Survival of the Sickest, Why We Need Disease

_{Salvador Cordova

April 27, 2009

Darwinism, Intelligent Design}

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“It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!”

This is a phrase a software engineer will use to jokingly confess his software has a defect.

When Sharon Moalem wrote the NY Times Bestseller, Survival of the Sickest: Why We Need Disease, he probably did not intend to make a joking confession of flaws in Darwin’s theory, but he succeed in doing so.

Recall the words of Darwin:

Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good.

C.DARWIN sixth edition Origin of Species — Ch#4 Natural Selection

If Darwin’s claim is true, why then are we confronted with numerous, persistent, hereditary diseases?

Can it be that Darwin was wrong? The obvious answer is yes. But in the face of an obvious flaw in Darwin’s ideas, Moalem argues that what appears to be a flaw in Darwin’s theory is actually an ingenious feature! Moalem extols the virtues of disease, and since disease is virtuous, natural selection will favor it.

It is accepted that sickle-cell anemia persists because of natural selection, but what about other diseases? Moalem explores many other diseases like diabetes, hemochromatosis, high cholesterol, early aging, favism, obesity, PANDAS, CCR5-delta32, xenophobia, etc. showing how natural selection incorporated these “virtuous” diseases into our species.

Moalem is not alone in arguing that natural selection creates through the process of destruction. For example, Allen Orr suggests that natural selection is the cause of blindness in Gammarus minus. In the world of Darwin, what happened to Gammarus minus isn’t the loss of vision, it is the creation of blindness. And since selection favors blindness in Gammarus minus, blindness is a functional improvement! Once again, Darwinism is immune to any testability through the process of constantly redefining what is considered “good”.

The net result is that Moalem’s book becomes an unwitting critique of Darwinian evolution. It highlights numerous empirical examples of how natural selection actually goes against Darwinian ideas of constant progress, and instead demonstrates how natural selection can be an agent of demise.

