Unlimited Variation: The Dark Energy of Biology

 

Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, wrote in 1858 that his theory could be summarized as “indefinite departure from the original type.” “Indefinite departure” is in fact the central claim of the theory of evolution by natural selection. But it still hasn’t been observed. Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne and others keep trying to bully us into accepting that it is a “fact.” OK. Maybe it is. So give us the evidence. We have to read their books carefully to realize how meager it is. They still haven’t shown us that extrapolation.

Back in 2013 Tom Bethell wrote an interesting piece about the "central claim" of modern evolutionary theory.  As with many interesting articles of this nature, my attention was drawn to it by a caustic review by a renowned ID-hater, in this case the inimitable Jeffrey Shallit. 

Shallit pedantically quibbles about Bethell's criticism of Charles Darwin.  Darwin stated that there was no reason to suppose any limit to variations of forms, e.g. no reason a fish couldn't become an elephant through a long enough series of minuscule changes, which casts natural selection as Dr. Moreau's scalpel working at a geological pace. This has enormous relevance to the extrapolative nature of evolutionary theory, for it is the justification for what Wallace called (as Bethell points out) "indefinite departure from the original type." By "indefinite" Wallace meant that for practical purposes it can be considered infinite, the limits being so indefinitely far out as to not rule out any connection between the varied forms we see and the simplest cell.

It is this sense of extrapolation that is central to evolutionary theory, more so than either common descent or natural selection. 

In a particularly Dawkins-esque stroke, Shallit pounds the pulpit:

What we do see is evolution taking place today, and we have the fossil record that shows the changes in the past. You have to be particularly dense or dishonest to deny this.

In other words, we already know that any limits to variation don't matter to macroevolutionary theory, because macroevolution must have occurred.  We have these here fossils, and we know Mr. Darwin's speculations about them must be true because we observe limited variation now.  Accept the extrapolation or be denounced as a "denier"! Shallit and his audience stand ready to punish the deniers by pointing and laughing while simultaneous shaking their fists in furious rage. 

Shallit invokes speciation.  I'm not certain if everyone would agree on his instances of speciation (none of which he offers--it is left as an exercise to the reader), but perhaps he would be surprised to know that even most "Young Earth" creationists believe in some limited form of speciation.  In spite of considering himself an expert on pseudo-science, he doesn't even understand the nature of his favorite "pseudoscientific" bugbear, Young Earth Creationism.  He might also be unaware that even though undirected speciation may be necessary for macroevolution, it is not sufficient to explain macroevolution.  In fact, Cornelius Hunter, who is not a Young Earth creationist, does not deny ultra-fast adaptation or an old age of fossils.  Shallit seems to consider him a run-of-the-mill creationist.  It seems that Shallit does not recognize any significant differences among those he considers "creationists" (which for him includes ID advocates).    

All of this is probably lost on evolutionary materialists who depend on a quasi-Newtonian metaphor in which evolution is moving with a sort of inertia.  This is why Jerry Coyne can liken macroevolution to a train in motion (though it is also an artificially powered and directed machine) and Shallit can compare it to cosmological materials flying apart.  (Although, the hypothetical drive powering the quasi-infinite variation of evolution is, in epistemological status, somewhat reminiscent of poorly understood "dark energy.")  

As natural as a train in motion...  Give this choo-choo
enough time and it just might reach the Galapagos Islands. 

PZ Myers: The Biology Does Work

Evolution 2.0

Perry Marshall is raising some eyebrows and saying some interesting things about his Evolution 2.0.   I mostly like what he has to say, although I don't think he is giving proper credit to what Intelligent Design is or where some of his arguments come from.  He presents 'Evolution 2.0' as a kind of bridge between evolutionary thinking and design intuitions (what started as 'Mere Creation') and this is essentially what Intelligent Design already is.  Marshall does seem to bring a lot of the collective arguments of Bill Dembski, Steve Meyer, and Mike Behe framed succinctly within the past 30 years of genetic discoveries.

