A correspondent raises this famous statement of Karl Popper on natural selection, with his “historically loaded word ‘recant’”:
I still believe that natural selection works in this way as a research programme. Nevertheless, I have changed my mind about the testability and the logical status of the theory of natural selection; and I am glad to have an opportunity to make a recantation. My recantation may, I hope, contribute a little to the understanding of the status of natural selection.
Mehmet Elgin and Elliott Sober argue convincingly that Popper merely changed the subject but not his mind. See their “Popper’s Shifting Appraisal of Evolutionary Theory,” HOPOS 7 (Spring 2017): 31–55.
It should be pointed out that well after the so-called “recantation,” Popper collaborated with the neuroscientist John C. Eccles on The Self and Its Brain (1977), a decidedly non-reductionist theory of the mind. Later, Eccles published Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (1989) in which he said,
Since materialist solutions fail to account for our experienced uniqueness, I am constrained to attribute the uniqueness of the Self or Soul to a supernatural spiritual creation. To give the explanation in theological terms: each Soul is a new divine creation which is implanted into the growing foetus at some time between conception and birth. It is the certainty of the inner core of unique individuality that necessitates the “Divine Creation.” I submit that no other explanation is tenable; neither the genetic uniqueness with its fantastically impossible lottery; neither the environmental differentiations which do not determine one’s uniqueness, but merely modify it. This conclusion is of inestimable theological significance.
Popper called Eccles’s work “an extraordinary achievement and an excellent book.” I believe Popper and Eccles came to firmly believe in a purposeful nature.