Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution

I finally finished reading this blog this evening. I don't regret it. Lots of good food for thought in there. I am more and more convinced that neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory is bankrupt. Here's a quote from the blog that I quite liked re the tarantula hawk, "a gigantic wasp that begins life as an egg inside a paralyzed and buried tarantula, where its mother put it":

Laird, if you find that sort of thing as greatly intriguing as I do, you really ought read 'Beyond Natural Selection' by Robert Wesson.  It's chock full of those types of very strange and interesting animal behaviors.

Beyond Natural Selection

[Laird]

Thanks, Reece, that book does look interesting. I notice that the (deceased) author's daughter posted a review... and a not altogether complimentary one. But generally, reviews were very positive.

Paul, be honest. You had a long running debate on the same subject with Lone Shaman. Every time you asserted "no evidence" he (or Michael Larkin or David Bailey, etc.) came back with some and you reverted to your assertion. I don't think it will achieve anything to go down that dead-end street again - we may as well all re-read those threads on the Skeptiko forum. 

Stephenw might respond but let's remember that LS left the forum because he tired of playing tennis against a wall.

Unfortunately for most people it ends up being about belief. Both LS and M. Larkin preferred to dismiss rather than consider evidence or ideas which didn't fit their belief systems. This applies to the sceptics too. But it ends up meaning that the people who benefit most from these exchanges tends to be the uncommitted reader, perhaps the so-called 'lurker', who may find information of which they were previously unaware. But if as a result they become a 'true believer' then the discussion can be considered to have  been a failure.

Out of curiosity...I see people keep referring to RM+NS, as though that represents the theory of evolution, but does anybody working in the field of evolution actually hold that view? Everything I've seen refers to other means of genetic variation and non-genetic means of heredity, such as epigenetics and phenotypic plasticity.

Why refer to outdated ideas, rather than the state-of-the-art in the field?

Linda

Thanks, Reece, that book does look interesting. I notice that the (deceased) author's daughter posted a review... and a not altogether complimentary one. But generally, reviews were very positive.

Yeah, I saw and read that.  I'm not sure what to say about it, though . . . It seems a bit strange to me that she did that, personally.

Anyway, the book is definitely interesting (due to all the fun examples), even if you don't fully agree with him.

Unfortunately for most people it ends up being about belief. Both LS and M. Larkin preferred to dismiss rather than consider evidence or ideas which didn't fit their belief systems. This applies to the sceptics too. But it ends up meaning that the people who benefit most from these exchanges tends to be the uncommitted reader, perhaps the so-called 'lurker', who may find information of which they were previously unaware. But if as a result they become a 'true believer' then the discussion can be considered to have  been a failure.

I feel the root lays with belief instead of recognizing the hard efforts that have gone into testing various ways life has and continues to evolve. Listening to various members it certainly appears they favor a non material perspective. I also think those same members are sympathetic if not outright agreeable to parts of "The Wedge Document", specifically this part from post 435.

 Governing Goals

• To defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural and political legacies.
  
  
• To replace materialistic explanations with  immaterial explanations and spiritual possibly theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God. 
  I've done some editorializing to the second line.
  

Unfortunately for most people it ends up being about belief. Both LS and M. Larkin preferred to dismiss rather than consider evidence or ideas which didn't fit their belief systems. This applies to the sceptics too. But it ends up meaning that the people who benefit most from these exchanges tends to be the uncommitted reader, perhaps the so-called 'lurker', who may find information of which they were previously unaware. But if as a result they become a 'true believer' then the discussion can be considered to have  been a failure.

Agreed, Typoz. I said in an earlier  post that I learned a lot from reading those threads but the worldview of those involved in the debate clearly played a part, as mine does when I look at the evidence. Once again I'll say without hesitation that my idealism makes it much easier for me to accept that mind is omnipresent and therefore intimately involved in the evolutionary process. So if it is a choice of thinking, well that complex eye or that bird's feather could have evolved according to some teleological purpose or, in tiny steps, by waiting for chance to provide the right mutation and relying on survival advantage to adopt that mutation, then I am inclined to go with the former. This is even more so for me when I consider the origin of life and the appearance of DNA. Yes, the sheer complexity of DNA and the elegant choreography of what happens in a single cell beggars belief unless some kind of intelligence is involved. 

