What Darwin Got Wrong [Hardcover]

 

 

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Written by two atheists, "What Darwin Got Wrong" is an attack on natural selection but not evolution (i.e. they think evolution proceeds by other, unexplained mechanisms). Generally, the text is quite hard to follow; the authors' ideas are never presented in clear, simple language.

There are two sections. The first aims to convince you that biology is very complex, with multiple interactions between genes, environments and traits; and so evolution is much more complex than one might imagine. That's fine as far as it goes.

The second section is where the book falls over. Here the authors present a very peculiar, "philosophical" argument that natural selection is meaningless. Traits, they tell us, often coexist. For example, a frog's trait of snapping at flies is also the trait of snapping at small black objects. Since these traits come together, there's no way to tell which trait is being selected for; thus natural selection is nonsense.

If this seems like a good argument then I don't know how to help you. I've seen much more coherent arguments from bona fide creationists.

Strangely, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini say that artificial selection makes sense (unlike natural selection) because there is a mind doing the selecting. Yet it's unclear why that matters: in both cases organisms vary in their reproductive success, and the ones that do reproduce are the ones that pass along their genes.

Having finished the book, I'm happy that evolutionists can still sleep safely in their beds.

Ever since Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin launched their attack on the "Panglossian paradigm" of adaptationism, biologists have been cautious about claiming some well-adapted trait was shaped by selection for its current function. An adaptive trait, Gould and Lewontin argued, could simply be a lucky by-product of selection for some other trait.

They drew an analogy with the spandrels of San Marco: at first glance, these features linking the dome and arches look to have been designed for the sake of the beautiful images that adorn them. But further reflection reveals otherwise: they were actually a by-product of resting a dome on arches! The moral for biologists: take care to distinguish the real products of selection from the "free-riders".

In their provocative new book, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini want to draw a different moral from this story. What it really shows, they argue, is that the idea of a trait being "selected for" is incoherent. To say the spandrels were put there to hold up the dome is, after all, to make a claim about what the architect had in mind. Since, by contrast, there is no mind in charge of natural selection, it makes no sense to say that some trait was "selected for" while another was a "free rider". Though they add a lot of complicated extras, this is the core of their master argument against Darwinism, as set out in Chapter 6.

So here's the obvious reply: the difference between selected-for traits and their free riders is a causal difference. Selected-for traits causally contribute to the reproductive success of organisms, whereas free riders don't. To say some trait is a "free rider" is to say that, regardless of its current function, it evolved without contributing to the success of its bearers. This is going to be hard to find out, of course, but the conceptual distinction is clear enough. No minds are needed.

This is what Fodor's critics have been saying for years. Yet it's not an objection explicitly addressed in the book, despite being, as far as I can tell, a perfectly good one.

It is important to realize the full scope (and extraordinary arrogance) of what Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini want to achieve here. Their ambition is not merely to downplay the significance of selection in evolution, as defenders of "evo-devo" often seek to do. Rather, they intend to annihilate the entire theory of evolution by natural selection a priori, from the recesses of their armchairs, with a knockdown objection at the conceptual level.

If they were right, biologists would certainly finish the book with egg on their faces. How stupid! To spend 150 years thinking some incoherent nonsense was the best idea ever! Unsurprisingly, all the egg goes the other way. In Daniel Dennett's words, "What could drive Fodor to hallucinate the pending demise of the theory of evolution by natural selection?"

'What Darwin Got Wrong' is a critical analysis of the theory of natural selection by a philosopher and a cognitive scientist. The writers fully accept the fact of evolution but argue that natural selection, the primary mechanism by which Darwin thought evolution took place, is logically untenable.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are two highly regarded senior academics in their own fields - or at least, they were until they published this book. Since then all kinds of curses have been rained down upon their heads and all kinds of vegetables have been thrown at them. As their argument attacks the theory of natural selection at a time when it is fighting a fierce action against the massed ranks of creationists, that is hardly suprising.

Given the controversy this book has stirred up I think I should say very briefly where I am coming from. I have no professional or academic expertise in evolutionary biology, I have always accepted natural selection as a fact and I call myself an atheist. I also have a very rusty degree in philosophy which has been useful in reading this book. I have given it five stars, not because I am bowled over by its arguments or committed to its point of view but because I believe that in science challenges are good and controversy is generally productive. A second reason is that 'What Darwin Got Wrong' is also a very enjoyable read: one of the most genial and well-written - I didn't say 'easy' - philosophy texts I have read in a long time.

So, why would you want to read this book? Well, unless you are a specialist, you will probably need to have at least several of the following: an interest in evolutionary theory; a thirst (or at least a capacity) for reading long, complex and closely argued philosophical arguments; a liking for controversy; an enjoyment of well-written theoretical texts; and a desire to take up an intellectual challenge. You might also be looking for an excuse to crow over the death of Darwinism, or, on the other side of the fence, you might be itching to take a pop at the authors.

First a warning. Interspersed with passages of easy and enjoyable narrative, the writing can sometimes get dense and difficult. If you are reading this book to understand its argument you are going to have to grapple with passages like this: "To a first approximation, the claim that, 'all else being equal, Fs cause Gs' says something like: 'given independently justified idealizations, Fs cause Gs reliably.' The intuition in such cases is that, underlying the observed variance, there is a bona fide, reliable, counterfactual-supporting relation between being F and causing Gs, the operation of which is often obscured by the effects of unsystematic, interacting variables.' Even genial philosophers talk like philosophers still!

