The Altenberg Sixteen

_{Paul Nelson

March 4, 2008

Intelligent Design}

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HT to Larry Moran’s Sandwalk for the link to this fascinating long piece by journalist Suzan Mazur about an upcoming (July 2008) evolution meeting at the Konrad Lorenz Institute in Altenberg, Austria.

“The Altenberg 16” is Mazur’s playful term for the sixteeen biologists and theoreticians invited by organizer Massimo Pigliucci. Most are on record as being, to greater and lesser degrees, dissatisfied with the current textbook theory of evolution. Surveying the group, I note that I’ve interacted with several of the people over the years, as have other ID theorists and assorted Bad Guys. This should be an exciting meeting, with the papers to be published in 2009 by MIT Press.

Mazur’s article is worth your attention. Evolutionary theory is in — and has been, for a long time — a period of great upheaval. Much of this upheaval is masked by the noise and smoke of the ID debate, and by the steady public rhetoric of major science organizations, concerned to tamp down ID-connected dissent. You know the lines: “Darwinian evolutionary theory is the foundation of biology,” et cetera.

But the upheaval is there, and increasing in amplitude and frequency.

[Note to Kevin Padian: journalists don’t like it when you do this to them. Mazur writes:

Curiously, when I called Kevin Padian, president of NCSE’s board of directors and a witness at the 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover trial on Intelligent Design, to ask him about the evolution debate among scientists –- he said, “On some things there is not a debate.” He then hung up.

That hanging-up part…not so wise. If you’re going to say there’s no debate, explain why.]

Comments

Hi Turner Coates, Yes, that information seemed quite popular on Panda's Thumb a couple of summers ago when Dr./Mr. MacNeill was offering his summer course on ID. Quite an episode that was. And he criticizes UD for incivility.Charlie_{March 5, 2008
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ps. Dr. MacNeill, I am sorry to hear about your recent illness and am glad that you are feeling better.Charlie_{March 5, 2008
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On Dr. MacNeill vs. Mr. MacNeill: UDers should love Mr. MacNeill, if only for the fact that he has distinguished himself in biology education at a top-drawer institution of higher learning without earning a doctorate. Of course, he has focused on teaching biology for more than thirty years, and it's not as though he's taken it on himself to criticize the shaky axioms of probability theory or hacked methods of data compression.Turner Coates_{March 5, 2008
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Allen MacNeill says many things that I like hearing from an evolutionary biologist. When he tells us that neo-Darwinian evolution is dead, that NS is not the engine of evolution (in fact, sometimes even goes so far as to tell us, with his friend Will Provine, that NS does nothing), that the engines of evolution are actually the engines of variation (of which we are only now getting an understanding --- notice that this means we are only now getting started understanding evolution, in MacNeill's estimation), that there is a real difference between micro-macro evolution, that genetic changes can be the result of phenotypic changes, etc., for instance. I even like the current admission that the word "random" is not accurate and doesn't mean quite what it is intended to convey. As was the case with Darwin's "spontaneous variation" the point is, as MacNeill has just said, that variation has no foresight. Since the randomness claim has failed the mathematical test over and over again, and biologists have had to resort to saying that because of NS (which does nothing) evolution is "anything but random", this word is going out of favour. It just is not empirically sustainable. What MacNeill and others mean is "without foresight". Of course, this is a philosophical assertion, and not an empirical observation. However, even with all the things MacNeill says which I like reading, it kind of galls me to have him self-righteously lecture people about the bounds of civil discourse. This lecturing about civil discourse on William Dembski's blog is especially ironic.Charlie_{March 5, 2008
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gpuccio: "In that category we can put deletion, inserion, frameshft mutations, inversion, and all chromosome random modifications. Where is the point? All all them are random mutations, And similarly, a tasty Piña Colada a garden will not make whether it gets the help from hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, insect migration, continental drift, volcanism, etc.....I will never bet my coconuts on that at all.JPCollado_{March 5, 2008
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Dr. MacNeill:
It is perhaps instructive to point out that Darwin never used the term “random mutation” (nor “random” anything, for that matter) in the Origin of Species....For example, how would one go about showing that something is “genuinely random” as opposed to “pseudorandom”?
