I just hope that when What Darwin Got Wrong comes out, this “conceptual argument” about coextensive traits won’t distract attention from more interesting questions about the relationship between learning and evolution.

Since you cut off comments on the other thread, I will make a brief reply here. You asked what I meant by micro biology and macro biology. That was purely a mistake made in haste as I finished up listening to the debate, wrote a quick comment on my reaction to it and then had to make a phone call. I meant micro evolution and macro evolution. I am not the best of writers and am prone to making small mistakes in haste.

I gave you my reactions to the debate and you remembered the incident from four years ago. I actually was going to refer to it when I made the comment about not offending you. I tend to be a thorn in a lot of people’s sides here as I try to speak what I believe but there is no greater defender of ID than me here.

I was very critical of Steve Fuller in his debate at the university of London a couple years ago and it led me to write something about what ID should do in such debates in order to avoid irrelevant issues. This is all offered in good spirit as I want you and others to succeed in the ID debates. If you want to strip this comment here, do so but I had to find some place to respond. I have it saved for an appropriate future post if a more relevant thread appears.

http://www.suzanmazur.com/?p=20

and – if Mazur is to be believed – his LRB article was instrumental in stirring up the activity that in turn led to Altenberg. But maybe Pigliucci has a different version of events.

I’d be interested to see a list of (say) the 50 largest grants awarded: my prediction is that none would be directly to evolutionary biology: some (though) might be used by evolutionary biology – infrastructure such as ships could be used by them.

Any evidence for your claim?

recipients of the biggest grants of any intellectuals,

Both physics (the experimental work, not the theoretical) and medicine (think clinical trials) get much bigger grants. Once one sees that sort of inaccurate hyperbole, one wonders about the rest of the book.

The argument is largely conceptual and proceeds in two steps: (1) that theories of NS are conceptually parallel to Skinnerian theories of learning and so share most of the same debilitating problems

There is also (slightly non-committal) praise from Chomsky himself. For a while now I’ve suspected that the question of cognitivism vs. behaviorism (vs. not-purely-naturalist alternatives) is very relevant to the question of neo-Darwinian gradualism vs. punctuationism/”nice” structuralism/etc. (vs. ID including “naughty”, non-naturalistic structuralism). Not only is there an apparent congruence between the two controversies, they’re also directly connected in the problem of explaining and understanding the mind/brain.