From: Derek Gatherer (d.gatherer@vir.gla.ac.uk)
Date: Wed 12 Oct 2005 - 08:36:22 GMT
At 23:41 02/10/2005, you wrote:
>If you think I've misstated modern biology, perhaps you should point out the
>error.
Let's see ..... and in the very next paragraph:
>With its dependence on accident
>in place of adaptation, neo-Darwinism is inherently implausible,
That's about as whopping a misrepresentation as one could think of
(it's called Hoyle's fallacy after the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle who
made the same mistake). Meanwhile in the real world, by the late
60s, many theorists had become so fixated on adaptation, that Steve
Gould felt compelled to write his famous "Spandrels" article and his
well-known Scientific American review to redress the balance. The
neo-adaptationist Dan Dennett was then moved to respond to Gould at
book length in "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". In "Structure of
Evolutionary Theory", Gould dissects pan-adaptationism and its roots
in laborious detail - you seemed to imply in a previous message that
you'd read "Structure", so why the Hoyle's fallacy?
Gould against adaptationism:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=42062&query_hl=2
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed 12 Oct 2005 - 09:01:12 GMT