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Saturday, 3 September 2022

Paleo darwinism v. Neo Darwinism?

 If Darwin Came Back Today... 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 

A classic ID the Future episode presents the beginning of a novella simultaneously fantastical and cheeky, I, Charles Darwin. What would happen if Darwin were to come back today? What would the gentleman of Down House think about the science of the 21st century, and how might it confirm or change his views on evolution? In today’s introductory episode of a multi-part series, Darwin finds himself returned from the grave and begins to explore modern London, followed by a return trip to the Galápagos Islands, where he is surprised by what he learns. Download the podcast or listen to it here. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit www.icharlesdarwin.com. 


David Berlinski on being an intellectually fulfilled Darwin sceptic:the conclusion.

 Darwin Without Darwinism 

BIOLOGISTS OFTEN affirm that as members of the scientific community they positively welcome criticism. Nonsense. Like everyone else, biologists loathe criticism and arrange their lives so as to avoid it. Criticism has nonetheless seeped into their souls, the process of doubt a curiously Darwinian one in which individual biologists entertain minor reservations about their theory without ever recognizing the degree to which these doubts mount up to a substantial deficit. Creationism, so often the target of their indignation, is the least of their worries.


For many years, biologists have succeeded in keeping skepticism on the circumference of evolutionary thought, where paleontologists, taxonomists, and philosophers linger. But the burning fringe of criticism is now contracting, coming ever closer to the heart of Darwin’s doctrine. In a paper of historic importance, Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin expressed their dissatisfaction with what they termed “just-so” stories in biology.(8) 

It is by means of a just-so story, for example, that the pop biologist Elaine Morgan explains the presence in human beings of an aquatic diving reflex. An obscure primate ancestral to man, Morgan argues, was actually aquatic, having returned to the sea like the dolphin. Some time later, that primate, having tired of the water, clambered back to land, his aquatic adaptations intact. Just so.


If stories of this sort are intellectually inadequate–preposterous, in fact–some biologists are prepared to argue that they are unnecessary as well, another matter entirely. “How seriously,” H. Allen Orr asked in a superb if savage review of Dennett’s Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, should we take these endless adaptive explanations of features whose alleged Design may be illusory? Isn’t there a difference between those cases where we recognize Design before we understand its precise significance and those cases where we try to make Design manifest concocting a story? And isn’t it especially worrisome that we can make up arbitrary traits faster than adaptive stories, and adaptive stories faster than experimental tests?


The camel’s lowly hump and the elephant’s nose–these, Orr suggests, may well be adaptive and so designed by natural selection. But beyond the old familiar cases, life may not be designed at all, the weight of evolution borne by neutral mutations, with genes undergoing a slow but pointless drifting in time’s soft currents. 

Like Orr, many biologists see an acknowledgment of their doubts as a cagey, a calculated, concession; but cagey or not, it is a concession devastating to the larger project of Darwinian biology. Unable to say what evolution has accomplished, biologists now find themselves unable to say whether evolution has accomplished it. This leaves evolutionary theory in the doubly damned position of having compromised the concepts needed to make sense of life–complexity, adaptation, design – while simultaneously conceding that the theory does little to explain them.


NO DOUBT, the theory of evolution will continue to play the singular role in the life of our secular culture that it has always played. The theory is unique among scientific instruments in being cherished not for what it contains, but for what it lacks. There are in Darwin’s scheme no biotic laws, no Bauplan as in German natural philosophy, no special creation, no elan vital, no divine guidance or transcendental forces. The theory functions simply as a description of matter in one of its modes, and living creatures are said to be something that the gods of law indifferently sanction and allow. 

“Darwin,” Richard Dawkins has remarked with evident gratitude, “made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” This is an exaggeration, of course, but one containing a portion of the truth. That Darwin’s theory of evolution and biblical accounts of creation play similar roles in the human economy of belief is an irony appreciated by altogether too few biologists. 

Notes 

A.S. Romer’s Vertebrate Paleontology (University of Chicago Press, third edition, 1966) may be consulted with profit.

The details have been reported in the New York Times and in Science: evidence that at least some entomologists have a good deal of time on their hands.

