At a thread at another website discussing the idea that ID is “boring”, an ID supporter wrote this:

“[ID] is boring to Will [Provine] I suspect (and to others for the same reason) because they rule out the possibility of an intelligent designer.”

Actually, knowing Will Provine pretty well and hearing him say that ID is “boring” on several occasions, I can confidently state that the reason he finds it “boring” is that whenever something interesting in biology is discovered and somebody asks “Why is that thing the way it is?” Will hears most ID supporters answer “Goddidit”. His opinion of ID is that it’s a science-stopper because rather than suggesting new and interesting ways of trying to figure out how something came to be the way it is, he thinks that IDers simply throw up their hands and say “It’s too complicated, so God / the Intelligent Designer must have done it”.

Personally, I don’t find ID boring for quite the same reason, as I don’t always see ID supporters resorting to the “Goddidit” pseudoexplanation. No, the reason I tend to find most ID boring is it’s relentlessly negative. That is, people like Michael Behe and William Dembski observe something marvelously complicated and say “That’s Irreducibly Complex!” or “That’s Complex Specified Information, so it couldn’t have evolved via naturalistic means”…and then they leave it at that. No alternative means of creating the marvelously complicated thing is proposed (unless you credit Behe’s “puff of smoke” pseudoargument).

Furthermore, I generally don’t see ID supporters doing any original empirical research. In particular, I don’t see any of them going out into the field (my favorite place to discover things) or into the lab and “getting down and dirty” with some biological phenomenon that they find absolutely fascinating.

My friend, Harry Greene (the world’s authority on rattlesnakes) is my idea of a real scientist. He absolutely loves snakes, talks about them at the drop of a hat, has spent his entire professional life studying them in the field and in the lab, and has revolutionized our understanding of the ecology, ethology, and evolutionary biology of reptiles. To me, he’s the epitome of an evolutionary biologist, because he has what we call “a feel for the organism” which goes far beyond simply studying it as an experimental subject.

And my friend, Lynn Margulis (the world’s authority on endosymbiosis) is also my idea of a real scientist. She absolutely loves getting knee-deep in the mud of some tropical lagoon and scraping scum off of rocks to look at under the microscope. She’s spent her entire professional life studying microorganisms in the field and in the lab, and has revolutionized our understanding of the evolutionary biology of microorganisms. Like Harry, she’s the epitome of an evolutionary biologist, because she also “a feel for the organism” which leads her to discover things nobody ever thought to look for before, such as symbiotic bacteria embedded in the cell membranes of symbiotic protozoa from the guts of termites.

I have yet to meet or hear about or read about any ID supporter who does anything like what Harry and Lynn do. Yes, Michael Behe is a biochemist, but the things he does in his laboratory at Lehigh have little or nothing to do with ID. And William Dembski wouldn’t know an actual living organism if it lunged out and bit him on the ankle.

Biology, and especially evolutionary biology, is that branch of the natural sciences founded and maintained by people who loved and were obsessed with nature and natural things. Darwin and Wallace and Fisher and Haldane and Wright and Dobzhansky and Mayr and Simpson and Stebbins and Hamilton and Trivers and Margulis and the two Wilsons (Edward O. and David Sloan): these are my heroes, and they are the “naturalists” (see how the word has another, much more positive meaning?) who have been the inspiration for my research, insignificant as it is compared with theirs.

And all that IDers can generally do is say “No, you’re wrong, it can’t happen that way, in fact it can’t happen at all without a deus ex machina?” Ugh: boring, pointless, and most of all, no “feel for the organism”.

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As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

–Allen

Mike Gene, the pseudonymous founder of Telic Thoughts and the author of The Design Matrix: A Consilience of Clues has written the following about metaphors and their application to the detection of intelligent design:

Metaphors such as “fear”, “cost”, “abhor” and “angry”, commonly share the projection of consciousness onto the world. Metaphors such as these represent the human tendency to view the world through anthropomorphic glasses. However, the metaphors employed by molecular biologists are not of this type.
…
Metaphors typically break down when we begin to take them literally.
…
[but] The design terminology that is used in the language of molecular biology does not break down when interpreted literally
…
[T]here is a basic and literal truth to the use of design terminology in molecular biology–these technological concepts are just too useful. Metaphors are certainly useful when explaining concepts to other human beings, yet the design terminology often goes beyond pedagogy–it provides true insight into the molecular and cellular processes. An understanding of our own designed artifacts, along with the principles required to make them, can guide the practice of molecular biology.

Metaphors are a special case of analogies (the other being similes). I have written extensively on the subject of the use of analogies and metaphors in science, and especially in the evolution/design debate here, here, and here. The fundamental question in this ongoing debate is, how do we know an analogy really exists? For example, do we have any objective way to determine if one rock is analogous with another? Or whether an anatomical feature (or a protein/substrate binding site) is analogous to another?

As in the case of agency detection, we think we can do this very easily (just as we can easily identify what looks like design), but I would argue that this is because both “finding” analogies and “finding” design and purpose are capabilities of the human mind (and the nervous system that supports it) that have conferred enormous adaptive value on our ancestors. As in the case of our hypothesized “innate agency/design/purpose detector” (which first becomes active in very early infancy), our “analogy detector” also appears to become active at a very early age, and operates entirely in the background. That is to say, we are almost totally unaware of its operation, and concentrate only on its output.

