Another review of What Darwin Got Wrong

May 11, 2010 • 2:56 pm

The piling-on continues, this time from science writer Kenan Malik, who pans Jerry Fodor and Massimo-Piattelli-Palmarini’s book at Literary Review.  Malik has training in neurobiology, but his discussion of natural versus artificial selection is a bit confused, though not obviously wrong.  Malik concludes:

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are no creationists, but ‘outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists’. That, however, only makes worse the incoherence of their understanding of Darwinism. There is much that Darwin got wrong, from his views of racial struggle to his occasional espousal of Lamarckism. There is nothing in this book, however, to suggest a fundamental flaw in his central argument about evolution by natural selection.

16 thoughts on “Another review of What Darwin Got Wrong”

  1. Nitpicking:

    There is much that Darwin got wrong, from his views of racial struggle to his occasional espousal of Lamarckism.

    I think there would be disagreement from Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution By Adrian Desmond, James Moore on Darwin’s views on racial struggle. I also do not recall Darwin embracing Lamarckism much either.

    1. I also do not recall Darwin embracing Lamarckism much either.

      See:

        http://enwp.org/Gemmule_%28pangenesis%29

      Darwin did indeed get wrong the specific biological details of heredity, which is why biology needed Mendel’s analysis of trait inheritance, and additional experimentation to figure out what was going on during reproduction.

      1. Although, as R.A. Fisher pointed out, to be fair to Darwin he recognized that given “blending inheritance” (commonly accepted at that time) natural selection virtually REQUIRED some kind of inheritance of acquired characteristics to be viable… If you have blending inheritance then half of the variance in a population disappears in each generation. That means that the population becomes homogenized over time and new beneficial traits that arise in a single individual can’t become fixed in a large population.

        Acquired characteristics provide a constant flow of new variation in each generation that selection can act on.

        So he was merely acting on the wisdom of his time. (Of course he also famously came close to discovering particulate inheritance himself, but that’s another story.)

      2. Darwin certainly was wrong about Gemmules but he considered only limited environmental inheritance.

  2. “—his discussion of natural versus artificial selection is a bit confused –“

    And my question is – how could Malik have made his discussion of natural versus artificial selection better?

    1. As a poor dumb psychologist who is trying to purge his and his students’ minds of as many misconceptions about evolution as possible, I, like Barry, would like to know how Malik’s discussion of artificial and natural selection is “a bit confused” and could be improved. I have found that Professor Coyne’s exposition of natural selection as a process to be an excellent antidote to confusion.

  3. Did F&MPP actually make the argument that natural selection is fatally flawed because a heart also makes noise?

    That seems so patently absurd, and such a misunderstanding of the theory, that I find it hard to believe that anyone would make it, let alone presumptuously write a book claiming Darwin was wrong.

    1. Would not a noisy heart be an indication of cavitation, which would make for a less efficient heart ?

      You could make a case that an efficient heart and a noisy heart are negatively correlated.

  4. ‘Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.’

    – Jacques Monod

  5. Your Google Ad promotes Jungian BOLLOCKS.
    Is there a reason for this travesty of rational thought?

    2. You were thinking that Jerry goes through a database of ads and picks the ones that he likes?

      I agree that the method is wrong but you need to talk to google about it, they aren’t Jerry’s adds.

      1. oh c’mmon..i didnt think they were Dr Coynes’ ads for chrisake-no pun intended.I mean why do they show up at all? What method?

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