What Darwin Got Wrong

by Fodor, Jerry; Piattelli-Palmarini, Massimo

• ISBN13: 9780312680664
• ISBN10: 031268066X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-01
• Publisher: Picador

Summary

What Darwin Got Wrong is a remarkable book, one that dares to challenge the theory of natural selection as an explanation for how evolution works---a devastating critique not in the name of religion but in the name of good science. Combining the results of cutting-edge work in experimental biology with crystal-clear philosophical arguments, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini mount a reasoned and convincing assault on the central tenets of Darwin's account of the origin of species. This is a concise argument that will transform the debate about evolution and move us beyond the false dilemma of being either for natural selectionor against science.

Author Biography

Jerry Fodor is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers University.

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini started his academic career as a biophysicist and molecular biologist and is now a professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. xiv
Terms of engagement	p. xv
What kind of theory is the theory of natural selection?	p. 1
The Biological Argument	p. 17
Internal constraints: what the new biology tells us	p. 19
Whole genomes, networks, modules and other complexities	p. 40
Many constraints, many environments	p. 57
The return of the laws of form	p. 72
The Conceptual Situation	p. 93
Many are called but few are chosen: the problem of 'selection-for'	p. 95
No exit? Some responses to the problem of 'selection-for'	p. 117
Did the dodo lose its ecological niche? Or was it the other way around?	p. 139
Summary and postlude	p. 153
Afterword and reply to the critics	p. 165
Appendix	p. 191
Notes	p. 207
References	p. 251
Index	p. 277
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

2

INTERNAL CONSTRAINTS: WHAT THE NEW BIOLOGY TELLS US

 

"One can spend an entire lifetime correcting a flawed paper published

in a reputable journal and still lose the battle if people like the basic idea."

—V. Hamburger, developmental neurobiologist, cited in Rakic, 2008

 

 

 

As we mentioned earlier, some of our good friends, patented experimental

biologists (usually known as ‘wet’ biologists) who have read

previous versions of this manuscript, slapped us on the wrist because

they think what we are saying is overkill. They told us, ‘no one is

thatkind of Darwinian any more’. We’d be happy if that were so,

but there is good reason to doubt that it is. And, if it is true, the

news has not been widely disseminated even among wet biologists

(see, for example, Coyne, 2009). This chapter and the next two are

essentially a summary ofwhythose biologists say what they (rightly)

say. Chapter 5 wades into relatively new territory, even for biologists.

News of what we summarize there has, alas, remained even more

elusive so far.

Strict neo-Darwinists are, of course, environmentalists by definition:

the genotype generates candidate phenotypes more or less at

random; the environment filters for traits that are fitness enhancing.

But there are signs of a deep revisionism emerging in current evolutionary

theory: modern biology urges us to conclude (what Darwin

himself had acknowledged) that the effect of ecological variables on

phenotypes is not the whole story about evolution. Indeed it goes

further, urging us to conclude that ecological variables aren’t even the

most important part of the story about evolution. We will now see, in

summary, how and why contemporary biology has changed classical

neo-Darwinian adaptationism beyond recognition. Many important

discoveries and many explicit quotes by their discoverers bear witness

to this momentous change. Our book as a whole, however, parts

company with many of these distinguished biologists. Paraphrasing

a famous slogan by Karl Marx (an author whose views we do not consider

to be otherwise germane), we can say: biologists have changed

neo-Darwinism in many ways; the point now is to subvert it.

Natural selection is real, of course (when properly construed)

There can be little doubt that shifting equilibria (that is, variations

in the relative frequencies of phenotypic types within and across

populations) happen all the time, on land, in the seas, in lakes, in

rivers and in streams all over this planet. They also happen within

our bodies. Alterations in epithelial (skin) cells, pancreatic cells, lymphocytes

(white blood cells), neurons and synapses occurred in us

even as we wrote these lines and in you even as you read them. Such

shifts are relentless and have been happening on Earth for hundreds

of millions of years. And webs of relations of predation, commensalism

(food-sharing), competition and migration are intermingled with

these shifts and modify, in the long run, our structure and that of our

ecosystems. The distributions of biological and behavioural traits in

populations that we see today are results of these processes, although

certainly not exclusively so, and probably not even chiefly so (assuming

that a reliable measure [a reasonable metric] could be established

for such probabilistic evaluations, a topic to which we will return).

It’s common ground that distributions of phenotypic traits in

populations change slightly and relentlessly over time. Having said

this much, however, it must be emphasized that such shifting equilibria

do not explain the distribution of phenotypes; rather, they are

among the phenomena that theories of evolution are supposed to

explain. These days biologists have good reasons to believe that selection

among randomly generated minor variants of phenotypic traits

falls radically short of explaining the appearance of new forms of

life. Assuming that evolution occurs over very, very long periods does

not help if, as we believe, endogenous factors and multilevel genetic

regulations play an essential role in determining the phenotypic

options among which environmental variables can choose. Contrary

to traditional opinion, it needs to be emphasized that natural selection

among traits generated at random cannot by itself be the basic

principle of evolution. Rather there must be strong, often decisive,

endogenous constraints and hosts of regulations on the phenotypic

options that exogenous selection operates on. We think of natural

selection as tuning the piano, not as composing the melodies. That’s

our story, and we think it’s the story that modern biology tells when

it’s properly construed. We will stick to it throughout what follows.

We think (and will argue in later chapters) that there are convincing

a priori arguments that show this. For the moment, however,

concede that it’s often very hard to anticipate the effects of applying

a process of selection to a randomly generated population of

traits. Even slight variations in the initial frequencies, in the rates of

random mutation and in the selection coefficients can lead to drastically

different new equilibria. This chapter summarizes a panorama

of specific mechanisms the discovery of which makes the gradualist/

adaptationist theory of natural selection plainly wrong in at least

some cases, because new phenotypic traits aren’t generated at random

(as they would be if the mutations that they express are independent)

or because adaptation to the ecology plays only a secondary role in

the fixation of the phenotypes, or for both of these reasons.