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Not So Natural Selection by Richard C. Lewontin
What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 264 pp., $26.00
Nothing creates more misunderstanding of the results of scientific research than scientists’ use of metaphors. It is not only the general public that they confuse, but their own understanding of nature that is led astray...Unfortunately, even modern evolutionary biologists, as well as theorists of human social and psychological phenomena who have used organic evolution as a model for general theories of their own subjects, are not always conscious of the dangers of the metaphor. Alfred Russel Wallace, the coinventor of our understanding of evolution, wrote to Darwin in July 1866 warning him that even “intelligent persons” were taking the metaphor literally.
...Evolutionary biologists are of two sorts. A minority really do not care why one inherited characteristic confers a reproductive advantage to its possessors. They are content to show that such an advantage exists for a particular inherited difference, thus exemplifying natural selection. The dominant figure in experimental and observational evolutionary genetics in the middle of the last century, Theodosius Dobzhansky, spent most of his life showing convincingly from observations of both natural and experimental laboratory populations that natural selection was the cause of both the year-to-year stability and the repeatable seasonal changes in the proportions of certain variants in the chromosomes in natural populations of fruitflies.
...In contrast, most evolutionary biologists work on natural populations of plants or animals that they have chosen because they believe they can tell a natural historical story of how selection actually operates in a particular case. The most famous example is the increase in the black form of the wings in the peppered moth that has occurred in England since the mid-nineteenth century.
...There is little doubt that this example, widely taught in lectures and textbooks, had a powerful influence in convincing evolutionary biologists who came into the field from their prior interest in natural history that one could tell the causal story of natural selection. One unfortunate feature of this case is that the caterpillars of the dark-winged forms also have a slightly higher survival rate than those of the speckled-wing form, even though they are not black, so something more is going on, but this fact is not part of the curriculum.
The interest of modern evolutionary biologists in natural historical stories is partly a reflection of the origin of the science in the genteel nineteenth-century fascination with nature that characterized men of Darwin’s social circumstances. The country curate who is an amateur collector of butterflies is a cliché of Victorian life. The success of evolutionary biology as an explanatory scheme for its proper subject matter has led, in more recent times, to an attempt to transfer that scheme to a variety of other intellectual fields that cry out for systematic explanatory structure. As Hegel lamented in The Philosophy of History, “Instead of writing history, we are always beating our brains to discover how history ought to be written.”
One answer has been to transfer the formal elements of variation and natural selection to other aspects of human activity. It is by no means an anomaly that one of the authors of What Darwin Got Wrong comes to the subject from cognitive studies and linguistics. We have evolutionary schemes for history, psychology, culture, economics, political structures, and languages. The result has been that the telling of a plausible evolutionary story without any possibility of critical and empirical verification has become an accepted mode of intellectual work even in natural science....
Full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/not-so-natural-selection/?page=1