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Timaeus Exposes Larry Moran

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All that follows is from UD commenter Timaeus:

Larry Moran wrote:

“I’ve been trying to teach Denyse about evolution for almost twenty years. It’s not working.”

Perhaps teaching is not your strong point, Larry. There is some empirical evidence of that, I believe.

Or perhaps it is expertise that is the problem. Last time I checked your website for your publications on evolutionary theory, I found many popular articles on ID and creationism, and some apparently self-published biochemical data on your university website. I couldn’t find a single article on evolutionary theory in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject for over 10 years into the past. For someone who has so many opinions on evolution, and voices them so loudly in non-professionally-controlled environments such as blog sites, you are surprisingly absent from the professional discussions. Perhaps you can explain the inverse relationship between your popular involvement in debates over evolution and your visibility in the technical books and articles on the subject of evolution.

It strikes me that spending hundreds of hours every year trying to convince ID people and creationists they are wrong would not be as profitable a use of a Toronto professor’s time as actually researching evolutionary mechanisms and publishing the findings at academic conferences, in books, and in journals.

[TIME PASSES]

I’ll take Larry Moran’s silence on my request for a list of his recent peer-reviewed publications in evolutionary biology as a concession that he has no such publications. I.e., I will infer that he is a commentator on debates over evolutionary theory, not an evolutionary theorist himself.

Of course, being a commentator on something is not a bad thing in itself. For someone to say: “Gould says such-and-such about evolutionary mechanisms, and Futuyma says something different, and Coyne says something different, and here are some of the points over which these men have disagreed” — that would be pedagogically useful for many readers. But that’s not the way Larry Moran has ever written about evolution.

Larry writes in this fashion: “Evolution doesn’t happen that way; it happens this way.” That is, Larry does not merely describe what the experts think, and indicate areas of possible strength in weakness in their various views, but tells his readers which views are right and which are wrong, which evolutionary biologists know what they are talking about and which don’t. He poses as someone who can referee the conflicts, who stands above all the others and can pass judgment on their scientific competence and the correctness of their theories, and, in a pinch, when none of them is right, can tell us the way evolution really happened, on his own authority. This is pretty arrogant for a guy with no recent publications in the field, and whose work (as far as I can tell) is never or rarely cited by Shapiro, Newman, Wagner, Jablonka, or any of the other currently important evolutionary theorists.

Larry has an inflated idea of his own importance within evolutionary theory. In fact, in reality, he is just one more of 10,000 guys in the world with a Ph.D. in biology or biochemistry or genetics who is under the illusion that knowing one of those fields automatically makes one an expert on evolutionary theory and evolutionary mechanisms. But the people who actually *do* evolutionary theory seem to take little notice of Larry Moran (or his blog site) at all.

Of course, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Larry regularly gets invited to big conferences on evolutionary theory to be the keynote speaker; maybe his judgments are revered around the world the way Ernst Mayr’s used to be. If so, I’ll be glad to be corrected, and to retract my statements. Someone here can write in with evidence of the hundreds of times Larry’s research on evolutionary mechanisms have been cited in the literature, with the details of the publications Larry hasn’t bothered to list on his web site, etc. What I can see for the moment, however, is that Larry Moran is a nobody in evolutionary theory, a biochemistry teacher at Toronto with an interest in evolutionary theory who is convinced he knows more about it than almost everyone else on the planet, but with no track record to corroborate that opinion.

That’s the problem with the internet age. Through web sites and blogs, it gives people the ability to be prominent, and many readers assume that prominence equals importance. But it doesn’t. The Kardashians and Paris Hilton are as prominent in popular culture as Tom Hanks or Meryl Streep, but they aren’t nearly as important. To be important, as opposed to prominent, one has to demonstrate ability. *Ability*, not the verbal fluency to hold forth on a subject on a blog site. And in science, ability is proved not on blog sites but at conferences, in articles, and in books. So what is needed is a list of Larry’s publications in these venues.

