What Darwin Got Wrong [Hardcover]

Jerry Fodor (Author), Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 16, 2010 | ISBN-10: 0374288798 | ISBN-13: 978-0374288792 | Edition: First Edition

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.

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a distinguished philosopher and a scientist working in tandem, reveal major flaws at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Combining the results of cutting-edge work in experimental biology with crystal-clear philosophical arguments, they mount a reasoned and convincing assault on the central tenets of Darwin’s account of the origin of species. The logic underlying natural selection is the survival of the fittest under changing environmental pressure. This logic, they argue, is mistaken, and they back up the claim with surprising evidence of what actually happens in nature. This is a rare achievement—a concise argument that is likely to make a great deal of difference to a very large subject. What Darwin Got Wrong will be controversial. The authors’ arguments will reverberate through the scientific world. At the very least they will transform the debate about evolution and move us beyond the false dilemma of being either for natural selection or against science.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The authors of this scattershot treatise believe in evolution, but think that the Darwinian model of adaptationism—that random genetic mutations, filtered by natural selection, produce traits that enhance fitness for a particular biological niche—is fatally flawed. Philosopher Fodor and molecular-biologist-turned-cognitive-scientist Piattelli-Palmarini, at the University of Arizona, launch a three-pronged attack (which drew fire when Fodor presented their ideas in the London Review of Books in 2007). For one thing, according to the authors, natural selection contains a logical fallacy by linking two irreconcilable claims: first, that creatures with adaptive traits are selected, and second, that creatures are selected for their adaptive traits. The authors present an ill-digested assortment of scientific studies suggesting there are forces other than adaptation (some even Lamarckian) that drive changes in genes and organisms . Then they advance a densely technical argument that natural selection can't coherently distinguish between adaptive traits and irrelevant ones. Their most persuasive, and engaging, criticism is that evolutionary theory is just tautological truisms and historical narratives of how creatures came to be. Overall, the scientific evidence and philosophical analyses the authors proffer are murky and underwhelming. Worse, their highly technical treatment renders their argument virtually incomprehensible to lay readers. (Feb.)
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From Booklist

Remaining staunchly atheist all the while, philosopher Fodor and cognitive scientist Piattelli-Palmarini challenge Darwinism more effectively than the entire creationist/intelligent-design movement has. Their short, deliberate, and—for readers consulting (and reconsulting) their dictionaries about the philosophical and scientific vocabulary the authors decline to dumb down—slow-reading tract lays out biological and conceptual arguments against natural selection. Natural selection as the driver of speciation has become decreasingly explanatory as research continues to appreciate the complexity of internal and external processes impinging on development. For one thing, inherent physical limitations of developing organisms nullify blind selection; adapt as they may, pigs will never grow wings. Conceptually, natural selection is faulty because it necessarily implies intentionality (selection is made by something), never mind that how something with adaptive effect is chosen is utterly elusive logically. There is a great deal more to Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s arguments, which ordinary general readers won’t be able to articulate afterward but will gratefully refer others—and themselves—to again and again. Many may find this the hardest, absolutely essential reading they’ve ever done. --Ray Olson

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (February 16, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374288798
• ISBN-13: 978-0374288792
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #921,457 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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147 of 183 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Meh February 20, 2010

By Philosophickle

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Here's the thing. I like reading Fodor. I had high hopes for this book, not so much because I have any particular axe to grind with contemporary evolutionary thought, but because the topic is interesting and Fodor is an extremely entertaining author. Unfortunately, this books is written in a highly inaccessible style, and some of the directions they take are confusing and detrimental to their cause. For example, it took me about 5 seconds to see some kind of surface similarity between strong-adaptationist models of evolution and B. F. Skinner's behaviorism, but they milk out odd conclusions from comparing those two for a whole chapter. I'm not buying it. And the chapter on natural selection itself? Nowhere was a clear statement of what natural selection actually is in the first place. In fact, it doesn't seem like they understand what it really is. They point out things like the flaws of genotypic grab-bags, but then suggest that it is incompatible with natural selection. Of course, adaptationists have always known that natural selection can only work with heritable traits that are visible to the world (whether by behavior or otherwise). No one thinks natural selection predicts that humans have fiber-optic nerves in their body because that would be more useful that our biochemical makeup. That's because this trait was probably never available for natural selection in the first place. It's a real constraint on natural selection. Adaptationists might be wrong, but they aren't stupid.