The book also has an unfortuante habit of diving into side issues, which makes the main line of argument less easy to follow. The language can be difficult at times and the authors seem to have an unnecessary love-affair with Latin tags: "ceteris paribus"; "mutatis mutandis"; and so on. None of these problems are insurmountable, but they do demand a fair bit from any reader who wants to understand the arguments in detail.

On the other side, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini have not left the general reader without some help. The technical terms in the passage above are explained in advance. The book is mostly well (even attractively) written. Its prose is lean. Without becoming arch or irritating, it is punctuated by moments of wry, warm humour, and there are plenty of explanatory examples and some recapitulations.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini present two arguments to support their case. The first is built upon empirical discoveries in evolutionary biology, some of them old, some a lot more recent. This argument suggests that the operation of natural selection is limited by formal and other constraits. It does not undermine Darwin's major theory but does question its position as the principal explanation for evolution. (Few, of course, not even Darwin, have ever claimed it to be the only explanation). It is a controversial argument, not entirely new and not generally well received by working scientists.

The second argument consists of an analysis of the logic underlying the case for natural selection. This is a purely philosophical (analytic) argument and is potentially more damaging - if shown to be valid. By using the concept of a counterfactual, the authors claim to have demonstrated that the terms in which natural selection is formulated contain a logical error - an intentional fallacy. To show the significance of this error, they draw parallels with other scientific theories (like B F Skinner's theory of Operant Conditioning) which follow an identical (and, they claim, identically flawed) logic. These other theories have, in consequence, been rejected by the scientific community as untenable, and for that reason natural selection is left looking extremely exposed.

The conclusion of this argument, and of the book, is that the theory of natural selection is not a scientific law. This means that it has no predictive power and therefore cannot lawfully govern all the myriad events of natural history. Instead, the authors argue, it is a (perfectly respectable) causal theory which allows us to provide plausible explanations of individual evolutionary events - after the fact - much in the way that historians provide explanations for historical events. The authors claim this is true of many scientific theories: "theories about lunar geography, theories about why the dinosaurs became extinct, theories about the origin of the Grand Canyon, or of the Solar System, or, come to think of it, of the Universe."

So, what is to be made of the controversy the book has raised? At this early stage in the debate (April 2010) the overwhelming response is hostile. One criticism repeatedly levelled at the authors is that they have strayed ignorantly into the field of evolutionary biology without understanding either its current state of knowledge or its methodology. Others have attacked the author's arguments directly. Unfortunately, along with some valuable comment there is also a great deal of heat and confusion. Many have made generalised attacks upon the arguments or dismissed them as nonsense. Others have accused the authors of hubris or of meddling where they are not wanted. Too often, accusers have themselves misunderstood the arguments they are criticising or failed to engage with them. Vague or ad hominem attacks of this kind are not very useful. If the arguments are flawed as most commentators assume they are, then we need to know precisely and clearly why they are flawed. The great majority of scientists and philosophers *believe* them to be flawed, but we are still waiting for the dust to settle and for a clear, detailed demonstration of the book's errors to emerge.

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Edited Update January 2011

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's secondary argument has now been comprehensively dismantled in the literature and the early claims that the authors had failed to understand the science have now been pretty well demonstrated.

A clear consensus has now emerged within the philosophical community that their primary argument is logically flawed. Here is a passage from a representative review in "Philosophy Now" dated October/November 2010.

"Philosophers of science have long dealt with the intentionality problem that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini pretend to have discovered out of the blue. The answer lies in distinguishing between selection *for* and seclection *of*. ... Incidentally, this difference is why, contrary to popular belief, natural selection is not an optimizing process - why it makes mistakes and is inefficient, yielding whatever outcome is good enough for survival and reproduction.

Yet another way to understand how strange Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's argument is, is to realize that if they were right and only law-like hypotheses supporting counterfactuals were to be given the status of science, then *all* the historical sciences would go done (sic) the drain, not just evolutionary biology. This flies in the face of all post-positivist scholarship in the philosophy of science."

On such small things are great philosophical storms raised! Darwin can now rest easy in his grave. Phew!

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Original conclusion to April 2010 review

Many of the commentators I have read so far have been antagonised by the book's methodology. That's unsurprising since most of its arguments are philosophical rather than empirical. The authors happily admit that the ideas in the book arose out of recent debates in contemporary philosophy and not evolutionary biology.

Those who are unfamiliar with the bodiless arguments of philosophers, or get impatient with their abstract methodology, or regard the whole philosophical enterprise as a bizarre, self-indulgent activity which has nothing to say to the world of hard-working empirical scientists, will quite possibly not even get as far as wondering whether the arguments are valid - it is quite likely they won't even find them very meaningful. Reviews on the web are bristling with opinions of this kind. Some are angrily expressing irritation over arguments more concerned with logical relationships and illustrative notional entities (like hearts that go `thump' and those that don't) than they are with presenting evidence from the natural world.

Those who appreciate that all scientific theories stand or fall not just upon empirical evidence but upon their own... Read more ›

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