Post Author: Bill Pratt

If I could count how many times I’ve been told that only ignorant, fundamentalist Christians doubt the truth of Darwinian evolution, I would be a rich man!  Alas, the worst nightmare of Darwin defenders occurs when non-Christians, and non-theists at that, write books criticizing Darwin’s ideas.

In their new book, What Darwin Got Wrong, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini do exactly that.  I have often told people that my doubts about Darwin have little to do with my religious beliefs, but from what I know of science.  Here are two atheists that likewise find the science to be lacking.

Salon.com interviewed Fodor recently and asked several provocative questions.  In one exchange, they ask Fodor about the standard evolutionary story about giraffes evolving long necks because they needed to adapt to food high up in trees.  Here is Fodor’s response:

The inference runs that there’s this creature that has a long neck, so this creature was selected for having a long neck. That inference is clearly invalid. A creature that has a long neck may have that neck because a different trait was selected, and the long neck came along with it.

And in a sense, there are no such things as traits. The environment selects creatures. Animals can have long necks and toenails, but if you try to break such creatures apart into traits and you say, OK, “What selected this trait?” and, “What selected that trait?” you’ve made a mistake right from the beginning. The disintegration of the organism into traits is itself a spurious undertaking. Biologists have said for a long time that organisms aren’t like Swiss apples, you can’t tap them on a table and have them fall apart into distinct wedges. Selection is operating on whole organisms.

In another exchange the interviewer asks what the implications are for Darwinism being wrong.  Fodor answers:

If this is true, then we need to rethink the implications of Darwinism. Maybe the right question to ask is not what environmental variables are doing selection, but what kinds of complexes are they selecting on. One sees, even without God, how this Darwinian story could turn out to be radically wrong. You could see a massive failure of the evolutionary project, because wrong assumptions were made.

Again, these guys aren’t fundamentalist creationists, but they recognize that the Darwinian story of the origin of species just does not work.  There are far too many holes in it.  Make sure you read the entire interview with Fodor.  It’s well worth it.