They have a strange view of behavior that comes out of Fodor's earlier reaction to evolutionary psychology (see The Mind Doesn't Work That Way). For some reason, Fodor thinks that the mind and conscious behavior can operate outside the reach of natural selection. This just seems wrong. Someone with a tendency to believe that petting hungry tigers is going to learn that he probably won't be having babies anytime soon. This leads me to two points, both of which are compatible with natural selection:

1) If having an aversion to petting hungry tigers is heritable (in some proto-form), then natural selection is a mechanism that applies pressure on putting that trait into fixation.
2) If having an aversion to petting hungry tigers is not (possibly) heritable, then natural selection cannot be defeated by this fact since it only applies to heritable traits (not quite true, since natural selection can weed them out of the population as well).

I don't think either (1) or (2) are scientifically robust notions of natural selection, but this is the kind of silliness the book takes us through. What bothers me about this odd "consciousness" argument is that it borders on the absurd. Minds are tethered to the brain (whatever that means is something these guys should be working on, not evolution), and minds perform behavioral functions. They hint at some kind of self-ordering conscious force, but I just read (rightly or wrongly) a defense of some strange neo-Lamarckianism.

Lastly, they just don't interact with pro-adaptationist arguments. We can rightly predict the kind of selective-pressures of, say, the AIDs virus as the environmental situation changes. I won't say that NS is the entire story, but in some cases it appears to be the most powerful explanation of evolution.

I was going to give this book three stars, but I can't forgive the title. It's blatantly sensationalistic, and these two are prominent members of academia. Shame on them for letting their publishers talk them into such a juvenile title. The book isn't all bad, and if you can get over their ridiculously unorthodox presentation of the opposition and frankly poor writing, then you can get some interesting insight into real problems (which seem to be non-fatal, in my opinion) which scientists will work out for some time to come. If you read this book as an anti-evolutionist, then you are going to be disturbingly misinformed about contemporary evolutionary theory. But if you have enough of a background in charitable interpretations of Darwinian evolution, then give it a go.

Edit: I've noticed that some people are trying to make this book about religion vs. atheism in some way. I'm afraid that would be a terrible mistake. The author(s?) is an atheist, and they both express their commitment to naturalism in some way. If you are an intelligent design proponent, then I really don't know what you would get from this book. I know the so-called Discovery Institute has already heralded the death of Darwinism with the release of this book, but don't buy into the hype. This is an in-house debate between evolutionists of a strongly naturalistic bent; keep your personal projections away from this text.

49 of 60 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful critique with some flaws of its own June 20, 2010

By Tamlyn M. Hunt

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This gutsy but overly pugnacious book is aimed at biologists, philosophers and educated laymen. I fall into all three of these categories but have never actually worked as a biologist after taking my undergraduate degree in evolutionary biology. As some reviewers have noted, this can be a difficult book and is definitely not dumbed down for wide accessibility.

It is unfortunate that no summary of the authors' arguments is presented, requiring that you read the whole book to get the argument. This may have been intentional, however, as it does force the reader to actually read the whole book and not just the introduction. I've provided below a quick summary of the main arguments and my reactions.

