Curtains for Darwinism? II

Why Darwinism is failing II:
November 21, 2015 Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, News


In “Why Darwinism is failing,” I noted that genome mapping changed the way we look at evolution: We are now much closer to the world of mechanism, not theory—closer to Popular Mechanics than to Philosophical Quarterly. The “single greatest idea anyone ever had” gives way to descriptions of mechanisms few expected or predicted—each of which might account for some evolution, though most of the picture is still missing.

Darwin’s defenders, apart from endless terminology quibbles, respond by insisting that natural selection acting on random mutation (Darwinism) can find room for all of it somehow. They seem not to have noticed that all useful theories are bounded. A theory that explains everything explains nothing.

By contrast, no one claims that horizontal gene transfer is so vast as to include epigenetics, genome doubling, and endosymbiosis. Each is a distinct, demonstrable mechanism in its own right.

But there is something else: Evolution has become a history. Histories are specific, and resilient in the long run to grand theories of the sort that produce accolades like ”most influential academic book” ever.

As noted here:

The more we learn about the history of life on earth, the less evolution is theory and the more it is history. It is less like Epicureanism and more like World War II. That cannot be good for Darwinian thinking, which fills in large gaps in history by the exercise of theory. Things that “must have” happened if the theory is correct are assumed to have happened.

But history is not like that. Consider, for example, Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese crippled the U.S. Pacific fleet in a surprise attack, though the United States was not at war with Japan. Assume that the account broke off there. Maybe a theory can fill in the blanks for us and tell us what “had to” happen.

But then, what if we later discover more and more evidence for what actually happened? It will be bad news Tuesday for some theories developed in the absence of evidence — maybe for quite a few theories. More.

After a while, gerrymandering a grand theory to “account for” unexpected evidence seems like a waste of time to anyone but true believers.

Darwinism is not, of course, failing in the popular imagination, or at least, not yet. Bimbette’s vast TV audience still believes, as does the “breath of fresh air” theology prof, and Zack Kopplin. But increasingly, the impetus comes less and less from keen minds like Collins and Venter, more and more from celebs, zealots, and lobbyists.


The history of life just cannot sustain the weight of so grand a theory.

Curtains for Darwinism?

Why Darwinism is failing:
November 20, 2015 Posted by News under Culture, Darwinism, News, Philosophy




Further to Barry Arrington’s post, “Zachriel goes into insane denial mode,” which has garnered so far 170 comments, and doubtless counting:

The biggest problem for Darwin’s supporters (paleo, neo, extended, whatever) today has nothing to do with Uncommon Descent or with any design hypothesis.

The problem is genome mapping. Blame people like Francis Collins and Craig Venter.

Darwinian evolution was always a theory, by which Darwinism (natural selection acting on random mutation generates huge levels of information, not noise) .

It was the single greatest idea anyone ever had, and could be believed without evidence because “Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life.” (p. 287, Blind Watchmaker, 1986)

And it has been believed without evidence. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is considered by a broad swathe of lay people to be the most influential academic book they know, with very little evidence backing it.

It is a theory that is in constant search for evidence, which results in masses of Darwinian fairy-tales about everything from why stressed mares miscarry through why insects kill their moms, or how people vote and why they tip at restaurants.

One need only map some circumstance in life onto the theory, chop off the inconvenient bits, and there we are: More “science” at work.

Loud crash is heard, some time around 2000.

Today, we know much more than we used to about how life forms change over time. Evolution has become a history, not a theory. Like all histories, it is messy. It only indifferently supports a theory.

Mechanism differs from theory in that it answers Behe’s question, “How, exactly?”: For example, one mechanism of the evolution of some life forms is simply absorbing genes from another organism (horizontal gene transfer):

Bacteria that grow on crustaceans can absorb fragments containing more than 40 genes, using a small “spear.” Researcher Melanie Blokesch describes that number as “an enormous amount of new genetic information.” That may explain why antibiotic resistance sets in so quickly. More.

Jut think of all the Darwinian fairy tales that could have been, and maybe were, told about how natural selection acting on random mutation caused the antibiotic resistance, when they were, for practical purposes of explanation, caused by bacterium equipped with a small spear.

We are now much closer to the world of Popular Mechanics than the world of Philosophical Quarterly.

Mechanism doesn’t answer the kinds of questions “science vs. religion” types or “God-and-science” types explore. But it does answer questions about how evolution happens.

It happens in a variety of ways.  Sometimes it doesn’t happen (stasis). Sometimes it reverses (devolution). Sometimes there are patterns. Other times, that’s unclear.