However, the confusion is in no small part because of the willful conflation of ID with creationism by ID's critics.  'ID Creationism' is a worthless term that is nothing more than a dishonest advertising campaign co-developed by Barbara Forrest and the NCSE.  Its effect has been to shut down discussion before it happens, and I believe that was precisely the intention.  This ploy was opportunistic ideological propaganda "in a cheap tuxedo."  If this lame political stunt now ends up causing people to pick up a book like Marshall's, so be it.  In the end inquiring minds will probably find that Evolution 2.0 is simply the more evolution-friendly version of ID.  

An interesting exchange between Perry Marshall and PZ Myers appears online and I was struck by various attempts by Myers to dismiss an engineering perspective of biology.  This one stood out in particular:

Over and over again what you do is you tell me ‘well from my perspective as an electrical engineer this doesn’t work, it can’t work’ and I’m telling you yeah but biology does work, so maybe your perspective is wrong.

What does Myers mean by "biology does work"?  In context, he seems to be saying that even though perspectives from engineering and computer science cast doubt on the very idea of a coding system arising through natural, random processes, it does indeed work so phooey on perspectives outside the fiefdom of biology.  Does he mean that the science of biology gives us useful technology (e.g. penicillin) and therefore we shouldn't question that life had a spontaneous origin?  Or is he dogmatically asserting that in modern biology it is a matter of unquestioned orthodoxy that natural processes are sufficient to produce whatever exists?  Fossils therefore abiogenesis?

Marshall challenges (with a 3 million dollar prize) the realm of biology to generate a coding system through an undirected chaotic process, and Myers states that this challenge is a sham because he should be able to present the already naturally occurring genetic code as evidence that this can happen and thus get the prize.  He doesn't need to question his assumption that abiogenesis happened because "biology does work"!  It is obvious that he, like so many others in evolutionary biology, are completely unaware of just how much intellectual laziness is represented here. 

He then goes on to ironically accuse Marshall of assuming what he intends to prove.  While Marshall is simply using the same abductive argument championed by Stephen Meyer, PZ Myers is unaware that museums full of fossils do not demonstrate that our DNA has a perfectly coherent natural explanation.  He fervently believes no one should actually have to do the work of demonstrating the random genesis of a code to get that 3 million dollar prize.  Darwin's "one long argument" showed the world that science had no need for God, and since there is no God we know that amazing codes like DNA have a perfectly natural explanation, even if we don't know what that could be (RNA, crystals, abiogenetic molecules du jour). 

I wish that Myers had promoted Tom Schneider's work as proof of a randomly generated code.  Then there might be some interesting back-and-forth about what a coding system is vs. a lock-and-key system.  While I suspect that there are flaws in the applicability of Schneider's model to actual site recognition, the bigger flaw is in its applicability to the sorts of biological "innovation" that Wagner and others have tried to characterize. 

Myers also criticized Marshall for what he considers an 'appeal to authority'.  Now you have to keep in mind that to Myers a 'creationist' isn't necessarily someone who believes that the world was created in 6 days, a 'creationist' is anyone that thinks that there are evidential reasons for thinking that life is the result of a conscious, creative act.  This is never more evident than in Myers' insinuation that Perry Marshall is a creationist.  As a rabid anticreationist, Myers will not only belittle 'creationists' for citing other 'creationists', but will get much more upset if they cite a figure that has some weight and is not already discredited as being skeptical of neo-Darwinism.  When 'creationists' do this, it must be characterized as an 'appeal to authority'. 

But if you read carefully, you'll see that Myers doesn't think it's wrong to appeal to authority; he faults Marshall for not appealing to the correct authorities. 