The first half of the book is a great overview of evolutionary forces and theories other than neo-Darwinian natural selection. It's a great update to Jablonka and Lamb's Evolution in Four Dimensions, which is an eye-opening expansion of neo-Darwinism (which is, strangely, never discussed by F&P-P, or even cited, I suspect because F&P-P didn't want to face the additional hurdle of criticisms that they were flirting with neo-Lamarckism, as Jablonka and Lamb do). This section of What Darwin Got Wrong is quite convincing in that it shows that natural selection (NS) is certainly not the only force at work in evolution, and nor is it the case that NS plus genetic drift (the standard sub-theories in neo-Darwinism) are the only forces in evolution. Rather, there are a tremendous number of other factors, far beyond the four dimensions discussed by Jablonka and Lamb (though it may be the case that all of the items discussed by F&P-P can be categorized in the four dimensions)

Much of the second half of the book is an extended argument about the fallacies behind adaptationism and NS. Basically, F&P-P argue that evolution can't distinguish between adaptive traits and other traits that "free-ride" with adaptive traits and, thus, adaptationism can't be true. It's certainly the case (and no one would argue otherwise) that there are many free-riding traits and that it is rarely the case that a new trait will pop up in a given organism with no other new traits. But this does not mean that the creature won't experience a net increase or decrease (or neutral effect) from the new traits when compared to creatures like it that don't have the new traits. And thus evolution works its magic on the net effect, not on any particular trait. So all F&P-P's argument demonstrates is that adaptationism and NS fail to explain ALL phenotypic features. But no biologist would argue this, to my knowledge. So we are left with a convincing discussion of many non-NS sources of evolution, but an unconvincing argument that adaptationism and NS are logically fallacious or that nature simply can't work that way.

The third main argument, which I find more convincing is that NS is an empty theory b/c it rests on a number of circular definitions. Fitness is generally defined as the set of traits that confer greater reproductive advantage for a given creature. Thus, saying that those creatures that are more fit survive and reproduce more is circular, because this is simply the definition of fitness. In other words, if we ask what is fitness, we are told it is characterized by greater reproductive success and if we ask what leads to greater reproductive success we are told it is fitness. This argument has been made by many other thinkers, including some prominent biologists like T.H. Morgan. Similarly, to say that a creature is adapted to its niche or its ecology (distinguished from the environment as a whole) is circular because niche and ecology can only be described in terms of those forces that act on, or are relevant to, the given creature. Thus, to say that a creature is adapted to a niche is an empty statement because the niche is defined precisely by the features of the environment that are relevant to the creature.

The solution to these problems is, according to F&P-P, to jettison NS and adaptationism entirely and acknowledge that explaining how creatures have evolved is a matter for natural history only. And natural history is "just one damned thing after another." There is no theory in natural history; it's just narrative. That is, there is no theory that can explain evolution, there is only historical examination (history). Once we have explained the natural history of each creature examined, there is no further natural theory that can explain how Nature worked its magic.

In sum, I find argument 1 very persuasive, argument 2 unconvincing, and argument 3 fairly convincing, with the acknowledgement that I have long been troubled by the neo-Darwinian version of evolution. I also found the tone of the authors unhelpful as they come across pretty arrogant and seem to want to pick fights unnecessarily. That's not my style, but I can't say it won't work in spurring a healthy debate about these issues. So the book gets four stars.

In the last analysis, I think this book raises many very powerful critiques of NS and neo-Darwinism, but I think they miss one very important element that Jablonka and Lamb explore a little (though still not enough): the idea that mind does in fact have a role in evolution. F&P-P, to the contrary, stake much of their argument on the basis that mind has no role whatsoever in evolution and that the purpose of naturalistic explanation is to get mind out of our explanations. F&P-P close their book on this note. I think, however, that this is a mistake. Mind has been further and further shoved out of scientific explanations, to the detriment of scientific explanations and our understanding of the universe, not to mention our culture's mythos more generally.

