Fodor's problem, as he's been hammering at since the early 90s with his initial skepticism regarding the assignment of proper function to any trait, is essentially with the concept of a cause. For Fodor, unless a claim can 'support' a counterfactual experiment (either in thought or in actuality), then it's not a genuine causal claim at all--hence the idea that it's tautological. 
 
But this is a bizarre notion of what it takes for a claim to be either causal or empirically significant. Although this is part of the point that Harnad is making, he doesn't seem to make it strongly enough. Fodor isn't just mistaken about what Darwin's revolution was about, he's mistaken about what conditions must obtain for a claim to be significant or causal. And, I'm sorry to say for those with no formal exposure to philosophy, a lot of this backs up into his odd (but philosophically common) claims that unless very outre counterfactuals can be ruled out, we can't know things with any determinacy. (See the Twin Earth problems for this kind of confusion on steroids.) It's really just Cartesianism in another guise, but what's the surprise there? 
 
If we relax our conditions on when a determinate causal claim can be made, just as we recognize that cause can be probabilistic and kinds can be statistical, the whole problem dissolves and with it most of Fodor's and Chomsky's worries and a massive amount of philosophy we could well do without.

One thing one might add to the analysis is the sex difference in name selection. I've noticed that while males tend to overwhelmingly take what they assume to be stereotypical names of successful English speakers (lots of 'Michael's, 'David's...--maybe Levitt's work on names got to them; or is the causality reversed?), females tend to all have happened upon the same 19th century book of female names. I personally know an Elodie, an Adeline, a Beryl, and several other curiosities from days of yore. Of course, these don't outnumber the virtually uncountable 'Grace's, but the choices are truly odd.

To back up Tom's comment: To argue that this is a natural example or extension of arbitration is a serious categorical mistake about the place of law in a well ordered society. Arbitration agreements, based on custom or other private notions are acceptable within a society precisely because they do not, by so doing, appeal to another system of codified law. Inserting anything other than informal appeals to common sense and fairness in private arbitration agreements is allow for the possibility of another sovereignty into a country. This is unacceptable in a well ordered society governed by the rule of law. The people of England, with their keen understanding of the rule of law, are absolutely right to be up in arms about this.

Just to back up Long Ma's point: Confucian scholars and linguists generally agree that it's Cantonese which is the conservative language and hence closer to more archaic forms. If you want to know what Confucius sounded like, it's plausibly much closer to Cantonese than Mandarin, especially in the number of tones. Mandarin was imposed from the North. Also, it may be worth nothing that the birthplace of Chinese civilization is traditionally taken to be between the two great rivers (Yellow and Yangtsze), not to the north or south.

Physicist Dave: 
 
I don't think your example is quite apt. Rawls is also explicit that what is on the table in the Original Position are not things like insitutions whose differences generate small differences in income, or even incomes per se. Rather, what is at stake are institutions that determine one's life chances, and, most importantly, the bases for one's self respect. He pays quite a bit of attention to self respect, and that, I think, is ultimately what his argument hinges on. Now one might have trouble figuring self respect into a decision theory matrix, but insofar as one can, would one gamble with such an important outcome when the Difference Principle is available? Would one take a chance that one could end up with less prospects for self respect because one chose institutions that allowed for disparities in the bases for that so long as averages were maximized? I don't know. I'm actually no Rawlsian, though, as I think (along with lots of others) that he games the argument with his theory of goods But still, I think his theory has it all over average utility.

I think we (including Half Sigma) need to be careful to understand Rawls correctly. First, Half Sigma's reading of how 'liberals' might react to Rawls' acknowledgment of the natural lottery is a bit of a strawman. One shouldn't confuse philosophical liberalism (which has many intelligent proponents and turns on minimal empirical assumptions) with a strong thesis of empirical equalitarianism. The latter position is taken seriously only by fools. Second, the Original Position, as a heuristic device for justifying the basic institutions and arrangements of society doesn't turn on an empathetic identification with anyone. Rawls is a Kantian after all, and hence no strong appeal to empathy (either to understand the argument or in its appraisal) is required. In fact, it's self concern, understood correctly, that is the main psychological assumption of Rawls. His basic insight is to see that the social contractarian idea of justice as the result of a fair bargaining procedure requires a Maximin decision procedure if the bargaining procedure is to do the justificatory work. Of course he never asserts that Maximin is a rational procedure in all cases, just in the case of the Original Position.

