Anyway, Novick’s critique of “adaptationism” must be heeded. With out explicitly weighing the prices of conceptual complexity towards the advantages, adaptationist hypotheses stay open to objection. There’ll all the time be the chance that some price has been ignored, some issue suppressed, within the service of the adaptationist narrative. Certainly, simply this appears to have occurred within the case of residing fossils. Right here what was ignored was the mischief brought on by the absence of shared evidential requirements for classifying residing fossils. This left open the chance that complexity developed by a type of conceptual drift, which enabled meanings to accrue not as a result of they had been helpful, however as a result of they weren’t actively dangerous.
Novick suggests in her paper that almost all ideas evolve on this neutralist trend. Or no less than that we should always take significantly the chance that they do. In her phrases, “Conceptual complexity might be web impartial or, extra exactly, practically impartial” (Novick 2022, 7). Which means it’s not adaptive within the sense indicated above; however simply as considerably it’s not deleterious. “Utilizing complicated ideas could also be barely useful or barely deleterious [depending on the concept]… however these (dis)benefits are usually not so giant as to event a lot fear.” I discover myself questioning: is that this the place discussions of residing fossils are headed? Towards the belief that the advantages offered by conceptual complexity roughly stability out the prices? If that’s the case, we must say that the polysemous nature of “residing 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 will be constructed, maybe the idea can dodge the sickle of purifying choice. If not it would in all probability vanish, like so many sphenodontians within the forests and waterways of prehistory.
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