Darwin’s Principles of Divergence and Natural Selection: Why Fodor was Almost Right


Συγγραφέας: Robert J. Richards


Robert J. Richards: Darwin’s Principles of Divergence and Natural Selection: Why Fodor was Almost Right (pdf, 259K)
In a series of articles and in a recent book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor has objected to Darwin’s principle of natural selection on the grounds that it assumes nature has intentions.' Despite the near universal rejection of Fodor’s argument by biologists and philosophers of biology (myself inc|uded),‘ I now believe he was almost right. I will show this through a historical examination of a principle that Darwin thought as important as natural selection, his principle of divergence. The principle was designed to explain a phenomenon obvious to any observer of nature, namely, that animals and plants form a hierarchy of clusters. Theodosius Dobzhansky made this the motivating observation of his great synthesizing work, Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937): "the living world is not a single array of individuals in which any two variants are connected by a series of intergrades, but an array of more or less distinctly separate arrays, intermediates between which are absent or at least rare. . . Small...