Sep 18 2009
Naive About Science
SGU listener Ben Lurvey sent me a link to this blog post by economist Eric Falkenstein. I have to say, this had my irony meter going to 11, so I thought I would have some fun with Mr. Falkenstein. The fact that he specifically criticized the SGU may also have something to do with my attention.
Falkenstein laments that “nonscientists (are) naive about science.” This is sometimes true, but not always. I also know some scientists who are naive about science. But certainly the degree of scientific understanding tends to be much greater among working scientists than the lay public. Falkenstein specifically complains about science journalists who “when these journalists digress from a specific subject, to science in general they are extremely naive or duplicitous.”
I have myself been highly critical of sloppy science journalism – but I don’t think it is limited to “science in general” – I think it is often atrocious even when dealing with a narrow topic. Sloppy journalism is sloppy journalism. Falkenstein then gets to the SGU:
If you go to The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, you invariably hear a bunch of caricatures of those who disagree with conventional wisdom on science—most of which truly are quacks, but not always—and they pedantically emphasize how these alternative views are ‘not science’: they have beliefs that do not have peer-reviewed tests supporting a falsifiable hypothesis.
Let me translate – the SGU does a generally good job describing science and attacking pseudoscience, but I take exception when they attack my sacred cows so I must find some excuse to dismiss their criticism.
I am always open to constructive criticism, it is often an excellent path to self-improvement, and I frequently emphasize that knowledge is a journey and not a destination. But I don’t have to accept unfair criticism lying down. Notice how Falkenstein dismisses our criticism as “caricatures” and minimizes the criticism of pseudoscience as going against “conventional wisdom.” I think listeners of the SGU will recognize that, rather, we specifically criticize poor arguments that either rely upon false premises, unjustified assumptions, incomplete data, or logical fallacies. Dismissing specific criticisms of logic and evidence as if they were non-specific dismissals of the unconventional is right out of the true-believer playbook.
He further dismisses our criticism of non-science as “pedantic.” Anyone with a working knowledge of science understands that attention to detail and precision is not “pedantry” – it is essential. Also, just to clarify, we do not criticize all true-belief as non-science; some of it is just very bad science. We are careful (pedantic?) to make that distinction.
But here is where you might want to unplug your irony meters less they overload – Falkenstein criticizes us and others for being journalists who do not understand science, and then he proceeds to naively butcher science in his examples. I guess we are meant to believe that journalists are naive about science but economists have a broad scientific expertise. I would also point out to Mr. Falkenstein (not that it really matters) that I am in fact a scientist, clinician, and educator – but not a journalist.
Since I have been highly critical of bad science journalism myself, let me clarify my position. I do not think a journalist has to be a scientist or an expert to do good science journalism. Rather, I would say that the quality of the science journalism is proportional to the overall scientific knowledge and savvy of the journalist. Also, in this context there are two broad kinds of science reporting – distilling our current understanding of a topic oneself, and reporting the distillation of others – presumed experts. In other words, sometimes journalists rely upon their own understanding of a topic, and sometimes they simply report what the experts say (and in practice most pieces are a blend of both, but these are distinct skill sets).
Carl Zimmer is an excellent example of a journalist and writer who is not a scientist but who does a fantastic job of reporting science. He clearly gets it.
Falkenstein makes a hack job of several examples of what he thinks are scientists glossing over our lack of understanding, but my favorite is when he turns to evolution:
Take the ‘evidence’ for evolution, which has been assumed overwhelming by conventional scientific opinion for over a century, and see how tendentious it is. Darwin thought his best evidence was Haeckel’s drawings that suggested ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, that species closer to our uber-ancestors look more like early embryos, species higher in the evolutionary tree like late embryos. We know know those drawings were frauds, and this line of reasoning is a dead end. Karl Popper gave as an example of the analytical power of evolution the existence of darker moths in industrial environments, and this example was prominent in textbooks for decades. But the signature pictures of the dark moth on the pollution-darkened tree were invariably stuck there with a pin, and not relevant to speciation. Or Darwin’s famous finch beaks, that were longer when there was less food–these turned out to be temporary phenomenon, and there is no trend in finch beaks that suggests this phenomenon leads to speciation.
