Is Darwinism “completely worthless to science”?

_{News
August 14, 2018

Culture, Darwinism, Intelligent Design

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Culture
Darwinism
Intelligent Design}

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Neurosurgeon Michael Egnor doesn’t mince words:

I despise Darwinism. It is, in my view, an utterly worthless scientific concept promulgated by a third-rate barnacle collector and hypochondriac to justify functional, if not explicit, atheism. Richard Dawkins got it right: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. A low bar, admittedly, but “natural selection” satisfied, and still satisfies, many. Even bright Christians, regrettably.

Darwin still has some cache among design advocates — the usual trope is that he provided evidence for common descent and explained microevolution. In this I differ from some of my friends and colleagues sympathetic to ID/Thomism. Darwin’s “theory” is completely worthless to science, a degradation of philosophy, and lethal to culture.

As Jerry Fodor (an atheist philosopher) has pointed out, natural selection is an utterly empty concept. It does no work; it explains nothing. Evolution is driven by natural history and genetic and phenotypic constraint. “Natural selection” adds nothing to our understanding of the process. Of course things change and survivors survive. Any real understanding of change in populations entails understanding the natural history of the changes and the biological constraints imposed by nature. Some of this evolutionary change is best explained as accidental. Some is best explained as design, and the conjunction of accident and design is where evolutionary change takes place. “Natural selection” is meaningless junk science — dismal logic put to the service of atheism. Darwinism is the most effective engine of atheism in modern times, except perhaps for consumer culture, for which Darwin bears some responsibility. “Survival of the fittest” casts a scientific imprimatur on acquisition as a life-goal. Michael Egnor, “A Darwinian Pilgrimage” at Evolution News

Hat tip: Philip Cunningham

See also: The brain is not a “meat computer.” Dramatic recoveries from brain injury highlight the difference

and

Neurosurgeon outlines why machines can’t think: The hallmark of human thought is meaning, and the hallmark of computation is indifference to meaning.

