Dawkins likes to ‘insist … that wherever in nature there is a sufficiently powerful illusion of good design for some purpose, natural selection is the only known mechanism that can account for it.’ He’s right, I think, but this is another of those two-edged swords. The conclusion might be that adaptation really is most or all of what there is to evolution; or it might be that we don’t actually know a lot about the etiology of what appears to be biological good design. Dawkins is inclined to bet on the first horse, but it’s not hard to find quite reputable scientists who are inclined to bet on the second. Either way, it’s a shame not to tell the reader that what’s going on is, in fact, a horse race and not a triumphal procession.
Fodor is an interesting figure to read on this topic, since he is very interested in separating plausible explanations from true ones: that an explanation may be an complete explanation is good, but that really tells us nothing about whether it's accurate. In the face of that, a little humility is interesting. I like the horse race/triumphal procession contrast, and will have to make use of it at some point.
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