Mind is, in fact, fundamental (as a disclaimer, I'm a card-carrying panpsychist; see David Ray Griffin's masterful Unsnarling the World-Knot for a thorough argument in favor of panpsychism) to nature and to ignore it in our explanations is to miss the entire story. Many biologists are now starting to examine this idea, including Steele, et al, in Lamarck's Signature, which presents a compelling and detailed argument from working immunologists that the evolution of our immune system is entirely Lamarckian. They show, essentially, that the Central Dogma of neo-Darwinism, which asserts that DNA encodes RNA encodes proteins, and in that direction ONLY, is entirely wrong when we look at the immune system. Instead, it is the case that proteins lead to new DNA all the time in our immune system - and this new DNA is heritable. Steele, et al., speculate a little that this demolition of the Central Dogma (also known as Weissman's Barrier) may be found to be true more generally. If this is the case, then it opens up a whole new world of explanatory power with what I call "individual selection." In this extension of evolutionary theory, minds do in fact have a role to play, perhaps a strong one, in prompting heritable genetic changes (and epigenetic). Anyway, this is beyond the scope of my review, but my feeling is that this is the direction that evolutionary biology should take in coming decades. Time will tell if it in fact does.

A final note: I just read all the one star reviews of this book and it is astonishing that not a single one of these reviewers has understood the arguments in this book. The attacks are wildly off the mark and accuse the writers of saying all sorts of things they don't even say. Not liking a book or not agreeing with the arguments is everyone's prerogative but such critiques should at least make an effort to understand what arguments are being made!

Update (8/15/2010): Since reading this book I have read a number of other books critical of Darwinism, and surveyed a number of peer-reviewed papers in the field. I have come to the conclusion that F&P-P's Argument 3 is entirely convincing, but it is the most sketchy of their arguments in the book itself, receiving only a few pages. The "tautology" argument re natural selection has been fleshed out by Tom Bethell and Norman MacBeth (Darwin Retried) in a convincing way. And, in reading through the various responses by evolutionary biologists (Gould and many others) and philosophers, I am now shocked that the tautology argument has not caused natural selection to be jettisoned as a theory. Natural selection, as a theory of how species change, is as insightful as saying that "the candidate who received the most votes won the election." No matter how we defined natural selection, as "survival of the fittest," or as "differential reproduction," or as "the spread of adaptive traits," we end up back with tautology because all of these statements have no more information than "the candidate who obtained the most votes won the election." Gould attempts to avoid this conclusion by appealing to "a priori" fitness, without apparently realizing that even if there were some pseudo-mystical a priori fitness for each organism the only way we could know what traits are more fit is to examine which organisms leave more offspring. So we're back to tautology. Other biologists and philosophers have attempted to re-defined fitness not as survival and reproduction but as the "ability" or "propensity" to survive and reproduce more. But we are right back to square one when we, again, ponder how on earth this ability or propensity can possibly be examined: by looking at the actual survival and reproduction. In short, I have now come to the conclusion, after thinking about evolution for over twenty years, that natural selection is indeed an empty theory and thus explains nothing and can predict nothing. This may seem harsh but it is an incontrovertible conclusion when we think it through. Read more ›

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars What Darwin Got Wrong October 1, 2010

By Spellman

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I found the text somewhat difficult to plow through at first. This is definitely an easier read for someone with a strong background in behavioral science, rather than in the wet sciences. Drawing on lessons from the Skinnerian model of behavior, Fodor and Palmarini embark on a journey to show not that the science behind evolution is incorrect, but that the rationale behind the conclusions from that science is faulty. Highlighting areas of evidence where adaptationism is simply not applicable to the overall scheme of evolution, Fodor and Palmarini argue that natural selection has provided no more than a historical narrative of what was and is rather than acting as a descriptive mechanism of the generation of phenotypic traits. They argue that the ecologic niche an organism occupies may be nothing more than circumstantially linked to the phenotypic outcome of the organism rather than being causative to that phenotype. One area of evidence they provide for their argument is in the inability of natural selection to distinguish between traits that provide fitness as opposed to accompanying traits that may not add to the organisms fitness in that ecologic niche. The authors also review newer data from the realm of molecular biology to illustrate the endogenous constraints on random mutation that exist within the organisms biochemical structure. I found this work interesting from a number of viewpoints. First, I am not used to philosophers engaging in the mechanism of science to the depth that these authors attempt to do. This personally, has provided fresh insight into the ramifications of analyzing data from a different perspective. It also has highlighted for me an undercurrent of fear of confrontation within the scientific community as "Holy Icons", like natural selection, are questioned for their legitimacy and validity.