Comments

Eugene S @ 113 114 You missed: "Any gene variant is a property of the individual and only then of the population, right?" You say: "A population responds to the environmental impetus by adjusting itself to produce maximum amount of offspring" yet that is directly contradicted by dying populations that DO NOT "respond to the environmental impetus..." Not a matter of "what you call it". The problem is that Darwinism invents all kind of crazy concepts with no basis in reality. This includes "natural selection" and "fitness" and you not being able to answer the simple questions asked is a direct proof of that.Nonlin.org_{September 20, 2018
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evolution:
The % of biologists that support ‘natural selection’ is in the high 90s.
Support it with what? What does that even mean? Natural selection has never been observed to produce anything more than a change in allele frequency over time within a population. And given that we don't understand the true nature of genetic change we can't even be sure about that. They can't even convince themselves that natural selection can do any more than that.ET_{September 19, 2018
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Nonlin 'that is not “fitness”.' I don't really mind what you call it. A population responds to the environmental impetus by adjusting itself to produce maximum amount of offspring. That is all there is to it at a high level. Whatever the other disadvantages of the model, it is not circular. I do not understand why you are having a such an issue with it.Eugene S_{September 7, 2018
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Nonlin "What is the property of the population but not of the individual in this case?" Percent C of individuals with a given trait.Eugene S_{September 7, 2018
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@ET The % of biologists that support 'natural selection' is in the high 90s. Until you convince most of them, well, you're not even wrong. UD Editors: Wow evil. Around 1500 the % of scholars who believed the sun orbited the earth was in the high 90s. So was Copernicus not even wrong? *palm forehead* We suppose appealing to consensus is comforting if all you want is a confirmation of your bias. It also allows you to draw conclusions without all of that messy and tiresome examination of the evidence. You've got that going for you too.evilution_{September 2, 2018
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Eugense S @105 So you agree "fitness" can only be measured by survival (not independent). If so, what is the point of "fitness"? Isn't a population made of its members? What can be a property of the population but not of the individual in this case? Any gene variant is a property of the individual and only then of the population, right? What predictions can you make on "fitness" traits other than status quo aka stasis? Example? If you're thinking something like "the spread of a virus in a population", that is not "fitness".Nonlin.org_{August 21, 2018
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HeKS, This might serve as a good example. This response to a question ("What is a simple example of a genetic algorithm?") on the website quora.com explains very briefly a GA approach to the Traveling Salesman problem. Here's the essential part:
Problem statement : Given a function that takes bit strings as inputs, and produces a score, find the bit string with the maximum/minimum score. Notice that you need bit strings as inputs, because the genetic operations are defined on bit strings. (You may be able to define mutation operations for other kind of inputs, but the original framework only allows bit strings). Now, this is an NP-hard problem, that is, there is no efficient way to solve this problem exactly. So we resort to approximate methods, that search the space of all bit strings. Because we cannot search the entire space efficiently, we use heuristics to navigate the space, to maximize the probability of finding a good solution. Genetic algorithms is one such class of heuristics. Let’s look at an example. Say you want to solve Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) on a given graph with 16 vertices. So there are 16! possibilities. This problem can be modelled using bit strings — represent each vertex using 4 bits, 0000 to 1111. So a path on the graph can be represented as a 64-bit string by concatenating the bit representations of consecutive vertices on the tour. Consequently, each 64-bit string can be assigned a score — if the tour is valid, the score is equal to the path length, if it is invalid (repeated vertices), then the score is ∞. You want to find the minimum of this function. The basic framework of genetic algorithms looks like the following:
1. Start with some randomly generated bit strings, called population. 2. Choose 2 [or more] bit strings from the current set of bit strings, and perform genetic operations (cross-over, mutation, etc.) to generate new bit strings. 3. Evaluate newly generated bit strings, and update the best bit string found so far. 4. Update the current population. 5. Go to step 2.
You repeat the steps until convergence, or for a fixed time.
daveS_{August 21, 2018
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Genetic algorithms use an active search heuristic to solve the problems they were intelligently designed to solve. Natural selection is not a search heuristic and it is not actively trying to solve anything. Natural selection is really nothing more than contingent serendipity.ET_{August 21, 2018
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HeKS, I also doubt that Darwin's theory was a necessary condition for the creation of genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation in general. I thought about asking in my first or second post where this field would stand if "Darwinism" (or some equivalent) had never caught on. I suspect something like EC would have eventually come about, so I agree there is indeed some factor of historical accident involved. I would like to come back to the statement that, say, genetic algorithms (and EC generally) model artificial selection, not natural selection. The examples of computation via GAs that I've looked at are very abstract, and quite far removed from physical reality. It's not clear to me how we know a particular GA models one kind of selection but not the other. What features of GAs allow one to make that determination?daveS_{August 21, 2018