Myers and likeminded crusaders against anti-science tend to dismiss the engineering/software analogy.  Dawkins and others embrace the analogy because they don't see the problem.  Regardless of the definitions, orthodox evolutionary biology has the unique problem of trying to explain how engineering happens without an engineer, how a coding system develops without a coder, how purposeful machines arise in entropy-ridden purposelessness.  The Myers approach is to claim that the analogies from digital engineering don't apply to the digital wetware in our bodies.  It is too different they claim because it is (a) complicated, (b) replicated, (c) fault-tolerant, and (d) so darn wet.  All that math and computer science that is applicable to artificial digital systems is therefore not applicable to biological wetware (except when it seems to confirm an evolutionary point of view, of course).  Biological matter is too different in its complicated, self-reproducing electrochemical wetness to be beholden to information principles.
Engineering analogies must not be applicable because fossils and stuff show that the "biology does work", and after all, there are random errors that follow known distributions.  Therefore we can safely conclude that all the non-randomness is due to the accidents of genome arrangement.  After all, hundreds of thousands of biologists show up for work each day, and do science, and get their findings published.  There's no need to demonstrate how such elaborate order arises from disorder, because evolutionary biologists already know that it did.  All this "brute force molecular biology" really has no place weighing in on the matter.  Myers can join Jerry Coyne here in lamenting how molecular biology is not bolstering evolutionary theory--the weed of secular creationism seems to be sprouting up in molecular biology.  Seems like we will have to extend the Salem Hypothesis to include molecular biologists. 

Pay no attention to any ramifications of Craig Venter's work.  Why?  'Cause biology does work already!  It works!  We're not going to give up a hundred years' worth of conjectures and plausibility stories for some preposterous "brute force molecular biology" experiments!  The biology has worked just fine without them.

Jerry Coyne Demonstrates the Real Power of Selection

Jerry looking very evolved.

Just a quick post here, since it is too easy to dig deeply into these silly exercises of Coynage, but Jerry Coyne wrote a blog post in response to an email from Paul Nelson discussing the limits of natural selection as the explanatory show pony of the evolutionary circus, citing the work of various biologists.

Coyne frames this a "McLuhan moment" (Annie Hall reference) since he is such a big mucky-muck in the speculative science of squishy things that, unlike the Woody Allen character, he can in real life pull these great biologists "from behind the sign" and have them comment on whether Nelson understands their fine work.

But first, the relevant claim by Paul Nelson:

So when you [Jerry Coyne] tell your WEIT audience that natural selection is the only game in town for building complex adaptations, . . .  Readers who already know about the thinking of workers such as Eric Davidson, Michael Lynch, Andreas Wagner, John Gerhart & Marc Kirschner, or Scott Gilbert (all of whom, among many others, have recently expressed frank doubts about selection) must discount what you say about the centrality of natural selection to evolutionary theory . . .

To sum up, even though Coyne hollers loud and long that natural selection is the central, driving, omnipotent core of evolution, various noted biologists have "frank doubts" about the centrality of natural selection and/or unrestricted appeals to its creative power--specifically relevant to the alleged claim of Coyne (which he appears not to deny) that selection is by-and-large omnipotent and all-sufficient even if there are other evolutionary processes interfering along the way.  This counter-claim by Nelson is what Coyne will supposedly debunk.

Central but Superfluous: Physics Envy

From ID-hater Jerry Coyne's "Of Vice and Men":

In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture.

But wait, hasn't the academic priesthood community averred loudly and proudly that doubting "evolution" (presuming the equivocal term includes the historical narrative) is like doubting gravity?  (Look up discussions about whether or not evolution is "just a theory.")  Eugenie Scott, former head of the Darwinist lobby think-tank NCSE, would say so.

How much of physics could you do without at least the Newtonian concept of gravity?  There's a lot of experiment that can't be done without the Einsteinian conception of gravity.  Yet Coyne was implying that as far as he knew in 2000, his field was largely irrelevant to experimental biology.  Is the historical science of evolution central to biology in a very different way than gravity being central to physical theory?

