Back to these polar bears now: (and this is where it's essential to stifle your intuitions; we know the answer, or think we do, but that's not the issue. The issue is: can TNS discriminate?).
... "can TNS discriminate?"
As far as these Fodorian quandaries go, there are more difficult questions than the issue of whether the theory appears to say that material environments can discriminate. Of course material environments are not "minds" and therefore cannot "discriminate". The
Great and Wise Environmental Discriminator produced white fur and then kept it around just in case it might have some bearing on reproductive fitness of bears who may or may not exist in the future. That would be teleology, which is not usually allowed in scientific theories, per se.
But this issue goes far beyond the mere appearance of obvious, phenotypic traits like polar bear fur color.
Somewhere on the early earth, (far prior to the Cambrian) say in the Proterozoic geological eon. Evolution by Natural selection gave rise to sex. Males and females. In the case of fungus it gave rise to multiple different kinds of "mating types" which must match in certain bizarre ways in order to initiate reproduction. But worse,
and this is what really matters to Fodorian arguments : the earth then sustained sexual reproduction all the way through the evolution of complex multi-cellular life. Fast-forward to the present day and evolution has sustained oogamy in humans.
Forget polar bear fur color, this is DISCRIMINATION WRIT LARGE. Sex is a very complicated chemical mechanism. Sex itself is a wasteful activity requiring organisms to put themselves in great danger in order to pull it off. According to Fodor, this would mean that the precambrian earth produces sexual reproduction as if to "prepare the table for" human beings a billion years in the future who would walk around with vaginas and penises. The early earth
discriminated the coming importance of sex to prepare history, ahead of time, for people to be pregnant and give birth. This is not just fur color on bears, sexual reproduction is something rather unexpected, complex, and inexplicable in reason.
At this point, those biologists who frequent this forum (and who are bothering to read this post), are screaming internally.
Jerry Fodor speaks and writes well, and he can wrap a gift in the prettiest of Christmas wrappings. (rumor is that he writes even better than he speaks). But in less formal contexts, we have already heard a similar argument used by Biblical creationists. The idea goes that "well sure the environment will select for traits depending on their application to an organism's fitness -- but where did the trait come from in the first place?"
(variations: "NS can select for existing traits but cannot create new mechanisms." "There is no way for information to increase under NS." et cetera).
Fodor would seduce the audience into believing the traits origin must have been in the designs of the
Great and Wise Environmental Discriminator who either has "access to laws" or who has a mind with intensional states allowing it to "design stuff". Thus sex was
designed by the the Great Environmental Discriminator , because in His Wisdom, he ordained the future drama that swirls around gender and sex, politically, psychologically and otherwise. I mean, sure, after the Great Discriminator
created sexual reproduction, it was then put to the struggles of reproductive test like all other traits are. (created first, tested later) Luckily it succeeded at those tests.
Anyways.. after the biologists of the forum get done screaming internally, they will likely say something along the theme of "this is not how the process works".
I will let those more educated forum posters fill out the finishing touches and finalizing summaries of the point.
. . .