Our ability to detect (and construct) analogies is, IMO, the core of our intelligence, as demonstrated by the fact that identifying analogies has been traditionally used as one of the most sensitive gauges of general intelligence in intelligence tests (such as the Miller Analogies Test).

In the context of Mike Gene’s ideas about metaphors, doing engineering (and especially mathematics) is essentially the construction of highly compact analogies, in which numerical (and sometimes physical) relationships are expressed in the form of abstract symbols. A blueprint is simply a metaphor for a building, just as a chemical formula is a metaphor for the product of the chemical reaction, and a recipe for a cake is a metaphor for the cake. Indeed, many mathematical relationships (especially in the natural sciences) are expressed as equations, which are quite literally metaphors expressed in symbolic form. For example, Newton’s equation for force:

F = ma

is a metaphor linking the concept of force with the concepts of mass and acceleration.

In molecular biology we encounter once again the concept of metaphors, for what is the genome of an organism but a highly abstract metaphor for the fully embodied and operating organism itself? I agree with those (and I expect Mike Gene would number himself among them) who assert that the encoding of “life” into a string of nucleotides is indeed the crucial difference between biological “metaphors” and physical “direct necessities”. Gravity isn’t “encoded” in anything, but proteins are, and so are cells, tissues, organs, organ systems, organisms, and (at least at some level) their behaviors.

So, is there a way to verify if an analogy or metaphor is “real”? In the case of some analogies in biological systems we have an independent double-check on our identification of analogies. This is based on the evolutionary concept of homology, or derivation from a common ancestor. If two structures on two different organisms (say a small bone of the jaw of a reptile and the even smaller bone in the middle ear of a mammal) appear to be analogous (on the basis of size, location, relationship to other bones, etc.) there are at least two different, though related, methods of verifying that these structures are indeed analogous (and not just accidentally similar).

One way is by means of comparative paleoanatomy, in which a series of fossils of known age are compared to determine if there is a connection between the evolutionary pathways of derivation of the structures. If such a pathway can be empirically shown to exist, this would be strong evidence for both the analogous and homologous nature of the objects.

Alternatively one could compare the nucleotide sequences that code for the structures to determine if they are sufficiently similar to warrant a conclusion of homologous derivation. In both cases, evidence for homology, combined with our intuitive “identification” of analogous structure and/or function, both point to the same conclusion: that the two structures are both analogous and homologous.

This is why structures that appear to be analogous, but for which there is no convincing evidence of homology (as in the wings of birds and insects) can present a serious problem to evolutionary biologists, and especially those engaged in biological classification. Such apparent similarities (technically called homoplasies) can either be the result of “true” (i.e. partial) analogy at the functional (and/or structural) level (and therefore assumed to be the result of convergent evolution) or they can be completely accidental. Simple inspection is often insufficient to separate these two hypotheses, and lacking either fossil or genomic evidence, conclusions about the validity of such analogies can be extremely difficult to draw. However, if there is fossil and/or genomic evidence and it points away from homology (i.e. descent from a common ancestor), then the structures can be considered to be analogous, but not homologous.

One of the dangers in invoking analogies and metaphors is overusing the concept of analogy to mean almost anything. Indeed, it is essential in discussions such as these that we be as precise as possible about our definitions, as imprecision can only lead to confusion (at best) and unsupportable conclusions (at worst).

Perhaps the most essential distinction to be made in this regard is between “analogies of description” (which could also be called “semantic analogies”) and “analogies of function/structure” (which could also be called “natural analogies”). The former (i.e. “semantic analogies”) are merely artifacts of the structure of human cognition and language, as happens whenever we describe an analogy that we have perceived.

By contrast, the latter (i.e. “natural analogies”) are the actual similarities in function/structure that we are describing (i.e. that resulted in our identification and description in the first place). As in the Zen koan about the roshi and the novice in the moonlit garden, much of the confusion about which of the two types of analogies we are discussing seems to stem from confusion between the moon that illuminates the garden and the finger pointing at the moon.

In the brief example from Mike Gene’s The Design Matrix posted at the head of this thread, the implication is that the analogies we perceive between biological systems and those engineered by humans are “natural analogies”; that is, they are real analogies, and not simply a form of linguistic convenience. However, there is nothing about the finding of an analogy that necessarily verifies that the analogy is “natural” (i.e. “real”), as opposed to “semantic” (i.e. “imaginary”). This would be the case even if one found repeated analogies between complex systems engineered by humans and biological systems that evolved by natural selection. To verify that an analogy is “natural” requires an independent source of validation for the assertion that the analogy is “real” and not merely “semantic”. At this stage in my reasoning about this subject I am not at all sure how one would go about this.

However, one thing I am sure of is that simply asserting over and over again that one has perceived an analogy, and that this is all that is necessary to validate the analogy, is not sufficient. Even I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.

