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Seeing everything through Darwin's eyes
Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution. Gary Cziko. (A
Bradford Book.) The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1995 . 385 pp.
$30.00 (ISBNO-262-03232-5 cloth),
"Not another polemic against creationism!" I exclaimed on firsr seeing
Without Miracles, whose dust jacket
features a magician pulling a
Darwin 's finch (perhaps not obvious
to the layman) out of a hat. Fortunately I did get past the sornewhat
deceptive title and the somewhar
confusing subtitle, which seems to
suggest that this book is a rejoinder
to the various evolutionary schools
positing alternatives to selection.
This book is acrually about evolutionary epistemology; the "second
Darwinian revolurion" refers not to
biology but to the biologizing of
. much of the rest of human knowledge. The book's aims are not modest.
The term eoolutionary epistemology has been used in several senses.
I will define ir simply as the idea that
our sensory access to information
about the world and our neural processing and integration of that information are products of our adaptive
history. We do not see in the ultraviolet range of the sp ectr um as bees
or butterflies do, or hear the whistles
we use to call our dogs. The evolu tionary epistemologist infers that our
aneestors did not have oceasion to
evolve those particular sensory capabilities. Seen in this light, many
traditional issues for philosophers
lose their distinctness and becorne
mere epiphenomena of biology-and
producrs of historical eontingeney,
at that. No wond er secular professional philosophers seem to fear
Darwin and Darwinists almost as
much as theists do! Evolutionary
epistemology is about as popular in
872
US university philosophy depart- gence). Those people experienced
menrs as sociobiology was in social with books by enrhusiasrs may alscience departrnents back when both ready smell trouble: No one is equally
sides rook soeiobiology's claim to eompetent in , or conversant with
primaey over the social sciences se- the literature of, so many fields. But
riously. Philosophers will tell you Cziko's not bad, as these things go.
In each realm he considers three
that the most fervent adherents of
evolutionary epistemology are philo- classes of explanations thar rnight
sophieal .autodidacts-either biolo- be, or have been, proffered: provigists ar total iaies-and therein lies dential, instructional, and selective.
the proof of its intellectual vacuity, Providential explanations include
conscious design by a higher power
QED!
Educational psyehologist Gary but are not Jimired to that-a point
Cziko is a bit of an aurodidact, or ar not obvious in chapter 2, in whieh
least an amateur enthusiast-but he the three categories of explanation
has been eounseled weil, particu- are introdueed. We learn later that
larly by Donald Campbell, the most any explanation thar simply takes
imporrant advocate of evolutionary the attribure in question as a given is
epistemology in this country. Cziko by definition providential. Thus
claims that selecrive retention pro- Noam Chomsky's innarist view of
cesses-analogues of Darwinian linguistic tem plates, insofar as it pays
natural selection-offer the only ten- no artention ro the question of why
able "nonmiraculous" explanarion they exist, is providential in characfar the appearance of " fir" (design) ter. (Chomsky, for obscure reasons,
in the biosphere: Not contenr to deal is antiselectionist, but neither does
with adaptation in rhe conventional he embrace a deity.)
Cz iko grounds instructional exDarwinian sense, he ranges over
immunobiology, neuroscience, ethol- planations in Lamarckism, bur onee
ogy,psychology,anthropology,edu- again the rreatment in chapter 2
caticn, linguistics, and computer breaks down on ce we move on to the
science (including artificial intelli- human sciences. In chapter 12, on
Bioscience Val. 46 No. 11
education, Cz ik o cires John
Cornenius ([1623J 1896) as an exemplar of instructionalisrn, which
he adrnits rernains the dominant
paradigrn in his own field. But this
instructionalisrn has nothing to do
with Lamarck. It is merely the notion that Information can be transferred to the individual from outside
irself. There is no requirernent that it
be passed on, genetically oe culrurally. (Cziko himsclf likes rhe concept of education in which the
"Iearner" is an active generaror of
knowledge, not a passive recipient.)
Bur things are muddled at multiple levels: rhe sense of instructionalism changes not only between
biology and culture but within biology itself. What in common da the
remodeling of bone, precopulatory
behavior, and the workings of the
immune systern display? But this is
of lirrle import anyway, insofar as
all instructionalist explanation is
gravely flawed when it avoids the
question of why the systern is appropriately responsive to instrucrion,
Ability ro "learn" is taken as a given;
thus instructionalist explanations
reduce ro providential ones. This is
why the arternpr to transfer structuralisrn from anthropology and linguistics to biology failed.