Thanks for this wonderful insight. My eyes are now opened, realizing that there may be some sort of warped bell-curve to the mutations causes me to see that systemsevolution would most certainly take place if the variations did not perfectly pass the chi^2 test. Dr. MacNeill, when are you going to give up pretending that the problem with us IDers is that we are stupid, that we "don't get" the theory of evolution? You knock us any time we refer to you or your coleagues as "stupid", yet, though you don't use the term, your pet solutions imply that you think we are stupid. Direct and indirect belittling are both as bad.bFast_{March 5, 2008
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The only negative to using NFV is that it assumes Darwinism to be true if that term is used to encapsulate everything. For example, an intelligence may set conditions by which a pseudorandom function induces variation. So foresight would be involved in setting the conditions. NFV would be a subset of all mechanisms for variation, whatever that may be called. Also, while there's obviously a certain level of plasticity in biology let's say the Designer(s) designed the system to macro-evolve. As in, due to intelligently configuring the initial starting modular components NFV is all that is needed from then on. But if intelligence is initially required for NFV to begin to function how could you call the mechanisms NFV in the first place since foresight was obviously involved? BTW, this hypothetical scenario is a different type of "front-loading" in that the front-loading is concerned with "designed to evolve via (otherwise) undirected mechanisms" instead of an "unrolling of a specific front-loaded plan".Patrick_{March 5, 2008
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Allen_MacNeill: "Insults, personal attacks, ridicule"? I find that rather ironic. I must have missed the kind undertone when you wrote: "So, like my students, repeat after me: natural selection is not random." Anyway, in my comments I have tried to express what you call "the kind of mutual respect (and absolutely ruthless critical viewpoint) to which most scholars are committed". May be you noticed the second point more than the first, but first of all respect has to be "mutual", and anyway it implies the commitment to hard and explicit intellectual confrontation when one deeply disagrees. I don't think I have to re-formulate my points, because in my opinion they were clear enough. If you don't feel like addressing them, it's your choice. I respect that. Meanwhile, I hope you will respect if I feel like going on commenting on what you write here. I like intellectual confrontation, even if not corresponded. From what you write in your new posts, I feel a bit confused. While I stick to the basic problem of the incredible limits of random variation as a means to create new CSI, as GilDodgen has well summed up in his last post, I see that you are offering some form of new approach which is worth of consideration. Let's see: 1) I have carefully reviewed you list of "47 sources of variation" to which you repeatedly refer. I find that list at best ambiguous. Many of the points are clearly forms of random variation, and the only point to be deducted from them is that random variation is not effected only by single nucleotide mutations. Well, that's very easy and very trivial: obviously, any kind of random variation can modify the genome, but it is always a random process. The relevance when you try to compute probabilities is just the same. Randomness is randomness, and its search power is always the same. In that category we can put deletion, inserion, frameshft mutations, inversion, and all chromosome random modifications. Where is the point? All all them are random mutations, or if you prefer random variations. Maybe we can discover thousands of ways of random variation, what is the difference? Another class of items in the list is definitely ambiguous: it's the long series which starts with the word "changes". Changes due to what? In the list there is no clue about that. If you say : "changes in activation factor function in eukaryotes (increasing or decreasing binding to promoters)", what do you mean? Changes secondary to random variation? In that case, we are still resfhuflling the same concept. The same can be said for items like: "addition or removal of gene products (especially enzymes) from biochemical pathways; splitting or combining of biochemical pathways". You seem to be listing a series of "results" and not of causes or mechanisms. I find this point more interesting: "deletion/insertion of one or more genes via transposons". But, if you mean that even that is random, we are again in the same class. Or it could not be random, and I am very interested in anything which is not random (except NS), because the only two alternatives to randomness are necessity and/or design. So, could transposons be an instrument of necessity and/or design? I am really interested in that possibility, as I am in any new perspective about the role of non coding DNA. The same applies, in my opinion, for the role of imprinting and of any other epigenetic factor. Finally, there are in your list a few items (especially the last ones) which, although vague and not detailed, seem to hint a (neo)Lamarckian perspective. That I am going to discuss in the next point. 