Customer Reviews

What Darwin Got Wrong

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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.

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.

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.

First off, this book is written to be as provocative as possible. Second, the book is very coherently interesting and mostly clearly written, with a great deal of humor. I'd advise readers of these reviews to disregard those who somehow omit recognizing these two points: they are either too heavily invested in the paradigm the book challenges, or just not intelligent enough readers, to trust.

The authors contend that that the theory of selection is 'empty' in several different ways, while also pointing to 'endogenous' aspects of life that selection theory is challenged to incorporate. While some have long suspected that selection theory explains much less than it claims to, many Biologists will have a very difficult time seriously considering that it is 'empty'. Certainly selection theory articulates a kind of unifying intuition that has served well, and biology is compelling as comprising an almost unimaginable diversity that somehow possesses an overriding unity. Selection theory has served biology so long as way of putting it all together that if it is taken away, there would seem almost a void that would scramble into chaos its entire academic edifice. But this kind of 'taking away' has happened before in the history of science, and it has made science better, not worse.

The authors suggest a historical rather than a theoretical paradigm for unification: natural history. While this has some appeal, probably it is not enough. At the end of the book, almost in passing, they suggest that an explanatory notion resembling 'contagion' may serve better than 'adaptionist selection' in characterizing the fixation of phenotypes under changing environmental conditions. On reflection, this seems more powerful to me than it it did at first, and well worth entertaining. But it perhaps has little prospect of turning into a unifying theory, and that may even be OK. As a trial it would be worth exploring how much of the role of selection theory it could substitute for: maybe the absence of selection theory would not create as much of a gap as it seems.

Still, the way the authors focus on the logical problems of selection theory is partially unsatisfying. The century and more of investigation and use of this paradigm must have left behind something worthwhile. (On the other hand consider the value associated, say, with the venerability of the Vatican.) In my own limited knowledge of the subject, for example, I can well imagine that things like game theory do have an important contribution to make to biology. Similarly, I've been impressed by the power of the distinction between survival selection and sexual selection. If this distinction, for example, doesn't work in its aspect of being part of a unifying theory, how does it work? Are these principles rather than aspects of a theory? Is there a way of using them that is not 'empty'?

As you can see, I found this book very stimulating, and consider it extremely worthwhile. Even if you happen to like people like Dawkins and Dennett, I'd suggest reading it as a worthwhile 'gedankexperiment'. If you don't care for those two, you should not need my encouragement to get ahold of this book.

When I went to college, Sartre, Freud, Marx, and Darwin were the Great Thinkers. I studied them avidly, even learning German, French, and Biology to do so. Now Sartre, Freud and Marx have been reduced to human size, if not completely discredited. Will Darwin follow in their footsteps? Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini do not take so extreme a position. Rather, they affirm the Darwinian genealogy of species (the so-called tree of life), but hold that natural selection is vacuous and hence should be thrown into the dust-bin of history---the same dust-bin, I imagine, that is currently occupied by existential nausea, penis envy, and historical materialism.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's argument is not relevant to the voguish religiously inspired critique of evolutionary theory, which centers on whether our species descended from earlier species or is the product of "special creation" by an "intelligent designer." By contrast, the issue addressed by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini is "by what process does an ancestor species differentiate into its descendants," (1-2) the Darwinian answer to which is: natural selection. The authors actually rarely discuss speciation directly, but rather deal with the population biology version of the problem, which they characterize as that of "explaining how the phenotypic properties of populations change over time in response to ecological variables." (3)

I am rarely enthusiastic about a philosopher's critique of a scientific discipline, or of a member of one discipline's critique of the standard practices or beliefs of another. However, when such critiques are successful, they can be particularly rewarding, as Bishop Berkeley's critique of the use of infinitesimals by Newton, and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman's critique of the economist's version of rational choice. So I suffered through this blessedly slim volume hoping for useful insights. I did not find any. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini have blown the famous "spandrels" analysis of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin ("The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme", Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 205 (1979):581-598) from a short story into a gothic novel, and what was an admonition against unwarranted belief in "just-so stories" for Gould and Lewontin becomes a rejection of the whole theory of natural selection for Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini. The Gould-Lewontin analysis was a brilliant cautionary tale aimed at the explanatory excesses of some brands of evolutionary psychology. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's magnification of the argument is painful, tendentious, and unconvincing.