************************************************

As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

–Allen

On Monday 9 March 2009 President Obama signed an executive order reversing the Bush administration’s ban on the use of Federal funding for embryonic stem cells for medical research (and presumably for any medical treatments that might eventually be developed as the result of that research). This policy change has raised a storm of controversy among right-to-life- advocates, and also among “intelligent design” supporters. This controversy has centered on the ethics of science, and whether scientists should be allowed to pursue their research wherever it leads.

Currently, most embryonic stem cells are derived from human egg cells that have been fertilized in vitro (that is, outside of the body of the egg-donor mother) as part of the process of in vitro fertilization (IVF) whereby childless couples can conceive of a baby using their own genetic material.

IVF clinics generally fertilize multiple donor eggs and then let them
divide by mitosis until the blastula stage is reached. During this process the inner cell mass is formed inside the blastula, from which embryonic stem cells are derived. The point to this process is not to produce the embryonic stem cells in the inner cell mass, but rather to produce viable blastulas, which can then be implanted in the uterus of the egg donor (or, in rare cases, a surrogate).

The way this process is carried out necessarily produces multiple unused blastula-stage embryos for every one that is implanted. These unused blastula-stage embryos are usually frozen in liquid nitrogen, in case the egg donor requires a repeat implantation.

Currently, there are almost half a million such blastula-stage embryos frozen in liquid nitrogen in IVF clinics in the United States, which leads to the first ethical question:

What becomes of the unused frozen embryos, and who decides?

Here is what generally happens:

Any embryos that you do not use in your first IVF attempt can be frozen for later use. This will save you money if you undergo IVF a second or third time. If you do not want your leftover embryos, you may donate them to another infertile couple, or you and your partner can ask the clinic to destroy the embryos. Both you and your partner must agree before the clinic will destroy or donate your embryos. [source]

So, should the “parents” (i.e. the egg and sperm donors) have the right to decide that their unused blastula-stage embryos be destroyed? Despite some political efforts to deny them this right, there is no legal jurisdiction in the U.S. in which this right has been abrogated (yet).

One way to solve this particular ethic dilemma is to “adopt” the frozen embryos by having them implanted in an “adoptive” mother. There is an organization that advocates this, Nightlight Christian Adoptions, and has arranged for some of these frozen embryos (which the organization calls “snowflakes”) to be “adopted” by implantation in “adoptive” mothers who are medically infertile (and married).

According to data at that website, the current number of successful “snowflake adoptions” is approximately 202 since the program was started in 1997. That works out to around 17 per year, or 0.0034% of the current half-million “snowflake backlog”. At that rate, all of the frozen embryos currently in cryogenic suspended animation will be “adopted” by the year 31421.

However, this grossly underestimates how long this backlog will persist, as it assumes that no new “snowflakes” are generated by new IVF procedures. Currently, the rate of production of new frozen blastula-stage embryos at IVF clinics in the US is approximately 18,000 per year. The current rate of “snowflake adoption” is approximately 20 per year, so unless IVF is permanently stopped, it is mathematically impossible for the current “snowflake backlog” to eventually be “adopted”.

One way to avoid the use of embryonic stem cells taken from frozen blastula-stage human embryos is to use adult stem cells instead. There are many different tissues in adult humans that qualify as pluripotent stem cells (that is, cells that can continue to divide by mitosis). Recent research has made it possible to “regress” adult stem cells almost to the embryonic stem cell stage, which raises the possibility of using adult stem cells instead of embryonic stem cells.

Personally, I strongly hope that adult stem cells can be used for all of the scientific and technical uses that most scientists originally thought only embryonic stem cells could be used for. However, this will then lead to two new, unforseen ethical dilemmas:

What will be done with the “snowflakes” that are currently frozen at IVF clinics, if they are not used for stem cell research and medical treatment?

and

What will be done with the adult stem cells that have been regressed to the embryonic stem cell stage, since these would then qualify genetically and developmentally as “snowflakes” themselves?

Clearly, one irony of the development of adult stem cell regression will be that the “snowflakes” now frozen in liquid nitrogen in all of those IVF labs will now almost certainly be disposed of (I suppose they defrost and incinerate them), rather than contributing to the advance of medical technology and human welfare.

The other irony, of course, is that by regressing adult stem cells to the embryonic stem cell stage, there would be many more “snowflakes”, rather than fewer, thereby necessitating the destruction of many more “potential human beings” than is currently the case.

There are two other solutions, both of which avoid the ethical dilemmas outlined above. One alternative would be:

To consider that neither embryonic stem cells nor adult stem cells are “human beings” until they are implanted into a mother and are born as human babies.

This, of course, would require defining “human life” as beginning at birth, rather than “conception” (regardless of where that “conception” took place).

Another alternative would be:

To consider that all stem cells are “human beings”, which would require that all stem cell research and treatment and all forms of in vitro fertilization be declared unethical, and presumably outlawed.

But this would also require that we outlaw all developmental research, because somewhere along the line some researcher somewhere might find out how to regress any human cell to the embryonic stem cell stage, and then simply scratching your head or drinking a cup of too-hot coffee would be equivalent to murder.