Yikes! It looks like Falkenstein thinks he understands evolution better than working scientists because he read some secondary hostile texts about it (i.e. creationist nonsense).
First, Falkenstein has a creationst-like obsession with Darwin. Here is a note to evolution-deniers – modern evolutionary theory began with Darwin, it did not END with Darwin. Who cares what the state of evidence was in Darwin’s time – we have 150 years of advances behind us now. How about some more contemporary examples of evidence for evolution.
Falkenstein also butchers each example. Haeckel’s drawings were made after Origin of the Species was published. It was not, and more importantly is not, a major piece of evidence for evolution. And yes, Haeckel’s drawings were exaggerated, as was the notion of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, which is now rejected in the classic form proposed by Haeckel. I also have to point out that there is no “higher” on the evolutionary tree – using that term instantly brands one as naive about modern evolutionary thought.
The notion, however, that embryological development reflects, to some degree, the evolutionary (phylogenetic) past of an organism is rock-solid science. The bones that currently make up the mammalian inner ear are the same bones that once resided in the reptilian jaw. There is nice fossil evidence of this transition. Further, these bones originate in the tissue that gives rise to the jaw and migrate to the inner ear during embryological development. This is just one example of evolutionary developmental biology (evo devo), which is actually a robust field of science replete with stunning evidence for evolution. To dismiss this based upon Haeckel’s drawings is equivalent to dismissing all of the fossil evidence because of Piltdown man.
Then we have the dark moth example – as industrialization darkened the trees of England the peppered moth, which was light colored, soon shifted to the darker moths predominating. This, in fact, occurred – even if the photos taken to illustrate it were staged. The photos were not the scientific evidence.
And finally he turns to Darwin’s finches (studiously avoiding any evidence from the last half century or so), and here Falkenstein misses the point of the finches entirely. Yes, it is true that within species of finches the beak sizes varied with the environment, but this change was cyclical and not directional. This demonstrates that natural selection can have an effect on population genetics, but by itself does not demonstrate speciation – but neither is it presented as evidence for speciation.
Rather, what Darwin cleverly observed is that the finches of the Galapagos actually existed in many species, with different beak designs adapted to different food sources. In other parts of the world these same niches were filled by different types of birds, but on the Galapagos they were all filled by finches. Why, it is as if an ancestor finch migrated to the Galapagos and then evolved to fill all the available niches for small birds, adapting their beaks and other feature to fit those niches, while still remaining recognizably finches.
And to be clear – this was an observation that led to the hypothesis of evolution. It is not, by itself, evidence for evolution or the mechanism of evolution.
That’s Falkenstein’s summary of the evidence for evolution – a naive and distorted hack job, likely lifted from a creationist text. Absent is any discussion of the actual modern evidence for evolution – including myriad transitional forms, evidence for mutation creating adaptive variation, natural selection, changes in allele frequency, and even speciation.
Falkenstein continues:
Darwin anticipated finding all sorts of intermediate forms in evolution, but these are the exception, not the rule. Indeed, Gould’s punctuated equilibrium theory was first seen as untrue, but then, a minor change in emphasis that Darwin’s theory allowed all the time. There is much effort to show Darwin did not reject sudden changes, but clearly the Origin of Species emphasized the smaller steps. One can argue that ‘sudden’ in geological time is long in generations, but nonetheless, it’s a major change in emphasis. The scientists like to whitewash these debates because they are scared to death of looking uncertain to Bible thumpers.
Oh boy. Actually, every fossil species is a transitional or intermediate form. These are not the exception at all. And there are plenty of beautifully transitional species between major extant groups – fish and tetrapods, reptiles and mammals, dinosaurs and birds, apes and humans, terrestrial mammals and whales, and many more. To dismiss all this evidence as the exception is hopelessly misinformed.
This is a good time to point out that the NESS is building a topic-specific reference site, and I am starting with creationism/intelligent design. This is an open-ended work in progress, but you can already see there a nice listing of recent books that go over the actual modern evidence for every aspect of evolution, and a list of some key research papers with specific evidence.
Regarding his last point – again the Darwin obsession – this is just silly. Where is the “much effort” to portray Darwin as anything but a gradualist? Sure, Darwin may have allowed for some geologically sudden events, but primarily he was a gradualist. And again, who cares. We have modified our understanding of the tempo and pacing of evolution based upon 150 years of evidence. Try to catch up.
