03.11.10

Against Physics as Ontologically Basic

Posted in argumentation, biology, epistemology, evolution, ontology, philosophy, physics, science at 12:42 am by nogre

1.  Biology is epistemically independent of physics:

Let’s assume that biology is not epistemically independent of physics, i.e. to know any biology we must first know something about physics.  However, consider evolution as determined by natural selection and the struggle for survival.  We can know about the struggle for survival and natural selection without appealing to physics — just as Darwin did when he created the theory — and hence we can fundamentally understand at least some, if not most, of biology independent of physics.

2.  Physics supervenes on biology:

Whatever ability we have to comprehend is an evolved skill.  Therefore any physical understanding of the world, as an instance of general comprehension,  supervenes on the biology of this skill.

3.  Biology is just as fundamental as physics:

If the principles involved in biology and physics are epistemically independent and each can be said to supervene on  the other, then neither has theoretical primordiality.

Therefore physics is not ontologically basic.

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[This argument was inspired by a discussion over at It's Only a Theory start by Mohan Matthen.

And I want it to be known that I HATE SUPERVENIENCE.  Basically if you use supervenience regularly then you are a BAD PERSON.  The only good argument that uses supervenience is one that reduces the overall usage of the word:  it is my hope that the above argument will prevent people from saying that biology supervenes on physics.  For every argument in which I thought that using supervenience might prove useful, I found a much, much superior argument that did not make use of the term.  I know you always live to regret statements like this, but right now I don't care.]

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01.19.10

Aristotle’s Theory of TOPOS (Place)

Posted in Relativity, philosophy, physics, science at 12:22 am by nogre

[This is something I wrote before I had this blog, but I really like it and hope the readers here will find it interesting.]

The task of explaining Aristotle’s theory of place lies in the interpretation of this sentence: “Hence the place of a thing is the innermost motionless boundary of what contains it,” (Physics IV 212a20).  Now the idea of a motionless boundary for perceptible and obviously movable objects seems impossibly counterintuitive.  However, using Aristotle’s comments into the nature of place, we can understand how this theory extends beyond a simple boundary theory and into the modern era.

His discussion is started by making an observation:

The existence of place is held to be obvious from the fact of mutual replacement.  Where water now is, there in turn, when water has gone out as from a vessel, air is present; and at another time another body occupies this same place.  The place is thought to be different from all other bodies which come to be in it and replace one another.  What now contains air formerly contained water, so that clearly the place or space into which and out of which they passed was something different from both. (Physics IV 208b1-8)

Aristotle then makes some tentative moves into defining what could possibly fulfill the role of place.  First he discounts any idea that place could “be body; for if it were” he says, “there would be two bodies in the same place,” (209a6) and shows how this causes untold amounts of theoretical difficulty (ibid.).  Then he discusses how, as that which “primarily contains each body” (209b1), place could be viewed as the form or the matter.  Again he discounts either of these possibilities by noting that neither of them can be separated from a thing, whereas place may be.

The analysis turns at this point asking, “How many ways one thing is said to be in another,” (210a14) in the hopes of landing upon a useful interpretation of the notion of being-in.  Aristotle entertains the idea that a thing may be in itself, or more specifically, in itself “qua itself or qua something else” (210a27).  He gives the example of a jar of wine being in itself in virtue of the whole’s description in terms of its parts: the jar of wine is not reducible to a jar or some wine, but to their specific combination.  Hence that which is a subject may potentially be a container as well, as the jar is the container of the subject ‘jar of wine’.  However, he says this is impossible as no object is actually like this: the wine would have to be an equal part container, and the jar an equal part wine, else the whole of the ‘jar of wine’ will not be completely in itself.  It is in virtue of being different that the jar and the wine may come together, and hence he concludes that, “since the vessel is no part of what is in it (what contains something primarily is different from what is contained), place could not be either the matter or the form of the thing contained,” (210b27).

Aristotle then considers two sorts of boundary theories.  First, place is such that it is “some sort of extension between the extremities,” (211b7).  However, this sort of boundary exists independently of what is bounded and is permanent.  Insofar as anything moves, the place will change, and there will be two problems generated: 1. The boundary between, for example, the wine and air moving in a jar will be exactly coincident with the boundary between the air and wine, and each of these two boundary extensions will be partially coincident but must also be unique, and 2. There will be a place at the boundary of the displaced place, and so an infinite regress of places associated with previous places will be generated.