Perhaps this close connection between Gould and Lewontin's spandrel critique of adaptationism and this book's critique of natural selection explains Richard Lewontin's cautiously favorable review of this book in the New York Review of Books (May 27, 2010). "If you make a living by inventing scenarios of how natural selection produced, say, xenophobia and racism or the love of music," Lewontin observes, "you will not take kindly to the book. Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science. True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time...Even at the expense of having to say "I don't know how it evolved" most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations. "

Lewontin's defense of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini is tendentious and incorrect. I am certainly one of those people who makes a living in part by developing mathematical models of evolutionary processes, calibrated to real, historical, social processes using the best estimates archeology and paleontology have to offer us, that might have led to the emergence of behavioral traits observed in social animals today. I always say "I don't know how this evolved, but here is a plausible scenario." To call this idle speculation is absurd. Are biologists to develop models of the evolution of RNA or DNA, or the double helix guilty of idle speculation? Of course not.

The authors characterize natural selection as follows: "(a) Phenotypic variation `expresses' genotypic variation; (b) Genotypic variation from one generation to the next is the effect of random mutation; (c) Macromutations are generally lethal; (d) The phenotypic expression of viable mutations is generally random variation around population means." (15-16) Only points (a) and (b) are central to natural selection. Point (c) is true but not of central importance, and point (d) is a assumption of some population genetic models, may well be true if by "phenotypic expression" we mean "fitness effects," but almost certainly false if in some qualitative phenotypic space. It follows that Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's critique of (c) and (d) are not very pertinent, and I will not go over them.

The authors accept (a), but they aim their heavy guns at (b), arguing that mutations are not "random," but rather are closely structured by the constitution of the organism. In making this argument, they compare Natural selection to Skinnerian behaviorism, which, like Natural selection, is driven by "random variation" followed by selection. For behavioral psychology, there was no looking into the "black box" of the mind, whence all changes in behavior were considered either novel and hence "random," or were reinforced or extinguished previously random variations, governed by the principle of effect. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini point out that cognitive psychology discredited behavioral psychology by showing that there are substantive cognitive processes governing the learning process in the mind of the individual thinker, so that it is false that individual psychology is simply the selection among randomly generated variation. Similarly, they argue, natural selection makes genetic change a "black box" summarized by "random variation," so that species are characterized by the way they have become accommodated to their environments. It is this that the authors call "adaptationism."

In this analysis, however, the authors have used an improper definition of "random." By "random," in natural selection theory is meant "non-teleological"; i.e., not preconceived by a planner, as would be the case of an engineer redesigning some aspect of a mechanical system. "Random" in natural selection theory does usually include "random with respect to fitness," although there are now documented cases where at least the rate of mutation is a function of the opportunities for fitness-enhancement of the organism. But the natural selection conception of "randomness" does not include random with respect to the physical and chemical forces operating within the organism. The notion of randomness as independent from the dynamics of the organism would indeed be as indefensible as is the behavioral psychologist's idea that there are no "structural psychological constraints" on behavior. But natural selection theory does not depend upon the notion that the array of mutations generated in an organism is independent from the internal physical and chemical structure of the organism. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini thus incorrectly critique natural selection by claiming that the dependence of gene frequency change on the constitution of biological organisms undermines its plausibility. "In essence," they proclaim, "we report cases when optimal structures and processes have been found in biological systems. There are naturally occurring optimizations, probably originating the laws of physics and chemistry. We think other self-organization processes by autocatalytic collectives are almost sure to be elucidated in the near future." (xvii--xviii). It is astounding to me that a serious scientist could consider this observation to be a critique of natural selection theory, but in fact a good deal of the book is devoted to such arguments. The authors even consider the fact that specific gene complexes are conserved through millions of years of evolution a strike against natural selection theory, which they incorrectly assert requires that any phenotypic trait be generated by a wide variety of genetic mechanisms.

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's attempt to discredit natural selection by comparing it to behavioral psychology is a scientific critique (although wrong). But the "randomness" argument is not Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's central charge against natural selection theory. Rather, the authors' main critique is based on the concept of "intensional explanation" and the role of "counterfactuals" in scientific explanation. The authors argue that "there is at the heart of adaptionist theories of evolution, a confusion between (1) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures with adaptive traits are selected and (2) the claim that evolution is a process in which creatures are selected for their adaptive traits. We will argue that; Darwinism is committed to inferring (2) from (1); that this inference is invalid...; and that there is no way to repair the damage consonant with commitments to naturalism" (xv).

