Daily Archives: 21/03/2013

Last time I tried to represent simply what made Jerry Fodor’s 2007 article and the later book with Massimo Piattelli Palmarini so controversial in both the biology and philosphy communities. The reaction to them, in my view, either shows the subtlety and difficulty of the case they were making, or (as Fodor suggested in a discussion with Massimo Pigliucci) that those committed to natural selection are circling the wagons to defend their paradigm. There seems to be evidence of both, which makes it that much harder to draw conclusions about the strength of weakness of the argument.