2) Reading those final points in your list (the "changes... in response" type), I get the impression that in some way you are trying (like other darwinists have done) to reintroduce, in "new" forms, a Lamarckian perspective, seeing evolution more as a form of "adaptation" than as the classical product of RV + NS. One of your affirmations in your last posts seems to confirm that: "However, it is becoming increasingly clear that most of biology is not simply reducible to genetic information (the current rage for “genomics” notwithstanding). On the contrary, changes in genetic information are only one way of changing heritable information among biological organisms, and may be a result rather than a cause of phenotypic variation (look up “genetic assimilation” and “genetic accomodation” for a detailed explanation of how this might be the case)." Well, I have looked. Here is Wiki on "genetic assimilation": "Genetic assimilation is a process by which the effect of an environmental condition, such as exposure to a teratogen, is used in conjunction with artificial selection or natural selection to create a strain of organisms with similar changes in phenotype that are encoded genetically. Despite superficial appearances, this does not require the inheritance of acquired characters, although epigenetic inheritance could potentially influence the result." and: "It has not been proven that genetic assimilation occurs in natural evolution, but it is difficult to rule it out from having at least a minor role" And this is about "genetic accommodation", from a paper by Mary Jane West-Eberhard: "I argue that the origin of species differences can be explained, and the synthesis of Darwinism with genetics can be improved, by invoking two concepts: developmental recombination and genetic accommodation. Developmental recombination, or developmental reorganization of the ancestral phenotype (5), explains where new variants come from: they come from the preexisting phenotype, which is developmentally plastic and therefore subject to reorganization to produce novel variants when stimulated to do so by new inputs from the genome or the environment. Genetic accommodation, or genetic change in the regulation or form of a novel trait (5), is the process by which new developmental variants become established within populations and species because of genetic evolution by selection on phenotypic variation when it has a genetic component." So, I try to sum up. This forms of revival of Lamarkism seem to start from the phenotype (ancestral or not) and its (intelligent?) interactions with environment, and then they postulate phenotypre selecion in absence og genetic change, and then, at some point, the transposition of the change at the genetic level. While all that is at least different form the usual model, I am certainly peplexed at many levels. The model is even more vague then the classical darwinian model. It poses a lot of difficulties from the point of view of information, and I am sure that it requires design concepts to be feasible at many of its focal points. Moreover, my impression is that the final point, thatg is genetic accommodation, has still to be achieved through some form of random variation, or of design, and so nothing changes. It seems even more magic how a phenotipic variation, probably due to intelligently designed potentialities in the ancestral phenotype/genotype, can translate into a "new" genetic information. By what means? Again, magical reshuffling of cards? Finally, I have big epistemological problems with what you say in post #38: "I have taken the position that since macroevolution includes (indeed, depends fundamentally upon) contingent historical processes (such as mass extinctions, endosymbiotic innovation, genome fusions, etc.), which by definition cannot be predicted nor mathematically modeled, but only described as historical events, macroevolution cannot be reduced to the kind of mathematically based theory that characterized the evolutionary “modern synthesis” of the mid-20th century." Frankly, I don't see how any scientific theory may be created without a rigorous mathematical, or at least logical, framework. If something "cannot be predicted nor mathematically modeled, but only described as historical events", than it is not science, but cronichle. If one renounces the logical mathematical approach, one is renouncing the chance of building theories.gpuccio_{March 5, 2008
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JPCollado@4 and gpuccio@5: Mazur is not the brightest bulb. The 2nd and 3rd quotations in #4 are of her, yet JP treats them as views of dim-wit scientists. I had problems from the get-go with her quote of Stuart Kauffman:
Well there’s 25,000 genes, so each could be on or off. So there’s 2 x 2 x 2 x 25,000 times. Well that’s 2 to the 25,000th. Right?
Wrong. That would be 200,000. What Kauffman must have said, and Mazur must have been too math- challenged to get, was "there's 2 x 2 x ... x 2, 25,000 times." I can't find any evidence that Mazur digested what the scientists told her. For the most part, she's strung quotations and pictures. It appears she's paid by the column-inch. The Altenberg meeting is certainly very interesting, but she has not cast much light on it with her verbiage. She did, however, record a wonderfully insightful observation by Richard Lewontin:
[S]cientists are always looking to find some theory or idea that they can push as something that nobody else ever thought of because that's the way they get their prestige. . . .they have an idea which will overturn our whole view of evolution because otherwise they're just workers in the factory, so to speak. And the factory was designed by Charles Darwin.
