A Big-Picture Look At Darwinism
by DeuceThere are two polar opposite pictures of Darwinism, when viewing evolution as a whole:
1. The determined view (Morris?). If you were to run evolution again on any planet like earth, things would come out the same, with flagellums, eyes, and finally rational humans with an interest in their own origin.
2. The chance view (an extreme Gould?). If you were able to run evolution again, things would come out wildly different. Only by merest happenstance would things like flagellums, eyes, and rational humans come about.
Now, we run into conceptual issues with both of these. If 1) is true, then what we really have is something like Dawkins' WEASEL program, where the outcome is actually specified from the beginning. As with that program, the real explanation for the outcome isn't natural selection at all, but rather the specification that was already placed at the outset, with the selection merely being a tool. In fact, under this view, selection isn't even "natural selection" per se, but rather a form of artificial selection, because, like dog breeding and WEASEL, it actually does have a goal.
However, under 2), Darwinism doesn't really do what it's purported to do. The whole point of the theory is to give a non-teleological accounting for biological organisation without the absurdities of having to appeal to raw chance. However, if the patterns of things like the rational mind, the bacterial flagellum, the eye, etc, require an explanation, and evolution wouldn't be expected to produce all those things except in extremely unlikely circumstances, then its explanatory power is all an illusion. We still have to appeal to infinite universes and whatnot to get the chance resources necessary to explain what needs explaining. We've been fooled into thinking the Darwinian mechanism is an improvement on chance, when in fact it just spreads the chance out a little over time.
In either case, the Darwinian mechanism is simply "passing the buck" on to either a previously existing specification (which still needs to be accounted for) or to chance, rather than actually accounting for the patterns itself. This, I think, is exactly what Dembski is getting at with the displacement principle.
So, what other options are there? Well, you can try to mix the two views together. But this doesn't solve your problems, it simply gives you a combination of the problems from both views. To the degree that the outcome of any particular pattern that needs explaining is certain, you need to account for the rules that made it so. To the degree that it isn't, you're appealing to chance.
You can also argue that everything that needs explaining is reasonably attributable to chance (good luck), or that nothing needs explaining (which amounts to either total existential skepticism, or the belief that the organization of life is a brute fact). Both positions cut natural selection out of the loop.
I think this dillemma is why, when asked what evolution would create if run a second time, Dawkins gave such a vague, meandering, uninformative answer, full of "probably"'s and "might well"'s (see here, and scroll down to near the bottom for the quote). He can't just say "anything could happen, anything at all", because it would be fatal to Darwinism as the "antithesis" of chance, and would seriously undermine it as a powerful and predictive theory. He can't say "Things would happen just the same as before", because that would imply that the outcome was set from the start, and is thus not really explained by natural selection. This also, I think, explains the strange back and forth we see regarding whether Darwinian evolution is "random" or the "opposite of random". Neither answer is really acceptable, so neither is given consistently.
February 24th, 2006 at 12:49 am
So, what other options are there? Well, you can try to mix the two views together. But this doesn't solve your problems, it simply gives you a combination of the problems from both views.
That depends on what you mean by "mix the two views together," and you are a bit vague there. It also depends on what you would consider to be identical outcomes from running evolution again and what you would consider to be wildly different outcomes. What if similar selective pressures are capable of producing similar but not identical organisms? If natural selection is the influence of environment (climate, geography, other organisms, etc), then evolution will have both predictable and unpredictable components, because environment consists of both predictable general trends and unpredicatble contingent events. Thus, evolution would seem to be neither option 1 nor option 2, but it can't simply be dismissed as having the problems of both caricatures, either.
If I can make a friendly suggestion, your essay would have more impact if you actually made some contact with real biology rather than speculating about other planets like earth. Take Caribbean Anolis lizards, for instance:
http://www.biology.wustl.edu/~...
Here we have a real world example of rerunning evolution — the independent evolutionary history of each island of the Greater Antilles. Each island is home to different Anolis species. Very similar morphological forms have evolved on different islands (e.g. ground dwelling species, small twig anolis, giant anolis, etc), but genetic analysis suggests that on each island, the different forms share a common ancestor. The lizards on different islands are not completely identical, so re-running evolution on different islands has not resulted in identical results (therefore not option 1). However, some general trends in Anolis evolution do seem to be observed (therefore not option 2).
And of course, Anolis can only evolve on an island if they get there in the first place. In the Caribbean, this almost certainly involved chance rafting of individuals or small groups. If the lizards never reach an island, there can't be any adaptive radiation. So, in that sense, re-running history might give completely different results: no Anolis whatsoever and some unrelated organism filling their ecological niche.
If you disagree that Darwinian mechanisms explain the evolution of caribean Anolis, what is your ID/teleological hypothesis? Do you reject common ancestry of Anolis species? Was "twig anolis" specified from the beginning on each island? If so, how? An ancestral Anolis "front loaded" with all the genetic diversity needed to generate the different forms? Did the designer independently tweak an ancestral anolis on each island to generate the different ecotypes? If so, why not just reuse the same species on different islands?