This argument is unpersuasive in part because the notion that natural selection is intensional is not correct. Without going into the philosophy of logic, the authors critique in this respect comes down to the assertion that if two traits are perfectly correlated and both evolve, there is no way to assert which of the two traits was "selected for." For instance, suppose all hearts are noisy. Then there is no way in principle for natural selection to distinguish between the two traits. Thus, the assertion that "the heart was selected for its blood-pumping ability" and the assertion that "the heart was selected for its noise-making ability" cannot be distinguished from each other on scientific grounds. This argument is completely specious. It may be difficult to distinguish between the two assertions, and indeed, both pumping ability and noisiness may contribute to the adaptive value of the heart. Natural selection can distinguish between perfectly correlated traits because natural selection is a cause, scientific process. The Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini intensionality critique is thus just smoke and mirrors.

Even were the intensionality critique correct, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's argument would not be cogent. All that is needed for the validity of natural selection theory is that creatures with adapted traits be selected. Claim (2) is not needed at all. Of course traits are not necessarily selected for their adaptive traits, although they may be. Natural selection depends on adaptive traits being selected, not necessarily selected for. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini here set up a straw man and knock him down.

Consider one of their favorite examples. Suppose hearts pump blood and make noise (p. 100). Because the correlation between pumping blood and making noise is perfect, we cannot say that hearts evolved through natural selection because of the fitness advantage they bestow upon organisms. It could equally well be that hearts evolved because they make noise. There is simply no causal analysis that can distinguish between these two explanations, they proclaim. They are correct, of course. Hearts could have evolved because they were noisy, scaring away predators (for instance), and developed a network of oxygen supplies to provide for vigorous noise-making. In later times, when the fitness advantage supplied by noisy hearts ebbed, hearts could have been retained because they supplied oxygen to other organs. This scenario is not very plausible, but it would in no way compromise natural selection theory. The current function of (read fitness advantage conferred by) the heart need not be responsible for its evolutionary emergence. Indeed, it could have been (but probably was not) that the developmental genes responsible for forming the heart "hitch-hiked" on nearby genes that were fitness enhancing for unrelated reasons, the heart being a sort of tumor going along for the ride. Nothing in the theory of natural selection suggests the impossibility of this situation. Of course, if a phenotypic trait does evolved by hitch-hiking, and that trait is costly in fitness terms, it is likely that mutations that lead to the breakdown of the developmental process leading to the expression of the trait will entail the disappearance or consignment to residual status of the trait. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini do not question this.

Adaptations could always be spandrels without undermining natural selection. Were this the case, the process of ascertaining the facts concerning evolution would be vexingly complicated, but natural selection would not be compromised.

After reading two lengthy book reviews of this book, I finally am able to dive in. In just a few pages, I'm glad I read the reviews because there is a certain amount of science, specifically evolutionary science, knowledge assumed. For example, their claim is that there is something seriously wrong with Darwin's theory, and from their chapter and the reviews, I understand that it has to do with adaptation, but before even explaining what that is, the authors dive into the controversy surrounding it.

They specifically and usefully delineate the structure of their argument:
1. At the heart of adaptionist theories of evolution there is confusion between whether creatures with certain adaptive traits are selected or creatures are selected for their adaptive traits. Adaptionists make the mistake of inferring that 1 causes 2: which I think means that creatures with certain adaptive traits are selected which results in the evolutionary emphasis on that adaptive trait.

Their emphasis is on ridding the discipline from the notion of "selection for" the adaptive traits. They do not believe that natural selection winnows randomly generated variations. How these variations (phenotype variations) occur, argue the authors, may not be a general process applicable to all organisms. Thus, there can be no general theory of evolution.

I had to keep looking up vocabulary words as I read this.

What seems most important in the book, from a lay person's perspective, is that a mutation in a gene cannot be said to cause a corresponding phenotype variation in a one to one relationship. A mutation may be a factor, but so many other factors are involved, both environmental and endogenous, that natural selection cannot be seen as the source of adaptations. Similarly, a mutation affects other biological entities than just one gene. And, furthermore, all these simultaneous occurrences are also affecting one another as well. We cannot conclude that all adaptations, thus, are geared towards the organisms fitness (I think).