I think PhysicistDave is on to something that maybe could be put a bit sharper. Part and parcel of the human exceptionalism that is the post-modern stance is a skepticism of all reductionist answers, precisely because of the exceptions to them. Weather can be predicted months out, so long as you're willing to give it within a fairly low confidence interval. But for the po-mos, the confidence level of any acceptable answer would have to be 100%, and since, as they rightly note, no social science is ever likely to do that, we should stick to interpreting (de/con/structing and problem/atizing) texts, blah blah blah. I find it humorous that those in the grips of po-mo and the unfortunate students in their grips are fond of accusing science of being dry and rigid when it's just the opposite. For arid rigidity and doctrinaire inflexibility, take a class in Comp Lit, oops, I mean Cultural Anthropology.

The real story is that this brand of cultural anthropology is as shot through with the kind of essentialist human exceptionalism as any of the doctrinaire religions whose missionaries they so fervently oppose. It's no coincidence that the worst of the Post-Modernists come from the home of Descartes. From Sartre, through Foucault to Derrida, they're all Dualists of one stripe or another. It's paradoxical, in a way, that the systematists they oppose are actually the ones with the leaner ontologies. One nature, one set of laws, let's get to work. For sure there's the risk of oversimplifying with a naturalistic outlook, but look at the risks of not. De Man being a Nazi was not much of a shock to those familiar the basic outlook.

I don't know if Jason or anyone else is still reading this thread, but I have a comment from a different direction. It concerns Jason's plea (shared with Pinker and others) that the answer to a moral code based on a questionable factual premise of equality ought to be supplanted with one based on one with a premise of moral equality. Essentially, move in the moral direction of Kant. As sympathetic as I am with that move, it's not itself without difficulties and, for that reason, it's not insane to base a view of moral equality on a factual premise of cognitive (or whatever) equality.  
 
Here's why. Presumably, this claim of moral equality will be based on some independent grounds, lest it be merely a circular statement of a priori faith. But what could justify this claim to moral equality? Touched by God? God I hope not. How about Kant's favorite: rationality? Oops, that's precisely the issue on the table. OK, but maybe there's some threshold of rationality that, factually, we are confident virtually all humans pass (actually, this is more like Kant's view). But why is the threshold set there, as opposed to a bit higher? Why don't we count some as more morally equal than others? Just because? There's that old circularity problem. Because the consequences of so doing would be hideous? I agree they would, but what justifies the standard itself? It's just wrong? A strange answer and one I wouldn't want to hear from those so (rightfully of course) demanding of reasons in other venues. 
 
Long story short: There's a reason these moral questions still bedevil us after 2600 years. Bioinformatics brevis, philosophia lunga.

I think Mitchell Porter's teasing out of the various interpretations of mathematical modeling of decisions is good. As Robyn Dawes is fond of pointing out, though, most people are much more linear (as in ordinary regression) in their thinking than they themselves typically acknowledge. So, 3a and 3b seem like no brainers and 1 might be closer to the truth than some would like. I think the real problem with some of the Overcoming Bias contributors is that they ignore their own advice about certain priors--namely, even if we have 'complete describability' via mathematical models of decisions processes, why think that this will, of itself, yeild the ability to duplicate these processes in other physical models? Informationalism is fine, but not to the exlusion of a sensitivity to physical facts and laws. If emotions are, as Antonio D'Amasio says, somatic responses to the chemical states of our cerebral spinal fluid, then without some massive chemical advances, we're a long way form the immortality hoped and hyped at Overcoming Bias. The attitude on this site (informationalism combined with physical savvy) seems much more realistic.

Here's another reason to doubt its authenticity. Whoever wrote it got the Greek wrong, and Galton, with his good English boarding school education (with its massive Greek and Latin indoctrination program), would never have done that. Genos is a word denoting race or maybe lineage, not child or children. That would be paidos or paidia. So genophilia, to anyone with Galton's background would mean love of race or something of that sort (not a thought totally foreign to Galton either), and not love of children.

To Mssrs. Mencius and Le Mur, 
 
I rather think the deepest problem is not specific to Christianity, but is rather a philosophical commitment to a kind of essentialism. Namely, that there is some sort of human essence (as there would be species essences) which all and only humans, necessarily, possess. The most distal source of this is probably Aristotle, but, oddly enough, you see it crop up in the Cartesian response to Aristotelian scholasticism as well--where the essence is thought. In its Cartesian guise it's still alive and well in the popular mind when it turns to mind. In its more Aristotelian guise, of course, you get the massive religious resistance to evolution and all things populational and probabilistic. This is why Dennett is so so right when he puts Darwin even above Einstein for what he single handedly overturned--two thousand years of essentialist dogma.

