A misguided attack on evolution

摘要

On the heels of last year's anniversary celebrations of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and C. P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' essay, an interdisciplinary view of evolutionary theory by philosopher Jerry Fodor and cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini might be anticipated with interest. Unfortunately, What Darwin Got Wrong fails to bridge these two cultures.rnBy misusing philosophical distinctions and misinterpreting the literature on natural selection, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini make a mess of what could have been an important contribution. The authors are correct in two of their assessments. Namely that: mainstream rnevolutionary biology has become complacent with the nearly 70-year-old Modern Synthesis, which reconciled the original theory of natural selection with Mendelian and population genetics; and that the field needs to extend the conceptual arsenal of evolutionary theory. But in claiming that there are fundamental flaws in an edifice that has withstood a century and a half of critical examination, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini err horribly.