It gets worse:
The smoking gun for evolution from common descent is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations. There is no smoking gun.
Wrong and wrong. Common descent has many smoking guns. The genetic evidence is a smoking gun – it displays a hierarchical pattern of relatedness that is a dead ringer for common descent. Developmental biology is a smoking gun of common descent. The fossil record is a smoking gun of common descent. Speciation is just one line of evidence – not the line of evidence.
And – there is evidence for speciation. Here is a definitive treatment at talkorigins.org.
There is so much more naive nonsense in his post, but I want to focus on one more point:
In all these cases, science mainly is about explanation, not prediction, and practitioners exhibit much more precision and confidence than is objectively warranted.
The other examples he gave included dark matter, planet formation, cosmology, and finance. I’ll give him a pass on finance since that does seem to be his area of knowledge, and it is definitely not mine. But for the others he is being, well, naive. In these cases science is not just about explanation. That may be the beginning of a hypothesis, but it is not sufficient to close the loop and make a discipline a genuine science.
Keeping with the evolution example, Falkenstein seems unaware that evolutionary theory (again, which started as a new explanatory hypothesis) has survived over a century of making predictions that turned out to be true. Evolution has survived countless potential falsifications that never materialized. Sure, scientists were surprised by evidence that forced them to revise our understanding of evolution – but nothing which called into question the basic theory of evolution itself.
There are no mammals in Cambrian fossil strata. Fossils occur in a temporal and morphological sequence that is compatible with common descent (when there are countless patterns that are incompatible with common descent). The pattern of base pairs in genes and amino acids in proteins across species also follows a pattern of common descent, but there are many many more potential patterns that would have been flat-out incompatible with evolution.
Evolutionary theory predicted that we would find Tiktaalik, and we did. It predicted that we should find morphologically transitional species, and we have steadily been doing so. Sure, we haven’t found all of them – that is trivially and predictably true – but we keep finding more and more, even where and “when” (geologically) we predict they should be.
In short, Falkenstein is an economist who thinks he is a scientist. This is not to say that economics is not a science, but apparently you can function as an economist without understanding science. Just as you can function as a physician without understanding science.
That Falkenstein makes as the centerpiece of his article criticism of others for being naive about the nature of science is extreme irony, as he then proceeds to display profound naivete about the nature of science and the status of the specific sciences he addresses.
42 Responses to “Naive About Science”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Isn’t Ben Stein also an economist? I’m just sayin’….
This comment from Falkenstein cracked me up beyond belief:
Ha.
Haha.
Hahahahahahahahaha.
“If facts were definitive there would not be a debate”?
My goodness. I’m sorry, but that was just so funny.
Let’s put it this way. The facts are unequivocal that the Holocaust happened, but there are still Holocaust deniers. The facts are unequivocal that the U.S. Government was not behind 9/11, but we still have the 9/11 “Truth” movement. The facts are unequivocal that water does not have memory and that diluting a substance to virtually zero does not make it stronger, but we still have homeopaths.
Where on earth have this guy been? He’s either incredibly naive or utterly disingenuous. Take your pick.
Also, gee, I don’t recall, but has SGU criticized Falkenstein lately?
The obsession with Darwin is strange to me, and I had a thought as I reasd thus piece & listened to the SGU 9/1/09 discussion of the appendix. An analogy to the “Darwin is wrong about stuff, therefore evolution isn’t true” is tantamount to saying gravity doesn’t exist because Newton didn’t get it 100% correct. Einstein didn’t disprove gravity, he just showed that Newton’s theory was incomplete & needed refinement. Just as newtonian physics suffices for everyday situations, Darwin’s explication provides a good general outline to understanding evolutionary theory. Understanding evolutionary history, however, does require some reference to the last 150 years of discoveries & developments.
I love what you’re doing at SBM and the NESS to create portals to information on specific topics.
For the NESS Creationism page, I would make it exceedingly clear that the “summary of key research” section is but a minuscule sample of the existing research.
“Actually, every fossil species is a transitional or intermediate form.”
Don’t you feel that this is true of all existing life as well? Dawkins gives a pretty convincing argument about the artificial designation of “species” in An Ancestors Tale.
