Book FAPP on the doorstep 12 May 2010 My copy of What Darwin Got Wrong by Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini has arrived and was waiting at the door for me this AM. God the British mail system is fast to Australia! Now I owe a series of posts on Rossano’s book first, but perhaps I will read FAPP on… Continue Reading
Evolution Even more FAPPery 8 May 2010 Richard Lewontin reviews FAPP in the New York Review of Books. It is a much more moderate review than many of the other reviews we have linked to. He ends up suggesting that biologists should not speculate on the origins of traits when such speculation is idle. However, like FAPP,… Continue Reading
Book More FAPPery 27 Apr 2010 Another review of What Darwin got wrong, by Kenan Malik, at The Literary Review. The money quote: Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are no creationists, but ‘outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists’. That, however, only makes worse the incoherence of their understanding of Darwinism. There is much that Darwin got wrong, from… Continue Reading
Creationism and Intelligent Design Another historian criticises FAPP 26 Apr 2010 Bob Richards is a leading intellectual historian of Darwinian ideas, and here he takes Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini to task for their misunderstanding of the way that the theories of evolution have developed. One point that he makes is that every “objection” FAPP have raised was an objection in the nineteenth… Continue Reading
Evolution Larson on FAPP 15 Apr 2010 Ed Larson, an excellent historian of biology, takes Fodor and Piattelli- Palmarini to task for their ahistorical setting up of a strawman “Darwinism” in the Wilson Quarterly. Recommended reading. Continue Reading
Epistemology Does teleology hang on in Venice? 18 Dec 201022 Jun 2018 Here’s an interesting paper, which I haven’t had time to digest, but which I thought I’d better mention before it enters the fog my brain contains these days… It’s by David Depew, one of my favourite philosophical writers on evolution (in no small part because he takes a historical approach… Continue Reading
Book At last, a proper review of Fodor and Piatelli-Palmerini 3 Jul 2010 Peter Godfrey-Smith reviews What Darwin Got Wrong in the London Review of Books, and finally the review matches the book I am reading. PGS is usually right on everything, so read this one. It is critical, but doesn’t suppose that FAPP have made grade school level errors, like so many… Continue Reading
Biology Book reviews 24 Apr 2010 Several interesting book reviews arrived in my feed this morning, of books I have not read. Jerry Coyne reviews FAPP’s What Darwin Got Wrong alongside Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth. I cannot help but think that he is on the one hand very easy on Dawkins and fails to… Continue Reading
Evolution More on the Fodor and Piatelli-Palmerini thing 21 Mar 2010 FAPP have replied to Ned Block’s and Phillip Kitcher’s critique in the Boston Review, showing that the interpretation I gave before is the right one: they really do think that because we cannot say without ambiguity, a priori, what it is that natural selection is selecting, and therefore there is… Continue Reading
Epistemology Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini on natural selection 24 Feb 2010 As R. A. Fisher once noted, Evolution is not Natural Selection, but critics in Darwin’s day and since have focused on this aspect of his theory. The most recent is by a philosopher, Jerry Fodor, and cognitive scientist, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarin. I have not read the book, but what I have… Continue Reading