have overdone it, they have circulated an essay that assures evolutionary biologists that they are not challenging the basic mechanism of evolution as a natural process described by the four principles of variation, heredity, differential reproduction, and mutation. In particular, they reject any notion that natural selection is some sort of force with laws like gravitation. For them, natural selection is simply a name for the differential reproduction of different kinds in a population. Not to be misunderstood, perhaps biologists should stop referring to natural selection, and instead talk about differential rates of survival and reproduction. The other source of anxiety and anger is that the argument made by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini strikes at the way in which evolutionary biologists provide adaptive natural historical explanations for a vast array of phenomena, as well as the use by a wider scholarly community of the metaphor of natural selection to provide theories of history, social structure, human psychological phenomena, and culture. If you make a living by inventing scenarios of how natural selection produced, say, xenophobia and racism or the love of music, you will not take kindly to the book.Even biologists who have made fundamental contributions to our understanding of what the actual genetic changes are in the evolution of species cannot resist the temptation to defend evolution against its know-nothing enemies by appealing to the fact that biologists are always able to provide plausible scenarios for evolution by natural selection. But plausibility is not science. True and sufficient explanations of particular examples of evolution are extremely hard to arrive at because we do not have world enough and time. The cytogeneticist Jakov Krivshenko used to dismiss merely plausible explanations, in a strong Russian accent that lent it greater derisive force, as idel specoolations.Even at the expense of having to say I dont know how it evolved most of the time, biologists should not engage in idle speculations. =============Notes: 1. The circulation of the proof copy of What Darwin Got Wrong, the product of a noted philosopher and a prominent student of linguistics and cognitive science, has resulted in a volume of critical comment from biologists and philosophers that has not been seen since 1859. No week has passed that a manuscript expressing bewilderment or outrage from a biologist or philosopher of science has not arrived on my desk or desktop. I have tried but not succeeded entirely in avoiding reading these before making a first draft of this review.2. This logical result is pointed out by the philosophers Ned Block and Philip Kitcher in "Misunderstanding Darwin," their review of Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's book, Boston Review, March/April 2010.3. This suggestion was made by the philosopher of biology Elliott Sober, in response to an earlier version of Fodor's argument. The general tone of argument among philosophers can be judged by the title of Sober's paper in Mind and Language, Vol. 23, No. 1 (February 2008): "Fodor's Bubbe Meise Against Darwinism."4. A recent book on the subject is Niche Construction by John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and Marcus W. Feldman (Princeton University Press, 2003).