Comments on: Shoot the Messenger

By: Paul

Paul — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 11:59:49 +0000

Tierney is right and Chuck’s comments are a perceptive summary of the state of play. From Lynn Margulis’s work on the “hijacking” of mitochondria to the intense, but highly technical, debates between Dawkins and Gould over issues like punctuated equilibrium, it is so blatantly obvious that evolution by natural selection without intelligent design is the mainstream position, and the only scientific one, that critics of this position are either ignorant of the science or willfully blind to it.

By: Tierney

Tierney — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 08:38:01 +0000

“Meanwhile, even Newton believed in ID as did Aquinas and the discussion will continue.”
So? Even Einstein was famously wrong about quantum physics–a debate in his own field! If long-dead authorities are all you have, then yes, the discussion is over.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 02:50:15 +0000

Above I described the synthesis resulting in our modern consensus on phyletic evolution over time within a given population – “microevolution” as you call it. This consensus was broadly reached by 1932. The second great synthesis,largely solved by 1947 with only minor conceptual questions (just how gradual is evolution? what is the unit of selection) remaining since. Dobzhansky, who famously said that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution, initiated this synthesis with the publication of his “Genetics and the Origin of Species” The second synthesis was concerned with the means by which species multiply and proliferate at a given time (cladogenesis). Dobzhansky’s greatest achievement was to describe the processes occuring when two populations of a species become physically separated from each other and how they become reproductively isolated either through physical barriers or behavioral incompatibilities. Mayr added much to this work in his work on the biological species concept and his studies in biogeography. This work added a mountain of evidence to the concept of speciation by geographic isolation, including, for example, the existence of certain species of squirrels living atop mountains in the middle of the desert who were isolated from other squirrel populations by the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age. Sometimes the geographic separation occurs because of a new physical barrier (a new mountain range or body of water), in what is called dichopatric speciation, and sometimes it occurs because a founder population establishes itself beyond the species’ previous range, in what is called peripatric speciation. These are both referred to as geographic speciation. Other forms of isolation besides such habitat isolation occur. Besides behavioral isolation, there is temporal isolation in which two populations that breed during different times of day, different seasons, or different years cannot mix their gametes. Changes in the ability of coexisting populations to mix gametes occurs largely by what is called sympatric speciation. Intrinsic factors, such as chromosomal changes in plants and nonrandom mating in animals alter gene flow. Sympatric populations become genetically isolated even though their ranges overlap. The second synthesis thus largely concluded that isolation between populations coupled with phyletic changes in gene frequency within those populations leads to branching. This is a remarkably simple concept and I find it nearly humorous that so many people have a hard time accepting it. Such rejection of well established science is common, however, for people who come to the conversation with preconceived notions not based on evidence that they will refuse to reconsider regardless of the evidence given them. It even makes otherwise Christian biologists mock the fundamentalists who bury their heads in the sand.

By: Chuck

Chuck — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 02:25:41 +0000

Eric,
In comments above and in other posts, you have displayed skepticism on the efficacy of “evolution” (and I think you mean natural selection) to create new species. You have suggested a sharp distinction between the validity of theories of microevolution and macroevolution, without realizing that the same theories describe both processes thanks to the work of evolutionary biologists decades ago. Before I refute your errors, I will also point out that the term “neo-Darwinism” has been thrown around carelessly in many threads by many people – even by professional biologists. “Neo-Darwinism” was first used by George Romanes to describe the Darwinism that rejected the inheritence of acquired characteristics, which was refuted in 1883 by August Weismann and established without question by molecular biology’s central dogma in the middle of the last century. Neo-Darwinism has been misused by some historians of science as a term for the bundle of theories emerging from the evolutionary synthesis, and at last again by creationists and other non-scientists to refer to anyone acknowledging the truth of evolution by any mechanism.
On speciation, it is difficult to know where to begin with a skeptic such as yourself. As I understand it, you accept the concept of anagenesis (the gradual evolution of established populations through time) but reject cladogenesis (the branching of populations that results, ultimately, in separate species). Other than invoking God – how do you explain biodiversity on this account? The evolutionary synthesis that Balta referred to, in which Mendel’s discoveries in genetics were incorporated into Darwinism, resulted in the grand unified theory of adaptation and “microevolution”, or anagenesis. This synthesis began soon after the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900. After IU’s very own H. Muller’s work on mutation, it was suggested that speciation might take place in saltations after a mutation that causes a single jump giving rise to a new species. Due to evidence in the fossil record and the existence in the natural environment of great and gradual populational biogeographic variation, saltations were soon found obsolete. Between 1915 and 1932, mathematical population geneticists such as Fisher, Wright, and Haldane showed that genes with only small selective advantages in due time could be incoporated into the genotype of populations. The debate between the population geneticists and Darwinian eventually produced the first synthesis that resolved the problem of adaptation – adaptedness is the result of natural selection acting on abundant populational variation. Many geneticists with backgrounds in the physical sciences found gradualism hard to accept at first since they were typologists in the Aristotelian and Platonic sense – every species is an ideal form and individuals are less-than-perfect copies. Variation, according to this view, is nothing more than imperfection. Typological thinking, so useful in physics where universal mathematical laws explain a great deal, is quite useless in biology and is responsible for much Victorian and contemporary racism.
(continued)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 17:25:12 +0000

