Scientists take a potshot at Charles Darwin’s pet idea and get nasty feedback

The very name of this book causes indigestion for some Darwin fans.




Joel Kontinen

Having written a book entitled What Darwin Got Wrong, its authors might expect to get rather harsh feedback. After all, the inerrancy of the Father of Evolution has become Darwinian dogma. When New Scientist published its Darwin was Wrong cover story last year, many evolutionists were calling for a boycott of the magazine.

Jerry Fodor, a professor of philosophy and cognitive sciences at Rutgers University, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona, nevertheless decided to break ranks with Darwinian orthodoxy by taking a potshot at one of the basic concepts behind evolution, i.e. the assumed omnipotence of natural selection.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini criticised the excessive role of natural selection in Darwinism.

Recently, in an interview for Salon.com, Fodor said that their book and articles had generated extremely harsh criticism in the blogosphere. It seems that people are not pleased when they are told that what they learnt in biology 101 is not true.

Fodor says, for instance, that the example often found in textbooks of how the giraffe got its long neck is mere storytelling.

This widespread tendency prompted professor Fodor to criticise the Darwinian propensity for making up just-so stories to explain phenomena such as how the spider got its web.

”One sees, even without God, how this Darwinian story could turn out to be radically wrong. You could see a massive failure of the evolutionary project, because wrong assumptions were made”, Fodor concludes. He says that he is still an atheist, though.

Richard Dawkins might not be too pleased with Fodor’s statements.

Source:

Rogers, Thomas . 2010. "What Darwin Got Wrong": Taking down the father of evolution. Salon.com (22 February)
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/02/22/what_darwin_got_wrong_jerry_fodor/

What Darwin Got Wrong About Natural Selection

Charles Darwin’s views are facing strong headwinds. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.




Joel Kontinen

“Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical.” This is how Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini characterise the writings of many evolutionists in New Scientist. For instance, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins praise natural selection to the skies and fail to notice that it is not all-powerful.

Natural selection plays a decisive role in the writings of Charles Darwin. Darwinists regard it as the mechanism of evolution that helps us to understand how phenotypic traits are passed from one generation to the next. Few have stopped to think about the limits of natural selection.

”Each generation contributes an imperfect copy of its genotype - and thereby of its phenotype - to its successor. Neo-Darwinism suggests that such imperfections arise primarily from mutations in the genomes of members of the species in question.”

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini suggest that this combination of natural selection and random changes cannot explain how phenotypic traits develop, however.

They compare Darwin’s view to that of B. F. Skinner whose behaviourist psychology overestimated the role of one’s environment in behaviour.

Although Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are not ready to throw evolution overboard, their view speaks of a type of courage that is seldom seen but is necessary in standing up against Darwinian orthodoxy. A year ago, when New Scientist published its Darwin was wrong cover story, many Darwinists were calling for a boycott of the magazine.


Source:

Fodor, Jerry ja Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. 2010.
Survival of the fittest theory: Darwinism's limits. New Scientist 2746 (3 February)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527466.100-survival-of-the-fittest-theory-darwinisms-limits.html?full=true