Finally Aristotle says, “place necessarily is… the boundary of the containing body at which it is in contact with the contained body,” (212a6).  Then, interestingly, he says, “Place… is rather what is motionless,” (212a17) and then, “Hence the place of a thing is the innermost motionless boundary of what contains it,” (212a20).  So how are we to make sense of containers that give us the boundaries but also do not move?

If we take our interpretation directly from the previous discussion of boundary, Aristotle seems to have made an awfully strange claim: place is a like a container that something perfectly fits in, and yet that container cannot itself move although what is contained therein necessarily can.  However, I would like to suggest taking him at his word in regards to place being necessarily a boundary.  It is necessarily a boundary of the containing body which is in contact with the contained body, but it is not sufficient that it be the boundary that most have in mind.  What has been missed by regarding the boundary as necessary and sufficient is the incorporation of Aristotle’s primary intuition into how we know place exists.

For us to notice any motion we need something stationary relative to the thing moving such that we may observe the motion as motion.  A stationary backdrop is necessary to view change.  Consider this example: it is a common experience to be sitting in traffic next to a bus.  When the bus starts to slowly pull forward sometimes it is possible to get the sensation that you have started to move backwards.  This sensation lasts until some other fact informs you that it was not you who were retreating, but the bus advancing.  In the first instance, the place that you inhabited was defined in terms of a stationary bus: any motion that occurred was relative to that fixed point.  When you realized it was the bus, and not you, that was moving, whatever it was that informed you that you were stationary became incorporated into the place.  Perhaps you saw a building and since it was not moving your senses of place and motion were reevaluated to accommodate this new information. Hence two different places were involved in this scenario: one corresponds to your (belief of) moving backwards and the other to the forward motion of the bus.  The first place has the innermost motionless boundary [illegitimately] defined in terms of the bus [since the bus was in motion], and the second has an expanded sense of place to include something motionless relative to both you and the bus. Place, therefore, not only encapsulates that which is moving, but also whatever is observing the motion and an independently stationary object.

When Aristotle says, “First then we must understand that place would not have been inquired into, if there had not been motion with respect to place,” (211a12) he was not making an idle comment on the ‘discovery’ of the phenomenon of place.  Instead, he was beginning his analysis with the most important feature to be explained.  Galilean relativity holds fundamentally that motion can only be defined relative to some “system of coordinates” (Einstein p. 14), i.e. something motionless with respect to the moving object.  Although Aristotle did not have the benefit of Descartes’ mathematical works he still recognized the need for a reference system unique to each motion.

Now that the meaning of the ‘motionless’ criterion has been explained, what does ‘innermost’ mean if the boundary may include objects at a significant distance from the one we are describing?  The Earth is, in some sense, the place of all sublunary objects, but it is surely not the innermost boundary.  Again appealing to the exact phenomenon that Aristotle was dealing with yields the correct explanation: the motion of an object with respect to its place cannot be described by saying that the place of the thing is Earth.  Instead the innermost boundary should be the first boundary for which the description of motion and place of the thing make sense.  In the example of swirling wine in a jar (with the jar held steady but the wine still moving), the place of the wine can be said to be the jar because it describes the closest motionless boundary.  One might say that the place of the wine is equally on the table, or in someone’s hand, but both of these descriptions are related to motion other than that of wine swirling in the jar, and are really just shorthand for ‘the jar of wine is on the table, or in hand’ (consider, “The wine is on the floor,”: no swirling to be had).  The correct place of the moving bus example was the street, which could reasonably include things such as houses and other stationary objects, the most important one being the road.  Aristotle gives the ancient version of this, just before his final definition of place, in terms of the motion of a boat, such that it must be defined in terms of the whole river, which is taken as stationary (212a19).

One may think that I am being too charitable to Aristotle at this point because it may look that I have implied that the ‘innermost’ criterion of the theory will do all the work of translation between coordinate systems, which it does not seem to do.  However, Aristotle allows for the fact that we may treat a vessel such as a boat as a “transportable place” (212a14).  Hence we may allow for the things within a boat to have motion independent of a preferred fixed reference system.  This connection drawn between vessel and place gives the final aspect needed for a true relativity theory.  Historically the example of a boat on a river (212a19) is striking because Galileo uses the same example of a ship in his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (Salgado).

