--- abstract: "Jerry Fodor argues that Darwin was wrong about \"natural selection\" because (1) it is only a tautology rather than a scientific law that can support counterfactuals (\"If X had happened, Y would have happened\") and because (2) only minds can select. Hence Darwin's analogy with \"artificial selection\" by animal breeders was misleading and evolutionary explanation is nothing but post-hoc historical narrative. I argue that Darwin was right on all counts. Until Darwin's \"tautology,\" it had been believed that either (a) God had created all organisms as they are, or (b) organisms had always been as they are. Darwin revealed instead that (c) organisms have heritable traits that evolved across time through random variation, with survival and reproduction in (changing) environments determining (mindlessly) which variants were successfully transmitted to the next generation. This not only provided the (true) alternative (c), but also the methodology for investigating which traits had been adaptive, how and why; it also led to the discovery of the genetic mechanism of the encoding, variation and evolution of heritable traits. Fodor also draws erroneous conclusions from the analogy between Darwinian evolution and Skinnerian reinforcement learning. Fodor’s skepticism about both evolution and learning may be motivated by an overgeneralization of Chomsky’s “poverty of the stimulus argument” -- from the origin of Universal Grammar (UG) to the origin of the “concepts” underlying word meaning, which, Fodor thinks, must be “endogenous,” rather than evolved or learned." altloc: [] chapter: ~ commentary: ~ commref: 'Fodor, Jerry A. (forthcoming) Against Darwinism. http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/Fodor/Fodor_Against_Darwinism.pdf' confdates: ~ conference: ~ confloc: ~ contact_email: ~ creators_id: - 'harnad@ecs,soton.ac.uk' creators_name: - family: Harnad given: Stevan honourific: '' lineage: '' date: 2009-04-12 date_type: completed datestamp: 2009-04-12 22:24:38 department: ~ dir: disk0/00/00/64/17 edit_lock_since: ~ edit_lock_until: ~ edit_lock_user: ~ editors_id: [] editors_name: [] eprint_status: archive eprintid: 6417 fileinfo: /style/images/fileicons/other.png;/6417/1/fodorcomm.rtf|/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png;/6417/3/fodorcomm.pdf|/style/images/fileicons/text_html.png;/6417/4/fodorcomm.htm|/style/images/fileicons/text_html.png;/6417/5/fodor%2Dharnad1.html full_text_status: public importid: ~ institution: ~ isbn: ~ ispublished: ~ issn: ~ item_issues_comment: [] item_issues_count: 0 item_issues_description: [] item_issues_id: [] item_issues_reported_by: [] item_issues_resolved_by: [] item_issues_status: [] item_issues_timestamp: [] item_issues_type: [] keywords: 'adaptation, Chomsky, consciousness, counterfactuals, Darwin, evolution, fitness, Fodor, learning, lexicon, mind, natural selection, poverty of the stimulus, Skinner, Turing, underdetermination, universal grammar' lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:57:21 latitude: ~ longitude: ~ metadata_visibility: show note: "This is an essay on Jerry Fodor's Hugues Leblanc Lecture Series at UQAM on \"What Darwin Got Wrong\" " number: ~ pagerange: ~ pubdom: FALSE publication: ~ publisher: ~ refereed: FALSE referencetext: "Blondin-Massé, Alexandre; Chicoisne, Guillaume, Gargouri; Yassine; Harnad, Stevan; Picard, Olivier; Marcotte, Odile (2008). 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Biological Theory 1 (1): 20-22.\r\n\r\nStrawson, Galen (2006) Why physicalism entails panpsychism. In: Galen Strawson. Materialism and other Essays. Oxfosd University Press.\r\n\r\nTuring, A.M. (1950) Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49 433-460 \r\n" relation_type: [] relation_uri: [] reportno: ~ rev_number: 43 series: ~ source: ~ status_changed: 2009-04-12 22:24:38 subjects: - phil-sci succeeds: ~ suggestions: ~ sword_depositor: ~ sword_slug: ~ thesistype: ~ title: On Fodor on Darwin on Evolution type: preprint userid: 63 volume: ~