Comment by Nick — February 24, 2006 @ 12:49 am
February 24th, 2006 at 2:46 am
Deuce wrote:
That's not what either man said. Gould never said that flagella, eyes or many other things would never evolve. He'd be a fool if he did because eyes have evolved dozens of different times. Gould's point was that we would not get an exact duplicate of a human being if we rewound evolution and ran it over. We might wind up with no intelligent creatures or with intelligent reptiles or intelligent uber-possums.
There are a lot of things that are so just plain useful (eyes, hearing, movable limbs, warm blood, breathing oxygen, etc) and which have such a smooth ramp from ultra simple to ultra complicated (non-directional light sensors, sensors which can tell what general direction the light is coming from, sensors that can more accurately detect the direction a light is coming from, sensors that form a crude image, sensors that form a clear image, etc.) that they are almost guaranteed to evolve several times and have, in fact, done so.
Comment by DataDoc — February 24, 2006 @ 2:46 am
February 24th, 2006 at 9:38 am
Deuce,
With Conway-Morris, I'm not so sure that you have strict determinism: you have something like tight-constraint; sort of like a ball rolling down a water slide. There exact path is contingent but tightly constrained.
DataDoc,
You're supposing that on every historical run of evolution you'd get multicellularity (and eyes). But if the historical tape is even relevantly contingent, then there is no reason to expect multicelluarity (and eyes) on every run.
The fact that they've evolved many times is itself dependent on what I presume most contingentists would say itself was a contingency. Once you get multicelluarity, then eyes seem to follow, yes. But that takes the contingency question back a step.
Of course, if you count eyes as just members of the class of environmental sensors, then it seems that life does drive deterministically towards this capacity.
Comment by bipod — February 24, 2006 @ 9:38 am
February 24th, 2006 at 10:28 am
Agreed, that's why I put the question mark by his name, but I probably should've been more clear.
Comment by Deuce — February 24, 2006 @ 10:28 am
February 24th, 2006 at 10:58 am
The existence of parallel and convergent evolution as evidenced in the anole lizard family and many, many other species, is a striking piece of evidence in support of Dr. Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance.
There is also a great deal of evidence that Lamarkian-type effects occur in evolution, which is contradictory to orthodox Darwinian evolution.
Comment by MatthewCromer — February 24, 2006 @ 10:58 am
February 26th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
Deuce,
what you call "polar opposite pictures of Darwinism" are nothing but Chance and Necessity, and it does not take much imagination to conclude that we are still (people are still) groping with the two ingredients of Jacques Monod's chief work Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York, Alfred A Knopf, 1971, ISBN 0394466152).
You say, with regard to Chance and Necessity:
Well, I think we must locate Monod's work in its time, to appreciate fully its impact. Unlike IDers, possibly Monod does not resort to the notion of information, but approaches the problem from a thermodynamic angle. Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics had already, since the "˜forties, recognized Information as just another way of looking at "order within a system" (whether artificial or natural). This is reflected by the title of his groundbreaking book Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, 1948).
Monod was confronted with the necessity of giving new coherence and consistency to the very foundations of the Theory of Evolution, which, since its formal birth in 1859 with Darwin's Origin of Species, has been confronted, without fully metabolizing them, with a host of novelties that Darwin could not even have the faintest notion of: and namely, the Laws of Genetics, the discovery of the highly organized structure of the cell (hardly "protoplasm" at all), the identification of the main biochemical ingredients of the cell, viz. proteins and nucleic acids, the discovery of the structure of DNA, the "code of life", real turning point of biological science. And finally, the identification of the "genes" as sequences in the DNA.
It is this modern evolutionary synthesis, this s.c. neo-Darwinism, of which Monod set to reorganize the conceptual foundations. It is from Wiener that Monod derives the equivalence between the thermodynamic order of an organism (the opposite of entropy=disorder, thence the expression neg-entropy). The original conceptual contribution of Monod is precisely to combine Chance and Necessity. In essence the idea is the following:
Chance, that is the "roulette" of random mutations of genes, provides the "raw material" upon which the constraints of General Natural Laws + Specific Environment work to select the "random inventions" of Nature that, occasionally, may prove fitter to the environment than the existing genotype, the "random inventions" that occasionally (among a host of random dysfunctional mutations) may outsmart the "genetic status quo". Monod also notices something fundamental: repetition and conservation is the rule, mutation and novelty is the exception. But because the rare "smart" mutation is interspersed among repetitions, and is only selected if functionally more adapted to the environment than the "genetic establishment", mutation & selection process can have a cumulative character.
Is Monod's Chance & Necessity model of Evolution true?
The new conceptual fremework that ID is developing, not so much the quasi-idealistic lucubrations, but, most of all, the empirical evidence (if corroborated) of Irreducible Complexity put serious doubts on Monod's brilliant conceptual construction. But, IMHO, Monod's model is the only rationally acceptable one (for ToE, of course, not within ID), if we want to remain in the domain of science proper.
