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“Nothing creates more misunderstanding of the results of scientific research ?

? than scientists? use of metaphors”

That is the opening line of an article ( Not so Natural Selection ) in the latest NYR of Books by Richard Lewontin, an evolutionary geneticist who has been a critic of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology,

He concludes:

The other source of anxiety and anger (in the community of evolutionary biologists) is that the argument made by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini strikes at the way in which evolutionary biologists provide adaptive natural historical explanations for a vast array of phenomena, as well as the use by a wider scholarly community of the metaphor of natural selection to provide theories of history, social structure, human psychological phenomena, and culture. If you make a living by inventing scenarios of how natural selection produced, say, xenophobia and racism or the love of music, you will not take kindly to the book. Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science. True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time. The cytogeneticist Jakov Krivshenko used to dismiss merely plausible explanations, in a strong Russian accent that lent it greater derisive force, as ?idel specoolations.?

Even at the expense of having to say ?I don?t know how it evolved? most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations.

Published in Models