THING AFTER THING:

The party poopers at Darwin’s 200th birthday: Following mainstream scientists’ celebration of Darwin’s big birthday last year, two new books argue that Darwin’s theory is not all it’s cracked up to be. Are they on to anything? (John Gillott , 3/26/10, Spiked Review of Books)

Within populations there exists variation in physical and behavioural traits. Darwin’s theory of natural selection states that if that variation is in turn linked to genetic variation that can be passed on from one generation to the next, then traits that confer greater reproductive success on organisms in a given environmental context will become more frequent in the population over time. As Coyne puts it in Why Evolution is True:

‘Selection is not a mechanism imposed on a population from outside. Rather, it is a process, a description of how genes that produce better adaptations become more frequent over time. When biologists say that selection is acting “on” a trait, they’re merely using shorthand saying that the trait is undergoing the process. In the same sense, species don’t try to adapt to their environment. There is no will involved, no conscious striving. Adaptation to the environment is inevitable if a species has the right kind of genetic variation.’

F & P-P are at pains to emphasise that they are not into Intelligent Design or any other kind of creationism. They are out and proud, card-carrying materialists and atheists. Rather, it is their contention that the variety and forms of order that we find in the natural world are not and could not be the product of natural selection as formulated by Darwin and developed by neo-Darwinism. Early in the book they state: ‘There must be strong, often decisive, endogenous constraints and hosts of regulations on the phenotypic options that exogenous selection operates on. We think of natural selection as tuning the piano, not as composing the melodies. That’s our story, and we think it’s the story that modern biology tells when it’s properly construed. We will stick to it throughout what follows.’

In fact, in what follows the argument is, if anything, hardened up. From the above quote the possibility of natural selection operating in a very constrained way seems to be allowed. Later the argument becomes that natural selection in the Darwinian sense does not exist, that Darwin confused himself and that Darwinists continue to confuse themselves and others through ‘just so’ stories and analogous thinking – comparing natural selection to the artificial selection of the animal breeder and the experimental and conceptual work of the human architect, two processes that involve human agency and thinking.

Furthermore, just as natural selection doesn’t operate, so species aren’t adapted to their environments, argue F & P-P. The following quote brings out this aspect of their argument and is at the same time a good example of their way of thinking:

‘Here’s the point: a creature’s ecology must not be confused with its environment. The environment that creatures live in is common to each and every one of them – it’s just “the world”… By contrast, a creature’s ecology consists of whatever-it-is-about-the-world that makes its phenotype viable. That is to say: it is constituted by those features of the world in virtue of which that kind of creature is able to make a living in the world. In effect, the notions of “ecology” and “phenotype” (unlike the notions of “environment” and “phenotype”) are interdefined. Since they are, it’s hardly surprising that a creature’s phenotype reliably turns out to be in good accord with its ecology. Do not, therefore, be amazed that the seagull’s wings meet with such remarkable perfection the demands that its airy ecology imposes. If seagulls didn’t have wings, their ecology wouldn’t be airy.’

That last sentence encapsulates the change in worldview they want to bring about. ‘If seagulls didn’t have wings…’ But why do they have wings? F & P-P spend most of the book in critical mode. Their alternative, however, is implicit, and they make it explicit in the last chapter. Building on the first half of the book that discusses, among other things, a range of sciences that suggest strong endogenous processes and constraints shape the forms of organisms, they argue that natural history, not natural selection, explains why there are the phenotypes that there are. And by history they do not mean history as understood by Marx and other nineteenth-century writers who looked for patterns and causation in history. They mean history in the sense of one damned thing after another. In this spirit they propose that we abandon any single way of looking at evolution:

‘On the present view, Darwin made the same sort of mistake that Marx did: he imagined that history is a theoretical domain; but what there is, in fact, is only a heterogeneity of causes and effects… Darwin pointed the direction to a thoroughly naturalistic – indeed a thoroughly atheistic – theory of phenotype formation; but he didn’t see how to get the whole way there. He killed off God, if you like, but Mother Nature and other pseudo-agents got away scot-free. We think it’s now time to get rid of them, too.’