

The Spandrels of San Marco Revisited: An Interview with Richard C. Lewontin - andyjohnson0
https://evolution-institute.org/article/the-spandrels-of-san-marco-revisited-an-interview-with-richard-c-lewontin/

======
devindotcom
Key point:

 _I think the right way is to start with the sentence: “We do not have any
hard evidence of the forces leading to the following evolutionary change.”
There has to be a prelude to the discussion of evolutionary change to make it
clear that although the theory of natural selection is very important and
happens lots, there are other forces, or other mechanisms, that lead to change
and we are not obliged by being Darwinians and being evolutionists to invent
adaptive explanations for all changes. I think that’s where you have to start.
Then, as either a philosopher or biologist, ask in a particular case what is
the direct evidence, besides the desire that we want to find something, that a
particular story is true or not true. Most of the time we’re going to have to
say that this happened in the Eocene or the Paleocene and we haven’t the
foggiest notion of why it happened. I think the admission of necessary
ignorance of historically remote things is the first rule of intellectual
honesty in evolution._

This was an interesting interview. The take-away, I think, is that speculating
on origins and "just so stories" is a fine way to think about things, but it
isn't science and should be prefaced by a frank admission that there is no
evidence to support those speculations. When chin-stroking "what if..."
theories, however interesting, become conflated in public discussion (and in
scholarly circles) with evidence-based theories, science suffers.