Commentary

Historically Aristotle’s theory of place has been treated as a simple boundary theory coupled with a few very strange statements that were assumed to be preliminary investigations into different methods of solving blatant paradoxes (King 91).  My suspicion for why this happened is twofold.  First, philosophy of place sounds like the most dry and uninteresting subject possible and hence it was not given its due study time over the course of history (after Aristotle that is).  Secondly, the modern formulation of relativity is given according to Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity.  Insofar as this is a theory of relative motion, it is easy to overlook the fact that it applies to objects without motion, things in place.  Aristotle’s formulation is none the weaker because of the way he cast his theory, but it is much more obscure to the modern reader, as Aristotle’s relativity is developed in a somewhat inverse way with respect to modern relativity.

Bibliography

• Barnes, J. ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle v.2, Princeton U. Press, Princeton 1995
• Einstein, Albert Relativity: The Special and General Theory Lawson trans.  Pi press, NY, NY 2005
• King, H. R., “Aristotle’s Theory of TOPOS,” Classical Quarterly #44 1950, pp. 76-96
• Salgado, Rob “Galileo’s Parable of the Ship” http://physics.syr.edu/courses/modules/LIGHTCONE/galileo.html Accessed 2/24/06

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12.31.09

Genetic Drift and the Uncertainty Principle

Posted in Relativity, biology, evolution, measurement, philosophy, physics, science at 4:48 pm by nogre

I have previously argued that the history of species must be treated like a evolutionary trajectory: we can only appreciate a species in a relative sense, just as we must evaluate physical trajectories relative to our own motion.

But what happens when we try to measure the very small in physics?  We find there is a limit to the precision at which we can measure, as given by the uncertainty principle.

This suggests that there may be some similar limit when it comes  to measuring small changes in species.  The more we try to pin down exactly what a species is, the less sure we will be about its future and the more we measure the direction the species is heading, the less sure we will be about exactly what constitutes that species.

If genetic drift is just another way of saying that we cannot pin down the exact genetic make-up of a species then drift may be considered to be an instance of the uncertainty principle.

and HAPPY NEW YEAR

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09.29.09

A Priori Against Physicalism

Posted in biology, ontology, philosophy, physics, science at 12:54 am by nogre

I saw that Richard Brown is working to defend physicalism against a priori arguments.  He says that most (all?) arguments use the same intuitions found in the zombie-knowledge arguments.

This got me to thinking about a priori arguments against physicalism and I came up with something different:

If physicalism is, as Dr. Brown says, “… the view that only physical things exist. Physical things are those things that are postulated by a completed physics,” then I wonder who made physics king?  I’d have to assume that there is something within science that specifies physics as most fundamental.

However, science itself, or more specifically philosophy of science, is discipline agnostic.  There is nothing within the basic structure of science to specify physics as the foundation.  Maybe it is biology that is fundamental, maybe it is psychology, maybe something else; the point is that there is no a priori reason to prefer one over any of the others.  If there is nothing that distinguishes physics as a ground for the other sciences, then there is no reason that physicalism should be taken as a fundamental philosophy.

At this point the physicalist would want to find some grounds for the claim that physics is fundamental.  This is problematic though: nothing could be used from within physics because that would be question begging.  On the other hand, if we try to justify physics as fundamental by appealing to something outside physics, then isn’t that thing that provides the justification more fundamental than physics itself?  If we have to justify the claim ‘physics is fundamental’ by appealing to something even more fundamental, then physics is no longer fundamental because it needs an outside justification.  Therefore any justification for physicalism is inherently question begging or self-contradictory.

I know I haven’t disproved physicalism; at best I’ve indicated that justifications for it are bad.  And if any justification is bad, then the position is indefensible.  Since most philosophers don’t like to hold indefensible positions, perhaps this is sufficient.

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08.14.09

Happy Birthday, H. C. O.

Posted in philosophy, physics, science at 7:09 pm by nogre

Today, as Google/Wikipedia tells me, is Hans Christian Ørsted’s birthday.  He coined the term ‘Thought Experiment’ and, if he had done nothing else, I’d still think he ought to be remembered far and wide.

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05.22.09

The Non-Reducibility & Scientific Explanation Problem

Posted in biology, epistemology, evolution, independence friendly logic, ontology, philosophy, physics, science at 9:23 pm by nogre

Q: What is a multiple star system?

A: More than one star in a non-reducible mutual relationship spinning around each other.

Q: How did it begin?

A: Well, I guess, the stars were out in space and at some point they became close in proximity.  Then their gravitations caused each other to alter their course and become intertwined.

Q: How did the gravitations cause the courses of the stars to become intertwined?  Gravity does one thing: it changes the shape of space-time; it does not intertwine things.

A: That seems right.  It is not only the gravities that cause this to happen.  It is both the trajectory and mass (gravity) of the stars in relation to each other that caused them to form a multiple star system.