Comments
SamHManning,
Professor Moran: “I have never published a paper in the scientific literature on evolutionary theory.”
SamHManning: Do you suppose the author if this article, Timaeus, has done so?
Do you have reading comprehension issues?
Timaeus #33: The difference between myself and Moran is that I don’t blog regularly on evolution, don’t present myself as an expert on evolutionary theory (as opposed to an intelligent person who has done some reading on the subject), and don’t pose as the referee on the work of the leading evolutionary theorists regarding evolutionary mechanisms. I don’t claim to know how evolution happened and I don’t claim to be able to apportion the appropriate causal weight to all the known, alleged, and as yet unknown potential mechanisms.
Box
June 11, 2015
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Silver Asiatic @243:
Professor Moran: “I have never published a paper in the scientific literature on evolutionary theory.”
Do you suppose the author if this article, Timaeus, has done so? Have you? Have any of the Biologic Institute fellows?SamHManning
June 11, 2015
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Mung @248:
SamHManning: Surely you are not referring to ReMine’s folly? I am referring to the cost of substitution. What do you mean about ReMine’s folly?
The same - ReMine's take on Haldane's "dilemma". It is folly because ReMine does not know and cannot tell us what the common ancestor of humans and chimps was such that his calculated (a worthless calculation given Ewen's statement) 1667 beneficial mutations could not account for human evolution from this unknown ancestor.
If you’re not qualified to discuss it I’ll understand.
I believe that I am far more qualified than you are, given the content of your posts. But you have a facade to burnish, so I understand.SamHManning
June 11, 2015
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The entire thread seems to boil down to Timaeus doesn’t like Moran’s attitude.
...though he can't point to an actual example of the thing he's so concerned about.wd400
June 10, 2015
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Silver Asiatic: We determine who has expertise in a field through an appeal to authority. One way is through credentialing. Another is through reputation within a field. Appeals to authority are inductive arguments, and the purpose is determining a level of confidence. For instance, when boarding a commercial airliner, we might assume the pilot has been properly trained and licensed, and for the most part, this is a valid assumption.Zachriel
June 10, 2015
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Zach
Appeals to authority have only limited value, and then only to those without expertise in a field.
We determine who has expertise in a field through an appeal to authority.Silver Asiatic
June 10, 2015
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Appeals to authority have only limited value, and then only to those without expertise in a field. The entire thread seems to boil down to Timaeus doesn't like Moran's attitude.Zachriel
June 10, 2015
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SamHManning: Surely you are not referring to ReMine’s folly? I am referring to the cost of substitution. What do you mean about ReMine's folly? If you're not qualified to discuss it I'll understand.Mung
June 10, 2015
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Eric says (#4):
Yet there are many others who are alleged experts in their field whose attitude is just as bad — Jerry Coyne springs to mind, for example. I don’t care a whit whether Jerry Coyne is the most well-published and most sought-after professor in his field. His unreasonable attitude and embarrassing lack of basic logical rigor when it comes to the question of design and evolution means that he has absolutely no credibility on that particular issue.
I am never surprised at the number of anti-evolutionists that apparently see themselves as experts in logic, evolution, and ID - even though it is almost a certainty that none of them meet Tim's criteria for being able to discuss such things. I suspect it is largely projection on their part, for I see no real logic in ID whatsoever, and few of the articles, essays, or comments on this site indicate that their authors possess the knowledge of logic, evolution, or ID that is asserted or implied.SamHManning
June 10, 2015
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Mung writes: #240
Haldane did expose a problem but it gets swept under the rug.
Surely you are not referring to ReMine's folly?
"Perhaps the only disagreement I ever had with Crow concerned the substitutional load, because I never thought that the calculations concerning this load, which he and others carried out, were appropriate. From the very start, my own calculations suggested to me that Haldane’s arguments were misguided and indeed erroneous, and that there is no practical upper limit to the rate at which substitutions can occur under Darwinian natural selection."
Warren Ewens Not that it matters. ReMine does not meet Tim's criterion for speaking on the subject. Nor, I suspect, does mung.SamHManning
June 10, 2015
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wd400 @ 241, Thanks. As I said, I was just wondering. -QQuerius
June 9, 2015
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Andre: What rates of change in the Fossil record are you talking about? You might look at Gingerich, Rates of evolution on the time scale of the evolutionary process, Genetica 2001. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~gingeric/PDGrates/Ging2001fig8.jpgZachriel
June 9, 2015
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Professor Moran: "I have never published a paper in the scientific literature on evolutionary theory." http://sandwalk.blogspot.fr/2015/06/whos-authority-on-evolutionary-theory.htmlSilver Asiatic
June 9, 2015
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The ape-to-man scenario requires the fixation of tens of millions of mutations within each lineage.
This assumes that ape-to-man is a question of mutations. Evolution offers nothing to support that. To even make the proposal that ape-to-human is possible, evolutionists have to define what a human is, and they don't have the tools or capabilities or even the authority within their discipline to do that. But, of course, many people grant evolutionists the privilege of defining what it means to be human. Thus we have 'modified deuterostome'. A human being is irreducibly complex - and therefore, cannot have evolved. You can't reduce consciousness or self-identity into physical component parts.Silver Asiatic
June 9, 2015
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Q, the string of baseless assertions in the quoted text suggest the whole thing is an exercise in giving pseudomathatical support to the authors' existing beliefs. So, no, I don't agree with it.wd400
June 9, 2015
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Haldane did expose a problem but it gets swept under the rug. Zachriel: Only a couple of hundred genes have been fixed since the divergence of humans and other apes. How do you know this? These are genes that are shared? Novel genes?Mung
