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Darwin Tried and True: Review of Jerry Scientists’ Bookshelf Darwin Tried and True Robert J. Richards WHAT DARWIN GOT WRONG. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini. xxii + 264 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010. $26. n November of 1859, when Charles ality on the part of nature; he preferred Herbert Darwin excitedly held in his hands the first Spencer’s phrase survival of the fittest. I published copy of On the Origin of Species, In the 1930s and 1940s, with the synthesis of virtually no reputable naturalist in England, modern genetics and Darwinian theory—pre- on the Continent or in America accepted the pared by such leading neo-Darwinists as Ernst proposition that species had altered over Mayr, Sewall Wright, Theodosius Dobzhansky, vast periods of time. The conception itself R. A. Fisher, Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Hal- was not new: Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck had dane—the device of natural selection was ce- advanced it at the beginning of the 19th mented into the foundation for most subsequent century, as had Darwin’s own grandfather work in evolutionary biology. Nonetheless, sev- Erasmus Darwin at the end of the 18th. Even eral of the 19th-century objections to natural Immanuel Kant entertained the hypothesis, selection have been reinvented and advanced although he rejected it for lack of evidence. by Jerry Fodor, a distinguished philosopher of By the time Darwin died in 1882, however, mind, and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cog- hardly a naturalist of standing could be found nitive psychologist, in their book What Darwin who denied the transmutation of species, so Got Wrong. In the view of the authors, Darwin utterly convincing was the argument of his and the neo-Darwinians got almost everything great book. wrong, because they founded their theories on In the Origin, Darwin gathered evidence of the vacuous concept of natural selection. various sorts: from biogeography, from embry- Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini divide their po- ology, from systematics, from anatomy, from lemic into three parts. In the first, they maintain behavior and especially from the experience of that most current developments in evolutionary breeders in transforming their stocks. Virtually theory show that two conjoined neo-Darwinian all of these areas of evidence were already well propositions are invalid: that phenotypic traits known to naturalists. Darwin, however, wove are the simple products of selection by an ex- these strands together into what he called “one ternal environment, and that such selection long argument,” the force of which depended operates without any internal constraints on on his causal device of natural selection. With- variability. In the second part, they argue that out natural selection as its unifying theme, his the idea of Darwinian selection smuggles into argument would have unraveled into its hetero- the operations of nature the assumption of in- geneous threads. tentional discrimination, based as natural selec- Darwin’s triumph in the 19th century oc- tion is on the model of the breeder’s selecting curred in the face of historical irony. Although for certain traits in organisms. In the third part, naturalists came to agree that species altered they suggest that accounts of species descent over time, many had objections to the cause ought to be regarded not as scientific but as his- Darwin posited. The astronomer and philos- torical explanations. The belief that underlies opher John Herschel called natural selection all three sections is that “Darwin’s theory of “the law of the higgledy-piggledy,” as if chance natural selection is fatally flawed.” The authors could shape the design of organisms. The biolo- have created a three-headed Hydra, with each gist St. George Jackson Mivart maintained that head distractedly chewing off the other two. natural selection was only an extrinsic, nega- The first part of their argument seems to tive factor and that descent required a positive, be principally the work of Piattelli-Palmarini, intrinsic principle. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, who has some training in biology, whereas the cofounder of the theory of evolution, thought second is most likely the creation of Fodor, that Darwin’s term natural selection was too an- who has mounted comparable conceptual ar- thropomorphic, suggesting as it did intention- guments against natural selection in a couple 238 American Scientist, Volume 98 © 2009 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Reproduction with permission only. Contact [email protected]. of recent essays. In the first part, the strategy is Also Reviewed in This Issue to survey a fair amount of work in evolution- ary biology and then to show that this work demonstrates the operation of internal con- 242 A NUCLEAR WINTER’S TALE: Science and Politics in the 1980s. straints on the range of genetic and phenotypic By Lawrence Badash. Reviewed by Sean L. Malloy. In this intri- variability, thus undermining the assumption, cately detailed history, Badash examines both the scientific origins attributed to the neo-Darwinians, that nature of the concept of nuclear winter and the debate over its relevance to exogenously selects from a completely filled nuclear policy and the Cold War arms race space of morphological possibilities. For example, some species of the plant ge- 246 SCIENCE AS A CONTACT SPORT: Inside the Battle to Save nus Achillea display “norms of reaction” that Earth’s Climate. By Stephen H. Schneider • STORMS OF MY are not simply monotonically related to gradu- GRANDCHILDREN: The Truth about the Coming Climate ated changes in the environment: Clones of Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. By some varieties of the plant are tall at the foot of James Hansen • CLIMATE COVER-UP: The Crusade to Deny mountains and also at higher levels but shorter Global Warming. By James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore. Re- at intermediate levels—thus expressing endog- viewed by Dimitri Zenghelis. Schneider, Hansen and Hoggan all enous constraints on phenotypic expression. say that their efforts to communicate the urgency of the problem of The authors bring to the bar two articles (one climate change to policy makers and the general public have met with published in 1981, the other in 1993) discussing powerful resistance coordinated by organizations seemingly bent on this phenomenon, but they seem completely sowing confusion. The public is indeed confused—and the conse- unaware that the classic studies of Achillea these quences, Zenghelis warns, could be tragic articles cite were actually conducted more than half a century ago by researchers who fully 250 THE AGE OF WONDER: How the Romantic Generation Dis- embraced natural selection and the emerging covered the Beauty and Terror of Science. By Richard Holmes. neo-Darwinian synthesis (Jens Clausen, David Reviewed by Frederick Gregory. This is a wonderfully engaging D. Keck and William M. Hiesey, Experimental narrative, says Gregory; Holmes’s biographical storytelling shows the Studies on the Nature of Species: III. Environmental impact of science on the hearts as well as the minds of Humphry Davy, Responses of Climatic Races of Achillea [Carnegie Joseph Banks, Mungo Park, and William and Caroline Herschel Institution of Washington, 1948]). This is a typi- cal example of the authors’ misunderstanding 252 THE EERIE SILENCE: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. of the history of evolutionary biology. By Paul Davies. Reviewed by Gregory P. Laughlin. We’ve been A more egregious case occurs when they fa- searching for extraterrestrial intelligence for 50 years now but haven’t vorably quote Ernst Mayr as protesting against found it. Could it be the case that civilizations inevitably destroy them- what he has referred to as “beanbag genet- selves before they evolve to the point of being able to colonize the galaxy? ics”—the view that genes singly determine phenotypic traits. Mayr, one of the architects 254 FIRST PEOPLES IN A NEW WORLD: Colonizing Ice Age America. of neo-Darwinism, is thus called on to oppose By David J. Meltzer. Reviewed by Douglas K. Charles. When did neo-Darwinism. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini the first humans arrive in the Americas? What route—or routes—did quote at length from a 1999 study by Geoffrey they take? Was there more than one wave of settlers? What did they B. West, James H. Brown and Brian J. Enquist do when they got here? Meltzer explains why archaeology has not yet (Science, 284:1677–1679) concerning “invari- been able to provide very precise answers to such questions ant scaling laws,” which constrain phenotypic expression quite independently of natural se- 255 A BRILLIANT DARKNESS: The Extraordinary Life and Mysteri- lection; they apparently do not realize that Ju- ous Disappearance of Ettore Majorana, the Troubled Genius of lian Huxley was a pioneer of this kind of allo- the Nuclear Age. By João Magueijo. Reviewed by David Kaiser. metric study in his Problems of Relative Growth In addition to examining theories about what became of Majorana (1932) and that he then integrated these very when he disappeared permanently in 1938, Magueijo explains why concepts of allometric constraint into his Evo- Majorana’s ideas about the neutrino are once again on the minds of lution: the Modern Synthesis (1944), a classic physicists, now that evidence has begun to accumulate that the elusive work of neo-Darwinism. neutrino has some tiny but nonzero mass My point is that none of the major contribu- tors to the neo-Darwinian synthesis subscribed 256 ISAAC NEWTON ON MATHEMATICAL CERTAINTY AND METH- to the assumption against which Fodor and OD.
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