Do you think speciation will ever drop out of evolutionary discussions altogether?
ADR150 – I do. In the topic overview I state:
Please be patient as we build this resource. In particular the key research we link to below – we obviously cannot summarize the thousands of published articles that constitute the evidence base for evolution. Rather, we focus on recent high quality representative studies that establish important principles of evolutionary theory.
But, I probably should reiterate this just above the research section
Although I can agree with much of the criticism of Falkenstein’s essay, here’s what he actually wrote that gives some context to the smoking gun commentary:
“The smoking gun for evolution from common descent is speciation, not local adaptation and differentiation of populations. There is no smoking gun. The mechanism of evolution is still a mystery, unless one is happy merely knowing that it’s ‘not God’, which given methodological naturalism, is true by assumption. Nonetheless, none of these setbacks has affected believers in the theory of evolution, which even in its very incomplete state of explanation is considered perhaps the greatest scientific theory of all time. In sum, there is no debate about the tautologous portion of evolutionary theory, but mass mystery on the ‘scientific’ part, though they are loathe to admit it.”
So I could be wrong, but it seemed to me he’s not denying that speciation is evidence for evolution – just the opposite. He’s complaining (perhaps not too coherently) about the weakness of the postulates regarding the mechanism. Which he’s correct in pointing out is still a mystery – not that it takes a rocket scientist to observe that.
ADR150 — I agree. In a recent online discussion, someone asked me to refer to “the studies confirming evolution” in a way that strongly suggested there were a few isolated studies and that’s all. It took a while to convince him that what he was really asking was akin to asking about the drops of water that confirm the rainstorm, and if he’ll actually go outside and look, he’ll get drenched.
artfulD — Looks to me like Falkenstein is just setting up for a goalpost-shift. “That’s just adaptation — THIS (speciation) is ‘Evolution.’” Then if we refer him to speciation, it’ll be “That’s just MICROevolution — THIS (macroevolution) is ‘Evolution.’” And of course, if we showed him macroevolution, it’ll be “That’s not Evolution — show me a dog that’s given birth to a cat.”
Economics is more of an applied, social science rather than a physical science.
There’s a lot more ambiguity in economics partly because controlled experiments are very difficult to execute, especially on the macroeconomic level.
How do you run a double-blinded RCT to see what the effects of raising taxes would be on the US economy in 2010?
How do you determine what would have happened to the US & world economies without the bailouts in 2008/9?
Darwin did not observe this. He was quite surprised when one of his colleagues, John Gould, recognized that the birds Darwin had brought back, many of which he had mis-identified as blackbirds, grossbeaks, or wrens, were in fact finches. It was John Gould who correctly identified them as 13 different species of finches. The bit about the birds’ beaks being adapted to different food sources was not observed by Darwin either; nor can I find such a speculation in Origin. I seem to recall it was first observed by David Lack, and later confirmed by Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the islands much later.
I can’t help but point out that Darwin was always quite careful to credit John Gould with identifying the different species of finches, but Darwin got the credit anyway. Sometimes people just don’t pay attention to proper attribution.
LarryCoon, you might be right as to Falkenstein’s ultimate intent to deny evolutionary theory in what could be its entirety, but if so, his means don’t seem to be sufficient for that end. Because pointing out that the mechanism is still a mystery at least acknowledges that there is a mechanism to our madness.
“The obsession with Darwin is strange to me”
I don’t find it strange at all. If you believe that revealed knowledge is an ultimate and unchanging Truth, then it’s only natural to believe that others feel the same way about their sources of knowledge. Darwin is the messiah of the godless. Origin is his revealed Truth to be worshiped unquestioningly. Pointing out flaws in the messiah or his work can’t help but shake the false faith of his followers.
So while their obsession with Darwin and Origin is misguided and irrelevant, it’s not unexpected.
This guy sort of gives Economists a bad name. We realize we don’t practice a hard science (in general), but we’re trying to move towards that in baby steps. Experimental and Behavioral Economics are burgeoning fields that have more to do with Psychology and Sociology than the stock market and the inflation rate. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re building foundations.
llewelly – thanks for the clarification, but let me further clarify. I did not mean to imply that Darwin recognized the significance of the finches while on the Galapagos. He did not formulate his evolutionary thinking until much later.