Crabby Patty, as I recall, it wasn't a homeless person who got into and was succeeding at Yale, it was a CA community college student who was a D student at Orange Coast College. He was, though, a great forger, and forged the SATs the letters, the transcripts, the whole thing and got into Yale. The really good part is that he had an A-/B+ average at Yale and would have graduated as such had he not got drunk one night and spilled the beans to his roomate. Yale of course expelled him but if you don't think it was more because of what that showed about rigor at Yale than it was at forgery per se, you're smoking something. Everyone in the business knows that As are the norm in liberal arts majors at all elite private schools (Stanford most definitely included) whereas, even in those majors, state schools, and yes, even community colleges, deal out Fs and Ds liberally.

Potentilla, 
 
One of the problems with the audio Homer, is that there's no definitive way to know exactly how the ancients actually pronounced it. What scans metrically, as the classicists call it, greatly underdetermines pronounciations. If you took your Greek from Oxbridge types, as I did, you have one way of pronouncing things (example, the English prefer Al(see)ibiades [sometime lover of Socrates and all around rat]), whereas others (frequently Germans) like Al(kee)biades. The same goes for innumerable other words and extends to accent, emphasis, and other phonological phenomena as well. It's still fun to listen to so long as you give up on any hope of authenticity.

As someone who's had the tribulations of years of formal training in Ancient Greek, but also the pleasures of reading the Illiad (and other classics) in their original, I must side with David Roth. The Lattimore is clearly the superior translation, if you want to know what Homer sounds like in Ancient Greek. Of course, one of the fundamental problems with translations of ancient languages is that all the evidence is purely lateral, i.e., other texts whose translation is also open to question; not to mention the not infrequent times when Homer uses a word or construction that occurs nowhere else but in Homer. But if there's one book that ought to be read by anyone who would call themselves educated, it surely is the Illiad, with the Odyssey not far behind. No one who hasn't read that great last line (from Lattimore): such was the burial of Hector, breaker of horses (going from memory) and shed a tear can call themselves educated.

Following up on Razib's point that the racial angle is seriously overplayed by the Bucholtz, how about the East Asian angle? Especially at a UC, how could Bucholtz failed to have noticed that East Asians fit into the 'hyperwhite' nerd ethos as a hand in a fitted glove? When I used to teach in Cupertino, CA, the complete amalgamation of Asian and White nerds into one glorious geek fest was obvious even to the blind. It's not race, but something else in play--and not interest in something other than popularity: That would place the Goths in there too. Methinks it's something people here are fond of: g anyone?

Here's an explanation of the rationality of refusing to accept low offers (by high testosterone types or any others) that seems to have been overlooked: It's a version of the 'as if' rationale, but it's not based one's concern about one's public persona, but, rather, one's concern about oneself. This rationale is expressed in work by Robert Frank, George Ainslie, and Eckman. The idea is that rather than being worried how others will take me if I accept a low offer, I'm worried about the kind of person I will become if I develop this habit. As Frank notes, one of the most effective ways to be thought of and become a fair (or tough minded) person is to act as one. So those who accept low offers could easily be sub consciously (or, this could be done for them by selection for that type of personality) trying to 'stay in shape' so not as to succumb to those low offers in iterated situations or what have you. If you think about this in arenas like self-control and the like, the strategy makes perfect sense.

The problem in understanding Everett's claims is that he seems to be straddling the fence as between a claim about linguistic practice (no recursion, no quantification) and a claim about cognitive habits or capabilities (here-now consciousness, no acknowledgement of 'deep past'). At some points he seems content to make a purely linguistic point and concede that he never claims the Piraha are cognitively different (or, at least, deficient). At other points, one certainly gets the impression that they are cognitively different (at least in their own culture).  
 
Whorf-Sapir were explicit in connecting the two phenomena, but Everett seems more cautious (as he should be). We'll see. Also, I can't see how one can say that even if his linguistic claims are proven true that this isn't a large knock on UG. It certainly has to be taken as evidence against UG that every new version of UG gets knocked out by some little language somewhere (there is a U in UG, right?). Hardly confidence inspiring and not what Polyani used to call a progressing research program.

As someone trained in philosophy (and still practicing it in a small way) who has an amateur's interest in these matters, I should point out that Dupre is a philosopher as well, so it's not all bad biology. Still, you'll never catch me making a substantive claim about this stuff--I just listen and read.