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Oh whatever.

By the same reason, studying history is useless.

There are legitimate quibbles with evolutionary theories. This is not one.

"By the same reason, studying history is useless. "

He who ignores ~~history~~ evolution is doomed to repeat it. Nope doesn't work. History is practical and relevant. Evolution is not.

BTTT

>>By the same reason, studying history is useless. <<

If it is false history, then it is.

Studying the B-29 was not useless for the Soviets, and they KNEW it was designed.

But Coyne isn't really even quibbling with evolutionary theory, just its over-selling. Regardless of whether one agrees with him that it IS oversold, one must (imo) admire his intellectual honesty.

Coyne is not attempting to debunk evolutionary biology--- he is attempting to strengthen it by ferreting out over-extensions of it, so that the whole is more useful, less easily attackable and more likely to be true. His main problem, it seems, whether in mainstream evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology, are "just so" stories such as the one Richard Dawkins sells about the eye evolving from a light sensitive patch in "Climbing Mt. Improbable". So the point isn't that evolutionary theory is useless--- that would make his work as an evolutionary biologist useless--- but simply that it is limited.

Similarly, you're right to state that studying history is useful, but wrong to characterize it as Coyne's point. Sure, history is useful--- but the over-selling of history, whether in Hegel or Marx or what have you, does the rightly understood and executed study of history an insult.

H. Allen Orr makes a similar criticism of Daniel Dennett:

I should make it clear that I am not troubled by the possibility that your civility (as well as mine) reflects ancient genetic changes. It may well. But the notion that the diffusion of morality among humans must have involved natural selection is absurd. Imagine, for instance, that evolution blessed our hirsute ancestors with consciousness and language. But, alas, these immoral brutes -- who are kind only to their families -- have run out of genetic variation and, thus, no further evolutionary change is possible. What reason is there to think that social contracts, cooperation among hunters, and the other ingredients of an Ur-morality couldn't catch on among these thinking, speaking beasts? None as far as I can see. Is it obvious that genetic changes are required for such a thing? Where are Dennett's trusty memes when we need them?

The deeper point, though, is that this navel-gazing -- these endless attempts to theoretically reconstruct what "must have" occurred during the emergence of human morality -- is no more than academic exercise. The ugly fact is that we haven't a shred of evidence that morality in humans did or did not evolve by natural selection. We do not even know what such evidence would look like. We can, if we like, construct plausible adaptive scenarios ("What would happen to a gene that said be nice to strangers if . . ."). But, in the end, a thought experiment is not an experiment. We have no data.

Dennett's treatment of evolutionary ethics is symptomatic of the problem plaguing his entire book. He is forever suggesting that the universal acid of natural selection may be involved here or there. Natural selection of alternative universes may explain why we live in a world having just these physical constants (I spared you this one). Selection may explain the rise and fall of ideas and songs. Selection may explain why "strong" artificial intelligence is destined to work (nature got semantics out of syntax, so digital computers can too). Selection may explain the spread of ethical codes among humans. But at each milepost the skeptical reader grumbles, "But maybe not." After all, the evidence for each claim ranges from non-existent (alternative universes, origin of morality) to negative (Darwinian evolution of memes). All Dennett really shows is that -- if one squints hard enough -- one can sort of see how Darwin's dangerous idea might play a role in this, that, or the other. Although he has produced a provocative and intermittently entertaining book, Dennett's chief claim is unconvincing. Darwinism may have little to tell us outside of biology.

Again, Orr is not criticizing Darwinin's theory of evolution through natural selection--- he is simply acknowledging that it is not a "universal acid" and thus has limits to what it can explain and what it can reasonably be applied to.

By the same reason, studying history is useless.

Can you connect the dots for me on that one? I'm not seeing the analogy.