Thanks for your kind comments about my post. I will say likewise that your blog is very fine.

I am in fact an evolutionist, but I have long had profound doubts about what exactly happens in the origin of species. I do not see any reason to deny that saltations might be part of the process and I am rather frustrated by the the common suggestion that this can not be the case. (I regard such an opinion as groundless.)

Regards,

Timothy E. Kennelly

If you take a look at the 4th to last paragraph in F&P’s response to Block and Kitcher it says:

“Both traits are then correlated with fitness, so both should count as adaptations according to the formulation of natural selection given above. But only one of them is a cause of selection, so only one of them is an adaptation, and, though both are selected, only one is selected-for. Thus the free-rider problem.”

This quote shows that F&P believe that the free-rider problem is a consequence of an inability to identify the specific “cause” [his italics, not mine] of an adaptation. I agree that if the causal structure actually was as F&P say it is, then we could very well be stuck with this free-rider problem. However, my above post was entirely dedicated to showing that Fodor did not appreciate the causal structure of evolution and hence his conclusions do not hold.

It is also instructive to notice how much time F&P spend discussing the need for a mechanism (see the second and third paragraph of the above linked response). This too shows that the underlying issue has to do with the causal structure of the theory because the mechanism is what would be doing the selecting-for.

Again, I thank you for your post, but I think your criticism of me is a little off the mark.

In the theory of evolution one finds an observed phenomena, descent with variation, which might be sufficient to explain an unobserved phenomena, the origin of species. In the most basic sense, F & P are arguing that although descent with variation is observed and may appear sufficient to explain the origin of species, this explanation is a belief which is no more certain than a belief based on word-of-mouth or profession of faith.

The argument is developed in part with ideas associated with Gould and Lewotin. It relies (in part) on the possibility of large variations being produced quickly (which G&L observed in the fossil record and explained with PE) by endogenous means and characteristics existing in populations which have nothing to do with selection, but are rather (presumably) the direct results of mutations (similar to G&L’s Spandrels) – F&P call these free-riders. A free-rider may or may not make a given species more fit, but since it is associated with other characteristics it might survive to be part of the genome of a species. The free-rider is not in the population because it makes the species more fit.
If either of these phenomena – endogenous characteristics or free-riders are common in evolution then natural selection is best understood as a sort of tautology that tells us very little (or only incidently) about why species are as they are or why life varies as it does.

Using an analogy, if you looked at professional sports in America in the 1940′s and 1950′s you might easily conclude that all the best athletes were white. Obviously this conclusion includes the assumption that the best athletes play professional sports, but the selection process for professional sports is more complicated than simply: “the best will survive” (especially in the ’40′s and ’50′s). F&P are saying that the species that survive and their phenotypes and genotypes are not simply sellected by their ability to survive in an envirnment, they are also selected chance events which introduce characteristics which are not selected in any meaningful sense.

Regards,

Timothy E. Kennelly