This has always been true, and claims by UDers that evolutionary biologists swallow "dogma" of the modern evolutionary synthesis hook, line, and sinker have always been false. Evolutionary theory has never wanted for divergent thinkers.Turner Coates_{March 5, 2008
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Patrick, "On “random mutations.”" I think a number of us have begun to use RV random variation, rather than RM because some of the variation is non-mutagenic, such as natural desasters. Patrick, "“Engines of variation” wouldn’t be bad since we could shorten it down to EV+NS for general conversation." Patrick, the problem with the term "engines" is that it implies an intentional mechanism. The variations are, as I understand, well "accidents". Allan MacNeill, "More useful might be “non-foresighted." Good enough. I will, from now on, use NFV+NS. Non-foresighted variation + Natural Selection. I still say that there isn't any way of producing some of the systems that exist on non-foresighted variation + natural selection alone. The most obvious problem with this mechanistic pair is that many of the mechanisms appear to not have a half-way point. If natural selection cannot work until the mechanism (think flagellum or HAR1F) is complete, if any half-way would rather be destructive to the organism then there is no smooth path up mount probable. The only way up mount probable is for there to be a path with a sufficiently mild slope that a person in a manual wheelchair can navigate it. I don't personally think that such a path exists. Dr. MacNeill, I'm still waiting for some serous wisdom from you as an explanation of systemsevolution. So far, it appears that you have been happy to set up ID strawmen, and bowl them over. Please show us how these systems can develop via NFV+NS.bFast_{March 5, 2008
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Allen MacNeill @ 33 wrote:
Granville Sewell: Please see my note vis-a-vis tyharris and gpuccio, above. Calling someone “stupid” is not within the bounds of civilized discussion, IMHO.
Yet, Mr. MacNeill, I am deeply offended when someone will so mischaracterize my doubts of a certain ideology as a religious caricature or something very close to it, especially when describing an organization that has served as an outlet for expressing these doubts as a "Neo-Creationism Propaganda Ministry." (see your comment dated 10/9/07 @ http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/) Now what level of cordiality could be expected when someone who is truly seeking to “civilly” debate the merits of a particular scientific or philosophic creed is confronted with such unwelcoming statements?JPCollado_{March 5, 2008
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Patrick: It is perhaps instructive to point out that Darwin never used the term "random mutation" (nor "random" anything, for that matter) in the Origin of Species. The concept of randomicity is a mostly 20th century concept (especially in biology), and one of dubious empirical merit IMHO. More useful might be "non-foresighted", as that describes more precisely the character of most (but not all) of the new variations that appear among the members of populations of living organisms. For example, how would one go about showing that something is "genuinely random" as opposed to "pseudorandom"?Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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Gil Dodgen: You wrote: "The problem as I see it is not getting enough variation, but getting enough original, novel, innovative variation." That was the point to my list of 47 mechanisms for generating phenotypic variation. Several of the mechanisms listed are capable of producing as much genetic variation as there are elementary particles in the known universe, while others (such as whole genome fusion) are capable of producing novel genetic combinations equivalent to the "hybridization" of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and the collected works of Anthony Trollope. In other words, the "engines of variation" are more than up to the task of generating anything that could conceivably be of use to a living organism (plus an immensely larger amount of useless variation). As to the question of whether any of the mechanisms in my list can produce "new" information, the answer is "yes", so long as one recognizes that what really matters is the production of new phenotypic variation. As I have already pointed out, the exclusive concentration on genetic variation on the part of both evolutionary biologists (EBers) and IDers has until very recently blinded us to the tremendous potential of other mechanisms that produce the same effects (see Jablonka and Lamb/Evolution in Four Dimensions for a complete discussion).Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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On "random mutations": Like bfast already stated ID proponents are using the term in reference to everything. For example, in Behe's new book he lists all the mechanisms on one page but in general he uses "random mutations" unless a distinction needs to be made. I've said it at least several times on UD before, but I'd like a better term that encapsulates all mechanisms for variation. "Engines of variation" wouldn't be bad since we could shorten it down to EV+NS for general conversation. But what has become the standard used by biologists; or is everyone currently using their favored set of terms?Patrick_{March 5, 2008
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Jerry: One of the basic principles of evolutionary biology is that natural selection can't be the mechanism by which speciation occurs. Darwin himself pointed this out in the Origin of Species. In chapter 8 ("Hybridism", located here: http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F373&viewtype=side&pageseq=263) Darwin points out that "On the theory of natural selection the case is especially important, inasmuch as the sterility of hybrids could not possibly be of any advantage to them, and therefore could not have been acquired by the continued preservation of successive profitable degrees of sterility." In other words, since sterility cannot be inherited from parents to offspring, it cannot evolve by natural selection. On the contrary, Darwin (and virtually all other evolutionary biologists) assert that speciation happens "by accident"; that is, when populations are prevented from interbreeding, they become different from each other via all of the mechanisms I list on my blog. Eventually they become sufficiently different from each other that either they don't