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daveS #95 and #99 It's possible I was not as clear about my meaning as I should have been. What I was trying to point out is that Darwin was inspired by artificial selection, and then when it came to Genetic / Evolutionary Algorithms, what they actually ended up modeling was artificial selection, not natural selection. So they ended up modeling the thing Darwin's theory was inspired by rather than the theory itself. That said, you're right that as a purely historical issue they were inspired by Darwin's theory. I guess what I would ask, though, is whether GAs would have failed to have ever been conceived of in the absence of Darwin's theory about Natural Selection? Perhaps so. But given that they ultimately ended up modeling a process that had been around and known long before Darwin came on the scene, and given that Darwin made specific reference to that process (Artificial Selection) as his own inspiration, it seems rather questionable to me that Darwin's theory about Natural Selection was a necessary condition for the eventual creation of GAs. That they happened to have been inspired by Darwin's theory seems more like an historical accident than an historical necessity because, in the end, all the roads lead back to artificial selection. And if that's the case, the creation of GAs really doesn't give us much reason to disagree with Egnor's assessment of the value of Darwinism to science as expressed in the OP. Still, it was inaccurate for me to say that GA's were inspired by artificial selection and you were correct in your statement about their inspiration. I should have said that it was Darwin who was inspired by artificial selection, while evolutionary and genetic algorithms ultimately modeled the thing that Darwin was inspired by (regardless of the fact that they were technically inspired by natural selection), making artificial selection the idea that was actually useful to science. Take careHeKS_{August 21, 2018
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daveS @73 You raise a very interesting question. I have no ready answer to it.Eugene S_{August 20, 2018
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Nonlin.org I am sorry if we have gone a full circle but I still think 'fitness' is about a population of organisms (not an individual) and it is measured 'post-factum' based on the number of offspring having a particular trait as a proportion of the population. We can do predictions about if and how fast this or that trait is fixed in the population before fixation happens. It seems really straightforward and I still see no tautology there ;) Maybe I am missing something.Eugene S_{August 20, 2018
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HeKS @94 An excellent point. hnorman5 @100 I had a similar eureka moment when I read about it in David Abel's articles. Yes, the concept of probabilistic resources is key.Eugene S_{August 20, 2018
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Not for a dogmatic Darwinist.john_a_designer_{August 17, 2018
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john_a_designer @101 Actually, Darwinism and its neo is falsifiable and proven false: Gradualism fails – http://nonlin.org/gradualism/ Natural selection fails – http://nonlin.org/natural-selection/ Divergence of character fails – http://nonlin.org/evotest/ Speciation fails – http://nonlin.org/speciation-problems/ DNA “essence of life” fails – http://nonlin.org/dna-not-essence-of-life/ Randomness fails – http://nonlin.org/random-abuse/ Abiogenesis fails – http://nonlin.org/warmpond/ Science against Religion fails – http://nonlin.org/philosophy-religion-and-science/ etc., etc. And let’s test it again and make sure it fails again and again: http://nonlin.org/evotest/Nonlin.org_{August 17, 2018
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Notice how Jerry Coyne along with many others (Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins etc.) argue that Darwin’s theory of evolution virtually proves that atheism and atheistic materialism are true. In other words, Darwinist’s are using “science” to establish a metaphysically based world view. From Egnor’s article:
Coyne tells of a summer course at Oxford for Harvard undergrads. The young pilgrims tour “Darwinland” (Coyne’s word). They visit the messiah’s birthplace, his hometown (Shrewsbury/Nazareth), the sites of his revelations, and walk in the footsteps of his prophets and apostles. Pilgrims can finger his artifacts and gaze on his holy books. It’s quite a spectacle. It is clearly a religious journey, with the reverence and fervor of a cult. And that is the meaning of Darwinism. This worthless science, idiot philosophy, and cultural rot is the creation myth of atheists, and homage is paid, as a duty, to the prophet and to his priests. Darwinian idolatry would be funny, if not for the trail of misery and horror Darwin left in his wake. The salient influence of Darwinian worship is not on science, but on ethics. With the Origin of Species and Descent of Man, vindication of the strong and eradication of the weak was, for the first time in history, given a scientific imprimatur. The ugliest impact of the Darwinian understanding of man is this lie: man is an evolved animal, nothing more, and all of man’s highest qualities evolved from the victory of the strong over the weak.
There is no doubt that Darwin was not primarily motivated by science but by a materialistic world view which he came to embrace because of the influence of family and friends. He saw design in nature and was trying to disprove it. Two biographies by Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist and Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins clearly documents Darwin’s personal evolution from a Christian theist to an atheistic materialist. His “theory” resonated with 19th century scientists not because of its science but because of its materialistic worldview. Up above @ 74 I asked: “Why do people keep clinging to Darwinism like a child’s security blanket?” The answer: “Because it provides a metaphysical hand and glove fit with atheistic naturalism/materialism.” https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/is-darwinism-completely-worthless-to-science/#comment-663097 No other theory of evolution will do. In other words, Darwin’s theory and Darwinism are not falsifiable.john_a_designer_{August 17, 2018