As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

–Allen

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

SOURCE: Original essay (repost from The Evolution List)

COMMENTARY: That’s up to you…

Phillip Johnson, one of the founders of the intelligent design movement, has proposed an alternative form of reasoning to that used by modern scientists. He refers to his form of reasoning as “theistic realism”, while the alternative could be called “empirical naturalism”. In this blog post, I intend to contrast these two forms of reasoning, to determine what assumptions one must hold to apply them, and what consequences flow from adopting one or the other position, which I freely admit at the outset are essentially metaphysical (i.e. not scientific) positions.

According to Charles Darwin, Ernst Mayr (and most other evolutionary biologists), evolution has two stages:
• the origin of variations via various mechanisms
• the origin of adaptations via natural selection

Johnson’s critique of evolution centers on the origin and patterns of variation, since he has repeatedly granted in various venues that natural selection occurs. However, according to Johnson, “God” (i.e. the supernatural entity/force behind “theistic realism”) causes and/or guides the generation of variations, leaving natural selection as a mere “stabilizing force” that only maintains adaptations by weeding out unfit individuals. In this sense, Johnson’s version of “natural selection” is virtually indistinguishable from that proposed in 1835-37 by Edward Blyth.

There are two fundamental problems with Johnson’s position, one theological and one metaphysical:

• First, the idea that stabilizing selection maintains God-created variations is essentially a form of “statistical norming”, and therefore violates the Judeo-Christian (and presumably, “theistically realistic”) principle of “sanctity of the individual”. If “not a sparrow falls, but that [God is] mindful of it”, then God doesn’t (indeed, cannot) treat individuals (including, presumably, individual humans) as instrumental entities (i.e. as means, rather than as ends) by weeding them out if they depart too much from the statistical norm of His created types. But, if God does pay attention and therefore intervenes on behalf of any and all individuals, then stabilizing selection doesn’t really exist, and we are back to a theory of “theistic evolution” in which God directly intervenes in nature, controlling and guiding (i.e. determining) absolutely everything that happens at all times and in all places.

• Second, if Johnson grants that God directly intervenes only in the generation of variations (and lets stabilizing selection maintain the particular variations He specifies), there are still two alternatives:

- That God creates a multiplicity of variations, and then lets natural selection operate to choose which ones will become adaptations; or

- That God determines which variations will be adaptive at the instant of their creation, thereby rendering natural selection (and all naturalistic mechanisms of variation) superfluous.

In the first case, God not only commits the sin of “statistical norming” (as described above), the process by which He does so would result in a pattern of evolutionary change that would be virtually indistinguishable from purely naturalistic evolution by natural selection, which does not require God to intervene at all. He would, in other words, render Himself and His actions completely pointless and invisible.

But in the second case, the apparent stabilizing selection described earlier is illusory, since all created individuals would be ipso facto adaptive. Indeed, unless God deliberately intends to create maladaptive individuals that depart significantly from the adaptive norm (and which therefore would be eliminated by selection), there should be virtually no maladaptive individuals at all, which should be easily verifiable by empirical analysis.

Either Johnson must grant that stabilizing selection does, in fact, operate (and God is therefore not mindful of individuals, but only of types), or he must grant that it does not. In the second case, natural selection doesn’t really happen at all, at any level, and God must therefore intervene directly in the survival and reproduction of every living organism that has ever existed, exists, or ever will exist. Furthermore, God does this despite the fact that only one type of organism, namely humans, has any choice about its behavior, about its living or dying (as far as we can tell).

To sum up, either:

• God (or the “Intelligent Designer”) intervenes directly in evolution via stabilizing selection, thereby destroying uncountable trillions of His creations (all of them innocent except humans, and even some of them, too) in order to “stabilize” His specified adaptations, or

• God (or the “Intelligent Designer”) doesn’t intervene via stabilizing selection, in which case He’s either irrelevant (i.e. natural selection “just happens”) or He completely determines absolutely every event that occurs throughout all time and space, in which case “free will” (and therefore sin) is an illusion.

Furthermore, since Johnson grants that natural selection really does occur, but only as stabilizing selection, this limits God’s intervention in the evolutionary process to the instant of the creation of variations. Under such conditions, the circumstances following this instant are empirically indistinguishable from pure naturalistic processes, regardless of whether God “specifies” such variations. Either that, or such variation is essentially random (and therefore “Godless” and “unspecified”).

But this position puts Johnson inescapably in the position of arguing once again for a “God of the gaps” position, since the only intervention God is capable of under such conditions is into the generation of variations; what happens afterwards is essentially “Godless”. This is a “God of the gaps” position because there are only two alternative scenarios:

• A mechanism that produces variations that does not rely upon supernatural intervention will eventually be discovered and applied to the entire fossil and genetic record, the “gap” will be closed, and God (like the Baker) will “softly and silently vanish away”; or

• No matter when one inquires, a mechanism that unambiguously does not rely upon supernatural intervention will not yet have been (and indeed, cannot ever be) discovered.

It would seem like the second situation would validate Johnson’s position. However, the second situation involves a fundamental (i.e. metaphysical) problem: the only absolutely validating outcome for the second alternative is that every possible mechanical (i.e. “Godless”) explanation for the origin of variations must have been tested and falsified. This is a metaphysical impossibility, as the empirical method relies on induction, and no amount of positive evidence for Johnson’s hypothesis (i.e. negative evidence for a “Godless” origin of variations) is enough to absolutely validate it (unless Johnson wishes to declare himself a logical positivist, which seems highly unlikely).