F and P also argue that gradualism is not necessary: that is there does not need to be a stage by stage development showing how an organism evolved.

The book is not written for a lay person or even someone with some science background. There is an assumption of a pretty high level of familiarity with genetics. If you have a limited science background, be prepared to do some work.

Life evolves seemingly endless varieties. To account for the varieties, Charles Darwin invented natural selection. He gave his invention the task of bestowing upon organisms whatever traits they have or had or will have.

What Darwin Got Wrong argues that the mechanism of natural selection is inadequate to this task. The book's authors, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (avowed atheists we learn), argue that Darwin overstated the power of natural selection, that it cannot account for how organisms got to be how they got to be. The authors don't cite missing fossils of transitional forms or appeal to irreducible complexity, a la intelligent design argument. They just pick away at the putative logic of natural selection until nothing remains but grandma's common-sense intuitions. They conclude that Darwin granted a truism wings to which it was not entitled.

The book attacks selectionism on various fronts, from its inability to field counterfactuals (if the arctic environment had been green, would polar bears have green fur?) to limitations placed on creaturely form by physical mechanics. But the star larvae hypothesis [...] is interested primarily in the accounts of internal, or endogenous, constraints on the variability of phenotypes, the observable forms of organisms. The internal constraints leave environmental, or exogenous, influences with little from which to select. As the authors put it, natural selection at most can tune the piano; it cannot compose the melody.

The book, in short, is about the conceptual rigor, or lack of, of the NeoDarwinian theory. The Neo- part is important, because the authors support their case with findings from genetic sequencing and analysis. In particular, they lean on a new discipline called evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, which has evolved from the discovery that DNA is conserved during evolution. This means that the genetic makeup of organisms, their genotypes, varies little across species, relative to the great diversity of phenotypes across species. How does a relatively limited genetic toolkit translate into so many forms of creatures? That is the question.

The answer apparently lies in the action of "master" genes and their protein-based "switches." These systems control whole suites of genes, turning them on and off during development. The authors cite, for example, a master gene designated Otxi, which influences the development of several seemingly unrelated organs. They point out, ". . . in particular, since the Otxi `master' gene controls the development of the larynx, inner ear, kidneys, and external genitalia and the thickness of the cerebral cortex, selective pressures sensitive to changes in the functions of the kidneys (due to bipedal station, or different liquid intake and excretion resulting from floods or droughts), or the fixation of different sexual patterns, may have had in turn secondary effects on the expansion of the cerebral cortex and the structure and function of the larynx."

They use this example to show that the key theoretical construct of "selected for," such as selection for long necks among giraffes or for a complex cerebral cortex among humans, cannot deliver what it is supposed to deliver. It can't tell an adaptive trait from a trait that coincidentally rides along with an adaptive one. Too few genes, it turns out, are available singly for selection. Genes tend to come hierarchically bundled.

The authors argue, "[E]volutionary theory purports to account for the distribution of phenotypic traits in populations of organisms; and the explanation is supposed to depend on the connection between phenotypic traits and the fitness of the creatures whose phenotypes they belong to. But, as it turns out, when phenotypic traits are (locally or otherwise) coextensive, selection theory cannot distinguish the trait upon which fitness is contingent from the trait that has no effect on fitness (and is merely a free rider). Advertising to the contrary notwithstanding, natural selection can't be a general mechanism that connects phenotypic variation with variation in fitness. So natural selection can't be the mechanism of evolution."

Nature cannot "select for" particular adaptive traits because in any given generation, only whole phenotypes are available for selection. All of the genes underlying a selected phenotype are selected. And evo-devo further complicates this already complicated picture. It asserts that only whole ontogenies, entire sequences of phenotypes expressed during life cycles, are available for selection. The sequential expression of sometimes wildly divergent phenotypes (think caterpillar to butterfly) during a life cycle is tightly constrained by developmental regulation, further restricting the potential formative power of natural selection.

The authors don't mince words: "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."

And

"[N]atural selection badly underestimates the significance of endogenous factors in the determination of phenotypes: we think that the thesis that organisms are random generators of phenotypes can't be sustained even as a first approximation to an explanation of why there are the phenotypes there are."

If natural selection cannot explain how creatures got to be how they got to be, what can explain it?

