Jerry Fodor is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist. He's also an atheist who has no time for creationism or intelligent design, so this article in which he concludes that it's time to discard one of the two main pillars of Darwinian theory, natural selection (adaptationism), is a bit of a shocker. Fodor says this:
The high tide of adaptationism floated a motley navy, but it may now be on the ebb. If it does turn out that natural selection isn't what drives evolution, a lot of loose speculations will be stranded high, dry and looking a little foolish. Induction over the history of science suggests that the best theories we have today will prove more or less untrue at the latest by tomorrow afternoon. In science, as elsewhere, 'hedge your bets' is generally good advice.
Traditionally the two engines that drive evolution have been thought to be random genetic mutation and natural selection. Michael Behe has delivered a blow to the hamstrings of the first of these in his book The Edge of Evolution, and now a prominent atheistic materialist is forecasting the demise of the second. Soon all that will be left of Darwin's theory will be the concept of descent by modification, but how that descent occurs will be anyone's guess.
One guess that might appear more and more frequently will be that life was front-loaded into the evolutionary process. There will be speculation, I speculate, that laws are somehow woven into the cosmos that direct the evolutionary process toward the production of man. Human beings, it will be suggested, were the inevitable outcome of the first primitive chemical reactions that lead to the genesis of biomolecules. This teleological explanation, of course, sounds very much like the view that mankind, or at least, higher life forms, were consciously intended, and once that sort of speculation breaks out people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens will be suffering apoplectic seizures.
HT: Uncommon Descent
RLC