Q: Saying that it is both the trajectories and the masses in relation to each other is not an answer.  That is what is in need of being explained.

A: You are asking the impossible.  I have already said that the relation is non-reducible.  I am not going to go back upon my word in order to reduce the relation into some other relation to explain it to you.  The best that can be done is to describe it as best we can.

Here is the problem: If you have a non-reducible relation (e.g., a 3-body problem or a logical mutual interdependence) then you cannot explain how it came to exist.  Explaining such things would mean that the relation was reducible.  But being unable to explain some scientific phenomenon violates the principle of science: we should be able to explain physical phenomenon.  Then the relation must not be non-reducible or it must have been a preexisting condition going all the way back to the origin of the universe.  Either you have a contradiction or it is unexplainable by definition.

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What can we do?  You can hold out for a solution to the 3-body-problem or, alternatively, you can change what counts as explanation.  The latter option is the way to go, though, I am not going into this now.

For now I just want to illustrate that this problem of non-reducibility and explanation is pervasive:

Q: What is a biological symbiotic relationship?

A: More than one organism living in a non-reducible relationship together.

Q: How did it begin?

A: Well, I guess, the organisms were out in nature and at some point they became close in proximity.  Then their features caused each other to alter their evolution and become intertwined.

Q: How did the features cause the courses of their evolution to become intertwined?  Physical features do one thing: they enable an organism to reproduce; they do not intertwine things.

A: That seems right.  It is not only the features that cause this to happen.  It is both the ecosystem and the features of the organisms in relation to each other that caused them to form a symbiosis.

Q: Saying that it is both the place the organisms are living in and their features in relation to each other is not an answer.  That is what is in need of being explained.

A: You are asking the impossible.  I have already said that the relation is non-reducible.  I am not going to go back upon my word in order to reduce the relation into some other relation to explain it to you.  The best that can be done is to describe it as best we can.

As you can see, I am drawing a parallel between a multiple body problem and multiple organisms that live together.  Like the star example above, there is no way to explain the origins of organisms living together.  Even in the most basic case it is impossible.

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04.24.09

What in the world have I been up to?

Posted in Relativity, biology, evolution, fitness, philosophy, science, technology at 4:48 pm by nogre

I’m sure the dearth of posts here has not gone completely unnoticed.  So what in the world have I been up to?  While it is possible that I had decided to forgo my normal practice of just making up philosophy as I see fit, this, of course, is ridiculous.

I do not know if any of my readers have been around since the beginning, but this blog started out with a good deal of my philosophy of biology.  The one-sentence description of my philosophy of biology is: I have relativized the theory of fitness within evolution and comported the rest of evolutionary theory to make it work.

In the last few months I’ve been teaching myself to program and, as of today, I have incorporated as much of my theory of evolution into a simulation as I can possibly hope to accomplish (at the moment).  All that is left is to get all the bugs out.

It is not every day that I can say that I have created something that is a direct result of a theory of philosophy, moreover a theory that I have personally developed.  I’m pretty stoked.  There is still a good amount of work getting the thing to actually run from this point forward, but at least none of the issues will be theoretical, just technical.

And of course there is no guarantee that things will go the way I want them to, but at least I gave it a shot.

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03.27.09

Aether Propeller?

Posted in fun, physics, random idiocy, science, technology at 12:00 pm by nogre

I was trying to figure out how planes stay in the sky.

So this is what I came up with.

As the plane moves forward, a small vacuum is created above the wing. The vacuum is a low pressure zone which pulls the wing up and the air down to fill itself in (because Nature HATES a vacuum).  This upward pull that the low pressure zone creates we call lift.

I thought, “Hooray.  This isn’t so complicated!  Planes stay up because they create small vacuums above their wings as they move forward, creating an upward force.”

Then I thought, “And this is why planes can’t fly in outer space, because there is no air to displace and create a vacuum.”

Then I thought, “But if there is an aether theory, why not?”

So as a wing moves through a vacuum, generally we don’t think there is anything to cause lift or drag.  But if we have an aether theory of a vacuum, i.e. there is some substance below what we can observe that our matter exists within, then why can’t we create a vacuum in that substance?

My line of thought was: Air is to Vacuum as Vacuum is to Black Hole.

Can’t we just spin a propeller fast enough in outer space to create lift?  As the prop turns small vacuums in the aether will be created, and, insofar as Nature hates vacuums, a force will be created to fill in this vacuum, pulling the propeller in that direction.