The authors don't propose an alternative to selectionism and look to research to throw out more clues. But an alternative might be right under their, and our, noses. Evolution might be just what the new science of evo-devo indicates that it is: the developmental unfolding of a life cycle, the ontogeny of an organism.

Darwin's phrase, "descent with modification," describes evolution and development equally well. Both processes involve descent with modification from a common ancestor. In the case of evolution the descent is of varieties of species, and in the case of development the descent is of varieties of cell/tissue types.

When regulatory proteins serially activate and inhibit various genetic "switches" in an organism the result is the ontogenetic development of the organism. The sequence of genes being turned on and off and their locations in the body steer development in a predictable direction, generating forms characteristic of the species. All of the descendant cells, no matter how modified from their common ancestor, the zygote, inherit the ancestor's entire genetic allotment. That is, during this process of descent with modification, DNA is conserved.

Now evo-devo comes along and paints a similar picture with regards to evolution. The new science points to "toolbox" genes discovered to be common across diverse species (and families, orders, classes, and even phyla) and the regulatory systems that turn these foundational genes on and off. DNA is conserved not only in ontogeny, but also in phylogeny, it turns out. Evolution generates new species in much the same way that an embryo generates new structures and tissue types, by flipping genetic switches. In this way, evo-devo weakens the selectionist model and suggests a developmental model instead. No doubt few evo-devo advocates would endorse such a radical interpretation.

Nonetheless, when the authors of What Darwin Got Wrong point to master genes, toolbox genes, genetic switches, protein-based regulatory systems, and other endogenous factors as the primary directors of phenotypic form, they are telling us that in the new, evo-devo, model of evolution the origin of species is an ontogenetic, developmental process. If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck . . . .

Classifying evolution as an ontogeny relieves the environment from having to account for phenotypes, something the authors insist that it cannot do. They assert, ". . . multiple levels of internal constraints on possible phenotypes make the notion of evolution as the product of external selection operating on phenotypic variations generated at random radically untenable." In a developmental model of evolution, however, the environment doesn't bestow medals of fitness on adaptive phenotypes, but functions as it does in ontogeny. A developmental model of evolution demotes the environment, subordinating it to the needs of ontogenetic programs. In this supportive role, it can function well or poorly, and in so doing facilitate or retard phenotypic expression. Nature in this model cannot select, as in the Darwinian model; it can only nurture or neglect. The environment does not pick any particular path, but it will feed or starve whoever ventures.

The old, and since discarded, formula was "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." The arrival of evo-devo and the arguments in What Darwin Got Wrong stand the formula on its head. Embryos don't replay the record of their evolutionary history. Rather, evolution unfolds as a process of development. Evo-devo, it seems, is a misnomer. The new understanding should be called devo-evo, or developmental evolutionary biology, with the emphasis on developmental. When we observe modification with descent managed endogenously, we are observing development and so should feel justified in adopting a developmental model of evolution and in retiring the theory of natural selection.

The arguments in What Darwin Got Wrong support the general argument of the star larvae hypothesis. The hypothesis [...] argues explicitly that evolution is an ontogenetic process--a stage in the life cycle of an organism. Terrestrial evolution is the larval stage of the stellar life cycle.

Reading this book left me with a bitter taste in my mouth. Fodor tries to make an impression that he came with a groundbreaking message that will shake the scientific community. Yet after reading it all one only realizes that Fodor has absolutely no idea what he's talking about.

The theory of evolution describes two major processes that work hand in hand to shape our biosphere:

a) the process of producing variety of traits inside a population of organism
b) the process of filtering out organisms with inferior traits (traits that give them lesser chance of survival and reproduction when compared to other organisms)

The second process is referred to as 'natural selection' and Fodor seems to have a couple of problems with it. First of his objections is a philosophical one - he says that the process of natural selection is too general to be applicable to concrete cases. That there is no formula of natural selection, where you could enter the traits of organisms and it would tell you which one survives and which don't. One might say that this is a fair objection, but all that Fodor does is being Mr. Obvious. Concrete cases of natural selection differ wildly and everybody knows that. The reason why dinosaurs died out is different from the reason why peppered moths turned black and that is different from the reason why peacocks tail evolved in it's current form. We all know that but Fodor is making a big thing out of it. What's worse though is that he claims that nobody knows how natural selection works. This is a blatant lie. How could have he missed all the papers on Darwin's finches, the above mentioned peppered moths and many others?

