Reddit reviews What Darwin Got Wrong

I'm using the same definitions of deleterious that are used by all population geneticists on both sides of the debate, as is evident in the papers I've cited so far in this thread. Sorry, but I'm done discussing this because I don't feel like we're getting anywhere and it keeps devolving into a debate about semantics. It will have to remain a point of disagreement.

> I asked for a secular life scientist that denies evolution in general, that supports an alternative idea for the origin of the diversity of life on Earth.

ID and evolution are really the only possible options. Either life formed by guided processes (ID) or unguided processes (evolution). And a lot come to believe in God after accepting ID, since other alternatives (such as aliens) still require a designer. But a designer-as-a-first-uncaused-cause avoids that.

But I'm wondering if cognitive scientists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini would qualify (both are atheists afaik). They who wrote What Darwin Got Wrong. From their interview on salon.com: "Creationism isn't the only doctrine that's heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin a web, you could tell a story of why spinning a web was good in the context of evolution. That is why you should be as suspicious of Darwinism as of creationism. They have spurious consequence in common. And that should be enough to make you worry about either account."

However, I haven't read their book and I don't know what explanation they propose for life, if any.

There's also mathemetician David Berlinski, although having Jewish heritage, is an agostic, religion critic, and strongly an ID proponent. But he's not a life scientist.

>Why? Wouldn't it be evolutionarily advantageous for the brain to model the 'self' as part of its overall strategy of modeling its environment?

This is problematic because the brain does not evolve to model itself.

-or this-

>I do wonder how you explain the spontaneous emergence of an intelligent, capable, knowledgable God without a process like evolution to get you there. But then, I can't ask you, because you have deleted your account.

Because it muddles abiogenesis with evolution. The two don't really have an overlap since abiogenesis necessitates not having a prior generation and evolution requires it.

-or this-

>if you put god into the evolution equation, you're entirely missing the point of evolution. The whole idea was to demonstrate a process through which complex life could form without the need for any kind of intelligence or creator.

As the whole idea of the Theory of Evolution wasn't to demonstrate anything. It was descriptive of observations and allowed falsifiability in certain places. His next post goes even more off base. Evolution is guided by environment as negative mutations to an environment often lead to death of a species or at least those individuals which have negative mutations. That is part of the basis of natural selection.


Here is a whole book that a couple of atheists wrote about evolution that is filled with flaws.

There is an obnoxious amount of misinformation in nearly any demographic and those of us who work in related fields just get used to glossing over them.

Although most of his essay is fine, I disagree with Pinker about group selection too, and agree with /u/self-assembled that Pinker is willfully ignoring evidence. I have no dog in the group selection fight, so it is mystifying to see Pinker (who I actually used to like) debase himself by arguing like this.

Major papers have been published as recently as last month showing that group selection happens. Not sure why empirical data from papers published in Nature should be thrown out because they don't agree with Pinker's conception of "the facts of psychology and history".

Pinker admits himself that he's not arguing from empirical data, but from an a priori view that tries to show that group selection as a logical explanation is flawed (i.e. incoherent). As a scientist, that's madness, and it is the special kind of madness that makes creationism happen and helps smart, atheist philosophers like Jerry Fodor write books called *What Darwin Got Wrong". Scientists use data to test theories, and the "proponents of group selection" (like Charles Goodnight, above) are just doing their job. Hell, if Pinker doesn't like their analysis he can redo it himself (here is their raw data).

So when Pinker says:
"the groups made copies of themselves by budding or fissioning, the descendant groups faithfully reproduced traits of the parent group (which cannot be reduced to the traits of their individual members), except for mutations that were blind to their costs and benefits to the group; and groups competed with one another for representation in a meta-population of groups."

Nearly everyone in the evolutionary biology community will agree with him. This is what empirical work is telling us happens in nature, and we're happy to go along with what peer-reviewed studies seem to suggest is the case.

But when Pinker says:
"But everyone agrees that this [natural selection on groups] is not what happens in so-called "group selection." In every case I've seen, the three components that make natural selection so indispensable are absent."

I have no idea how he can conclude this given the evidence. It is actually very much like talking to a creationist.