Given the foregoing, it appears that Johnson’s assertion that God guides the origin of variations directly violates Popper’s falsifiability criterion (just as Johnson claims evolutionary theory does). This is because, no matter how fine a level of discrimination one specifies for ruling out supernatural intervention in the origin of variations, Johnson can claim that God’s intervention lies somewhere “deeper” (even if we someday get down to the level of sub-subatomic particles).

But, at some arbitrarily fine level of discrimination, either God’s intervention will “jump out” of the statistical analysis (i.e. it will violate accepted principles of statistical reliability) or it won’t. If it doesn’t, the hypothesis of God’s direct intervention in the origin of variations will have once again become unnecessary, and by the standard of parsimony (i.e. “Occam’s razor”), if a causal factor is unnecessary, it isn’t included in a scientific (i.e. empirically grounded) explanation of a phenomenon.

When one examines Johnson’s metaphysical positions on these subjects, it is clear that he doesn’t give a damn about empirical validation or falsifiability or statistical reliability or anything else that could conceivably be called “scientific”. For example, in Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds [1], Johnson states quite unequivocally:

“Truth (with a capital T) is truth as God knows it. When God is no longer in the picture there can be no Truth, only conflicting human opinions. (There also can be no sin, and consciousness of sin is that built-in moral compass [pro-Darwinian philosophers] reject…as illusory.)” [Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, page 89]

In my opinion, no more succinct a statement of anti-scientific thinking could be imagined. Johnson asserts that the only two alternatives are
(1) God-given Truth and
(2) conflicting human opinions.
Where, in either of these, is empirical verification? Is “God-given Truth” amenable to empirical verification? If Johnson thinks so, he flies in the face of centuries of both scientific and theological metaphysics, which has consistently concluded exactly the opposite. But what about the alternative: is Johnson asserting that all scientific principles, such as the law of gravity, are “human opinions”? This was the position taken by the author of the “Sokol Hoax”, which of course was shown to be both a hoax and an indirect validation of the assumption that physical laws are not subject to human opinions. Ergo, if Phillip Johnson were of the opinion that the law of gravity does not apply to him, could he thereby escape its operation? Don’t be ridiculous…

Johnson argues that we should, as scientists, conflate two totally incommensurate forms of “knowing”:

• Deontological Absolutism - a universe in which God’s direct intervention in events occurring in the real world is self-evident and does not require empirical verification (in fact, to attempt such verification would qualify as blasphemy), or

• Scientific Empiricism - a universe in which the assumption that God intervenes in any event that occurs in the phenomenal/physical universe is unnecessary, and therefore irrelevant to such an explanation.

That’s what all this really comes down to: Johnson’s “theistic realism” is semantically reducible to “its True because I say so, and I say so because I believe that God says so, too”, since no amount of empirical evidence can either validate (or invalidate) his position. The only “proof” he provides (or requires) for his position is his assertion of it. Interesting, perhaps, as an exercise in theological metaphysics (not to mention hubris), but not, by any stretch of the imagination, science.

REFERENCES CITED:

[1] Johnson, Phillip (1997) Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, ISBN #0830813624, 137 pages.

As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

–Allen

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

SOURCE: The Evolution List (repost)

COMMENTARY: That’s up to you…

I have mentioned several times in other posts that 2008 is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin and the sesquicentennial of the publication of the Origin of Species. Hundreds of scientific and cultural organizations are gearing up to celebrate Darwin’s birthday on February 12th, proclaiming it the kickoff for the “Darwin bicentennial year”.

However, in a very real sense, today is the first day of that centennial celebration. On the first of July 1858 two papers and two letters were read to the members of the Linnean Society in London. One of the papers, entitled “On the Tendency for Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type”, was written by Alfred Russell Wallace. The other paper and the two letters were written by Charles Darwin, and outlined his theory of evolution by natural selection.

The paper by Wallace had been sent to Darwin, with a request by Wallace that if it were of sufficient merit, would he please forward to the society for publication? Darwin was stunned; he had been working on the very same idea for almost twenty years. Here is what he wrote on 18 June 1858 to his friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, following his receipt of Wallace’s paper:

My dear Lyell

Some year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the Annals [a natural history journal], which had interested you & as I was writing to him, I knew this would please him much, so I told him. He has to day sent me the enclosed [manuscript] & asked me to forward it to you. It seems to me well worth reading. Your words have come true with a vengeance that I shd be forestalled. You said this when I explained to you here very briefly my views of “Natural Selection” depending on the Struggle for existence.—I never saw a more striking coincidence. if Wallace had my M.S. sketch written out in 1842 he could not have made a better short abstract! Even his terms now stand as Heads of my Chapters.

Please return me the M.S. which he does not say he wishes me to publish; but I shall of course at once write & offer to send to any Journal. So all my originality, whatever it may amount to, will be smashed. Though my Book, if it will ever have any value, will not be deteriorated; as all the labour consists in the application of the theory.

