Evolution theory beyond Darwin (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, February 07, 2010, 19:50 (5402 days ago) @ David Turell

Saturday's Guardian carries a review by Mary Midgley of What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli Palmarini: -www.mywire.com/a/GuardianUnlimitedUK/Darwin-Got-Wrong-Book-review/15983015/?extId=10029 -A few quotes to tickle your tastebuds:-"Charles Darwin complained quite crossly in his autobiography that, despite many denials, people still kept saying he thought natural selection was the sole cause of evolutionary development."-"He saw that the doctrine itself did not make sense. No filter, however, powerful, can be the only cause of what flows out of it. Questions about what comes into that filter have to be just as important."-Mary Midgley summarizes various complex inheritance mechanisms which Darwin would not have known about and which the authors explain in detail. The new book thus "strikes an outsider as an overdue and valuable onslaught on Neo-Darwinist simplicities." She singles out Jacques Monod and Richard Dawkins as being largely responsible for keeping "dogmatic 'Darwinism' ... largely independent of its founder ... afloat for so long." -Incidentally, her one criticism of the new book is its title, which she finds too personal. "This isn't just a point about Darwin; it's a point about the nature of life." I haven't read the book, but misrepresentations of Darwin are all too common, as we've noted before on this forum (see the thread "Misrepresenting Darwin"). If he could read what so-called Darwinists attribute to him nowadays, he would be even more cross than he was in his autobiography. (And she says that too!)