The book is
What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. I haven't read the book, I don't own the book, I have no intentions of buying the book.
But Fodor and Massimo have an opinion article in this week's
New Scientist magazine (
Survival of the fittest theory: Darwinism's limits) that presents the fundamental argument in their book, that biology greatly overestimates the contribution of natural selection to evolutionary change. They argue that other considerations have a greater impact on evolutionary change, and they include factors like Kimura's neutral theory (not explicitly mentioned, but certainly included by implication), constraints of physics and chemistry, and constraints from above like "minimum energy expenditure, shortest paths, optimal packing and so on."
The sole provided example is endogenously linked traits. If trait t
1 and trait t
2 are endogenously linked, then if an organism possesses one of these traits it must have the other. It cannot possess just one or the other. But if only one of the two traits is adaptive then the other will go along for the ride, even though it is neither adaptive or non-adaptive.
Does this sound like Kimura to anyone? And does this sound particularly novel to anyone? Though such possibilities don't get much exposure at the undetailed level that evolution is discussed here, are there many evolutionists here who didn't already know that there's such a thing as linked traits?
I really hated the article (and by projection the book, too) because it seemed like a rather obvious attempt by Fodor and Massimo to garner attention by expressing what we already know, but in an inflammatory way through attacks on natural selection. Obviously they know natural selection is the only way to produce adaptation because adaptation is part of their sole example of linked traits, but throughout the article they attack natural selection relentlessly and conclude like this:
Fodor and Massimo writes:
However, the internal evidence to back this imperialistic selectionism strikes us as very thin. Its credibility depends largely on the reflected glamour of natural selection which biology proper is said to legitimise. Accordingly, if natural selection disappears from biology, its offshoots in other fields seem likely to disappear as well. This is an outcome much to be desired since, more often than not, these offshoots have proved to be not just post hoc but ad hoc, crude, reductionist, scientistic rather than scientific, shamelessly self-congratulatory, and so wanting in detail that they are bound to accommodate the data, however that data may turn out. So it really does matter whether natural selection is true.
Again, how can they argue that natural selection might not be true when their single example of linked traits requires natural selection. Pah!
I'm not familiar with Jerry Fodor, but I'm very familiar with Massimo because he's a frequent guest on the Center for Inquiry's (CFI) weekly
Point of Inquiry podcast. CFI is a humanist/atheist organization dedicated to countering the influences of pseudoscience and flim-flammery in our culture. I usually like him because he doesn't oversimplify complex topics, but in the case of this new book he seems to himself have slipped a bit toward pseudoscience.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Fix title.
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