(Someone please tell me how this is nonsense so I won’t go around thinking I’ve come up with a new model of space flight.)

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03.20.09

Dismantling Fodor’s Argument

Posted in General Relativity, biology, evolution, fitness, measurement, philosophy, physics, science at 1:21 pm by nogre

Fodor argued that the theory of evolution is not a legitimate theory of science because it is either vacuously true or wrong.  He accused Darwin of committing the intentional fallacy. (synopsis here)

Insofar as he made no logical mistakes in his reasoning, we need a different strategy to defend the theory of evolution.  In this post I will argue that his argument is an instance of gerneral underdetermination, and hence not a problem of evolution but of philosophy of science.

Underdetermination means that we can’t specifically identify the exact cause of scientific phenomena.  For example, given some phenomenon, say darkness during the day, there can be many possible explanations: an eclipse, an exploding volcano shooting ash into the air, the sun has gone out, the electric company has blocked the sun to make more money, it was the work of Claw Vipers, etc.  The exact cause of the darkness is underdetermined; sure we can research the problem and eliminate some of the possible explanations, but because of our limitations we will never be able to check everything.  So the cause of the darkness can be said to be underdetermined, i.e. there is just not enough determining evidence.

Fodor argues that the theory of evolution is vacuous becuase given any trait we identify as benficial to the fitness of the organism is arbitrarily selected.  Since there are too many factors to identify within an ecosystem or organism acting within that ecosystem, any hypothesis we propose about the fitness of that organism in that ecosystem will be trivially compatible with evolution.

For example assume there is an argument that having a certain trait, say longer legs, increases a zebra’s fitness.   We can recognize that this argument could be unfounded because it might not be the longer legs but something else that increases the zebra’s fitness.  It just happened that increased leg length was a harmless side affect of this truly beneficial trait.  Either way, if it is the longer legs or some other unidentified trait, evolution is always compatible with our theories, and so it is trivially vacuously true.

In short I would say that he is arguing the cause of natural selection is underdetermined.  The task is to identify whether this is a unique case of underdetermination or an instance of general underdetermination.  I will now show that this sort of underdetermination can exist in physics*:

Imagine we are doing physics and we want to know which of two metal ingots is the more massive.  We pull out our scale, place each object on one of the trays and wait for the scale to indicate which is the more massive.

Why does the scale tip in the direction of object A?  We could argue that object A has a trait, it is composed of iron, and that trait makes it more massive than some other object.  However, maybe object B is connected to a helium balloon.  Maybe there is a gravitational anomaly in the location where we are doing our experiment.  Maybe the iron is magnetized and there is another ingot with the opposite polarity under the table.  Maybe a God is tampering with our experiment with a noodly appendage.  Feel free to make up as many of these as you want.  There any number of reasons why one object could tip the scale in its favor, and being more massive is among them, though selecting this as the reason is arbitrary.

(One of the things that is wrong here is that we don’t expect General Relativity to predict which objects are more massive.  The mass of an object is the result of the history of its creation and ‘life’ up till the point we measure it.  We do expect Relativity to suggest methods for testing such claims, which it does.  Likewise Evolution should not be expected to predict which organism is fitter, but to suggest methods for testing fitness.)

If I now recast Fodor’s criticism into physical terms, in reference to the above thought experiment, this is the result: The theory of General Relativity (gravity) is vacuous because any given trait we identify as increasing the mass of an object is arbitrarily selected.  Since there are too many factors to identify within a physical system, any hypothesis we propose about mass of the object in that physical system will be trivially compatible with General Relativity.

Therefore physics suffers from the same kind of underdetermination that Fodor accused of evolution.  Anyone who persists in disbelieving evolution on these grounds should also deny General Relativity.  Of course this is excessive: since the underdetermination criticism goes to the heart of our scientific theories in general, it is a problem of philosophy of science and not a problem of biology or physics specifically.  Insofar as underdetermination remains an issue within the philosophy of science we still have to take it into consideration, but this should not be seen as a reason to think our current scientific theories are wrong.

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See a continuation of the argument against Fodor in What Fodor Got Wrong, and in Fodor’s Intensional Criticism of Evolution.

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* This is the argument I presented Fodor with during our brief conversation after his talk at CUNY.  He tried to block it by saying that Natural Selection is statistical, whereas General Relativity is not.  In my previous post, What Fodor Got Wrong, I argued that this position begs the question or is just wrong.

