Professor of biology: Fear that criticism will encourage creationists and proponents of intelligent design
by KrauzeThis new book, Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment, looks interesting:
Natural selection is commonly interpreted as the fundamental mechanism of evolution. Questions about how selection theory can claim to be the all-sufficient explanation of evolution often go unanswered by today's neo-Darwinists, perhaps for fear that any criticism of the evolutionary paradigm will encourage creationists and proponents of intelligent design.
In Biological Emergences, Robert Reid argues that natural selection is not the cause of evolution. He writes that the causes of variations, which he refers to as natural experiments, are independent of natural selection; indeed, he suggests, natural selection may get in the way of evolution. Reid proposes an alternative theory to explain how emergent novelties are generated and under what conditions they can overcome the resistance of natural selection. He suggests that what causes innovative variation causes evolution, and that these phenomena are environmental as well as organismal.
After an extended critique of selectionism, Reid constructs an emergence theory of evolution, first examining the evidence in three causal arenas of emergent evolution: symbiosis/association, evolutionary physiology/behavior, and developmental evolution. Based on this evidence of causation, he proposes some working hypotheses, examining mechanisms and processes common to all three arenas, and arrives at a theoretical framework that accounts for generative mechanisms and emergent qualities. Without selectionism, Reid argues, evolutionary innovation can more easily be integrated into a general thesis. Finally, Reid proposes a biological synthesis of rapid emergent evolutionary phases and the prolonged, dynamically stable, non-evolutionary phases imposed by natural selection.
Robert G. B. Reid is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He is the author of Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis.
February 25th, 2007 at 6:08 pm
I have an idea for a blog post, but I'm not a contributor and not a biologist, so hopefully someone else can take this idea and run with it. I got his from a popular source; someone with a subscription to Science might look at his technical article or his webpage.
The research seems to parallel Robert Reid's ideas as presented in this blog.
"Designed for Evolution"
I ran across a discussion of George Gilchrist's (http://gwgilc.people.wm.edu) research on Spanish fruit flies, and how they show (relatively) rapid evolution of specific chromosomal inversions in response to latitude/temperature changes. The article was in the context of global warming, but the research has to do with how a colony of one type quickly, "soon evolves" in his words, parallel inversions on two continents that mirror the distribution on a third. He is quoted as saying ""¦you have reason to think it's not a coincidence."
Now, he appears to be a through going conventional evolutionist and anti-ID, so his explanation appears to be that these changes are environmentally driven. But given that these changes appear reversible as the population moves into new areas ( — my statement seems implied by the article, but needs further research into his results — ), and we "know" that evolution cannot look ahead, this seems to be a challenge to blindwatch making that the changes would be so predictable.
However, from an ID perspective, if we allow ourselves to ask "IF the system was designed, how might a designer provide the ability for a genome to exploit environmental changes and evolve accordingly.
I for one believe that the statement "this system is designed" is forever a philosophical statement, even if the reasoning is based on good empirical science. However, it seems to me that opening up biology to ask "IF this system was designed, what exploits not available to random search are there to generate variation?*" allows us to ask a completely new set of questions. Then, after a period of time by all means compare the results of the two paradigms. As it is, the later question is disallowed because "it just can't be designed."
*Yes, I know NS is not a random process, it is a filter that destroys variation; it is the source of variation (blindwatch maker vs. telic) that is at issue in our debates.
Comment by cody — February 25, 2007 @ 6:08 pm