It has become a history.

Nowhere is there any reason to believe that Darwin’s claimed mechanism, that massive increases in information somehow happen just because the “fittest” at any given time survive and reproduce, explains anything in particular. And the claimed random creation of high levels of information just does not fit with what we know about the universe we live in.

Darwin’s faithful are thus reduced to endless terminological squabbles about what “stasis” or “primitive” mean.

It keeps us on our toes, and keeps up our site numbers.

Note: Francis Collins has had to walk back his earlier enthusiasm for junk DNA, to support some kind of Christian Darwinism, and Craig Venter doesn’t even put much faith in common descent.


And these guys still have jobs! Goodness! Darwin’s lobby must start calling on Top People for support more often, not?

JEHOVAH'S suboptimal beats man's optimal

Engineering a Bionic Eye
David Klinghoffer August 31, 2012 5:22 AM

Richard Dawkins is fond of citing the German phyisologist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) who complained of the eye that if a human engineer designed such an organ -- with its counterintuitive wiring and virtually unnoticeable blind spot -- he'd have sent the engineer away, disgusted with the incompetence of the plan.

With 40 million blind people in the world today, it would be a wonderful thing if some modern bioengineer were to come up with a design for a bionic eye capable of restoring vision and replacing, as needed, our own natural organ of sight. Yet as a bioengineering problem, developing a bionic eye has proved to be frustratingly difficult, as I noted here earlier.

In this context a headline out of Australia this week -- "'World-first' bionic eye implanted in human patient" (Agençe France-Presse) -- catches your attention. It sounds like scientists have finally solved the problem of designing a working visual prosthesis. Great! How exciting, right? Um, not so fast. Unfortunately as you read the article the impressiveness of the achievement, and the hope it holds out to the blind, have to be adjusted sharply downward with almost every paragraph.

The lucky recipient of the bionic eye is Dianne Ashworth, who suffers from degenerative retinitis pigmentosa. The article first calls it the "'world-first' bionic eye prototype." In the next paragraph it's demoted to an "early prototype." We then learn that what's called an "incredible experience" for Ms. Ashworth was no more than perceiving some flashing lights.

"I didn't know what to expect, but all of a sudden, I could see a little flash -- it was amazing," she said in a statement.
"Every time there was stimulation there was a different shape that appeared in front of my eye."

You read on and find that even this can be done for her only in a lab, so outside the lab Ms. Ashworth is back to being blind.
The team with government-funded Bionic Vision Australia hopes to improve on the current model, which employs 24 electrodes. They are

working towards a "wide-view" 98-electrode device that will provide users with the ability to perceive large objects such as buildings and cars, and a "high-acuity" 1,024-electrode device.
Patients with the high-acuity device are expected to be able to recognise faces and read large print, and BVA said it would be suitable for people with retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration.

So anything remotely like achieving normal vision lies far in the future. The article concludes by quoting researcher David Penington who says the device so far has "fulfilled our best expectations, giving us confidence that with further development we can achieve useful vision." Meaning that Ms. Ashworth, when she can swing by the lab, currently enjoys vision that is not "useful" to her.

That is strange since Hermann von Helmholtz, going back more than a century and a half, talked like he could have done a better job in designing an eye than nature or nature's designer actually did. Despite Dawkins's admiration, maybe the guy was just an arrogant ass, after all.

Reductionism takes another hit

A Philosopher Chastises Reductionist Myopia
Evolution News & Views August 29, 2012 5:14 PM

"Through their thorough arguments, the essays in Processes of Life challenge widely held assumptions about biology and evolution. Dupré provides a view of life grounded in recent research and current understanding. His perspective also reminds us how much we do not know."

This is how Christian Julian Villabona-Arenas ends his review in Science of John Dupré's new collection of essays, Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford University Press, 2012). We've mentioned Dupré before here, here and here. He's a philosopher of biology who describes himself as a philosophical naturalist, but is critical of reductionism. Based on Villabona-Arenas's review, the book offers more criticisms of Darwinism than supports for it.

As philosophers are wont to be, Dupré is a gadfly raising doubts about all the things scientists take for granted: What is life? What is a species? What is an organism? What is a gene?

