Ultra-Darwinism

A core assumption of ultra-Darwinism is that if not all, then most observed characters must be adaptive, so as to provide the phenotypic material upon which natural selection can act. However, what constitutes a character - and what constitutes an adaptation - is as much in the eye of the beholder as in the organism that is beheld, as Gould and Lewontin pointed out in their famous paper on spandrels (Gould and Lewontin, 1979). Natural selection s continual scrutiny does not give it an a la carte freedom to accept or reject genotypic or phenotypic variation. Structural constraints insist that evolutionary, genetic mechanisms are not infinitely flexible but must work within the limits of what is physically or chemically possible (for instance, the limits to the size of a single cell occasioned by the physics of diffusion processes, the size of a crustacean like a lobster or crab by the constraints... 

Philosophical howlers and whoppers as egregious as those perpetrated by the ultra-Darwinians were bound to catch up with their advocates. And the reason is because the ultra-Darwinists are indulging in precisely the kind ofmetaphysical speculations that they claim they are trying to expel. The case of Charles Darwin is once again... 

Conor Cunningham writes,..Conor Cu.nninghz.rn. Darwin s Pious Idea Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong. 2010, Eerdmans, p. 148. 

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