I hope you will approve of Wallace’s sketch, that I may tell him what you say.

My dear Lyell
Yours most truly

C. Darwin

Knowing how long Darwin had labored on his theory, Lyell and botanist Joseph Hooker prevailed on Darwin to allow them to read his unpublished essay on natural selection (written in 1844) and two letters on the same subject from Darwin to Hooker and to the American botanist, Asa Gray, along with Wallace’s paper at the July meeting of the Linnean Society. Neither Darwin nor Wallace attended the meeting (Darwin was at his home at Down, in Kent, mourning the death of his son, Charles, who had died three days earlier; Wallace was still in the Maylay archipelago), and the joint reading raised hardly a ripple of comment.

Despite their lack of notoriety at first, these papers and letters were the first public presentation of the theory that would fundamentally and radically change the way we view ourselves and the natural world around us.

Here are some links to websites with much more information about this sesquicentennial event:

Happy 150th Birthday Natural Selection!

On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties

How Darwin won the evolution race

Darwin, Wallace and The Linnean Society of London

150th Anniversary of the Darwin-Wallace Papers

The Darwin-Wallace Letters of 1858

Fire the starting gun! The Darwin year begins…NOW!

Previous anniversary celebrations

July 1, 1858: Darwin and Wallace Shift the Paradigm

As always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

–Allen

AUTHOR: Allen MacNeill

SOURCE: The Evolution List (repost)

COMMENTARY: That’s up to you…

Ever since Darwin, the primary “engine” of evolution has been considered to be natural selection. However, if one takes a closer look at this, it is clear that natural selection is not an “engine,” it is an outcome. If evolution is defined as change in the characteristics of the members of a population over time and natural selection is defined as unequal non-random survival and reproduction (or, more parsimoniously, differential reproductive success), then the underlying cause of the changes that are differentially preserved over time is the real “engine” of evolution by natural selection.

And what might this “engine” of change be? Exactly what Darwin said it was in the Origin of Species: the “laws of variation” of which naturalists of his time were almost “completely ignorant.” That is, given that some variations are heritable and that they can be passed from parents to offspring in the process of reproduction, then it is the processes that cause such variations that are the real “engine(s)” of evolution, including evolution by natural selection.

Darwin was on the right track when later on he sought out the specifics of the “engines of variation” in Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, published in 1868. Darwin suggested that the rate of variation changed over time, in response to specific changes in the environment. For example, he pointed out that the variation between domesticated animals and plants was considerably greater than that found in the wild. This suggested to him that something about domestication – increased food, improved nutrition, lack of predators, etc. – caused an increase in the production of variations that were then exploited by animal and plant breeders.

However, it is now generally accepted that the only real difference between domesticated and wild animals and plants, in terms of variation, is that the conditions of domestication allow more variants to survive and reproduce, rather than causing more of them to be produced in the first place. I do not know enough genetics to say whether or not this is the case, but it seems to me at least that Darwin’s idea is worth empirical investigation. Here are the relevant questions (which may or may not already have answers):

• Is the rate of generation of genetic and phenotypic variation a constant?

If the answer to this question is “yes,” then all we need to investigate is the actual genetic and developmental mechanisms by which such variations are generated. However, if the answer is “no,” then the rate of generation of genetic and phenotypic variations is variable, which immediately suggests more questions:

• Is the increased rate of generation of variations correlated with any identifiable factor in either the genetics/development or the environment of organisms in which such variable rates of variation are observed?

If the answer to this question is “no,” then we may safely assume that the underlying “engine(s)” of variation is/are entirely random, insofar as we can observe it changing randomly over time. However, if the answer is “yes,” then there are more questions:

• Via what mechanism(s) is the increased rate of variation generated, and are the “triggers” for such increased variation endogenous, exogenous, or some combination of the two?

Clearly, the “engine(s)” of variation are prodigious, as it/they have been able over time to modify something as simple as a mycoplasm into an oak tree or a blue whale. Some supporters of “intelligent design” (ID) would dispute this statement, of course, claiming (without any empirical evidence) that “you can’t get here from there.” However, we clearly have gotten here from there; the real question is “how?” There are logically at least two possibilities:

• The process(es) by which the “engine(s) of variation” have produced the necessary variation have operated endogenously by means of a prodigious (and undirected) “random variation generator,” the products of which have been sorted over time by natural selection (i.e. the Darwinian hypothesis), or

• The process(es) by which the “engine(s) of variation” have produced the necessary variation have operated endogenously by means of a less prodigious “non-random variation generator,” the products of which have been sorted over time by natural selection (i.e. the ID hypothesis).

Noticing that the only difference between these two possibilities is the amount of variation and its source immediately suggests a way of testing the two hypotheses: do the currently identified mechanisms of genetic and phenotypic variation produce enough variation to get from there to here, or not? If the answer is “yes,” then the ID hypothesis is unnecessary, and therefore irrelevent to science.

So, the next obvious question is, what are the currently identified mechanisms of genetic and phenotypic variation, and do they provide enough variation to get here from there? The answer to this question will be posted soon -watch this space.

And as always, comments, criticisms, and suggestions are warmly welcomed!