Epigenetics seems to be a step in the right direction except that those who propose it still seem to insist on a blind and purposeless process. Epigenetics, as proposed, is still missing mind.

Epigenetics seems to be a step in the right direction except that those who propose it still seem to insist on a blind and purposeless process. Epigenetics, as proposed, is still missing mind.

Actually, I might be less than accurate in that statement. Danis Noble, for example, seems to favour teleology rather than "blind and purposeless" but he seems to hope to side-step the usual understanding of teleology by claiming that the teleology in evolution somehow emerged from evolution. Seems like a bit of circular reasoning to me - perhaps in order to deflect the outrage of those who might charge him with being open to a design argument.

What do we mean by “teleology” if not the tendency of a system to move towards the function that serves its interests in the organism as a whole, i.e., to have a goal? As I will argue later in this Dialogue, that does not require us to believe that there was a creator that designed the cardiac pacemaker. The term “final cause” has unfortunately created the impression that there is some ultimate goal in the universe from which all other forms of teleology derive. By contrast it is sufficient in my view to see teleological behavior as emergent during evolution.

Interviewer
 
 First, do you see teleology as objectively there in organisms themselves, or as a kind of illusion projected onto organisms by us? Doesn’t cybernetic theory, together with evolutionary theory (as delineated by Harvard ornithologist and philosopher Ernst Mayr [1904–2005] and others), obviate the need for us to take the apparent teleology in living things at face value?

Denis Noble

I also originally held that view. It was a debate with the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in 1967 that began the process by which I came to a very different view. In the first article, I demonstrated what Ernst Mayr and others argue, which is that for every high-level description there must exist a valid low-level description. Taylor replied that that may be true in any given case but that it would not explain what is happening if one takes a set of cases. They may be ordered only at the high level. I further replied that this move makes the issue one of explanation, i.e., conceptual rather than strictly empirical.

I now go much further. My work on heart rhythm taught me that the rhythm simply doesn’t exist at the molecular level. If I placed all the molecular components in a nutrient solution, but without being constrained by a living cell, the rhythm would not exist. By the usual ontological criteria the rhythm doesn’t exist at a molecular level but does exist at a cellular level.

So, if I'm reading him correctly, Noble seems to be saying that if you follow the reductionist route - in his example of the natural cardiac pacemaker - then, at the molecular level there is no trace of the pacemaker rhythm. But go up a level to the cellular level then the rhythm appears when the molecules become a system. I'm still not sure how this means that the goal (teleological purpose) arose from nowhere. He seems to be saying that the systematic arrangement of the molecules produces function and that function is, by definition, teleological. So, the question in my mind remains: what guides the arrangement of the molecules into a functioning system?

Just by the way, this article seems to confirm what has been pointed out earlier in this thread: that atheists continue to erect the strawman argument that religious (or spiritual) automatically means biblical creationism. The article, unfortunately, makes no distinction between evolution and Darwinism, not to mention neo-darwinism. Nor does it mention any challenges to current evolutionary orthodoxy other than creationism so, in effect, the article commits the same error that it reports.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/s...ual-divide

Here's another related and more considered article:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/poli...eationists

Paul, be honest. You had a long running debate on the same subject with Lone Shaman. Every time you asserted "no evidence" he (or Michael Larkin or David Bailey, etc.) came back with some and you reverted to your assertion. I don't think it will achieve anything to go down that dead-end street again - we may as well all re-read those threads on the Skeptiko forum.

Can you give a link to one of these pieces of evidence? David's argument was that a random search through sequence space wouldn't come up with anything in a reasonable time. I agreed and suggested that it's not a random search. I don't remember what Larkin said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequence_s...evolution)

~~ Paul