Which leaves selection, Czik o
clearly believes that selection explains just about anyrhing of any
interest about the biosphere, and
perhaps the universe. His enthusiasm is not uniformly convincing,
however. He is at his best when
arguing for evolutionary epistemology in the first sense of Wuketits
(1990; as I defined the term earlier
in this review). When he is using it in
Wuketits' seeond sense-te deseribe
the aceumulation of human knowledge-he (Iike Wuketits) is less persuasive. Oddly, he fails tO eite
Wuketits, although his book is arguably the best exposition of the topic
around.
Coming from edueational psychol<Jgy but touching on so many
areas of human thought, Cziko understandably miss es arguments, studies, and phenomena thatwould boost
his case. In chapter 7, on the adaptive modification of behavior, I
waited in vain for his discussion of
food-aversion learning (the "Garcia
eHect": Garcia and Koelling 1966,
December 1996
Garcia et al. 1966). Feod-aversion
learning was the first major erack in
classical stirnulus-response learning
theory. The notion rhar animals
would associare eating a novel food
with significantly de!ayed, subsequent illness was so outrageous thar
journal reviewers found ir unbelievable. Yet had Garcia 's work been
se nt to naruralists familiar with
Batesian mimicry, they would have
found ir vastly reassuring. Behaviorist dogma made the behavioral basis
for Batesian mimicry impossible. The
naturalists were right; rhe behaviorists were wrang; and the whole thing,
in retrospect, was predictable on
stricr selectionist grounds.
Chapter 11, on human language,
screams out for a discussion of the
early work of Peter Marler on the
acquisition of bird song to put rhe
debate over Chomsky-Fodor
"innatisrn" into conrexr. Bur it is not
there. Nor does Cziko seize the opportuniry t o integrate George
Lakoff's (1990) synthetic masrerpi ece on cognitive linguist ics,
Women, Fire, an d Dangerous
Things, inro his own synthesis.
Given the book 's ambirious reach,
orher quibbles are inevitable. On
page 172, Cziko glosses over objections to Popper's falsifiability crirerion for delimiting science from
nonscience, ignoring an emerging
consensus thar no such straighrforward criterion can be found. On
page 286 he accuses E. O. Wilson's
sociobiology of being "innarist"
(hence, insufficiently selecrionist)akin to accusing the Pope of being a
schismatic. On page 319 he conflates
the evolution of bird wings and inseet wings, referring ludicrously to
the early avian wing as "stubby protuberances from the backs of
protobirds. " Biologists may argue
with his use of terms, but that is the
only blatant biological error I noted
in the book.
As an enthusiast, Cziko overreaas to the charge that selection is
purely negative and attributes too
much crearivity to it-a common
errOf. Paradoxically, he also fails to
acknowledge that the opportunism
of selection is bounded only by what
is presented to it. He should, for
example, realize that directed mutation would enhance fitness and thus
if directed mutation could evolve, it
would. The only reason to rail against
ir (as on page 317) is an ideological
commitment [0 "randorn" mutation,
a notion now so fuzzy one could pla y
tennis wirh it as the ball.
It does not Follow logically that
natural selection would aurornaticaUy favor selecrive rerention processes analogaus to itself when
shaping behavior, cognition,
immunobiology, and so forrh. Selection favors that which works and is
available. If selective rerention proces ses are rhe best garne in town,
they will win out; if not, not.
One does not have to agree with
everyrhing Cziko claims to appreciate this book. Ir is thar rare synthesis
in which different fields, usually read
in isolation from one another, are
inrimately inrerpenetrated. For rhe
biologisr, it puts Rowe's (1994)
Tbeoretical Models in Biology in a
much broader conrext. For the humanist or social scientist, it is a
potential antidote to reflexive antiDarwinian turf-guarding. Without
Miracles will broaden the horizons
of anyone who reads ir.
ARTHUR M. SHAPIRO
Center for Population Biology
llniuersity of California
Dauis, CA 95616
References cited
ComeniusJ. [162311896. The great dida cric.
Loridon (UK): Adam and Charles Black.
Garcia J, Koelling RA. 1966. A relation of elle
to consequence in avoidance learning.
Psychonomic Science 4: 123-124.
Garda J, Erwin ER, Koelling RA. 1966 . Learning with prolonged delay of reinforcemem.
Psychonomic Science 5: 121-122.
Lakoff G. 1990 . Warnen, fire, and dangerous
things. Chicago (TL): Universiey of Chicago Press.
Rowe G. 1994. Theorerical models in biology :
the origin of life, the immune system, and
the brain. Oxford (UK ): Oxford Universiry Press.
Wukerits FM. 1990. Evolueionary episremology and ies implicarions for hlJmank ind .
Albany (NY): State University of New
York Press.
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