One fundamental argument Dupré offers against reductionism is that biology works with concepts that depend not only on their constituents but also on the larger systems of which they are part. Debates over the nature of species have generated a substantial fraction of the evolutionary biology literature; less attention has been placed on the definition of genes. In addition to the concerns around such issues, there is the central question of what constitutes the individual organism. (Emphasis added.)
Inherent in these questions are questions about evolution. At several points in his review, Villabona-Arenas, a molecular evolutionist at the University of São Paulo, indicates that Dupré is critical of standard evolutionary theory to the point of chastising evolutionists for their pretensions. But at no point in the review does the reviewer show the author granting neo-Darwinism evidentiary support, even though he is clearly an evolutionist himself.
For instance, the title of his review, "Ending Microbial Myopia," alludes to Dupré's contention that microbes are far more significant than "macrobes" (anything not a microbe) as units of evolution. For most of earth history, they were it:

Although their scientific importance remains generally unappreciated, microbes surpass macrobes (a term Dupré advocates for those organisms that are not bacteria, archaea, or protists) in their contribution to evolutionary history: the first three billion years of life on Earth were overwhelmingly microbial. Even today, they include most living things, exhibit a greater metabolic diversity, and inhabit a wider range of environments (including extremely harsh ones); their collaborative enterprise is so extensive that at the heart of every interface between multicellular eukaryotes and the external environment lies a complex multispecies microbial community. In three essays, Dupré and coauthor Maureen A. O'Malley (University of Sydney) present a strong case for ending the myopia that leads us to undervalue microbes.
That being said, does Dupré show how they came to be? On the contrary, in describing the complexity and variety of microbes, and their interactions, he leaves the door wide open for reassessment of basic evolutionary concepts:
As Dupré and O'Malley note, paying proper attention to microbes has already yielded observations that may force us to rethink fundamental ideas about evolution. In light of the extent of lateral gene transfer, the "tree of life" seems better considered as a net. Studies of cooperation, development, competition, and communication among unicellular organisms have revealed that they can possess many of the characteristics used to define multicellularity. Given that the entities that form lineages are not always the same as those that form metabolic wholes, collaboration may be the central characteristic of living matter. Traditional organisms cannot be seen as "'the' biological individuals on which selection operates." Abandoning some theoretical commitments will open the way for further understanding nature.
Looking at a few finch beaks, in other words, puts the focus on irrelevant details but misses the big picture. It's myopic, Dupré is saying, to see an individual bird or moth as a unit of selection when the living world is a complex, interacting, cooperative, dynamic whole. We might even treat our own microbial travelers (that comprise 90% of the cells we carry with us) as one big "single composite entity." Dupré's view of the biosphere recalls a kind of Heraclitan flux that defies simplistic evolutionary principles. Villabona-Arenas writes,
A living world where none of the entities that constitute an organism are static implies an interactive flux subtly different in every iteration but similar enough to be a distinctive process. Because biological concepts are static abstractions from life processes and different abstractions provide different perspectives on these processes, we face considerable difficulties in reconciling satisfactory general concepts.
So far, they've taken away Darwin's tree and replaced it with a net. They've questioned the unit of selection. They've elevated microbes to collaborative, communicating entities on par with multicellular organisms. They've undermined the ability to describe satisfactory general concepts of evolution. Will they provide something to rescue Darwin from obsolescence? No. They turn on the heat with epigenetics, undermining the Central Dogma:
The author's reasons for recognizing the importance of the environment accentuate the relevance of epigenetics and developmental systems theory, areas that for a long time attracted little interest but have now become very active. Beyond doubt, Dupré emphasizes, the perpetuation of life from one generation to the next requires much more than simply the passage of DNA. He concludes that genomes do not merely store information. Because of their constant dynamic interaction with other constituents of the cell, their capacities depend not only on their sequence of base pairs. More important, those capacities are determined by the systems of which the DNA molecules are only part.
That's not all. Dupré continues by chastising evolutionary psychology, claiming that "evolution has had ample time since the Stone Age to shift our behavior" and "the complexity of the developmental interactions between a wide variety of internal and external factors" (such as epigenetics) discounts the evo-psych claim that we are as we are because we were as we were: e.g., we are obese because our hunter-gatherer ancestors had to store fat for periods of famine. "He applies similar reasoning in rejecting claims of genes for race, highlighting the mistake made in thinking of strings of DNA as having specific functions defined only in terms of phenotypic outcomes. For such reasons, he rejects genetic determinism."
Readers are undoubtedly finding implicit support in all these statements for intelligent design theory, while neo-Darwinism is getting a whipping. Don't look for a last-minute rescue. In his last paragraph, Villabona-Arenas ends the review with one last rebuke:


Through their thorough arguments, the essays in Processes of Life challenge widely held assumptions about biology and evolution. Dupré provides a view of life grounded in recent research and current understanding. His perspective also reminds us how much we do not know.