You left out my favorite part of Jerry Fodor's criticism or perhaps you posted it previously: Call this "Psychological Darwinism as Conspiracy Theory".
Jerry Fodor says:
"A lot of the fun of Pinker's book is his attempt to deduce human psychology from the assumption that our minds are adaptations for transmitting our genes. His last chapters are devoted to this and they range very broadly; including, so help me, one on the meaning of life. Pinker would like to convince us that the predictions that the selfish-gene theory makes about how our minds must be organised are independently plausible. But this project doesn't fare well. Prima facie, the picture of the mind, indeed of human nature in general, that psychological Darwinism suggest is preposterous; a sort of jumped up, down-market version of original sin. Psychological Darwinism is a kind of conspiracy theory; that is, it explains behaviour by imputing an interest (viz. in the proliferation of the genome) that the agent of the behaviour does not acknowledge. When literal conspiracies are alleged, duplicity is generally part of the charge: 'He wasn't making confetti; he was shredding the evidence. He did X in aid of Y, and then he lied about his motive.' But in the kind of conspiracy theories psychologists like best, the motive is supposed to be inaccessible even to the agent, who is thus perfectly sincere in denying the imputation. In the extreme case, it's hardly even the agent to whom the motive is attributed. Freudian explanations provide a familiar example: What seemed to be merely Jones's slip of the tongue was the unconscious expression of a libidinous impulse. But not Jones's libidinous impulse, really; one that his Id had on his behalf. Likewise, for the psychological Darwinist: what seemed to be your, after all, unsurprising interest in your child's well-being turns out to be your genes' conspiracy to propagate themselves. Not your conspiracy, notice, but theirs."
"How do you make the case that Jones did X in aid of an interest in Y, when Y is an interest that Jones doesn't own to? The idea is perfectly familiar: you argue that X would have been the rational (reasonable, intelligible) thing for Jones to do if Y had been his motive. Such arguments can be very persuasive. The files Jones shredded were precisely the ones that would have incriminated him; and he shredded them in the middle of the night. What better explanation than that Jones conspired to destroy the evidence? Likewise when the conspiracy is unconscious. Suppose that an interest in the propagation of the genome would rationalise monogamous families in animals whose offspring mature slowly. Well, our offspring do mature slowly; and our species does, by and large, favour monogamous families. So that's evidence that we favour monogamous families because we have an interest in the propagation of our genes. Well, isn't it? Maybe yes, maybe no; this kind of inference needs to be handled with great care. For, often enough, where an interest in X would rationalise Y, so too would an interest in P, Q or R. It's reasonable of Jones to carry an umbrella if it's raining and he wants to keep dry. But, likewise, it's reasonable for Jones to carry an umbrella if he has in mind to return it to its owner. Since either motivation would rationalise the way that Jones behaved, his having behaved that way is compatible with either imputation. This is, in fact, overwhelmingly the general case: there are, most often, all sorts of interests which would rationalise the kinds of behaviour that a creature is observed to produce. What's needed to make it decisive that the creature is interested in Y is that it should produce a kind of behaviour that would be reasonable only given an interest in Y. But such cases are vanishingly rare since, if an interest in Y would rationalise doing X, so too would an interest in doing X. A concern to propagate one's genes would rationalise one's acting to promote one's children's welfare; but so too would an interest in one's childrens' welfare. Not all of one's motives could be instrumental, after all; there must be some things that one cares for just for their own sakes. Why, indeed, mightn't there be quite a few such things? Why shouldn't one's children be among them? "
Just wonderful!
On 6/8/06, ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org> wrote:
> [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):
>