“A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem.”
You might reasonably wonder whether writing a critique of the classical Darwinist programme is worth the effort at this late date. Good friends in ‘wet’ biology tell us that none of them is ‘that kind” of Darwinist any more; no one in structural biology is a bona fide adaptationist. …
We are pleased to hear of these realignments, but we doubt that they are typical of biology at large (consider, for example, ongoing research on mathematical models of optimal natural selection). They are certainly not typical of informed opinion in fields that either of us has worked in including the philosophy of mind, natural language semantics, the theory of syntax, judgement and decision-making, pragmatics and psycholinguistics. In all of these, neo-Darwinism is taken as axiomatic; it goes literally unquestioned …
A view that looks to contradict it, either directly or by implication, is ipso facto rejected, however plausible it may otherwise seem. Entire departments, journals and research centres now work on this principle. In consequence, social Darwinism thrives, as do epistemological Darwinism, psychological Darwinism, evolutionary ethics – and even, heaven help us, evolutionary aesthetics. If you seek their monuments, look in the science section of your daily paper. We have both spent effort and ink rebutting some of the most egregious of these neo-Darwinist spin-offs, but we think that what is needed is to cut the tree at its roots: To show that Darwin’s theory of natural selection is fatally flawed. That’s what this book is about.
– Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, What Darwin Got Wrong (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. xvi.