What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor & Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini

Author:Jerry Fodor & Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

Second option: laws of selection

Laws can support counterfactuals. That’s most of what they do for a living; arguably, it’s what makes them different from mere true empirical generalizations. So, then, suppose there is a law that says that (in such and such circumstances) t1s are selected in competitions with t2s. If that’s a law, then (tautologically) it holds in all nomologically possible states of affairs; which is to say that it determines the outcome of any nomologically possible t1 versus t2 competition, including ones that are merely counterfactual. None of that should seem surprising. Or at least none of it should on the assumptions that laws are relations among properties and that properties that aren’t instantiated in the actual world may nevertheless be instantiated in some nomologically possible other world. So laws of selection might support the counterfactuals that are required to vindicate the distinction between selection and selection-for. So all may yet be well. So the story goes.

Presumably, the paradigm of the kind of law we’re looking for would be something like: ‘All else being equal, the probability that a t1 wins a competition with a t2 in ecological situation E is p.’ But are there such laws? We doubt that there are (although, it is, of course, in large part an empirical issue);12 a priori argument won’t decide it one way or the other. But we can think of several reasons why there might seem to be laws of selection even if, as a matter of fact, there are none. We want to look at some of these, because, unlike the idea that natural selection is an intentional system, the suggestion that counterfactuals about selection are grounded in laws of selection isn’t nutty; it’s just (according to us) untrue.

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