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03.18.09

What Fodor Got Wrong

Posted in biology, evolution, fitness, ontology, philosophy, physics, science at 2:29 pm by nogre

Jerry Fodor recently (4 March) gave a talk entitled “What Darwin Got Wrong” at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.  He accused Darwin of committing the intentional fallacy and hence said, straight out, that he didn’t believe in the theory of evolution.

So what exactly does Fodor think Darwin got wrong?

He believes that the theory of evolution is vacuously true (or just wrong) and hence not a worthwhile theory of science.

You can sink your teeth into the argument in this synopsis, but be forewarned, the argument is good: you may, depending upon your convictions, be forced to disbelieve the theory of evolution.  However, it doesn’t identify all the critical presuppositions that Fodor uses (this is no fault of the synopsis; it is accurate to the argument), and these are what are really necessary to show where Fodor is mistaken.

[The one day, the ONE DAY, a year that there is a talk specifically having to do with my work on philosophy of science and biology and I have an international plane flight to catch only a few hours after the talk.  I happily was able to catch the whole talk but I couldn't stay for the question and answer session.  So I did the only thing I could think of and asked my questions during the break and ran out of the building (literally).  The following quote is accurate as far as I can remember, and, as far as I know, I am the only one who heard him say it.]

Fodor said,

“Natural Selection is statistical. It just is.”

What does this mean?

In my world Natural Selection is a force.  It is a force that changes species over time.  For example lets take some species of bacteria.  A few of the bacteria in that species adapt to be able to eat a novel sort of food and this gives them an advantage over the others.  Eventually these bacteria are able to replicate more often and eventually most of the overall bacteria population has this trait.  Hence the species has changed from not having a certain property to having a certain property.  If you ask me what caused this change in the bacteria population, I would say that Natural Selection was the cause or force behind the change in the species.

There are two ways I can think of interpreting Fodor’s statement: 1) Natural Selection is statistical and not a force.  2) Natural Selection is statistical and a force.

Taking the first interpretation that Natural Selection is statistical and not a force, how are we to understand my little story about the bacteria above?  Perhaps: “The change in the physiology of certain bacteria statistically increased their fitness over the other bacteria.  Hence those bacteria were able to replicate more readily and eventually outnumber bacteria without that trait.”  The thing that changed the species was the increased fitness, which was caused by the physiological change.  Natural Selection was the result of this change and can be observed statistically by seeing how individual organisms with that trait were able to fair better than their compatriots.  Therefore Natural Selection is a non-causal description or explanation of how species change.

This is immediately problematic because a description or explanation is always describing or explaining something that already exists: it will always be vacuously true, e.g. snow is white if(f) snow is white, or it will just be wrong, e.g. snow is blue.  Therefore, by assuming that Natural Selection is statistical and not a force, we have begged the question against Natural Selection.

Now let’s take a look at option 2: Natural Selection is statistical and a force.

As a force Natural Selection is the cause of things.  Causes can work directly, such as one object striking another and causing it to change direction, or as a field does, by creating an environmental disturbance of some sort which affects the object.  Natural Selection falls (more or less) into the latter category: the environment changes and this causes species to change, to adapt.

Is Natural Selection statistical under this interpretation? No.  If Natural Selection acts in the way a field does, by changing the environment which then affects things in that environment, then at every point there is some local interaction between the field and the object.  Otherwise we have a theory of action-at-a-distance, i.e. one thing is causing something to happen without any way for us to identify the underlying process: a theory of magic.  If something is acting statistically, then it is acting at different places with no known connection between them.  However, evolution comes with a ready made theory of local interactions: every organism is constantly struggling for survival.  The struggle for survival ensures that there is a connection between Natural Selection and the environment.  Therefore if Natural Selection is a force, it cannot also be statistical.

[I can confirm that Fodor believed that the struggle for survival was not critical because earlier in our brief conversation he said that the struggle for survival was merely a metaphor.  I responded by saying that Natural Selection is a metaphor then too, but he disagreed.]

In conclusion, by assuming that Natural Selection is statistical and ignoring the local interactions in the struggle for survival, Fodor has begged the question against evolution.  As a statistical non-causal explanation, Natural Selection cannot act as a force in evolution.  Once evolution has lost it’s driving force, it no longer can function as a working scientific theory.  However, believing that Natural Selection is a non-causal explanation is unfounded.  The theory of evolution provides a method – the struggle for survival – that explains how Natural Selection causes change in species via the environment, and ignoring this is what Fodor got wrong.

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See a continuation of the argument against Fodor in  Dismantling Fodor’s Argument, and in Fodor’s Intensional Criticism of Evolution.

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