A little over two years ago, Jerry Fodor, a well-known and respected philosopher of mind, wrote an article in the London Review of Books, “Why Pigs Don’t Have Wings,” criticizing the concept of natural selection because it was both philosophically incoherent and empirically untenable.

The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn’t what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, ‘hedge your bets’ is generally good advice.

Many of us, philosophers and scientists alike, responded by writing letters to the LRB pointing out Fodor’s empirical and philosophical errors (scroll down below his article to see all the exchanges). Fodor was intransigent, refusing to give quarter and continuing to maintain that natural selection is erroneous and outmoded.

Now he and a colleague, Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a cognitive scientist with some biology training, have expanded the attack on natural selection into a whole book: What Darwin Got Wrong, a book highlighted in today’s Independent. Fortunately (unlike the BBC), they’ve chosen somebody smart and critical—science writer Peter Forbes—to write the appraisal, which is not pretty:

Fodor is a philosophical flâneur: he loves cheap jokes and affects a kind of provocative insouciance. His 2003 book on Hume states at the outset that he “could even write a book on Hume without actually knowing anything about him,” and then claims to have done so. Philosophers and scientists could not be further apart. For geneticist and science writer Professor Steve Jones, “philosophy is to science what pornography is to sex” . . . Unlike physics, biology is the science of exceptions. Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini come to the same conclusion but mostly for the wrong reasons.

Given the provocative title, it’s important to stress what Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini’s polemic is not. From the outset, they assert that they have no quarrel with the course of evolution and its timescale, only its mechanism. Furthermore, they affirm that they are “outright, card-carrying, signed-up, dyed-in-the-wool, no-holds-barred atheists.” For that small relief, much thanks.

I do, however, disagree with one of Forbes’s criticisms:

Secondly, they attack the logic of Neo-Darwinism. In their philosophical assault, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini pursue several lines, one of which boils down to the old conundrum: natural selection demonstrates the survival of the fittest. What are the fittest? Those that survive. Scientists know that this is a trivial linguistic trick but Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini pursue this wrangling for 68 pages.

This seems to me a mischaracterization of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmerini’s argument, which is more complex than simply pointing out a tautology. (“Survival of the fittest” is not, by the way, a tautology.)

I’ll be reviewing this book elsewhere, so it would be inappropriate for me to do so here (link will be forthcoming). Let me just say that virtually every biologist and philosopher who has followed Fodor’s arguments over the past two years has taken issue with his views on natural selection and with his philosophical arguments. The book will, I predict, give enormous comfort to creationists, but will receive almost no praise from philosophers and scientists. Fodor, who as far as I can tell has never admitted an error, will then claim that biologists and academic philosophers have an entrenched interest in the truth of natural selection, and that he and Piattelli-Palmerini are, like Galileo, being reviled for criticizing erroneous dogma.

To this I respond: for every Galileo there are a thousand crackpots who also question received wisdom—but are wrong. In their misguided attacks on natural selection, Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini are straying dangerously close to crackpot-dom.