Lewontin on Darwin Celebration

Richard Lewontin has a piece well worth reading in the New York Review of Books:

There are, however, occasions on which there are orgies of idolatrous celebrations of the lives of famous men, when the Suetonian ideal of history as biography overwhelms us. For Darwinians, 2009 is such a year.

He wanders around a bit, looking at the history of evolutionary ideas and why 19th century industrial capitalism might have contributed to the Origin success as a runaway best-seller.

Lewontin makes a point (about Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution Is True) that's been made before, but that's well worth keeping in mind:

Where he is less successful, as all other commentators have been, is in his insistence that the evidence for natural selection as the driving force of evolution is of the same inferential strength as the evidence that evolution has occurred. So, for example, he gives the game away by writing that when we examine a sequence of changes in the fossil record, we candetermine whether the sequences of changes at least conform to a step-by-step adaptive process. And in every case, we can find at least a feasible Darwinian explanation.

But to say that some example is not falsification of a theory because we can always "find" (invent) a feasible explanation says more about the flexibility of the theory and the ingenuity of its supporters than it says about physical nature. Indeed in his later discussion of theories of behavioral evolution he becomes appropriately skeptical when he writes that imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories.

While this is a perfectly good argument against those who claim that there are things that are so complex that evolutionary biology cannot explain them, it allows evolutionary "theory" to fall back into the category of being reasonable but not an incontrovertible material fact.

In other words, there is a distinction between a response to creationist 'evolution can't possibly do this' arguments (like irreducible complexity), and the task of showing what evolutionary scenarios have happened in nature. Science isn't about making up stories about what might happen - it's about doing the hard work to find out what really is true.

Old NID
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