Life evolves seemingly endless varieties. To account for the varieties, Charles Darwin invented natural selection. He gave his invention the task of bestowing upon organisms whatever traits they have or had or will have.
What Darwin Got Wrong argues that the mechanism of natural selection is inadequate to this task. The book’s authors, Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (avowed atheists we learn), argue that Darwin overstated the power of natural selection, that it cannot account for how organisms got to be how they got to be. The authors don’t cite missing fossils of transitional forms or appeal to irreducible complexity, a la intelligent design argument. They just pick away at the putative logic of natural selection until nothing remains but grandma’s common-sense intuitions. They conclude that Darwin granted a truism wings to which it was not entitled.
The book attacks selectionism on various fronts, from its inability to field counterfactuals (if the arctic environment had been green, would polar bears have green fur?) to limitations placed on creaturely form by physical mechanics. But the star larvae hypothesis is interested primarily in the accounts of internal, or endogenous, constraints on the variability of phenotypes, the observable forms of organisms. The internal constraints leave environmental, or exogenous, influences with little from which to select. As the authors put it, natural selection at most can tune the piano; it cannot compose the melody.
The book, in short, is about the conceptual rigor, or lack of, of the NeoDarwinian theory. The Neo- part is important, because the authors support their case with findings from genetic sequencing and analysis. In particular, they lean on a new discipline called evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, which has evolved from the discovery that DNA is conserved during evolution. This means that the genetic makeup of organisms, their genotypes, varies little across species, relative to the great diversity of phenotypes across species. How does a relatively limited genetic toolkit translate into so many forms of creatures? That is the question.