Comments

As a first approximation to an answer to the question I posed in the previous comment, I would propose that Ernst Mayr's requirement that a teleological object or process be produced and/or regulated by a program be perhaps the primary criterion by which design may be legitimately inferred. Furthermore, I would point out that such programs must have two characteristics: 1) they must precede the objects and/or processes whose assembly and operation they specify and regulate, and 2) like all forms of information, such programs must "run" in some kind of physical medium while specifying and regulating the assembly and operation of the object and/or process. That is, the program must consist of meaningful information, which must have a physical medium during at least part of its operation.Allen_MacNeill_{April 27, 2009
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While I believe that natural selection is part of an elaborate design process, the overall view of how it works is one of limitation. A great book that all interested in ID should get is "THE NATURAL LIMITS TO BIOLOGICAL CHANGE by Ray Bohlin, Ph.D." While Dr. Bohlin, who has a Ph.D. in biology, is involved primarily now in a religious mission, this book looks at change in species according to a naturalistic paradigm. It finds the same thing that dog breeders or breeders of other animals do. Namely, that there is a limit past which naturalistic processes cannot go in terms of inward change. The Darwinist answer is that of course that is true but over long periods of time, mutations along with gradual small changes will break down this barrier and allow the grand suite of species that we have seen in the fossil record and on earth today. Because this assumption of long periods has certain obvious predictions that have never been observed, the Darwinian paradigm has been falsified and a large number of evolutionary biologists have looked elsewhere for an answer. There seems to be some obvious reasons why one designing the naturalistic processes would want limitations and a big one is that an ecology is necessary for life to work. But if each individual organism is under the natural selection guidance to maximize its individuality by being faster, stronger, smarter, older, more prolific etc, it would destroy the ecology. Natural selection does not see these limitations as barriers but in reality they exist. And the answer to why is a troubling one for any naturalistic paradigm. Just one, the role of age, seems to be a very persistent barrier. After all being older means having the opportunity to have more offspring and would according to the NS paradigm be one most likely to have more survivors. But we do not see organisms getting older as time goes on. If one were going to design a viable ecology these limitations on change or the ability of one species to dominate another or to use all the resources of an ecology would be paramount. The individual species does not know or the selfish genes do not know that they must be Politically Correct organisms or Politically Correct genes and behave in such a way so as to ensure that their neighbors also have a chance too. But if one wanted also to have these organisms to have the capacity to adapt to changing environments there would be built in a mechanism for some change. Thus we have another Goldilocks effect, not too much and not too little. Eventually individual populations run into an environment where they cannot adjust and they go extinct but lots of others are around to take up their place but are limited. The universe seems to have an abundance of these Goldilocks phenomena. Why? Natural selection exists but there definitely seems to be a built in regulator on how much change it can effect.jerry_{April 27, 2009
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This is why, rather than simply asserting that things are designed, I have consistently asked "what structural and functional characteristics do unambiguously designed objects and processes (such as heat-seaking missles or thermostats) have, which can then be used as criteria to determine which natural objects and processes possess such structural and functional characteristics and may therefore legitimately be considered to be the product of design? BTW, simply saying that something "has" CSI" or is "IC" does not qualify as a sufficient "structural and functional characteristic" of a designed object, IMHO. IOW, CSI and IC may be necessary characteristics of a designed object or process, but I do not think they are sufficient in and of themselves.Allen_MacNeill_{April 27, 2009
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Sorry, that should be Lewontin (as in Richard Lewontin, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin ), not LewintonAllen_MacNeill_{April 27, 2009
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So far this thread has supported Gould and Lewinton's 1979 critique of what they called the "adaptationist paradigm". I hasten to add my voice of support to this critique, but would go on to point out that, if taken to its logical extension (which Gould and Vrba almost did in their 1982 paper on "exaptation"), this would not only undermine much of "Darwinian" evolutionary theory, but all of ID as well. The reason is quite simple: if (as Gould, Lewontin, and Vrba argue) adaptation isn't legitimately part of what evolutionary theory is about, then the whole idea of "design" and "function" is read completely out of evolution, leaving only descent with modification. I believe that this is, indeed, the case, and have posted about it at my blog: http://evolutionlist.blogspot.com/2006/06/are-adaptations-real.html I would strongly suspect that most ID proponents would disagree, and assert that the fact that adaptations aren't "real" is precisely why guidance by an "Intelligent Designer" is necessary. However, I would counter by asking "Why is design necessary at all in explaining nature?" Simply asserting that it must be designed doesn't make it so, nor does pointing to things we know are designed (i.e. by us) make it so. "If wishes were horses then beggars would ride..."Allen_MacNeill_{April 27, 2009
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In Orr searing critique of Dennett, Dennett's Strange Idea
Evolution is henceforth the magic word by which we shall solve all the riddles that surround us.-- Ernst Haeckel
and
When does adaptationism stop being a useful research strategy and start being a silly exercise in cleverness? Dennett never confronts these legitimate worries. It is far easier for him to ridicule Gould and Lewontin's rhetorical excesses. I suspect Dennett fails to appreciate these concerns in part because his thinking is guided by a subtly misleading picture of adaptation. Dennett is fond of speaking of selection as leading organisms through "Design Space": Selection "lifts" organisms along "ramps" of good Design. Although this imagery is often useful, it invites two subtle misconceptions about adaptation. The first is that natural selection cares about Design. In reality, selection "sees" only brute birth, death, and reproduction, and knows nothing of Design. Selection -- sheer, cold demographics -- is just as happy to lay waste to the kind of Design we associate with engineering as to build it. Consider the eyes of cave organisms who live in total darkness. If eyes are expensive to make, selection can wreck their exquisite engineering just as surely as it built it. An optic nerve with little or no eye is most assuredly not the sort of design one expects on an engineer's blueprint, but we find it in Gammarus minus. Whether or not this kind of evolution is common, it betrays the fundamental error in thinking of selection as trading in the currency of Design. Second, hazy imagery of selection lifting organisms along Design ramps makes it hard to see that selection sometimes moves individual traits down ramps. But this surely occurs.
scordova_{April 26, 2009
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NOTES: In addition to Moalem's findings, natural selection will fail to weed out the bad unless there are sufficient population resources. One example is the well known phenomenon of Mutational Meltdown. For all the supposed examples where natural selection is touted as "improving" a species, there are probably far more examples which illustrate natural selection fails to purge bad traits, or worse, ensure their persistence. Let us say for the sake of argument that there are Free Lunches (contrary to the ID claim of No Free Lunch), and that Behe's Irreducible Complexity can be solved via gradualistic improvement, Darwinism still faces the barriers outlined in mainstream literature. I list below some links explaining some of the other considerations why natural selection doesn’t work in the way Darwin envisioned. These problems have not been lost on great geneticists like Motoo Kimura and NAS members like Masotoshi Nei. In my humble opinion, even based on accepted mainstream ideas, the hypothesis that Darwinian evolution as the primary mechanism of how life evolved has been theoretically and empirically falsified. Blyth's view of the role of natural selection seems to have been vindicated over Darwin's. Nachman's U-Paradox Speed Limits of Evolution Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection Airplane Magentos (the problem of contingency designs) Genetic Entropy Gambler's Ruin is Darwin's Ruin HJ Muller, unwitting pioneer of genetic entropy theories Walter ReMine surveyed 40 cases of the evolution of anti-biotic resistance, and in almost all cases, he reported to me that selection preserved a strain because of a functional defect, not because of novelscordova_{April 26, 2009
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