Evolution of Minds
Philosophers of mind against evolution (of minds)
This is my second post concerning skepticism about the evolution of the human mind or pessimism about various approaches to the evolution of the human mind. My previous post looked at a debate in the nineteenth century between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace. Today we take a look at challenges to evolution by philosophers of mind.
The case against evolution (of minds)
Both Jerry Fodor and Thomas Nagel have argued against various accounts of the evolution of mind. These philosophers have argued not only that the mind is not a product of evolution but have taken the further, more radical, step of saying that evolutionary theory itself is flawed. We look at their arguments here.
Fodor’s first salvo against evolutionary thinking about minds was his book The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way (2000), where his focus was in part on evolutionary psychology but he was most concerned with tackling what he took to be illegitimate extensions of his modularity of mind thesis (See J. A. Fodor 1983). Fodor argued that massive modularity proponents (See e.g. Carruthers 2006) had missed the point of the modularity of mind thesis, which Fodor set up to support the conclusion that cognitive science was impossible or at least very difficult. Evolutionary psychologists developed accounts of the evolution of mental modules of the kind Fodor believed did not exist, providing one source of his skepticism about evolutionary psychology.
Fodor’s work with Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (2011) had broader scope: here not only were evolutionary accounts of the origin of mind presented as suspect but so was the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology. Elliott Sober (2010) points out that Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini take two approaches in their attack on evolution an empirical one and an a priori one. Their empirical approach has attracted much less attention (among philosophers of mind) than their a priori arguments. Here they claim that biologists have uncovered lots of processes that undercut natural selection or undercut the idea that natural selection is the most important explanatory component of evolutionary theory. This approach appears to be consistent with that of evolutionary biologists defending developmental systems theory or the extended synthesis. Proponents of these approaches argue for a much smaller role for natural selection in evolutionary explanations. There are wide ranging debates in theoretical biology about these topics. Most philosophers of mind focus their attention on Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s a priori arguments, perhaps because delving into debates in theoretical evolutionary biology requires expertise most philosophers lack. Or perhaps because philosophers love a good a priori argument.
Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s a priori approach does not appeal to empirical resources from biology. Rather, here they extend and elaborate on an argument Fodor (2008) introduced against the distinction between “selection of” and “selection for.” The argument aims to show that there cannot be an “evolutionary theory of adaptation” (Sober 2010, 595). If their argument is successful, then all evolutionary accounts of the acquisition of mind are done for and this is what they conclude. Certainly, Darwin’s natural-selection-based approach to the evolution of mind (introduced in an earlier post) would be done for. Is their argument successful? The answer is a resounding “No” from the philosophy of biology community. Let’s see why.
There are several strands to the a priori argument but the part that gets the most attention is the following: say there are two traits T and T* that are both expressed by the same organisms in the population, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini argue that we cannot say which of the two traits was selected for, that is we can’t tell which of the two traits is conducive to organismal fitness. Let’s say the traits are pumping blood and making thumping noises, traits that mammalian hearts have. The idea is that we can’t tell if hearts were selected for due to the contribution that pumping blood makes to fitness. They conclude “natural selection cannot distinguish between coextensive phenotypic traits” (Jerry A. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini 2011, 154). Biologists can in fact tell, in a vast range of cases, which of two such traits are fitness conducive, because they have all manner of experimental methods directed at doing just that. Such experiments are carried out in genetics, organismal biology and cell biology. As a result, practicing evolutionary biologists need not worry about Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s argument(s). Much of the business of biology is assessing the extent to which traits are selected for.
Sober (2010), along with many other philosophers of biology, is further convinced that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s a priori argument fails even without taking into consideration facts of scientific practice in evolutionary biology. However, if skepticism about natural selection is aimed at changing the minds of evolution of mind researchers, then perhaps that skepticism would be fruitfully informed by all the theoretical and experimental work those researchers engage in. Repeating the a priori argument will not change minds within evolutionary biology. There are parallels here with the predicament that faces creationists challenging evolution. For example, some creationists have long insisted that the theory of evolution by natural selection rests on a tautology. Evolutionary biologists dispute this characterization. However, introducing empirical and theoretical work in biology to support their position appears to have no impact on this particular strand of creationism. Creationists simply repeat their point. Fodor (and Piattelli-Palmarini) look to be in a similar predicament.
