[Damn, I can't resist jumping in!]
I don't understand the above at all. The use of quotes around "design" seems to hide the fact that it is the implied non-quoted notion of design that gives selection higher capacity than randomness (or more appropriately, higher-order properties). It seems to me not mere chance that presents the similar usage of design here, with that seen in "intelligent design".
Perhaps out of ignorance, I keep reposting Fodor's excellent criticism of Pinker and Plotkin, which to me directly deals with a lot of the fuzziness surrounding these issues. Here is one section (the bulk of it can be found in the LBO archives -- URLs below):
> Much to his credit, Pinker does seem a bit embarrassed about some of
> these consequences of his adaptationism, and he does try to duck them.
>
> Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that 'animals
> try to spread their genes'. This misstates . . . the theory. Animals,
> including most people, know nothing about genetics and care even
> less. People love their children not because they want to spread
> their genes (consciously or unconsciously) but because they can't
> help it. . . What is selfish is not the real motives of the person
> but the metaphorical motives of the genes that built the person.
> Genes 'try' to spread themselves (sic) by wiring animals brains so
> that animals love their kin . . . and then the[y] get out of the
> way.
>
> This version sounds a lot more plausible; strictly speaking, nobody has
> as a motive ('conscious or unconscious') the proliferation of genes
> after all. Not animals, and not genes either. The only real motives are
> the ones that everybody knows about; of which love of novels, or women,
> or kin are presumably a few among many. But, pace Pinker, this
> reasonable view is not available to a psychological Darwinist. For to
> say that the genes 'wire animals brains so that animals love their kin'
> and to stop there is to say only that loving their kin is innate in
> these animals. That reduces psychological Darwinism to mere nativism;
> which, as I remarked above, is common ground to all of us Rationalists.
> The difference between Darwinism and mere nativism is the claim that a
> creature's innate psychological traits are adaptations; viz. that their
> role in the propagation of the genes is what they're for. Take the
> adaptationism away from a psychological Darwinist and he has nobody left
> to argue with except empiricists. It is, then, adaptationism that makes
> Pinker and Plotkin's kind of rationalism special. Does this argument
> among nativists really matter? Nativism itself clearly does; everybody
> cares about human nature. But I have fussed a lot about the difference
> between nativism and Darwinism, and you might reasonably want to know
> why anyone should care about that.
>
> For one thing, nativism says there has to be a human nature, but it's
> the adaptationism that implies the account of human nature that
> sociobiologists endorse. If, like me, you find that account grotesquely
> implausible, it's perhaps the adaptationism rather than the nativism
> that you ought to consider throwing overboard. Pinker remarks that
> 'people who study the mind would rather not have to think about how it
> evolved because it would make a hash of cherished theories . . . When
> advised that [their] claims are evolutionarily implausible, they attack
> the theory of evolution rather than rethinking the claim.' I think this
> is exactly right, though the formulation is a bit tendentious. We know -
> anyhow we think that we do - a lot about ourselves that doesn't seem to
> square with the theory that our minds are adaptations for spreading our
> genes. The question may well come down to which theory we should give
> up. Well, as far as I can tell, if you take away the bad argument that
> turns on complexity, and the bad argument from reverse engineering, and
> the bad arguments that depend on committing the rationalisation fallacy,
> and the atrociously bad arguments that depend on preempting what's to
> count as the 'scientific' (and/or the biological) world view, the direct
> evidence for psychological Darwinism is very slim indeed. In particular,
> it's arguably much worse than the indirect evidence for our intuitive,
> pluralistic theory of human nature. It is, after all, our intuitive
> pluralism that we use to get along with one another. And I have the
> impression that, by and large, it works pretty well.
Fodor is here talking about the mind and cognition (as also below) but his reasoning can be quite generally applied to language, as well.
> Adaptationists say about the phylogeny of cognition that it's a choice
> between Darwin and God and they like to parade as scientifically
> tough-minded about which one of these you should pick. But that
> misstates the alternatives, so don't let yourself be bullied. In fact,
> we don't know what the scientifically reasonable view of the phylogeny
> of behaviour is; nor will we until we begin to understand how behaviour
> is subserved by the brain. And never mind tough-mindedness; what matters
> is what's true.
Finally, there is the issue of parsimony, which while itself meta-scientific, has been a reliable guide in our choice of explanations. And it seems to me that adaptationist accounts of language are, absent empirical verification or theoretical underpinning, a needless flight of fancy. Why not remain silent on the matter, until we can say something? Therein, IMHO, the strength of Chomsky's caution.
Fodor: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Fodor_on_Pinker_98.html
Previously on LBO:
--ravi
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