Schutzenberger’s comments were made at a symposium held in 1966. The proceedings were edited by Paul S. Moorhead and Martin Kaplan and published as Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press,1967). Schutzenberger’s remarks, together with those of the physicist Murray Eden at the same symposium, constituted the first significant criticism of evolutionary doctrine in recent decades.

Murray Eden is, as usual, perceptive: “It is as if,” he writes “some pre-Newtonian cosmologist had proposed a theory of planetary motion which supposed that a natural force of unknown origin held the planets in their courses. The supposition is right enough and the idea of a force between two celestial bodies is a very useful one, but it is hardly a theory.”

Black Mischief: Language, Life, Logic & Luck (1986).

The same pattern of intellectual displacement is especially vivid in Daniel Dennett’s description of natural selection as a force subordinate to what he calls “the principle of the accumulation of design.” Sifting through the debris of chance, natural selection, he writes, occupies itself by “thriftily conserving the design work . . . accomplished at each stage.” But there is no such principle. Dennett has simply assumed that a sequence of conserved advantages will converge to an improvement in design; the assumption expresses a non sequitur. 

It is absurdly easy to set up a sentence-searching algorithm obeying purely Darwinian constraints. The result, however, is always the same–gibberish.

“The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society. Volume B 205 (1979). 

The brain of the talking ape.

 More Ways that Human and Ape Brains Differ. 

Evolution News @DiscoveryCSC 


Yale University researchers have identified more specific ways the human brain differs from the brains of all other primates. Using “hundreds of thousands of cells collected from the dlPFC of adult humans, chimpanzees, macaque, and marmoset monkeys,” they found 

After grouping cells with similar expression profiles they revealed 109 shared primate cell types but also five that were not common to all species. These included a type of microglia, or brain-specific immune cell, that was present only in humans and a second type shared by only humans and chimpanzees.


The human-specific microglia type exists throughout development and adulthood, the researchers found, suggesting the cells play a role in maintenance of the brain upkeep rather than combatting disease… An analysis of gene expression in the microglia revealed another human-specific surprise — the presence of the gene FOXP2. This discovery raised great interest because variants of FOXP2 have been linked to verbal dyspraxia, a condition in which patients have difficulty producing language or speech.


YALE UNIVERSITY, “WHAT MAKES THE HUMAN BRAIN DIFFERENT? STUDY REVEALS CLUES” AT SCIENCEDAILY (AUGUST 25, 2022) THE PAPERREQUIRES A FEE OR SUBSCRIPTION. 

More Differences 

Some other differences between human brains and other primate brains:


➤ Human brains are heavier. “For starters, our brains weigh an average of three pounds, which is enormous for an animal of our body size. By comparison, chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, have brains that are one-third the size of our own, although they are very similar to us in body size. Most of this brain-size difference reflects the evolutionary expansion of the association cortex, a group of regions that supports such sophisticated cognitive functions as language, self-awareness, and problem solving.” — Todd M. Press, BrainFacts (July 23, 2014). However, the relationship between brain size/type and intelligence is not straightforward.


➤ Human brains are especially asymmetric. “Researchers compared geometric differences between brain scans of humans and chimpanzees. They observed structural asymmetries in both human and chimpanzee brains, but human brains were especially asymmetric.” — Tanya Lewis, LiveScience (April 23, 2013). It’s suggested that asymmetry might be related to brain adaptability. 

The human brain allocates more cells to thinking skills. “… a part of the brain called the cerebral cortex – which plays a key role in memory, attention, awareness and thought — contains twice as many cells in humans as the same region in chimpanzees.” — eLife (September 26, 2016).


➤ Our brains have many more language connections. “Especially the fasciculus arcuatus, a bundle of connective nerve fibres important for the processing of language, is connected to many more areas in humans than in macaques, and even in chimpanzees.” — Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour (May 12, 2020). The paper is open access.


➤ There are distinct differences at the molecular and genetic level. “Specifically, the researchers’ results showed that interneurons expressing genes that code for dopamine synthesis are present in humans’ striata but not in non-humans’. This, they say, is part of what makes human brains uniquely human. Neuromodulatory transmitters, in particular dopamine, are involved in distinctly human aspects of cognition and behavior, such as working memory, reasoning, reflective exploratory behavior, and overall intelligence” …” — Peter Hess, Inverse (November 27, 2017)