A convening of the Gods old and new

Evaluating fitness.

 Why Knockouts and Deletions Are Insufficient for Inferring Function — The Mystery of Cell “Vaults” 

Paul Nelson 

The other day, UPS brought me a copy of Larry Moran’s new book, What’s in Your Genome: 90% of Your Genome Is Junk (University of Toronto Press). Moran, an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the U. of Toronto, is a well-known opponent of intelligent design (but also a friendly acquaintance of some ID proponents, including me; Moran and I met in person at the 2016 Royal Society meeting on the extended evolutionary synthesis). In his new book, much of which has appeared previously in slightly different form on his blog Sandwalk, Moran argues that “functional DNA is any stretch of DNA whose deletion from the genome would reduce the fitness of the individual” (p. 98).

Moran puts this definition in bold font, so the reader can’t miss it. I appreciate that, as it makes his argument easier to follow. But I wonder how Moran would respond to the long-standing mystery of cell “vaults.” This is a vault:

Striking structure, right? And widely conserved in eukaryotic cells. Vaults are big; according to the Wikipedia entry, three times the size of ribosomes.

Not Well Understood

The Wiki entry also reports that the function of vaults is not well understood. Most importantly, as a direct challenge to Moran’s definition of “function,” knockouts of the major vault proteins in mice showed no phenotype.

Does that mean vaults have no functional role? Of course not. Fitness is always determined relative to some background. Not showing a phenotype (for instance, when a gene is deleted) does not equal “no function.” Likewise, our analytical difficulties about finding the right fitness background to assess possible vault functions says nothing about whether vault functions exist.

My favorite non-biological example of the trickiness of assessing function against a fitness measure or system background comes from Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Phileas Fogg has purchased the steamship Henrietta from its captain, as Fogg is crossing the Atlantic, so that he can burn all the non-essential materials on the ship to feed its steam boiler and engine. The 1956 movie version shows the Henrietta with much of its decking and cladding, etc., removed to serve as fuel.

Now an observer whose fitness background for steamships is limited to “transport from point A to point B” might mistakenly infer that the removed materials served no function. But that would be nonsense. 

Darwin had male chauvinism down to a science?

 Darwin: Why Women Are Inferior

Nancy Pearcy 

Editor’s note: We are delighted to present a preview adapted from Nancy Pearcey’s forthcoming book The Toxic War on Masculinity. The book will be published on June 27, but you can pre-order now!

Any list of toxic male behavior includes disrespect for women, and Darwin bears some responsibility for that as well. He was convinced that males are superior to females — that man attains “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.” He concluded that “the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.” 

Darwin explained male superiority by proposing that among social animals, young males have to pass through many contests to win a female — and many additional battles to retain their females. Over time, he said, natural selection will favor the stronger, more courageous males. Although modern men do not literally fight for a mate, he wrote,

yet they generally have to undergo, during manhood, a severe struggle in order to maintain themselves and their families; and this will tend to keep up or even increase their mental powers, and, as a consequence, the present inequality between the sexes. 

By contrast, Darwin wrote, women at home nurturing the young are out of reach of natural selection; thus they have evolved more slowly and their mental powers are lower. (It was assumed in his day that males pass on more of their traits to their sons, and females, to their daughters.) 

Darwin did acknowledge that women have “greater tenderness and less selfishness” than men, and even greater “powers of intuition, and rapid perception.” But he dismissed these traits as “characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilization.” Even women’s positive traits were devalued as evidence of their inferiority. 

Darwin’s theory thus gave supposedly scientific authority to the idea that women are intellectually inferior to men — that women have no ideas or insights that warrant male respect. Women were pushed off their Victorian pedestal and relegated to a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder. 

In reality, of course, the survival of the human species depends just as much on characteristically female activities like giving birth and nurturing the young. Nevertheless, evolutionary thinkers preferred to exalt the more typically male activities like hunting and fighting as most important for the progress of the species. 

Beasts at Heart

Other evolutionary thinkers likewise promoted theories of male supremacy. The most influential popularizer of Darwinism in America was the sociologist Herbert Spencer, who argued that survival of the fittest weeds out all but the most aggressive men: 

In the course of the struggles for existence among wild tribes, those tribes survived in which the men were not only powerful and courageous, but aggressive, unscrupulous, intensely egoistic. Necessarily, then, the men of the conquering races which gave origin to the civilized races were men in whom the brutal characteristics were dominant. 

How could women survive in relationships with such brutal men? Spencer’s answer was that women needed to develop the “ability to please.” It would help if they also acquired “the powers of disguising their feelings” in order to hide the sense of “antagonism produced in them by ill treatment.”

The lesson of evolution, apparently, was that men are brutal beasts and that women must appease and placate them, while learning to hide their resentment of “ill treatment.” 

Many leading scientists of the day agreed with Darwin that women were less evolved than men. Anthropologist James McGrigor Allan held that “physically, mentally and morally, woman is a kind of adult child.” Thomas H. Huxley, whose fierce defense of Darwinism earned him the moniker Darwin’s Bulldog, said even education could not lift women to intellectual equality with men. Since women’s inferior abilities were a product of natural selection, he argued, they were not “likely to be removed by even the most skillfully conducted educational selection.” There was no hope, apparently, for women to escape their inferior position.