Charles In Charge

In the bookstore I saw something entitled What Darwin Got Wrong. I figured it was either a scientific book about how Darwin missed some things, which he certainly did, or a creationist book about how he's completely off. Instead, it was sort of in-between. It was two academics, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini’s (neither professors of biology), who had scientific and philosophical problems with Darwin--in particular, natural selection, not evolution itself.

Their arguments tended to be technical, but if you dug down, there wasn't much there. As far as I could understand, most of their scientific claims were pretty weak, some having been directly answered long ago. They used recent research (carefully, if not naturally, selected) that didn't really add much to the tired old arguments we've heard before. Meanwhile, their philosophical arguments seemed entirely barren--more playing with words than making serious points.

Indeed, many of their objections to "adaptationism" seemed to be aesthetic: a feeling, not unlike Intelligent Designers have, that there are just certain things something as simple as natural selection can't do. But the science they back it up with lacks rigor. They throw around a lot of terms, but can't close the loop.

They're hardly the first experts outside biology who are so displeased with Darwin that they feel they have to do something about it. Both authors work in cognitive sciences, and it seems they don't like the implications modern evolutioary studies could have on psychology. Perhaps that's why they need to take Darwin down a peg.

Luckily, there have been reviewers up to the task of wading through their arguments and pointing out their weaknesses. For example, Jerry Coyne, who wrote Why Evolution Is True, takes them down pretty well. Michael Ruse also does a decent job.