste products. Birds, amphibians, and reptiles (and even some mammals) have only cloacae and excrete pretty much when waste is produced. This is particularly important for birds; flying is costly without carrying extra weight. Raptors also regurgitate material that does not digest well right after eating – mostly bones and feathers/fur/scales. Great way to find where owls hang out.
There have been accusations here that some posters have a naive veiw of evolution and so misunderstand it. It seems to me that some posters have a very simple view of evolution that does not coincide with reality. Single traits do not evolve in isolation, they are inherited along with a host of other traits and attributes of whole organisms.
Which animal would be the fittest from the following?:
1. The strong, unattractive, stupid one.
2. The weak, intelligent, slow one.
3. The attractive, stupid, fast one.
I could continue this list indefinitely and of course it all depends on the particular situation. Dark colour, light colour, large beaks, small beaks may become prominent but they are part of a larger whole that must be taken into account. It is easy to imagine that the continuation of a trait depends on its contribution towards its success in reproduction. But because it does not appear in isolation we cannot claim that a single trait has caused an animal to have the various attributes that it presently possesses. To do so would be to formulate a just so story that is beyond testability.
So you may believe that natural selection, or if youy prefer, survival of the fittest is the reason why organisms have the characteristics they do, but this is just an undemonstrated belief.
CharlieM,
Just because traits don’t function in isolation doesn’t mean we can’t measure how each trait contributes to overall fitness. That’s why we do experiments.
Are you asking for a general theory of what brains are good for?
Hi everyone,
I’m back again after an absence of a couple of days. I’ll just respond quickly to a few comments that readers made.
Or, if you like Dennett, it’s a deepity, the sort of thing that seems profound only to the believers, contributes nothing to understanding and, on analysis, doesn’t serve as explanation.
You welcome.
Can you point me to any experiments that will give me a figure for the contribution made towards human fitness by the possession of large brains?
Hi keiths,
In response to my comment:
you wrote:
Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear enough. The point I wished to make was that reasoning is not an ineluctably private thing that we do inside our heads; rather, it is an essentially public, critical activity. If you claim to have reasons for believing that X, then it’s always appropriate for me (or any other human being) to ask you what those reasons are, and to criticize them if they don’t sound terribly convincing. And if you can’t provide a defense of your view, then I am perfectly entitled to call it into question, and say that you have no good reasons to support it.
Crows are incapable by nature of debating and discussing. They cannot criticize each other’s arguments. That’s why I see no point in imputing reason to them.
You also wrote:
Except that even with a stroke victim, it’s not usually that cut-and-dried. They may be able to reason about simple matters, but find it difficult to organize a complex sequence of activities. And while they may not be able to argue, they may be able to say a few words. It’s impossible to totally divorce reasoning from language, even in the case of the stroke victim.
Erik, ‘Survival of the fittest’ is a nice slogan, a logo, a meme. I get that you’d like it to constitute an entire scientific theory, because it’s simpler to criticize. But it’s not an entire scientific theory, and what it expresses is roughly true, wheter there are dumb, ugly people posting at TSZ or not.
Jesus Christ.
Hi walto,
You write:
For the record, I would certainly agree that it’s “better to be clever than a doofus,” and I would also agree that natural selection favors the clever, other things being equal. The issue on which I disagree with evolutionary naturalists is whether natural selection can explain the origin of human intelligence, and in particular, the origin of language. At the very least, I would expect naturalists to be able to successfully refute the arguments advanced in the OP above against the possibility of an evolutionary origin for human language.
Complete agreement. That’s why I urged that we should distinguish reasoning from intelligence.
Hi Kantian Naturalist,
Thank you very much for your clarifying comment above. I would basically agree with your way of delineating the three positions that can be held. Perhaps there are other variations on the third position: some people may support another hypothesis to account for our uniquely human abilities. Anyway, I’m glad we agree about human uniqueness.
Mung, I take your point that large brains aren’t OBVIOUSLY adaptive. It turns out that they are anyhow, though.
Mine isn’t particularly heavy, however, as my parents opted for the less costly ‘agile, mobile and versatile’ model. And, as it can survive without thinking for weeks at a time, there hasn’t really been what you could call ‘buyer’s remorse.’ There have been a few issues, admittedly, but, so far no law suits have officially been filed–though three or four have been contemplated.
Specific stuff though, not overall dissatisfaction.
Then you’re just defining them as unreasoning.
Considering that reasoning often is imputed to humans who figure out what crows figure out, it seems that you’re just narrowing the definition of “reasoning” in order not to include crows. The interesting thing to do is to study how reasoning in humans occurs, and how it differs (or doesn’t) from how crows appear to reason.
If you don’t call what crows do ‘reasoning’ it’s still the case that many people would, unless something other than the fact that they are not conversant is found that means that it is not similar enough to be called reasoning. In other words, you can’t just define away faculties that appear to underlie speech, they’re still there even if you don’t like them to be called “reasoning.”
Glen Davidson
Emphasis mine.
Wikipedia says, “Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.”
Question: What else besides the concept of natural selection has Darwin’s theory of evolution contributed to biology? The Wikipedia article implies – absolutely nothing. Everything else was already there prior to Darwin.*
Maybe you can do better and show how, minus natural selection, we still have Darwin’s theory of evolution.
* Even natural selection was there prior to Darwin. For example, it underlies Mendel’s second and third law.
So you didn’t notice that we did?
Glen Davidson
walto,
Oh, so evolution is NOT survival of the fittest?
Very interesting. Do tell.