interbreed (for behavioral reasons, in the case of animals) or they can't interbreed, as the result of the accumulation of increasing degrees of genetic/developmental incompatibility. Once separated by reproductive incompatibility, natural selection can begin to eliminate those individuals that do not discriminate between compatible and incompatible mates, via various mechanisms (look up "prezygotic and postzygotic isolating mechanisms"). A minority of evolutionary biologists believe that such isolating mechanisms can "take hold" while populations are still panmictic, a process called "sympatric speciation", but there is relatively little unambiguous empirical evidence for this, and a mountain of empirical evidence pointing toward allopatric speciation (i.e. speciation that results from geographical isolation). So, your questions all point in what appears to be the wrong direction: speciation (technically, "cladogenesis") isn't the result of natural selection, but rather other genetic and behavioral mechanisms, none of which have as their "purpose" the production of new species. However, they aren't bad questions in and of themselves. On the contrary, they highlight the difference between anagenesis — the evolution of adaptations within an evolving clade (which happens via natural selection) — and cladogenesis — the splitting of evolving lineages into the reproductively isolated populations we call "species".Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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I’ll also have to admit I don’t have a lot of admiration for evolutionary biologists and here why: It seems impossible to get any of them to acknowledge what is obvious to the layman
Thank you, Granville! Someone had to say it. When I think off all the thousands of biologists with all their book learning and fancy degrees, it is just maddening that they refuse to recongize what is obvious to a simple high school graduate like myself.poachy_{March 5, 2008
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I just want to know what key roles such factors as inheritance, fecundity and "46 other sources of variation" played in the creation of something so comparatively simple like the flagellum.JPCollado_{March 5, 2008
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Mr. MacNeill, I visited your blog and was immediately struck by the following. You wrote:
Creationists and supporters of Intelligent Design Theory ("IDers") are fond of erecting a strawman in place of evolutionary theory, one that they can then dismantle and point to as "proof" that their "theories" are superior.
Are you sure IDers and creationists are the only ones guilty of using this logical fallacy? How were you able to determine that this is not an otherwise reactionary response on the part of IDers in their attempts at correcting the other side, if indeed it was found out that the darwinist camp was also implicated in bringing up such an "error?" Do you really stand by this statement (as per your quote above) and are you willing to rise or fall upon discovery of the facts?JPCollado_{March 5, 2008
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I'll admit my "these people are too stupid to reason with" was over the top, but I'll also have to admit I don't have a lot of admiration for evolutionary biologists and here why: It seems impossible to get any of them to acknowledge what is obvious to the layman, that the problem they are studying is FUNDAMENTALLY different from all other problems of science. I talk a lot about the second law of thermodynamics, about the fact that Nature cannot create order out of disorder, and invariably I am given examples like the snowflake (I'll bet I've heard that one 20 times) or crystalization to show that Nature can indeed create order out of disorder, hence there is nothing strange about it creating human brains. So I have a bit of an overreaction every time I hear the snowflake postulated as an example of the order that Nature can create on her own. Is it really so hard to see the fundamental difference between unintelligent forces creating snowflakes, and creating brains?Granville Sewell_{March 5, 2008
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Allen, I wish you well and hope for a full and speedy recovering concerning your health problems. Concerning the following:
However, we now have a century of empirical research into the various “engines of variation”, and as the various comments above have all indicated, they are fantastically fecund. That is, the problem is not getting enough variation to produce everything we see in nature, but rather how that variation is “pruned” to produce the relatively small number of actual existing variations.
The problem as I see it is not getting enough variation, but getting enough original, novel, innovative variation. My checkers program to which I linked is composed of about 65,000 lines of C code. In includes hundreds of modules, routines, mathematical operations, etc.: move generation, search algorithms, evaluation functions, hash tables, sorting routines, decision trees, boolean operations, indexing functions, memory access, time control, statistical move-history heuristics, disk I/O procedures, user-interface routines, graphics routines, and much, much more. The number of possible ways all these routines and operations could be recombined is virtually limitless, but you're never going to get from a checkers program to a word processor, PhotoShop, a database program, or an Internet application through recombination. Completely new and original code is required. This is the problem as I see it for biological innovation by proposed evolutionary mechanisms. Variation and recombination don't represent the entire story. It seems clear that recombination of existing biological information, as fecund and varied as it might be, is not going to get you from a bacterium to Bach. Totally new stuff is required -- really sophisticated stuff -- and lots of it. Of course, variation, recombination, and successive expression of dormant biological information could do the trick if the entire history of life had been preprogrammed into the first living cells. Some find this to be a more reasonable hypothesis than contemporary evolutionary theory, and more in keeping with the testimony of the fossil record, which overall is characterized by stasis and the sudden appearance of innovation.GilDodgen_{March 5, 2008
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Dr. MacNeill:
random mutations are only one (and probably a relatively minor) source of phenotypic variation between individuals in populations.
