Thursday, November 11, 2010
What Darwin Got Wrong
by Jerry Fodor & Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini
I don't know if I should review this book or not. I mean, I read it, but it was way over my head. Perhaps I should have read it with a dictionary at hand so I could understand what the heck they were talking about. But since I was reading this out of idle curiosity instead of serious scholarship, I let the big words pass by without comprehension. So what did Darwin get wrong? Near as I can tell, it's what some folks mislabel as "survival of the fittest"--the concept that what drives evolution is all those tiny mutations accumulating over the millennia until a new species arises out of an older one. The authors argue that evolution is not that simple, bringing arguments from biology and philosophy to back up their point. And that's about all of a synopsis I can offer, since my vocabulary didn't evolve over the reading of this book to increase my understanding. What I did understand, however, was interesting. We live in a rich, complex and fascinating world.
It is worth checking out.
LibraryThing link
I don't know if I should review this book or not. I mean, I read it, but it was way over my head. Perhaps I should have read it with a dictionary at hand so I could understand what the heck they were talking about. But since I was reading this out of idle curiosity instead of serious scholarship, I let the big words pass by without comprehension. So what did Darwin get wrong? Near as I can tell, it's what some folks mislabel as "survival of the fittest"--the concept that what drives evolution is all those tiny mutations accumulating over the millennia until a new species arises out of an older one. The authors argue that evolution is not that simple, bringing arguments from biology and philosophy to back up their point. And that's about all of a synopsis I can offer, since my vocabulary didn't evolve over the reading of this book to increase my understanding. What I did understand, however, was interesting. We live in a rich, complex and fascinating world.
It is worth checking out.
LibraryThing link
Labels: CheckItOut
// posted by John @ 3:53 PM 
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