Even more FAPPery

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, he fails to tell us when that is, and is not.

Douglas Futuyma on the other hand is much more dismissive in Science, and suggests that being experts in one field doesn’t make them competent in another.

I am still wondering what we lose if we abandon the “selection for/selection of” distinction. If we do this, then FAPP’s concern resolves down to: “you can’t get intentionality out of the principle of NS”, which is rather like “you can’t get colour distributions out of a sorting process”; true but trivial.