I have read your list of variations. It appears that when you discuss the IDers view of "random mutations" you are assuming that we mean point mutations. We don't. As with your "natural selection is not random" comment, we are not that simple. It remains, though your list of variations goes far beyond the point mutation, it is a list of either contingent events (events without plan or purpose) that happen to an organism without strategy to give the organism any advantage (random with reguard to the organism) or are mechanistic -- the (presumed) product of the above. (In here I would include co-evolution, though it doesn't do a great job of fitting. In any case, organism A wanders from ideal fit via natural causes and organism B catches up via NDE, then organism B wanders, and A catches up. Its a mechanism that maintains balance, a presumed product of the same.) Dr. MacNeill:
Perhaps this is because, as several people have pointed out, many of you are computer programmers (or sys admins, etc.)
Actually, we are a pretty advanced group of systems programmers. This is as different from system administrators as car designers are from fleet managers. And I bet that between us we hold 50 patents, along with other national and international awards and honors. As a systems programmer, I am unimpressed with microevolution -- the NDE mechanisms explain it just fine. I am also unimpressed with macroevolution as defined by evolutionary biologists -- the crossing of the imaginary species boundary. We know that if you take a wolf and breed it, you can get all of the various breeds of dogs. It is absolutely reasonable that if you put a wolf into a new environment with many available niches, a variety of breeds would each establish itself in a niche, resulting in speciation by the current definition. Once the wolves had established themselves in their niches, contingent mutational events, filtered by natural selection, would move these species into more ideal fits to this new environment. I, as most of us, are quite content that this is pretty much what happened to produce the variety of species that we have. This all seems well within the realm of what RV+NS can accomplish. As a systems programmer, however, I am intrigued by the systems that have developed. They are incredible. They are better than I can do. I think therefore, that seeing as the biological community already has a whimpy definition for macroevolution, we need a new term, call it systemsevolution, to present the stuff that is truly challenging. One of those intriguing systems is the bacterial flagellum. Behe suggests that this systme is unevolvable. So far the best excuse for a just so story is something produced by Matzke. His story should be testable in the lab. I bet his scenerio is unreproduceable. Another intriguing system, as you mentioned earlier, is SNRPs. It produces data compression technology. As such, it seems unevolvable to me. Show me that it is not. And my third favorite is the HAR1F, an ultra-conserved RNA gene that seems to have taken on 18 point mutations in the human. It appears to me that these 18 mutations had to have occurred simultaneously. This small event alone is probably less probable then the UPB.bFast_{March 5, 2008
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Dr. MacNeill, I have a rather complicated and lengthy set of questions to ask you about natural selection and species formation. Would it make sense to do it on your blog or should I post it here. Essentially I believe that most of the species in the world are the result of natural selection but that naturalistic process do not explain the original gene pools from which all these species are formed. I have used the percentage 99.99% of the species owe their origin to NS but not all. Many here get hung on just how much NS can explain and by NS you can include other genetic processes that operate to change a gene pool such as genetic drift and gene flow or whatever other mechanism you can point to. As a hastily put together response to a post a couple a weeks ago on this topic go to https://uncommondescent.com/the-design-of-life/new-at-the-design-of-life-can-hybrids-create-new-species/#comments I would like to expand on the comment I made on this thread and if possible get your reactions to it. I realize that you will not agree with everything but would welcome your critical remarks if you have the time.jerry_{March 5, 2008
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DaveScot, "and they [snowflakes] don’t fit together with other snowflakes to form machines." What you talkin' 'bout! You don't live where I live, obviously. Around here the snowflakes assemble into machines that we call roof-crushers. They're quite effective.bFast_{March 5, 2008
