Crack evolutionary biologist Douglas Futuyma (from SUNY Stony Brook) assesses Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong in this week’s Science. It would be an understatement to say that the book doesn’t fare too well: the review is called “Two critics without a clue.”
These theories of natural selection work: they successfully predict research outcomes. John Werren predicted and experimentally confirmed that the first of two female parasitic wasps who lay eggs in a host insect lays a more female-biased brood than the second (2). No such prediction could be made without selection theory. Among countless other examples, the pattern of variation in DNA sequences that betokens a “selective sweep” of an advantageous mutation was predicted years before such data could be obtained. Natural selection theory makes successful predictions across a huge range of biological phenomena, and it inspires countless fruitful research programs. What more can one ask of a theory? Contrast that with the ludicrous analogy with which Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini end: “organisms ‘catch’ their phenotypes from their ecologies in something like the way that they catch their colds from their ecologies.” They helpfully explain that the similarity consists of there being both environmental and endogenous instrumental variables. I look forward to reading about the research that this formulation will inspire.
Mayr once wrote that “Evolution seems to be a subject on which everybody thinks he is qualified to express an expert opinion” (3). Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini show little familiarity with the vast literature on genetic variation, experimental analyses of natural selection, or other topics on which they philosophically expound. They are blithely agnostic about the causes of evolution and apparently uninterested in fostering any program of research. Because they are prominent in their own fields, some readers may suppose that they are authorities on evolution who have written a profound and important book. They aren’t, and it isn’t.
And he’s right.