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Eugene S @12 The words you bolded "selection from among" and "selection for" led to me having a eureka moment with respect to understanding Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's book. As of now, in my opinion, their book becomes a little less opaque if you read it not as about "selection" versus "selection for" but as about "selection from" versus "selection for". So now I've achieved about a 15 percent understanding of that book. And- As far as the debate over cancer is concerned, a Darwinian interpretation is in a Catch 22 situation. If the probablistic resources exist for the tumors to gain mutations that give it an advantage, then we're looking at "selection from". That can be modeled scientifically but it gives no insight into how evolution achieves the illusion of design. If the cancer does not have such probablistic resources, then the question becomes how does it achieve the variation. That would be "selection for" and that requires a designer.hnorman5_{August 17, 2018
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HeKS, PS to my #95: Here is an excerpt from Mitchell's An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms, pages 2--3. I added bolding to highlight the beginning of the part on genetic algorithms.
In the 1950s and the 1960s several computer scientists independently studied evolutionary systems with the idea that evolution could be used as an optimization tool for engineering problems. The idea in all these systems was to evolve a population of candidate solutions to a given problem, using operators inspired by natural genetic variation and natural selection. In the 1960s, Rechenberg (1965, 1973) introduced "evolution strategies" (Evolutionsstrategie in the original German), a method he used to optimize real-valued parameters for devices such as airfoils. This idea was further developed by Schwefel (1975, 1977). The field of evolution strategies has remained an active area of research, mostly developing independently from the field of genetic algorithms (although recently the two communities have begun to interact). (For a short review of evolution strategies, see Back, Hoffmeister, and Schwefel 1991.) Fogel, Owens, and Walsh (1966) developed "evolutionary programming," a technique in which candidate solutions to given tasks were represented as finite-state machines, which were evolved by randomly mutating their state-transition diagrams and selecting the fittest. A somewhat broader formulation of evolutionary programming also remains an area of active research (see, for example, Fogel and Atmar 1993). Together, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, and genetic algorithms form the backbone of the field of evolutionary computation. Several other people working in the 1950s and the 1960s developed evolution-inspired algorithms for optimization and machine learning. Box (1957), Friedman (1959), Bledsoe (1961), Bremermann (1962), and Reed, Toombs, and Baricelli (1967) all worked in this area, though their work has been given little or none of the kind of attention or followup that evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, and genetic algorithms have seen. In addition, a number of evolutionary biologists used computers to simulate evolution for the purpose of controlled experiments (see, e.g., Baricelli 1957, 1962; Fraser 1957 a,b; Martin and Cockerham 1960). Evolutionary computation was definitely in the air in the formative days of the electronic computer. Genetic algorithms (GAs) were invented by John Holland in the 1960s and were developed by Holland and his students and colleagues at the University of Michigan in the 1960s and the 1970s. In contrast with evolution strategies and evolutionary programming, Holland's original goal was not to design algorithms to solve specific problems, but rather to formally study the phenomenon of adaptation as it occurs in nature and to develop ways in which the mechanisms of natural adaptation might be imported into computer systems. Holland's 1975 book Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems presented the genetic algorithm as an abstraction of biological evolution and gave a theoretical framework for adaptation under the GA.
daveS_{August 17, 2018
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daves has a valid point. Even though they missed the mark the GAs were based on their misunderstanding of what Darwin was saying. They thought they were mimicking natural selection but they just didn't fully understand the concept so their product didn't reflect their intent. The solution or solutions are actively searched with the program providing everything needed to achieve the goal. Natural selection isn't even a search heuristic let alone one dedicated to solving specific problemsET_{August 16, 2018
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Ambly:
By why should that matter.
Because it is the individual who has the cells that is the object of natural selection.
Unless you want to get into some bullshit syntactic argument based on your own shallow understanding of this topic?
Syntactic argument? Are you daft? The shallow misunderstanding is all yours, mr syntactic argument. Do you apply natural selection to skin cells also? Does it apply to hair? Is hairier better? Is having excess skin mean the skin is winning? What if one cancer cell in the tumah wants to take over and starts eating the other cancer cells? Would the others stick together (he he) to prevent it?ET_{August 16, 2018
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When tumors are stand-alone organisms, nay, when individual tumor cells are stand-alone organisms, come back and talk to us.
By why should that matter. Unless you want to get into some bullshit syntactic argument based on your own shallow understanding of this topic?Amblyrhynchus_{August 16, 2018
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Greetings, HeKS. Is the question of what inspired GAs not really an historical one? I have not read much about this, but my understanding was that the pioneers in the field were trying to simulate evolutionary processes which they believed occur in nature. At least some were "evolutionists" who accepted, rightly or wrongly, Darwin's theory, at least broadly. PS: I have looked only at genetic algorithms specifically, and essentially nothing else in the very diverse field of EC, so my perspective may be skewed by that.daveS_{August 16, 2018
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daveS #3 & Eugene S #6 I haven't had a chance to read the whole thread, so I don't know if anyone else made this point, but I thought I'd make it just in case.
daveS: Darwin’s theory inspired the field of evolutionary algorithms, so it is arguably not worthless to science.