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Granville Sewell: Apology accepted; indeed, I take responsibility for having assumed that your comment was directed at evolutionary biologists in general, rather than Stuart Kaufman in particular.Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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bFast: I think the confusion between your position and mine is at least partly the result of a common confusion among people considering these issues: the difference between macroevolution and the origin and evolution of adaptations. The theory of evolution, as originally presented by Darwin, was actually a synthesis addressing both of these issues. Darwin proposed that "descent with modification" (i.e. evolution) had occurred, and proposed natural selection as the cause of such modification. He also explained the origin of adaptations as the result of natural selection. In more modern terms, it is generally valid to equate "descent with modification" with the technical term "cladogenesis" (i.e. the process of macroevolution) and "natural selection" with the technical term "anagenesis" (i.e. one of the processes subsumed under "microevolution"). Hence, my statement about macroevolution was intended mostly to address cladogenesis, not anagenetic origin of adaptations. Virtually all of ID is about anagenetic origin of adaptations, and rarely if ever addresses the broader topics of cladogenetic macroevolution. Again, this may be due to the fact that evolutionary biologists have formulated precise and testable mathematical models for anagenetic microevolution, but have until recently assumed that such models could be extended to macroevolution without modification. I have taken the position that since macroevolution includes (indeed, depends fundamentally upon) contingent historical processes (such as mass extinctions, endosymbiotic innovation, genome fusions, etc.), which by definition cannot be predicted nor mathematically modeled, but only described as historical events, macroevolution cannot be reduced to the kind of mathematically based theory that characterized the evolutionary "modern synthesis" of the mid-20th century. Please let me know if I haven't addressed your query to your satisfaction.Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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Allen_MacNeill, You are right, I apologize for the use of the word "stupid", which by the way wasn't directed at you (I hadn't even read your comment), it was directed at the author, Stuart Kauffmann, of the quote at the top of my comment, who is called a "genius" in the article.Granville Sewell_{March 5, 2008
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To all: Many of the comments and questions in this and other threads seem to indicate to me that most of you consider genetic information to be the sine qua non of evolutionary biology, if not biology as a whole. Perhaps this is because, as several people have pointed out, many of you are computer programmers (or sys admins, etc.) Ironically, this means that you fundamentally agree with the framers of the evolutionary "modern synthesis", whose mathematical models were based on precisely the same assumption. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that most of biology is not simply reducible to genetic information (the current rage for "genomics" notwithstanding). On the contrary, changes in genetic information are only one way of changing heritable information among biological organisms, and may be a result rather than a cause of phenotypic variation (look up "genetic assimilation" and "genetic accomodation" for a detailed explanation of how this might be the case).Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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DaveScot: You wrote "Our position is bascially that non-random natural selection isn’t sufficient to generate all the complexity of life if its only input is random mutations." And I completely agree with you. As the list of the "engines of variation" on my blog was intended to indicate, random mutations are only one (and probably a relatively minor) source of phenotypic variation between individuals in populations. There is no necessary reason to assume that all of the various mechanisms that produce phenotypic variation are random, other than that it makes mathematical modeling immensely easier. IMO this is why the early population geneticists (Fisher, Haldane, Wright, etc.) included such an assumption in their mathematical models for evolution. However, we now have a century of em pirical research into the varioius "engines of variation", and as the various comments above have all indicated, they are fantastically fecund. That is, the problem is not getting enough variation to produce everything we see in nature, but rather how that variation is "pruned" to produce the relatively small number of actual existing variations. As just one example, why do insects all have just six legs, while land vertebrates have just four. The answer is clearly that the genetic and developmental processes that cause the formation of legs in insects and vertebrates are constrained, almost certainly by a combination of "rules of form" (such as those discussed by D'Arcy Thompson and Gregory Bateson) and historical contingency. The only way to find out is to do the hard, slogging work of formulating and testing hypotheses, publishing the results, and then discussing the results and there implications in public and with the kind of mutual respect (and absolutely ruthless critical viewpoint) to which most scholars are committed.Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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I found this passage by biologist Stuart Kaufmann very interesting [...] it seems that someone is beginning to do the math, which is comforting.
Stu Kaufmann introduced random Boolean networks as models of genetic regulatory networks in 1969.Turner Coates_{March 5, 2008
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Granville Sewell: Please see my note vis-a-vis tyharris and gpuccio, above. Calling someone "stupid" is not within the bounds of civilized discussion, IMHO.Allen_MacNeill_{March 5, 2008
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