It is also true that Darwin misclassified some of his finches, although others he did get correct as finches. And it was John Gould who ultimately classified all of the finch specimens as finches and pointed out Darwin’s error.
However, I do credit Darwin with putting them into an evolutionary context, once he figured out the whole evolution thing. As reported here: http://www.sulloway.org/Finches.pdf
As Darwin remarked in the second edition of his Journal of Researches, “Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends” (1845:380).
In any case – the finches are an excellent example of adaptive radiation, and that’s the point. (not to continue the Darwin obsession)
There’s some commentary going on right now at Frankenstein’s site, and so far he’s been responding. Perhaps he’ll add some clarity to what now appears to be an obsession with the mysterious.
My best guess is that what we have here is a follower, if not an advocate of methodological naturalism, accepting of evolution, but leaving the door open for some aspect of theistic interference with the process. If so, the advocacy exhibited is lacking in its strategic effectiveness.
Let me apologize for writing Frankenstein instead of Falkenstein. It was completely inadvertent and a mistake. His position and his efforts deserve respect, even if misguided.
Steven Novella:
That much I agreed with (and thank you for the link to that paper, though I haven’t had time to read it yet), but I was unable to find a statement that specifically referred to the beaks being adapted to different food sources. I was quite puzzled by this, as I had previously thought that Darwin had at least speculated about the connection between beak size, shape and food source.
I didn’t come across that remark, as I only looked in Origin and Beagle. Origin has similar remarks, but I didn’t interpret any of them as a specific reference to the beaks being adapted to different food sources, (as opposed to being adapted to some other need, such as mate selection). In retrospect, I think I’m guilty of reading his words too narrowly. Unfortunately I won’t have time to revisit this until Sunday afternoon.
I read Eric Falkenstein’s blog, and followed a link to a different item
http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/economists-arent-more-stupid-than-other_11.html
at the end of which was a comment by one Oliver Manuel who made a number of assertions regarding solar structure, such as the centre of the Sun is a neutron star, the most common element in the Sun is iron, etc. It turns out that Oliver Manuel is actually an Professor Emeritus in Missouri. His home page is:
http://www.omatumr.com/resume.html
I looked at a few papers he authored. I think that he is wrong, if only because what he is proposing is just so radically different, and if correct, would mean everything we think we know about stellar structures, particle physics and so on were wrong. But I can’t judge on what little I know about physics.
Is there anyone who can comment?
Well, let me defend myself a bit. I don’t believe in God, never have, so necessarily evolution created all life in some way. But it that sense, I find the theory rather tautological, if you don’t believe in miracles and such, there’s no other framework. I’m criticizing the mechanism, which I think does not generalize as easily as Dawkins implies via millions of years applied to small changes. If local fitness maxima were not such a constraint, we wouldn’t see things like horseshoe crabs virtually unchanged for 400MM years.
So, I noted that some of the primary examples, highlighted by Darwin, and Popper, turned out to be dead ends, with little consternation. Dawkins promoted the gene-level mechanism, which is now rather quietly being overturned, again with not much fanfare. Dawkins’ example of turning one sentence into another via keeping letters of the target sentence assumes a known end-game, again, a primary example that later was dismissed as not important when the criticism was made. There are lots of such dead ends, such as Stanley Miller’s primordial soup. Don’t expect a field’s elders to anything but ‘all’s great in our field, we understand soo much’.
The post was making the point that for big theories is science, most work is explaining the data we see (eg, dark matter in physics explaining galaxy movement, unmeasurable stochastic discount factors in finance explaining risk, asteroids explaining the solar system). That is in contrast to the Popperian ideal, which many science journalists use to dismiss people who propose alternatives (and yes, almost all alternatives are wrong, many silly).