Let's review Philip Skell's statement in "The Scientist":

"While the great majority of biologists would probably agree with Theodosius Dobzhansky's dictum that 'nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' most can conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas," A.S. Wilkins, editor of the journal BioEssays, wrote in 2000. "Evolution would appear to be the indispensable unifying idea and, at the same time, a highly superfluous one." I would tend to agree. Certainly, my own research with antibiotics during World War II received no guidance from insights provided by Darwinian evolution. Nor did Alexander Fleming's discovery of bacterial inhibition by penicillin. I recently asked more than 70 eminent researchers if they would have done their work differently if they had thought Darwin's theory was wrong. The responses were all the same: No.
I also examined the outstanding biodiscoveries of the past century: the discovery of the double helix; the characterization of the ribosome; the mapping of genomes; research on medications and drug reactions; improvements in food production and sanitation; the development of new surgeries; and others. I even queried biologists working in areas where one would expect the Darwinian paradigm to have most benefited research, such as the emergence of resistance to antibiotics and pesticides. Here, as elsewhere, I found that Darwin's theory had provided no discernible guidance, but was brought in, after the breakthroughs, as an interesting narrative gloss.

Re-read Coyne's "Vice" piece and Gould's famous Dr. Pangloss piece, and then think of what an "interesting narrative gloss" might mean.

Now, remember all those teachers in Texas who signed a petition because they were terrified that without a firm belief in the evolutionary narrative and the established power of selection, students would not be prepared for careers in biology.  These teachers apparently were privy to something Jerry Coyne didn't know in 2000.  I think Jerry has since doubted the superfluousness of evolution to medicine, but his supposed examples hinge on directed evolution and informational genetics.  Ask yourself how directed evolution is different from artificial selection, the technology that inspired and long preceded Darwin.  And Coyne wonders why biochemists and molecular biologists are turning on the evolutionary narrative?

I'm reminded of Jeffrey Shallit's comments (filed under "science stopper"?) that knowing that life is designed would turn out to be a completely uninteresting fact.  (Just think about that statement on its own terms, and then think about how hard textbook writers have tried to ingrain the "central" idea that lifeforms are engineered by processes that are undirected, nonteleological, and purposeless.)

I can think of a way in which Shallit's statement could be construed as true.  It could be true to the extent that modern biology already has a Designer.  To some extent biology already treats lifeforms as engineered by a "watchmaker," if a "blind" one.  But I can't rule out.  Currently, it would seem the main reason that Jonathan Wells has had trouble getting visibility on his centrosome hypothesis, is that journals are afraid of giving any credibility to someone who doubts the central tenets of the priesthood profession.

See more interesting quotes at "Darwinism Is Pseudo-Science."

Jerry Was A Man

I didn't plan the title of my post... It leapt from my fingers as I started typing and the title of the famous science fiction short story somehow seemed appropriate.

I came across a post from Jerry Coyne, anticreationist extraordinaire, which exemplifies for me and reminds me just how bankrupt the materialist, secularist view of humanity really is.

When a male lion invades another group and kills the cubs, when a chimp tears another chimp to bits, those are just bits of nature, and aren’t seen as wrong.  And the amorality of nature is touted even by those who realize that our primate relatives show rudiments of morality, . . . . is it really true that all of nature, including primate societies, must be seen as amoral, while human actions must be judged by this thing called “morality”?

Secular creationism on the rise in molecular biology!

From Jerry Coyne [emphasis mine]:

Virtually all of the non-creationist opposition to the modern theory of evolution, and all of the minimal approbation of [Coyne's University of Chicago colleague James] Shapiro's views, come from molecular biologists. I'm not sure whether there's something about that discipline (the complexity of molecular mechanisms?) that makes people doubt the efficacy of natural selection, or whether it's simply that many molecular biologists don't get a good grounding in evolutionary biology.

LOL   

(I thought I heard for the last 15 years that evolutionary theory was molecular biology...)

I guess these molecular biologists are ... SECULAR CREATIONISTS!