By JERRY COYNE - WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
Added: Sat, 06 Feb 2010 00:00:00 UTC

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/02/06/new-scientist-blurbs-dumb-ideas-about-evolution/

Ah, New Scientist always jumps gleefully on any idea that combines the words "Darwin" and "wrong." (Remember their “Darwin was wrong” cover a year ago?) Well, they’ve befouled themselves again, this time by publishing, without any critical comment, a piece by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini that is a precis of their upcoming book, What Darwin Got Wrong. I’ve intimated before that this book is not exactly God’s gift to the scientific literature, and will save my comments for an upcoming review. But if you want to see the gist of their argument without having to waste $$ on their book, the New Scientist article is the place to go. Their beef: natural selection, which they find logically flawed and empirically unsupported.
Their conclusion:

However, the internal evidence to back this imperialistic selectionism strikes us as very thin. Its credibility depends largely on the reflected glamour of natural selection which biology proper is said to legitimise. Accordingly, if natural selection disappears from biology, its offshoots in other fields seem likely to disappear as well. This is an outcome much to be desired since, more often than not, these offshoots have proved to be not just post hoc but ad hoc, crude, reductionist, scientistic rather than scientific, shamelessly self-congratulatory, and so wanting in detail that they are bound to accommodate the data, however that data may turn out. So it really does matter whether natural selection is true.

TAGGED: BIOLOGY, COMMENTARY, SCIENCE