But back to evolution. You’re the experts. I find the following analogy in evolution explains my intuitive skepticism for the mechanism as we know it. Say you have proto organism, like a bacteria. Think about the number of changes needed to turn this into an Elephant. I think that is like turning the code for Pong into the code that underlies EBay. Both involve a different set of competitors, users. There are some vague similarities in the code, but many changes. Now clearly EBay was ‘designed’ in a way Elephants were not. But if we assume every day, the design team for Pong went to work, and created small errors, and each error that stayed had to maintain its popularity, what is the probability this would randomly change to EBay’s source code? I say a small number, like 1 in X. Now, you have Y such games like Pong, say Y. So the odds EBay could be created is a function of Y, X, where X is really an integral over time, which can involve . The numbers are all fantastically large, outside of intuition, but merely because we have 1 B years does not mean anything can happen. This still seems very improbable for Pong to EBay, and bacteria to elephants.
I don’t see macro-evolution, which implies not merely a change to a small set of bits, but moving parts in constellations with logistics and such in place, as being a linear extrapolation from the evolution of finch beaks or resistance to AIDS drugs. I figure there needs to be something like transposons, or some change that can make quantum leaps, so that, say, the type II secretory system can finagle its way into a flagellum, and just saying we see ‘homologous’ parts, and saying, with enough time, and unknown intermediate fitness to modifications, they form everything, seems like a lot of hand waving. One needs to know probabilities, and one doesn’t see those, merely, a reference to millions of years and possibilities.
Eric Falkenstein
Eric – thanks for responding. I think two point in your argument about evolution need correcting/addressing.
The first is that you are asking the wrong question in your bacteria to elephant question. The question assumes a predetermined end- elephants. The real question is what is the probability of single-celled creatures evolving into anything as complex as an elephant. There are an astronomical number of possible outcomes. This is a critical distinction in thinking about probability in evolution.
Second, you are assuming the accumulation of small and incremental changes, but evolutionary developmental biology and genetics give us a different picture. Some genes are regulatory genes, where one mutation can result in a dramatic change in body plan – whole limbs appearing and disappearing. You have to think of genetic change as altering the way in which the developmental plan unfolds. Some changes may only affect final steps, but others may affect earlier steps in the process and have profound effects on the ultimate phenotype.
There are also other processes, like gene duplication and even duplication of part or whole chromosomes, that provide extra raw material for evolutionary tinkering.
Regarding your criticism of big science, I think you are just mistaken. New ideas do originate because they fill an explanatory need – but those hypotheses must be testable. If we cannot test the hypothesis of dark matter, then it will not be useful to science and it will go nowhere. But – you also need to get up to speed on the topics you comment on, because there have already been some confirmations of dark matter. http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/scientists_confirm_dark_matters_existence/
Also – there are still some cosmologists who are exploring the alternative – that our current concepts of gravity are off and explain the phenomena we are observing. I think they are wrong, but sometimes these minority opinions turn out to be right.
In short – you need to have a view of science that is more of a journey and a process. It starts out as observation, but then hypotheses are either useful, because they make predictions that can be tested, or they are not. Hypotheses and theoreis are all somewhere along that path from observation to solid conclusions, and you seem to be criticizing theories that you feel (and you are not up to date) are not at the destination already.
Put another way, successful scientific theories must have both explanatory power and predictive power, and scientists absolutely do not give theories a pass if they have the former but not the latter. Just think about all the criticism that string theory has garnered.
Science is also very much a community effort, which is why the excessive focus on individuals, like Darwin and Dawkins, seems strange.
At least there was mention made by Eric of transposons, something I’ve not seen mentioned here, especially as to their arguably more than accidental role in causing mutations within cells.
– In reference to comments about economics as a science…
An engineer, a chemist and an economist are stranded on a desert island with a gigantic box of baked beans but no can opener. The engineer says, “We can poke tiny holes in leaves and place drops of water on the holes forming a compound lens to focus the sun’s rays on the can and cause it to burst open as the pressure increases.” The chemist says, “The salt in the ocean is corrosive, and will help weaken the metal the cans are made of.” The economist says, “First, we must imagine we have a can opener.”
Wow. Let me count the logical fallacies. Well, there’s mainly one, which is an argument from incredulity. Just because you can’t conceive of how evolution can create something as large and complex as an elephant and think that the odds are so enormously against it, you are “skeptical” of evolution. You also use a really bad analogy, given that mutations are largely random and you’re postulating intentionally inserted errors, which would not be random.
Falkenstein’s examples almost entirely come from the book “The Icons of Evolution” by Jonathan Wells. So, we can be pretty sure which source he’s relying upon.
