we know what we are

[larvatus]

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini propound the following analogy in their letter to the TLS Editor:

Our difficulty with Darwin is very like our difficulty with our stockbroker. He says the way to succeed on the market is to buy low and sell high, and we believe him. But since he won’t tell us how to buy low and sell high, his advice does us no good. Likewise, Darwin thinks that the traits that are selected-for are the ones that cause fitness; but he doesn’t say how the kinds of variables that his theory envisages as selectors could interact with phenotypes in ways that distinguish causes of fitness from their confounds. This problem can’t be solved by just stipulating that the traits that are selected for are the fitness-enhancing traits; that, as one said in the 1960s, isn’t the solution; it’s the problem.

Matthew Cobb, a contributor to the evolutionist advocacy blog owned and operated by Jerry A. Coyne, Ph.D and a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago, fancies himself to have made short work of this argument. But misunderstanding the analogy between evolving through natural selection and succeeding on the market by buying low and selling high is a clear symptom of being out of one’s mind in the following, precisely defined sense:

1. Natural selection is said to be responsible for evolving all functions of living organisms.
2. The mind counts among the functions of some living organisms.
3. The mind of some living organisms is capable of making intensional distinctions such as the one between being renate and being cordate, or the one between being an even prime number and being equal to the positive square root of four.
4. Natural selection is incapable of making intensional distinctions.
5. Natural selection cannot evolve the capacity to make intensional distinctions.
6. Some minds have functions that cannot have evolved through natural selection.
7. Some functions of living organisms cannot have evolved through natural selection.

At this point, to echo Sir Winston Churchill, we know exactly what you are as a living organism; we are just haggling about something that determines your price.

Crossposted to larvatus, philosophy, and real_philosophy.

Comments

[jethomas5.livejournal.com]

"Natural selection cannot evolve any capacity that it cannot distinguish from every other capacity."

But the only way it has to distinguish a capacity of genes, is by whether it increases the gene frequency.

It does not have to be very smart to do that.

So, do smarter bacteria reproduce better than dumber bacteria? Maybe. E Coli grows in intestines, and grows better if it can stay in the intestines and not get expelled -- though the surplus population must continually be expelled and take it's chances to find somebody else's intestines. E coli can swim through thick viscous liquid, or it can swim through thinner liquid. It has no senses to tell which it is dealing with, so it apparently switches from one to the other at random at low frequency.

E coli swims toward higher concentrations of hydrophilic amino acids and away from lower concentrations. It swims toward its preferred pH and away from less-preferred pH. It swims toward increasing sugar and away from decreasing sugar. Etc. But it has no senses to tell it which direction the good things are increasing, and it is probably too small to detect a difference in concentration. So what they do, is they swim in a random direction and they notice how much things are getting better. The faster things get better, the longer they keep swimming in that direction. After awhile they stop and turn for awhile, and then they start again in a new random direction. If things are getting worse they stop quickly.

So with very few senses they perform complicated judgements that result in their improving their situation on average. The choices are built into their genes, and evolution could have created all this while itself using no judgement beyond noting which bacteria survived better.

Evolution can produce things that it cannot detect except by their effect on gene frequencies. This can work for anything affected by genes. But it might not work the way people would expect. Do smart women have more surviving children? Maybe. Sometimes. Which women have more surviving children than they would choose to have, given their desire to be reasonably comfortable? A smart woman who cares about evolution might still choose to stop at two. A woman who's smart about some things might increase her genes in the population if she keeps having children until she is too busy taking care of them to have sex. Who is favored by evolution? A cultured woman who gets an extensive education and carefully uses planned parenthood? Or a skank ho who quickly becomes a milf?

The answer is plain -- evolution has created us to be no smarter than we ought to be.