Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings (The classical Darwinist account of evolution is in trouble)

London Review of Books ^ | 10/18/2007 | Jerry Fodor

[hellbender]

I'm not disputing evolution at all, but I find incredible this idea, which permeates the pop literature, that our traits were all selected to meet the needs of hunter-gatherer societies. Are we supposed to believe that the minds of Einstein, Newton, Darwin, J.S. Bach, etc. can all be explained that way? In much of the world, people have lived in civilized, settled communities for several thousand years. I think selection has continued throughout that period, and people whose brains were merely capable of stone-age culture were at a disadvantage even in the Middle Ages, when there was a lot of technology and sophistication to life (consider the enormous number of people with "vocational surnames" like Miller, Clark (clerk), -wright, etc.)

The enormous variety of dog breeds has been created in just a few hundred years. Why doesn't anyone consider that human beings have evolved any since the stone age?

[wideawake]

how could such an awful human being make such lovely music?

Awful human beings making beautiful music seems to be the modern standard.

[Physicist]

From the article:

What used to rile Darwin’s critics most was his account of the phylogeny of our species. They didn’t like our being just one branch among many in the evolutionary tree; and they liked still less having baboons among their family relations. The story of the consequent fracas is legendary, but that argument is over now. Except, perhaps, in remote backwaters of the American Midwest, the Darwinian account of our species’ history is common ground in all civilised discussions, and so it should be. The evidence really is overwhelming.

You did read the article, right?

[Physicist]

I wonder if anyone read this article that is attacking it. It was hard to get through because of poor writing but seems to make sense as far as its main point goes.

The article seems to make two main points: 1) that natural selection is limited in what it can select for, because it can only select from phenotypes that are available and 2) that traits can become widespread (or ubiquitous) in a population even when they themselves are not specifically selected for.

Neither point is wrong, but then neither point is new, surprising, original or incompatible with Darwinism.

[Greg F]

Yah, it doesn’t seem to me to be anything but a warning against overreaching when you try to logically reverse Darwinian natural selection to get to an answer of “why” a trait exists in a species.

[SirLinksalot]

This is what Michael Behe’s latest book, The Edge of Evolution was trying to explain.

In his observation, no new variation develops to allow natural selection to go anywhere other than within its limits. I think the author is trying to say this -— natural selection is a conservative force, not because it cannot drive novelty but because it doesn’t have the resources on which to act.

It would have been very easy for Natural selection to act as the driving force of evolution if only variations exist to drive it. The weakness of Darwinism is not natural selection but the lack of diversity in the genome to drive it anywhere.

[dalereed]

The wings kept breaking trying to get all that lard airborn and they gave up.

[Physicist]

I think the author is trying to say this -— natural selection is a conservative force, not because it cannot drive novelty but because it doesn’t have the resources on which to act.

That's nowhere in this article, and it's not remotely what the article is about.

[TigersEye]

...selective breeding is performed only by creatures with minds, and natural selection doesn’t have one of those.

That one statement knocks this whole lengthy diatribe off its pins. All beings have minds that’s why they’re called sentient beings.

[jbp1]

??

[TigersEye]

The statement I quoted ignores the fact that, by definition, sentient beings have minds. “Natural selection” doesn’t necessarily occur randomly without the input of mind.