Otherwise, the "new "versions of Lamackism, Lysenkoism, or even Teilhardism, are already disturbingly looming back on stage, maybe fancily renamed as "morphogenetic fields", "formative causation", "morphic resonance" or, with pure voodoo twist, even resorting to the Jungian "collective unconscious".
Note for the Webmaster
I have notice d that this thread, as it is "Uncategorized", is not monitored in the "Recent Comments" column, and in the "Latest Activities >Comments" area of the "Dashboard" page. I am sure that this can easily be sorted out.
Comment by Servetus — February 26, 2006 @ 6:11 pm
February 26th, 2006 at 6:56 pm
For you to compare Rupert Sheldrake to Lysenko is absolutely disgusting and vile.
The merit of a scientific theory are its consonance with the evidence, not whether or not the ideas "disturbingly loom" as threats to a popular worldview whose devotees cannot imagine anything beyond it.
Comment by MatthewCromer — February 26, 2006 @ 6:56 pm
February 26th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
MatthewCromer,
you have obviously invested a lot, both intellectually and emotionally, in Dr. Sheldrake's approach. It's a pity that your reaction to my comment is so heated and personal. Thank you, anyway, for giving further info about Dr. Sheldrake's ideas and activities.
I have got nothing in principle about even the most heterodox approaches, like Dr. Sheldrake's views on Telepathy (and by easy inference, all kind of "psi" phenomena). Even Dr. Sheldrake does not seem to hesitate to resort to the expression "fringe science", for the type of research he feels more inclined to.
For my part, let me say once again that, as a matter of method (and style) I prefer to stick to Dickerson's Rule #1, very much like a like to a "Professional Rule" for Scientists:
Comment by Servetus — February 26, 2006 @ 7:30 pm
February 26th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
It means what it sounds like. Instead of saying that a particular pattern was inevitable, you'd say that it was just more probable than not. But this would still imply something like the WEASEL program, just with a weaker genetic algorithm. And if you say that the pattern was more likely to not happen, then you start appealing more to chance.
I intentionally left that stuff out, because this entry was meant to be a thought-provoker, not an answer to the question. I intended for the reader to think about what would constitute identical outcomes and what would not, and other such issues. However, note what I pointed out above:
"You can also argue that everything that needs explaining is reasonably attributable to chance (good luck), or that nothing needs explaining (which amounts to either total existential skepticism, or the belief that the organization of life is a brute fact). Both positions cut natural selection out of the loop."
Arguing that all or most outcomes are identical would be a way of saying that nothing needs to be explained. Or you could try to broaden out what you consider identical to the point that each pattern in need of explaining is sufficiently broad to be explainable by chance.
That, I think, is the primary issue - figuring out what exactly needs to be explained and why. After all, you need to know what needs to be explained before you can explain it.
Comment by Deuce — February 26, 2006 @ 10:12 pm
February 26th, 2006 at 10:16 pm
Comparing someone to Lysenko is like comparing someone to Himmler. He was a mass murderer who used his position of power to liquidate his intellectual opposition. It's entirely appropriate for me to be outraged at your comparison of a friend of mine to a Soviet butcher, and you ought to be apologizing for your grotesque statement of equivalence between Lysenko's theories and Sheldrake's, not defending it.
I'm not sure what the word "paranormal" is supposed to mean, other than phenomena that you personally believe don't exist. Trying to create a "rule" where you exclude emperical research into certain topics because they might offend journal editors is the exact opposite of the spirit of scientific inquiry. Those who espouse such are behaving dogmatically and not scientifically, no matter what sheepskins might be hanging on their walls.
Comment by MatthewCromer — February 26, 2006 @ 10:16 pm
February 27th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
OK, I agree that even hinting at any kind of association of Lysenko's name to that of your friend Sheldrake was not nice on my part. But let's distinguish, if you don't mind. Lysenko not only was a pseudo-scientist, but he also took advantage of the soviet power system in the most abominable way:
MY only "charge" against Sheldrake, on the contrary, is that of pseudo-science.
Comment by Servetus — February 27, 2006 @ 12:44 pm
February 27th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
Thanks for your apology. Appreciate it.
On what basis? What exactly is "psuedo-science" supposed to mean, anyway? Is it just a term of derision by the institution of mainstream science against those it dislikes, or is there a clear definition that can distinguish "real science" from "pseudo-science"
As a related point, are you aware of Sheldrake's background as a highly-respected biologist and director of a research program at Cambridge, as well as one with impeccable publication credits before his "heresy"
Comment by MatthewCromer — February 27, 2006 @ 1:20 pm
February 27th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
I can only refer you to may post of February 26th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Comment by Servetus — February 27, 2006 @ 3:48 pm
February 27th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
So to you telepathy is a-priori excluded from the realm of things science should investigate, just because.
Got it.
Comment by MatthewCromer — February 27, 2006 @ 5:03 pm