–Allen

AUTHOR: Cornelia Dean

SOURCE: New York Times

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

In an unusual foray into electoral politics, 75 science professors at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland have signed a letter endorsing a candidate for the Ohio Board of Education.

The professors’ favored candidate is Tom Sawyer, a former congressman and onetime mayor of Akron. They hope Mr. Sawyer, a Democrat, will oust Deborah Owens Fink, a leading advocate of curriculum standards that encourage students to challenge the theory of evolution.

Elsewhere in Ohio, scientists have also been campaigning for candidates who support the teaching of evolution and have recruited at least one biologist from out of state to help.

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist at Case Western Reserve who organized the circulation of the letter, said almost 90 percent of the science faculty on campus this semester had signed it. The signers are anthropologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, physicists and psychologists.

The letter says Dr. Owens Fink has “attempted to cast controversy on biological evolution in favor of an ill-defined notion called Intelligent Design that courts have ruled is religion, not science.”

In an interview, Dr. Krauss said, “This is not some group of fringe scientists or however they are being portrayed by the creationist community,” adding, “This is the entire scientific community, and I don’t know of any other precedent for almost the entire faculty at an institution” making such a statement.

But Dr. Owens Fink, a professor of marketing at the University of Akron, said the curriculum standards she supported did not advocate teaching intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. Rather, she said, they urge students to subject evolution to critical analysis, something she said scientists should endorse. She said the idea that there was a scientific consensus on evolution was “laughable.”

Although researchers may argue about its details, the theory of evolution is the foundation for modern biology, and there is no credible scientific challenge to it as an explanation for the diversity and complexity of life on earth. In recent years, with creationist challenges to the teaching of evolution erupting in school districts around the country, groups like the National Academy of Sciences, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent scientific organization, have repeatedly made this point.

But the academy’s opinion does not matter to Dr. Owens Fink, who said the letter was probably right to say she had dismissed it as “a group of so-called scientists.”

“I may have said that, yeah,” she said.

She would not describe her views of Darwin and his theory, saying, “This isn’t about my beliefs.”

School board elections in Ohio are nonpartisan, but Dr. Owens Fink said she was a registered Republican. Her opponent, Mr. Sawyer, was urged to run for the Seventh District Board of Education seat by a new organization, Help Ohio Public Education, founded by Dr. Krauss and his colleague Patricia Princehouse, a biologist and historian of science, and Steve Rissing, a biologist at Ohio State University.

At the group’s invitation, Kenneth R. Miller, a biologist at Brown University, will be in Ohio today through the weekend campaigning for other school board candidates who support the teaching of evolution. Dr. Miller, an author of a widely used biology textbook, was a crucial witness in the recent lawsuit in Dover, Pa., over intelligent design. The judge in that case ruled that it was a religious doctrine that had no place in a public school curriculum.

After that decision, Dr. Owens Fink said, the Ohio board abandoned curriculum standards that mandated a critical look at evolution, a decision she said she regretted. “Some people would rather just fold,” she said.

But Dr. Miller said it was a good call, adding, “We have to make sure these good choices get ratified at the ballot box.”

COMMENTARY:

Once again Ohio is the battleground in the ongoing culture wars. A similar change in the composition of a state board of education happened in Kansas earlier this year. It will be interesting to see what happens in Ohio, especially in the context of what many are beginning to perceive as a “glacial shift” in Ohio politics, away from religious conservatism and the Republican party and toward a more tolerant and pluralistic libertarianism, as exemplified by Tom Sawyer (even his name resonates in American cultural history). Whether the Democrats can finally become vertebrates and take a principled position on this and related issues remains to be seen…

–Allen

AUTHOR: Christopher Ryan

SOURCE: Evolutionary Psychology

COMMENTARY: Allen MacNeill

The following question was asked on the Evolutionary Psychology list:

“…[W]e look to the EEA for the origins of the design of the human mind (modules, and so on) precisely because the structures in question change so slowly. If, on the other hand, it is demonstrated that complex physiological (and, presumably, psychological) structures can arise and disappear in as few as twenty generations, then of what relevance is the EEA to our discussions here?…Does Gould’s punctuated equilibria theory integrate such rapid evolutionary change? And is it accepted by the folks working in [evolutionary psychology]? If so, why do we spend so much time discussing adaptations that have likely been replaced long ago?”

To which I replied:

Eldredge and Gould, like the vast majority of other evolutionary biologists (beginning with Darwin and including such luminaries as Ernst Mayr) studied animals almost exclusively. It now appears that the equilibrium/stasis pattern that characterizes macroevolution in animals is at least partly an artifact of their developmental biology. Specifically, the hierarchical control of gene regulation in animals via homeotic genes makes possible surprisingly rapid phenotypic change without correspondingly large changes in genotype (i.e. the old “modern synthesis” has been superceded by the new “evo-devo”).

Therefore, it is quite possible (indeed, likely) that relatively slight changes in genetic regulation of development have caused the remarkable changes in hominid phylogeny reflected in the fossil record. This has already been shown to be the case for the FOX-2-P gene, and just last month for the HAR-1-F gene (see “And the winner of the fastest gene award…”), slight changes in both of which have been correlated with significant changes in the human phenotype (both in the direction of greater neoteny, by the way).