June 9, 2015
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Zachriel What rates of change in the Fossil record are you talking about?Andre
June 9, 2015
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"I’m not happy to listen to self-appointed referees laying down the law, week after week, in column after column, regarding who is ignorant, who is wrong, etc., in areas in which their own expertise has not been demonstrated." It would appear that the irony is lost on this Timaeus.SamHManning
June 9, 2015
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wd400 @ 234 noted,
I never claimed to not know what Haldane’s dilemma was, just that I didn’t know why is was called a dilemma.
Yes, I stand corrected. So, do you agree with "Haldanes Ratchet" proposed by Rupe and Sanford in the paper linked by SA in 235? Just curious, that's all. -QQuerius
June 8, 2015
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Silver Asiatic: even to simply avoid extinction due to accumulating deleterious mutations, the large majority of these tens of millions of fixations would have had to have been beneficial. Most mutations are neutral or nearly so. Only a couple of hundred genes have been fixed since the divergence of humans and other apes. Haldane didn't find a problem. He indicated that evolution can only move so quickly, given his assumptions, but that is well within the observed rates of change in the fossil record.Zachriel
June 8, 2015
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Haldane's Dilemma - thanks to BA77 for citing this paper.
The ape-to-man scenario requires the fixation of tens of millions of mutations within each lineage. Most such mutations would necessarily have been nearly-neutral in their effect, but none can be assumed to have been perfectly neutral. It is widely agreed that many such fixations would have been slightly deleterious. Yet to enable a net increase in fitness (i.e., allowing increased intelligence in the human lineage, etc.), and even to simply avoid extinction due to accumulating deleterious mutations, the large majority of these tens of millions of fixations would have had to have been beneficial. The scenario clearly demands over ten million beneficial fixations. Yet the fundamental problem of Haldane’s Dilemma only permits the selective fixation of hundreds, or at best, thousands of beneficial mutations in that six million year time period. The ape-to-man scenario falls short of the needed beneficial fixations by a factor of at least three orders of magnitude. http://media.wix.com/ugd/a704d4_47bcf08eda0e4926a44a8ac9cbfa9c20.pdf
Silver Asiatic
June 8, 2015
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I don't know if you really think you weren't confused, you are still too clueless to know the two results are different if you are now just lying. But I can't say I really care. I never claimed to not know what Haldane's dilemma was, just that I didn't know why is was called a dilemma.wd400
June 7, 2015
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wd400,
I don’t believe I’ve ever run across someone so unable to admit such an clear mistake.
Baloney. The only mistake is your continued deliberate misinterpretation of what I said. Also note
“Unless selection is very intense the number of deaths needed to secure the substitution by natural selection, of one gene for another at a locus, is independent of the intensity of selection. It is often about 30 times the number of organisms in a generation. It is suggested that in horoletic evolution, the mean time taken for each gene substitution is about 300 generations. This accords with the observed slowness of evolution” - JBS Haldane, The Cost of Natural Selection (1957), page 524. (emphasis mine)
Ok. Apparently, you can articulate Haldane's dilemma after all. Are you sure you didn't know what it was previously or were you just being disingenuous? -QQuerius
June 7, 2015
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I don't believe I've ever run across someone so unable to admit such an clear mistake. There would have been no shame in saying "oh, I confused this result with Haldane's dilemma" to start with. Maintaining you were right all along is just not credible. Van Valen quote is pretty straightforward. He imagines Haldane's substitution cost from the point of view of population evolving to match a changing environment. The "dilemma", such as it is, is that the more excess reproduction the population spends on fixing one allele the less able it is to fix alleles at other loci. Investing in one substitution limits their ability to make future substitutions. (This is of course conditioned on the assumptions in Haldane's paper holding in real populations, which they do not)wd400
June 7, 2015
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Good one, Timaeus! Enjoy nipping at the heels of science for the rest of your life. We'll try not to step on you.Curly Howard
June 7, 2015
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wd400, Notice that fixation is mentioned by Van Valen in his paper on Haldane's dilemma here:
That is, since a high number of deaths are required to fix one gene rapidly, and dead organisms do not reproduce, fixation of more than one gene simultaneously would conflict.
So, here's the connection that you incorrectly characterized as "something entirely different." And by your own admission, you did not know where the term Haldane's dilemma" came from. Really? I said as a generalization
tlawry, yes, I’m familiar with Haldane’s dilemma as a sort of evolutionary speed limit.
tlawry's statement was that ID proponents were unfamiliar with some of the more damning evidence against evolution, and he gave an example involving fixation. However, Haldane's dilemma is the major obstacle, and the rate of fixation is related, making it worse. I clearly stated that my source for the likelihood of even a beneficial mutation from disappearing from a population came from another source, not Haldane. And you're still ducking the question of why it was called Haldanes dilemma. Frankly, I don't believe you can articulate it in your own words. -QQuerius
June 7, 2015
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I wrote a paper called "Post flood Marsupialism Explained" by Robert Byers. Just google. I failed to get it published in the few crsationists publications.Yet its "published" on the internet and so DOES that make me a expert? I might trump almost everyone here!Robert Byers
June 7, 2015
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UB, KF, I e-mailed KF earlier this afternoon, so, hopefully, we can connect soon.StephenB
June 7, 2015
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UB, could you email me, too? KFkairosfocus
June 7, 2015
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KF: "SB, could you please email me?" KF
And hey SB, I have question I would like to ask you as well. Check your email. :)Upright BiPed
June 7, 2015
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