Eugene S: GAs model artificial selection, not natural selection and therefore the fact itself that GAs exist does not lend any support to (neo)-Darwinian claims.
I agree with Eugene here. This means, though, Darwin's theory did not inspire evolutionary / genetic algorithms. In reality, the algorithms and Darwin's theory about natural selection are both inspired by artificial selection, which is a form of design. It's rather clear how design is worthwhile to science, and this is just one more example. On the other hand, if Darwin's theory is somehow useful to science, it doesn't seem to me like this would be a good example of it. Take care, HeKSHeKS_{August 16, 2018
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"It's NOT a tumah"! When tumors are stand-alone organisms, nay, when individual tumor cells are stand-alone organisms, come back and talk to us.ET_{August 16, 2018
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Ambly:
What are cells
It all depends on the context. Google helps- What are cellsET_{August 16, 2018
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individuals in the population
What are cells in a tumour if not individuals in a population?Amblyrhynchus_{August 16, 2018
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Ambly:
I really don’t see any prospect of you doign anything but parrot the same ill-informed lines you have so far.
Whatever you say projector-boy
You are now claiming that random variations that spread in a population as a result of their heritable effects on reproductive success are not an example of natural selection.
I made no such claim. You have to be desperate to say such a thing.
Your reason for saying this is because you personally hold that natural selection can’t operate on individual cells in a metazoan.
Ernst Mayr said it in "What Evolution Is"- He said natural selection pertains to the individuals in the population- the phenotype. He does say that if the individual genes make the phenotype less or more fit but the phenotype is still the object of NS. So that would be the humans/ organisms. Intelligent Design is NOT anti-evolution Analyzing, tracking and treating cancer has nothing to do with Darwin's great idea that natural selection is a designer mimic capable of producing Paley's appearance of design. It has nothing to do with universal common descent. But it does fly in the face of his fit individuals within a population- those with the adaptions that help them survive- are those who will take over a population given time.ET_{August 16, 2018
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I really don't see any prospect of you doign anything but parrot the same ill-informed lines you have so far. But, jut to round things off. You are now claiming that random variations that spread in a population as a result of their heritable effects on reproductive success are not an example of natural selection. Your reason for saying this is because you personally hold that natural selection can't operate on individual cells in a metazoan. Even if this was the case. Who impact would giving the special case of natural selection acting on cells within a multi-cellular creature have on anything? You can give it a special name if you'd like. But we could still apply the tools of evolutionary biology to study. Egnor's ignorant claim at this start of this thread is that Darwinian evolution is a "useless" field for the rest of biology. Whether or not you personally want to call natural selection acting within a body natural selection (and, again, I can think of no good reason to give them different names), it's still the case that the methods of "Darwinian evolution" are being used to analyse, predict and even treat cancers.Amblyrhynchus_{August 16, 2018
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Wow, no way I am as stupid as you are. I said that Darwinian evolution CAUSES cancer. I never said Darwinian evolution causes cancer to change to become whatever you think is more fit. But all that is moot as natural selection does not pertain to individual cells of a metazoan. And you cannot link to the scientific theory of evolution tat says otherwise.ET_{August 16, 2018
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I think you might be the stupidest person I've ever tried to communicate with. You just agreed Darwinian evolution occurs among cells in tumor, know you are backtracking on that? Or do you just have no idea what you are saying now?Amblyrhynchus_{August 16, 2018
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