Orac,
If you look at the cited paragraph in context, you’d see that he’s not questioning that evolution has “created” elephants, he’s questioning the odds that it could do so without the mechanism that his intuition has told him is clearly missing from present evolutionary theory. And his intuition also tells him the mechanism is likely to be within the “creations” themselves. Hence the reference to transposons.
It may be a given to you that mutations are largely random, but unfortunately, that insight has not yet been revealed to some of the rest of us.
It still is an argument from incredulity that he (EF) is making. I know this feeling well, as I found it convincing myself for many years until I learned about evolutionary biology and cognitive biases.
Yes, he has admitted that a significant amount of incredulity is driving his arguments. But, or so he claims, it’s apparently not incredulity based on advocacy for a competing theory.
It’s cute how he argues that evolutionary theory is only “descriptive” not “predictive”.
Evolution takes hundreds of generations to start to see results. We’ve had the theory for 150 years or so, and we’ve had gene sequencing for a few decades. In long-lived organisms, theory correctly predicts that we shouldn’t be able to see much evolution yet.
Also, most scientists are reluctant to comment on the future evolution of the human race. It’s nearly impossible to be objective about such matters, and a theory of human evolution would inevitably be twisted to serve extremely questionable political ends.
Which, if I may add, tends to blur the line between incredulity and skepticism.
“Science is also very much a community effort, which is why the excessive focus on individuals, like Darwin and Dawkins, seems strange.”
Indeed Steve. That always bugs me. Even Dawkins is guilty of it though. He seems to a have a fetishistic relationship with Darwin. I find the hero worship distasteful.
Relative to what was known during his time, Darwin did get an amazing number of things right though.
It’s not like Dawkins pretends that Darwin wasn’t wrong about anything. It’s just that Darwin’s limits in areas such as genetics are due to the lack of contemporary knowledge in that field, not of his lack of scientific thinking.
efalken — in addition to what others have said, you seem to be vastly understating the effects of selection. As a demonstration of something somewhat akin to your Pong-to-eBay example, here’s a demo of a computer system where the “genetic modification” is the addition or modification of a graphical element on a canvas, and the “selective pressure” is keeping any modification that results in the graphic looking more like the Mona Lisa:
http://rogeralsing.com/2008/12/07/genetic-programming-evolution-of-mona-lisa/
As you can see, it quickly converges on an image that is unmistakable. It’s not 100% analogous to evolution in that this demonstration is teleological, whereas evolution is not. Still, it shows that the proper application of selective pressures make your Pong-to-eBay argument moot. (And this represents only one kind of modification, whereas evolution has several, such as recombination.)
Eric,
Every time you open your mouth you just display a deeper and deeper ignorance of what you think you know about evolution. Perhaps you should just listen and learn? You said, for example, there were very few transitional fossils. This has been shown to you repeatedly as incorrect. Have you updated your opinion in light of this knowledge or do you still contend your claim is an accurate depiction of the fossil record and the vast consensus of paleontologists?
Now you’re here trying to argue the old “a wind storm in a junk yard couldn’t possibly produce a 747″ argument. (Your example was how could random changes in Pong produce Ebay.) Again, this shows a deep and profound ignorance of some of the basic mechanisms of evolution. I don’t know if anyone above answered your Ebay analogy but if the environment favored random changes where Pong had a greater chance of survival more it resembled Ebay then yes. Pong, over billions of years, could turn into Ebay. Are you aware of a mechanism that would prevent it? Aside from personal disbelief?
I especially appreciate the examples. But I sense my fundamental point was lumped with a caricature that I do not think is fair, or at least could equally attributed to either argument. That is, assuming a mechanism can create something we see does not imply it obviously created something we see merely because it is a possible explanation, and the universe and time is large. Nowhere have I seen actual probabilities, numbers. My incredulity is based on intuition on the state space blowing up (for how changes affect the type, sequence, and position of amino acids within a cell), and the ratio of adaptive changes to detrimental or neutral changes.
People who think I’m wrong are incredulous I could rationally believe this based on the time it takes for this to happen (indeed, the assumption is I have bad faith based on ulterior motives, or a moron). I think a good scientist would maintain their equanimity in counter arguments, and either ignore me, or explain precisely where my concerns are wrong or speculative, as opposed to simply trying to lump me with Creationists and then point to arguments against their ‘a miracle happened’ alternative. Creationist-labeling is like a debate where if you say you are for health care reform, and your opponent then criticizes your communism.
