In A Eulogy for “Selective Death” (New Oxford Review, November 2011), Terry Scambray reviews Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini’s What Darwin Got Wrong:
Modernism is built on Charles Darwin’s idea that the world made itself. So when Darwin’s idea is discredited, the materialist and reductionist foundations of Marxism, Freudianism, and atheistic humanism will be discredited too, along with their various sub-cults like multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, postmodernism, and so on. In a word, if Darwin is wrong, modernism is reduced to a faith position. Thus, the so-called Darwin wars are not a parochial sideshow between biblical fundamentalists and science, but are a fundamental controversy in the profound sense of the word.
Though this may be news to many, the truth is that natural selection has been discredited at least since Darwin’s time. No less than Thomas Huxley, for one, told Darwin to avoid relying on natural selection as the engine of evolution.
But it didn’t matter, because Darwinism was never of any value in science. It was of value for educating generations in folk materialism.
Apparently though, it is permissible when someone like Noam Chomsky admits that Darwinism is more philosophy than science. But when someone with a theistic view makes the same point, he is ruled out of line.
Of course, because Johnson was a critic, and Chomsky was attempting to rescue a shred of integrity as a thinker by peeping out a little acknowledgment of the fact that no honest person can really deny. Just as Karl Popper did.
And it all works for them because the damage is still done, just as they desire it to be, but they are not assaulted by trolls and they imagine they have achieved some dignity.
See also: Look out, ghosts in the machine! That guy over there has a vacuum cleaner
Jerry Fodor shows why Dawkins is wrong in saying “We must believe Darwinism”