Anyway, the critique of “adaptationism” must be broadly heeded. With out explicitly weighing the prices of conceptual complexity towards the advantages, adaptationists hypotheses stay open to objection. There’ll all the time be the chance that some price has been ignored, some problem suppressed, within the service of the adaptationist narrative. Certainly, simply this appears to have occurred within the case of dwelling fossils. Right here what was ignored was the mischief attributable to the absence of shared evidential requirements for classifying dwelling fossils. This left open the chance that the idea developed by a type of conceptual drift, which enabled complexity to accrue not as a result of it was helpful, however as a result of it wasn’t actively dangerous.
Novick suggests in her paper that almost all ideas evolve on this neutralist vogue. Or at the least that we must always take severely the chance that they do. In her phrases, “Conceptual complexity might be web impartial or, extra exactly, almost impartial” (Novick 2022, 7). Because of this it’s not adaptive within the sense indicated above; however simply as considerably it’s not deleterious. “Utilizing advanced ideas could also be barely helpful or barely deleterious [depending on the concept]… however these (dis)benefits usually are not so giant as to event a lot fear.” I discover myself questioning: is that this the place discussions of dwelling fossils are headed? Towards the belief that the advantages offered by conceptual complexity roughly steadiness out the prices? In that case, we should say that the polysemous nature of “dwelling fossil” isn’t precisely useful, however neither is it a scientific catastrophe. Or maybe the state of affairs is extra severe than this, and the absence of a shared evidential framework actually does threaten the long-term viability of the idea. If an acceptable framework could be constructed, maybe the idea (and the related practices) can dodge the sickle of purifying choice. If not it is going to in all probability vanish, like so many sphenodontians within the forests and waterways of prehistory.
References
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