Unfortunately, Fodor's argumentation gets even worse than that. He accuses the idea of natural selection of failing to explain things, that are actually explained by the other process, the process of producing variety. He wonders why traits that give no survival/reproduction advantage get through the filter of natural selection. His example is that the heart has the trait of being noisy yet this trait gets 'selected'. This is utter foolishness. First of all, it doesn't get 'selected' - it merely does not get filtered out. Second, the process of producing variation does not offer an alternative to noise producing heart - either there is noisy heart or no heart. Is it really so surprising that the former wins the evolutionary race over the latter? And don't even get me started on the pigs with wings thing...

The overall problem with this book is that the authors are playing a semantics game in a field where empirical observation governs the advancement. All their dances around 'selecting' versus 'selecting for' and cries about 'free-riding traits' amount to nothing when contrasted with serious work of proper biologist that is based on observation and experiment. Fodor apparently thinks he could fly if he could argue the theory of gravity away. And that's what he's got wrong. Unlike Darwin, he never left his desk to do his field work. Shame on him!

So why does Fodor do all this ridiculous mind bending semantics exercise? It is not quite clear, but I do have a guess. Every now and then he complains about the process of evolution by natural selection being 'arbitrary' and all the time his vocabulary bends around personified terms like 'designed for', 'selected for' etc. Even though he claims to be atheist, my guess is that he believes there is an ultimate purpose for human existence. And he is deeply unsatisfied with the fact that the theory of evolution does not show any.

When a book opens with a list of acronyms and goes on to "Skinner's theory of learning by operand conditioning (OT)" my interest dies... what are they talking about? Why OT? Why not OC or OL? Really confusing. I could not finish it. From what I could gather the authors are making a grand claim on a narrow interpretation of evolution. Fair enough, but this is more suited to an academic paper than a whole book with a flaming title. There may be a point here lost in the confusing writing and it is invigorating for the science to argue such alternatives. That's why I started the book. I am sure modern genetic and evolutionary theory can absorb their arguments and progress. I just hope the fundamentalists do not latch onto this as another proof that science debunks evolution, which is certainly not what the authors intend.

What Darwin Got Wrong,
I enjoyed this book. I did not find it too hard to read, or written in to technical a manner, even though both author's are very well educated with a good basis in the science. Basically, the authors, seeing that Skinner's theories in behavioral psychology were undermined by his adherence to Darwinian explanations of evolution, specifically his ideas concerning Natural Selection, were compelled to examine Natural Selection itself to see if it made any more sense in the realm of biology. It doesn't.
Upon examination it is shown that Natural Selection is tautological at best, and really offers no explanation as to how anything evolved. The authors throw this notion in with ideas about Santa Clause, the Tooth fairy, "the Selfish Gene" and God. Well I might object to them about their thoughts on God, but I found their reasoning concerning Natural Selection to be quite sound.
Make no mistake, these men are not Christians or even theists, they are committed atheists. But they see a problem with the theory of evolution as it is normally presented and they are going to attack it, because in the end it is just a bad argument. In the end they go so far as to say there isn't any theory of evolution.
Well there are theories, it's a matter of how valid those theories are, and the traditional theories have fallen on hard times, they just don't hold water. In fact what Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini show in this book is the same sort of thing expounded by James Shapiro in Evolution: A View from the 21st Century (FT Press Science) and Koonin in The Logic of Chance: The Nature and Origin of Biological Evolution (FT Press Science). It is really nothing new, Karl Popper tried to express the same sentiments quite a long time ago, and was severely lashed for it. But now it is coming to light that he was correct, and more and more scientists are coming to realize that the theory of evolution is untenable. The new trend is to try treat it as an historical phenomenon without much saying why or how it happened, just that it did. In fact, many of their peers originally reading the manuscript told them that no one was that kind of Evolutionist anymore, that is one who buys into Darwin and Natural Selection. Of course, that is just plain false, it may be that there are few wet biologists who think along these lines once they have their PHD, but one does not have to look far to find Darwinism being taught as fact. Fodor found his foil with Coyne, and Dawkins. And of course the stuff is still taught in schools, and one has to regurgitate the nonsense to pass college entrance exams and standardized testing. So the authors have done the world a favor in bringing their argumentation to publication. I found it to be a very insightful read.