So, it is quite possible that humans have changed significantly over the past 40,000 years, and perhaps not just via purely cultural means. It is still an open question just how much of our behavior is affected by our underlying genetics, and how quickly such relationships can change (and under what conditions). And, if new research in epigenetics is any indication, such changes may be even more common and rapid than has been heretofore suspected. Nutrition during early development, chronic stress (including chronic stress in utero), and exposure to certain environmental chemicals have all been implicated in altering gene regulation, and some such alterations have been shown to be heritable (shades of Lamarck!), thereby challenging further the “standard social science model” so vilified by Pinker and other EPers.

Therefore, the EEA for some current “modules” may not date to the Pleistocene, but rather to much later periods, including (but not limited to) events in historical times. Indeed, since relative reproductive success, rather than absolute numerical differences, is the basis for natural selection (and therefore adaptation), it may be that such seemingly cultural processes as warfare, migration (including forced migration via slavery), and religious practices involving both celibacy and increased procreation (via religious prohibition of contraception) may all have played significant roles in the shaping of the human behavioral phenotype via correlated alterations in the expression of genes affecting behavior.

In a nutshell, then, the answer is yes: since humans are animals (like those studied by Eldredge and Gould), it is quite possible that punctuated equilibrium theory is applicable to human evolution, including behavioral evolution, and that further investigations into the relationship between gene regulation, development, and human behavior may yield productive, testable hypotheses about such relationships.

At the risk of blowing my own horn, I have attempted to propose such a hypothesis for the evolution of the capacity for religious experience (see: “The Capacity for Religious Experience is an Evolutionary Adaptation to Warfare”):

“The pan-specific qualities of both religious experience and warfare indicate that they are both evolutionary adaptations. There is considerable variation between individuals with respect to their capacity for religious experience and motivation to participate in warfare. Selective advantages for participation in warfare accrue to both winners and losers as long as the benefits of participation exceed the average costs. These selective advantages, primarily in the form of differential reproductive success, accrue to males when they are on the winning side in a war, and often to females no matter which side they are on.”

“Recent work on the evolutionary dynamics of religion have converged on a “standard model” in which religions and the supernatural entities which populate them are treated as epiphenomena of human cognitive processes dealing with the detection of and reaction to agents under conditions of stress, anxiety, and perceived threat. Religious experience at the individual level is characterized by depersonalization, coupled with submission to a super-individual force; the same is essentially the case for participation in warfare. The capacities for both religious experience and participation in warfare are adaptations insofar as they evolve by means of natural selection operating primarily at the level of individuals who are members of groups in which both kin selection and reciprocal altruism are also operative. It is likely that the overall patterns of supernatural organization exist as the result of coevolution between the memetic content of religious beliefs and the underlying neurological matrix within which such beliefs are maintained and transmitted in the context of specific ecological subsistence patterns.”

–Allen

Evangelists Want Fossil Exhibits Kept Out Of Sight

Robin McKie, science editor
Sunday September 10, 2006
The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1868955,00.html

The world’s most important collection of human fossils may soon be hidden from public view - if religious leaders get their way.

In a move that has stunned scientists, senior clergy have demanded that the bones and skulls currently exhibited in Nairobi’s National Museum of Kenya be removed from display to prevent young Africans from being corrupted.

‘It’s creating a big weapon against Christians that’s killing our faith,’ said Bishop Boniface Adoyo, who is leading the hide-the-bones campaign. ‘When children go to museums they’ll start believing we evolved from these apes.’ Not surprisingly, the bishop’s remarks have infuriated scientists who consider the museum’s collection to be unrivalled anywhere else in the world. Its fossils include those of the 4 million-year-old apeman, Australopithecus anamensis, the 1.5 million-year-old remains of the Nariokotome boy, the most complete skeleton of an ancient human ever found, and a series of other bones that highlight crucial phases of our evolutionary past.

Many of these fossils were discovered by palaeontologists Louis and Mary Leakey in areas around Lake Victoria and Lake Turkana and are generally regarded as providing stark demonstrations of how our species was shaped by natural selection.

Their son, Richard Leakey, and his wife Maeve, have continued this fossil-hunting tradition. They too have been dismayed by the bid to suppress the museum’s fossils. ‘The church is being ridiculous,’ said Richard Leakey. ‘Its leaders are out of step. Evolution theory is accepted across the world. This is scientific history and Kenya has the best of this evolutional history. Globally, few can match that claim to fame.’

The National Museum of Kenya is currently preparing to reopen next year after completing massive EU-funded renovations. As part of that work a special exhibit, The Origins Of Man, which displays the key finds around Africa’s Great Rift Valley - considered by many the cradle of humanity - is now being set up.

However, it is this display that African evangelicals say they find offensive, because it promotes Darwin’s theory of evolution. As a result, they are demanding that the display be removed or at least shunted to a less prominent location.

‘When museums put it out there that man evolved from apes, theologically they are affecting many people who are Christians, who believe God created us,’ says Bishop Adoyo, the chairman of the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya, which claims to represent churches of 35 denominations with nine million members.