adaptationism - Rudy Garns on Diigo

here is the philosopher of biology Elliott Sober’s solution to the problem, which he gave in 1984, and which is basically the same as Fodor’s own implicit proposal: ‘“Selection of” pertains to the effects of a selection process, whereas “selection for” describes its causes. To say there is selection for a given property means that having the property causes success in survival and reproduction.’ If a property doesn’t cause success in survival and reproduction, but is linked to one that does, then there is no selection for that property.

LRB · letters page from Vol. 29 No. 22

Coyne and Kitcher react to Fodor's Why Pigs Don't Have Wings

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Whiteness and camouflage (along with protein balances and forms of genetic material) are candidates ‘for’ natural selection because they figure in the causal history of the changes in the bears; being a Thursday’s cub isn’t a candidate because it doesn’t play a comparable causal role.
The rival mechanisms Fodor cites are supplements to natural selection, not replacements.
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- The constraints of development may tell us why an eye, for example, has a particular form (our retina lies behind the blood vessels and nerves that feed it because retinas evolved from everted portions of the brain), but they cannot tell us why eyes are there in the first place. They are there because the gradual acquisition of vision gave animals a leg up in the evolutionary struggle for existence.
- many features of organisms can be by-products of evolution rather than the direct objects of natural selection.
- evo-devo drives home the importance of the fact that in addition to the information in the genes (the ‘recipes’ for making offspring), there is information in the developmental processes (the ‘readers’ of the recipes), and both together need to be considered in a good explanation of the resulting phenotypes, since the interactions between them can be surprising.
- Fodor’s mistake, which he is hardly alone in making, is to suppose that if our minds are scientifically explicable bio-mechanisms, then there could not be any room at all for values.
- Jerry Fodor’s attack on ultra-Darwinian pan-adaptationism (and Flintstone evolutionary psychology) is spot on, but he does less than justice to Darwin, or to modern pluralistic evolutionary theory.
- organisms select environments just as environments select organisms.
- Modern selection theory (in the hands of other than ultra-Darwinists) recognises multiple levels at which selection works: gene, genome, organism (phenotype), population and species. It also recognises that what evolves is not an adult phenotype but an entire developmental system (faster-running antelopes do not emerge fully grown). By contrast with pan-adaptationism, pluralistic evolutionary theory recognises the presence of spandrels (non-adaptive features of a phenotype, such as the red colour of blood) and exaptations: features originally selected with one function which then come to have another, such as feathers, which were a thermo-regulatory mechanism before they took on their role in flying birds.

12 Jul 09

Evolution: The Pleasures of Pluralism

Gould - The New York Review of Books

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The "fundamentalists" among evolutionary theorists revel in the belief that one overarching law—Darwin's central principle of natural selection—can render the full complexity of outcomes (by working in conjunction with auxiliary principles, like sexual reproduction, that enhance its rate and power).
Evolutionary psychology could, in my view, become a fruitful science by replacing its current penchant for narrow, and often barren, speculation with respect for the pluralistic range of available alternatives that are just as evolutionary in status, more probable in actual occurrence, and not limited to the blinkered view that evolutionary explanations must identify adaptations produced by natural selection.
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- punctuated equilibrium is the dominant pattern of evolutionary change in the history of living organisms. This theory, formulated by Niles Eldredge and me in 1972, proposes that the two most general observations made by palentologists form a genuine and primary pattern of evolution, and do not arise as artifacts of an imperfect fossil record. The first observation notes that mostnew species originate in ageological "moment." The second holds that species generally do not change in any substantial or directional way during their geological lifetimes—usually a long period averaging five to ten million years for fossil invertebrate species.
- In his second attack, Dennett denigrates the importance of nonadaptive side consequences ("spandrels" in my terminology) as sources for later and fruitful reuse.
- spandrels define the major category of important evolutionary features that do not arise as adaptations.
- Dennett denies theoretical importance to the roles of contingency and chance in the history of life, a history that hasfew predictable particulars and no inherent directionality, especially given the persistence of bacteria as the most common and dominant form of life on Earth ever since their origin as the first fossilized creatures some 3.5 billion years ago.
- Cultural (or memetic) change manifestly operates on the radically different substrate of Lamarckian inheritance, or the passage of acquired characters to subsequent generations. Whatever we invent in our lifetimes, we can pass on to our children by our writing and teaching. Evolutionists have long understood that Darwinism cannot operate effectively in systems of Lamarckian inheritance—for Lamarckian change has such a clear direction, and permits evolution to proceed so rapidly, that the much slower process of natural selection shrinks to insignificance before the Lamarckian juggernaut.
- Wright presents no neurological evidence of a brain module for sweetness, and no paleontological data about ancestral feeding. This "just-so story" therefore cannot stand as a "classic example of an adaptation" in any sense deserving the name of science.
- But how can we possibly obtain the key information that would be required to show the validity of adaptive tales about an EEA: relations of kinship, social structures and sizes of groups, different activities of males and females, the roles of religion, symbolizing, storytelling, and a hundred other central aspects of human life that cannot be traced in fossils?
- Moreover, this interdigitation implies that human cultural change needn't even follow genealogical lines—the most basic requirement of a Darwinian evolutionary process—for even the most distant cultural lineages can borrow from each other with ease. If we want a biological metaphor for cultural change, we should probably invoke infection rather than evolution.

Stephen Jay Gould Pleasures of Pluralism

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09 Jul 09

Darwinian Fundamentalism

Gould review in The New York Review of Books

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"I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification."
the ultra-Darwinists share a conviction that natural selection regulates everything of any importance in evolution, and that adaptation emerges as a universal result and ultimate test of selection's ubiquity.
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- the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success
- The generally accepted result of natural selection is adaptation—the shaping of an organism's form, function, and behavior to achieve the Darwinian summum bonum of enhanced reproductive success.
- But selection cannot suffice as a full explanation for many aspects of evolution; for other types and styles of causes become relevant, or even prevalent, in domains both far above and far below the traditional Darwinian locus of the organism.
- developmental biologists have documented an astonishing "conservation," or close similarity, of basic pathways of development among phyla that have been evolving independently for at least 500 million years, and that seem so different in basic anatomy (insects and vertebrates, for example).
- the ultras' philosophical manifesto of pure adaptationism
- Our problem is that, in many adaptive stories, the protagonist does not show dead-obvious signs of Design
- Natural selection does not explain why many evolutionary transitions from one nucleotide to another are neutral, and therefore nonadaptive. Natural selection does not explain why a meteor crashed into the earth 65 million years ago, setting in motion the extinction of half the world's species.
- the neutral theory of molecular evolution
- Natural selection is evolution's basic crane; all other cranes (sexual reproduction, for example) act as mere auxiliaries to boost the speed or power of natural selection in constructing organisms of good design.
- evolution includes so much more than natural selection that it cannot be algorithmic in Dennett's simple calculational sense

09 Feb 09

Mary Midgley: Darwin made it clear that he never meant to exalt selection into a kind of 'universal acid'

Darwin made it clear that he never meant to exalt selection into a kind of 'universal acid' (guardian.co.uk)

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Darwin adaptationism natural-selection

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