Nagel (2012), like Fodor (and Piattelli-Palmarini), takes aim both at evolution in general and the evolution of mind in his Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Echoing, although never citing, Wallace (see my earlier post), Nagel argues that there cannot be an evolutionary account of consciousness, cognition or value. Unlike Wallace, Nagel appears to think that we cannot provide an evolutionary account of any traits, because evolution is grounded in mistaken, reductionist assumptions. Nagel also argues that human consciousness (and cognition and value) is special and so cannot be accounted for by any reductive, materialistic science and that evolutionary biology is an exemplar of reductive, materialistic science. As a result, there can be no evolutionary account of consciousness (or cognition or value).
Nagel claims that his criticism of evolution is not grounded in theism, however, he expresses strong sympathy for intelligent design proponents, saying that they should be taken more seriously by evolutionary theorists (and their philosopher defenders). Most intelligent design proponents conclude that the array of life on earth, with all of its complexity, must result from the action of an intelligent designer. This is a more far-reaching claim than Wallace’s invoking of a “higher intelligence” to account for human consciousness. While Nagel rejects a “higher intelligence,” he is drawn to the negative skeptical arguments presented by intelligent design proponents. He takes these skeptical arguments to be directed at the “assumption governing the scientific project” of evolutionary biology (Nagel 2012, 11). He articulates this assumption as follows: “the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law” (Nagel 2012, 11). He takes evolutionary theory to be a part of “physics as a theory of everything” (2012, 12). Nagel presents evolutionary theory as a reductionist materialist project that aims at explaining the origin of life on earth and the differences between all of the various life forms in terms of physics. This is a view held by a very small minority of evolutionary thinkers, let’s take a look at why.
Evolutionary biologist George Williams, in Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966), appeals to the example of a flying fish’s aerial trajectory to illustrate where adaptationist[1] thought should be applied. For Williams, physics takes care of the flying fish landing back in the water, via the principle of gravitation. What is of interest to evolutionary biologists is how and why the flying fish spends so long in the air relative to any old object shot out of the sea: “To explain the delay in returning we would be forced to recognize a gliding mechanism of an aerodynamic perfection that must be attributed to natural selection for efficiency in gliding. Here we would be dealing with adaptation” (Williams 1966, 12). He goes onto discuss the appropriateness of invoking natural selection in accounting for aspects of the biological world. Importantly, he does not invoke Nagel’s assumption that adaptation must be laid out in terms of physics. Williams assumes that evolutionary explanations should be pursued in cases in which we cannot straightforwardly appeal to physics. Evolutionary biology does not require reduction to physics for epistemic security.
Williams does not explicitly articulate the view that evolutionary biology is a non-reductionist enterprise but many philosophers of biology have taken great care to establish that this is the case. (It is also worth noting that Nancy Cartwright (1983), long ago, rejected the idea that physics itself is best understood as a law based, reductionist enterprise.) Ken Waters (1990) addresses the anti-reductionist consensus in evolutionary biology in the process of trying to find a small space for some reductionism within genetics. Waters confronts Philip Kitcher’s (1984) claim that we, philosophers of biology and evolutionary theorists, are at consensus that classical genetics cannot be reduced to molecular biology. Waters counters that some form of reductionist account is defensible here. This is a difficult discussion that relies on a great deal of knowledge of the details of genetics practice but these details are worth revisiting by those who encounter Nagel’s materialist, reductionist assumption about evolutionary biology. Even if Waters is right and some reduction is possible between parts of classical genetics and molecular genetics, this is a far, far distant scenario from all of evolutionary biology being reducible to physics. So, evolutionary biologists do not practice under the materialist, reductionist assumption and there are scant sources of support for the possibility of such a reduction.[2]
Fodor and Nagel’s skepticism about evolution is not well founded. Even those who think there are more merits to their arguments than I do, are unlikely to think that their skepticism will have any purchase on evolutionary thinkers confronting the difficult issues about the evolution of human minds. The closeness of both Fodor and Nagel’s thinking to intelligent design and creationist views doesn’t help their cause. Most people think it reasonable that physicists don’t give flat earthers’ views serious consideration. Likewise, a priori arguments against evolution, especially those presented by allies of creationism and intelligent design, can reasonably be ignored by evolutionary biologists. Further, such arguments do not provide reasonable support for pessimism about various evolutionary accounts of human minds.
[1] For our purposes here, this means the application of natural selection.
[2] One clear outlier to Kitcher’s anti-reductionist consensus is Alex Rosenberg (2006), who does argue for a strong form of reductionism. However, Rosenberg does not argue that evolutionary biology is, or should be, reduced to physics, rather he argues that it should be reduced to molecular biology. Bill Wimsatt (2007) discusses issues of reductionism via numerous detailed examples from evolutionary biology and in doing so illustrates the myriad difficulties for any straightforward reductionist approaches such as Rosenberg’s or the position Nagel stakes out.