So? Would you like to examine his evidence for his scientific conclusion? Aquinas spent the rest of his life not writing. So?

By: philosopher

philosopher — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 14:46:12 +0000

He also spent much of the last years of his life trying to turn lead into gold.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 13:15:53 +0000

Newton also believed in a universal frame of reference. Pity, that.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 12:11:48 +0000

Thanks for the links so we can check for ourselves! This is, I think, one of the main differences between blogs and newspapers. The former have an avocation to truth wherever it leads, the latter do not. Meanwhile, even Newton believed in ID as did Aquinas and the discussion will continue.

By: Elf M. Sternberg

Elf M. Sternberg — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 03:54:16 +0000

The nice thing about this whole hullabaloo is it finally exposes the creationists to the same kind of harassment they've been pelting biologists with for the past century. "What about piltdown man?" Never mind that piltdown was never widely accepted and the fraud was shown to be a fraud by the scientific method.

Eric, ID is stillborn as ideology. It's not merely bad science, it's bad theology, as it limits what the Divine can do by proposing that His actions can be grasped and divined by humankind. Dembski has the ultimate hubris to claim that his consciousness can illustrate divinity in action. Not one of Behe's "black box" examples has survived rigid scrutiny, but you won't hear the Discovery Institute admit that.

Biology can finally point to Sternberg's (man, I hope I'm not closely related to the guy) shennanigans and show that not only is the ID camp as capable of fraud as the ocassional desperate-for-attention researcher, but that ID's fraud, like that of other frauds, is best brought to light not by prayer but by scientific investigation.

If there's a lot of reaction against Sternberg, there should be: no scientist who circumvents the safety system that produces valid science should be allowed to get away with it. In the end, this isn't about ID; Sternberg's suffering the same consequences as Pons and Fleischmann, and for the same reasons.

By: Ed Brayton

Ed Brayton — Tue, 01 Feb 2005 03:53:47 +0000

Eric wrote:

I appreciate your comments. Suffice it to say, however, I haven't seen enough evidence to conclude that Sternberg engaged in the sort of intentional dishonesty that you accuse him of (a very serious charge). Nor have I seen enough evidence to conclusively find him innocent.

But Eric, I would point out that you also don't have enough evidence to conclude that Sternberg was treated unfairly either. All you have at this point is a second hand article based upon his accusations with no response from the other side. You also aren't likely to get their response for a while, as their attorneys are likely to tell them not to respond publicly until it gets a hearing in court or in front of the agency it has been referred to. Klinghoffer isn't exactly a credible source, I might add, and given the often false and exaggerated stories we have gotten lately on other hot button issues (how many times have you read that the Cupertino school district "banned the Declaration of Independence" or that the ACLU has sued stores to make them stop saying "Merry Christmas" lately? Both claims are utterly false but shouted loudly by the right wing media), it seems reasonable to be a tad bit skeptical about this uncorroborated report. You also wrote:

Leaving aside your naked assertions about ID, what is intellectually dishonest about an advocacy group which so openly discloses its intents? It would be nice if certain neo-Darwinists would disclose the philosophical hostility to Christianity that motivates their arguments.

There is absolutely nothing intellectually honest about the Discovery Institute's discussion of their intentions. That blog that you praised so effusively in your post contains virtually daily postings complaining whenever a press report mentions their religious motivations and their real goals. They scream holy hell when their own words are mentioned. I have documented the dishonesty with which they attempt to hide their theological goals from the media while playing them up to their followers many times on my blog. They also scream about how horribly they're mistreated when someone compares creationism to holocaust deniers, yet virtually all of the DI fellows have repeatedly compared evolutionary biologists as Nazis and Stalinists. They are engaged in little more than a dishonest PR campaign. Again, I have documented this in dozens of posts on my blog.