Self-Organization and Natural Selection: The Intelligent Auntie’s Vade-Mecum

Abstract

This paper is aimed at clarifying one particular aspect of Derek Bickerton’s recent contribution to Biolinguistics (Bickerton 2014a), where he contends that biolinguists tend to emphasize the specifics of certain non-standard evolutionary models in order to prejudicially avoid the theory of natural selection. According to Bickerton (2014a: 78), “they [biolinguists] have problems with the notion of natural selection, up to and including a total failure to comprehend what is and how it works”. This is the most understandable, also according to Bickerton, because even evolutionary psychologists and philosophers like Pinker and Dennett, who have devoted well-known papers and books to explaining and applying natural selection to the case of cognition and language, have failed to understand the real import of Darwin’s idea: “Natural selection could not ‘explain’ complex design”, claims Bickerton (2014a: 79), “even if Pinker & Bloom (1990), Dennett (1995), and others who are not biologists think it does. In fact, natural selection does not provide a single one of the factors that go into creating design”. Bickerton’s comments in the Biolinguistics piece are specifically targeted at the model of ‘self-organization’ associated to complexity sciences, which is introduced in Longa (2001) as potentially capable of dealing with some recalcitrant problems of the evolution of language. Bickerton (2014a: 79) writes that Longa’s attacks point to “a straw man”, and that his claim that self-organization is an alternative to natural selection is “a category mistake”, for selforganization is simply one of the factors that generates the variation that natural selection selects from. So, according to Bickerton, natural selection and self-organization must be conceptualized as two complementary mechanisms that operate in a coordinated manner to bring about complex biological designs. In this response we want to explain that this is a wrong conclusion supported on wrong premises. For that purpose, we first document that biologists generally agree on the idea that natural selection creates design; second,