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Natural Selection, Causality, and Laws: What Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini Got Wrong

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Elliott Sober
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Extract

In their book What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini construct an a priori philosophical argument and an empirical biological argument. The biological argument aims to show that natural selection is much less important in the evolutionary process than many biologists maintain. The a priori argument begins with the claim that there cannot be selection for one but not the other of two traits that are perfectly correlated in a population; it concludes that there cannot be an evolutionary theory of adaptation. This article focuses mainly on the a priori argument.

Type
Discussions
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , October 2010 , pp. 594 - 607
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

‡

I thank Matthew Barker, John Basl, Ned Block, Mihnea Capraru, Hayley Clatterbuck, Jerry Fodor, Dan Hausman, Samir Okasha, Larry Shapiro, Michael Titelbaum, Davide Vecchi, Rob Wilson, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

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