Until there are actual probabilities on speciation, or the creation of new tissue, or phyla, I don’t see why my incredulity is conceptually different than my dissenter’s incredulity (if you say these concepts have no clear definition, I would just say define what you mean by macro-evolution, and generate the testable hypothesis based on probabilities–not hypotheticals or anecdotes). I don’t pretend to be able to prove some alternative, I just think the existing mechanism as understood is missing something really big, and to present the theory of evolution as rock solid, but missing this piece, seems misleading.
Eric, only mathematical theories can hope to approach the solidity of rocks. Evolutionary theory is philosophical – scientific methodology is after all a philosophical construct. As a philosophy, it’s about as solid as we can expect such a structure to get. Its foundation is sound, and by its nature, it will support more stories at its top, and auxiliary structures all ’round. The more the building, the stronger it seems to get.
Mathematics is useful to this structure as an assessment tool – a tester of it’s strength at best. The tool was not the builder nor is it material for its concept. Evolution’s philosophy is its form and its function.
The structure stands, no probabilities to the contrary. Give us some data that’s predictive as to when it will fail to stand, let alone fail to grow. Are you up for that?
Eric, by far the largest and most compelling evidence in favor of evolution and common descent is the genetic data from extant organisms. That data is orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude larger than the fossil data. Easily billions, trillions and quadrillions of times more data.
That is a lot of data. So far, every gene in every genome that has been sequenced looks like it evolved. All the genes from all the genomes look like they evolved from common ancestors that as far as we can tell exactly and precisely match what the tree of life would predict. That is hundreds of organisms, each with tens of thousands of genes, each with hundreds of proteins.
In a protein, most amino acids are simply place-holders. Their identity has no effect on the properties of the protein. When those proteins are conserved, it is not because they are essential for function, but simply because there was no change from the parent organism to the descendent.
We don’t need to know the a priori probability of these things changing, we can look at the DNA of extant organisms and see how much it changed from the ancestors those extant organisms shared. We know that humans are related to chimpanzees because so much of the DNA of both of them is identical. If you found two books where each page was 95% the same, would you think the two books were written independently by separate authors? Or would you think they were copied with changes from a common text? That is what each organism is, a book with tens of thousands of pages, each page very similar to pages from the book of another organism.
The hypothesis of evolution predicts what has been observed. The hypothesis of common descent predicts we won’t see sudden generation of organisms with completely new and unique genomes. So far, we haven’t. No biologist expects to. If any biologist did find such a thing, it would be front page news in every science journal in the world and would be a guaranteed ticket to Stockholm. If it were correct that is. It would be extraordinary, and would require extraordinary evidence, sequencing in multiple laboratories. Once that was done and confirmed, then scientists would modify their understanding to fit the data.
There are mathematical models for predicting Divergence Time, how long ago did two species diverge from a common parent.
http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.4003/006.027.0203
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.33.010802.150500?cookieSet=1&journalCode=ecolsys.1
‘Scuse only providing the abstract but they popped up early in a Google search. There are problems in the models but they do use probability to estimate divergence time as in, it takes x amount of years for mutations to regularly occur (way over simplification but I think the idea is there).
There are a few other ways in which large chunks of DNA change besides transposons. For example, viruses. They often set up shop by integrating their own genetic material into the host’s genomic DNA. There are more mechanisms which I’m happy to go into.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-inspired_computing
You might be interested in bio-inspired computing.
Another link: http://www.econ.iastate.edu/tesfatsi/holland.GAIntro.htm
Certain optimization problems cannot be solved in a top-down, planned manner. There simply are too many variables and too many potential solutions to explore. Genetic algorithms involving a kind of natural selection over several generations have become a pretty important engineering discovery.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_biology
One of the problems with being an academic is that you get the idea your ideas about things outside your field are worthwhile.
Steve’s rehashing old arguments, because someone who holds them is a fellow academic, is being kind and maybe should be done in private. It’s likely Eric has listened more than once and might be considered a fan in different circumstances.
Steve, you need to set up a google alert. :-p