From: swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: SWAA Lecture
Date: 26 Jan 93 00:22:56 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: NCR Teradata Database Business Unit

In article <1jelm6$ejh@agate.berkeley.edu>, philjohn@garnet.berkeley.edu (Phillip Johnson) writes:
|>  Grasse, an eminent French zoologist,
|> believed in something which he called "evolution."  ...
|> Grasse used the same term to refer to
|> something very different, a poorly understood process of
|> transformation in which one general category (like reptiles) gave
|> rise to another (like mammals), guided by mysterious "internal
|> factors" which seemed to compel many individual lines of descent
|> to converge at a new form of life. 

Indeed.  This was a widely held theory up until fairly recently.  It is now
generally called 'orthogenesis', to distinguish it from Darwinian evolution.
[The use of the term 'evolution' for orthogenesis was quite typical].

|> Grasse denied emphatically
|> that mutation and selection have the power to create new complex
|> organs or body plans, explaining that the intra-species variation
|> that results from DNA copying errors is mere fluctuation, which
|> never leads to any important innovation. ...
|> 
|>      Grasse insisted that the defining quality of life is the
|> intelligence encoded in its biochemical systems, an intelligence
|> that cannot be understood solely in terms of its material
|> embodiment.  ...
|>      It is not programmed as in a computer,     
|>      but rather it is condensed on a molecular scale in the     
|>      chromosomal DNA or in that of every other organelle in     
|>      each cell.  This "intelligence" is the sine qua non of     
|>      life.  Where does it come from?... 
|> 
|>      Grasse argued that the Darwinists who dominate evolutionary
|> biology have failed, due to their uncompromising commitment to
|> materialism, to define properly the problem they were trying to
|> solve.  The real problem of evolution is to account for the
|> origin of new genetic information, and it is not solved by
|> providing illustrations of the acknowledged capacity of an
|> existing genotype to vary within limits.

True, and if that were indeed all that had been demonstrated, Darwinian evolution
would be in dire straits.  Fortunately the creative power of *selection* can
be easily demonstrated in many ways.

|> Darwinists had imposed
|> upon evolutionary theory the dogmatic proposition that variation
|> and innovative evolution are the same process, and then had
|> employed a systematic bias in the interpretation of evidence to
|> support the dogma.  

Ah ha! Here is Grasse's fundamental error!  Variation is due to mutation,
innovation is due to selection.  These are two seperate processes.  It is
the *combination* that makes the Darwinian model work.

Naturally, given this mistaken understanding of the Darwinian model, he will
reject it.

|>      Grasse was an evolutionist, but his dissent from Darwinism
|> could hardly have been more radical if he had been a creationist.

Today he would be called an orthogeneticist.

|> It is not merely that he built a detailed empirical case against
|> the neo-Darwinian picture of evolution.

Not really - he built his case against a chimera, a misunderstanding of
the Darwinian model.  He shows in several of his quotes a profound mis-
understanding of the new-Darwinian theory.

|>  he challenged the crucial doctrine of uniformitarianism,
|> which holds that processes detectable by our present-day science
|> were also responsible for the great transformations that occurred
|> in the remote past.  According to Grasse, evolving species
|> acquire a new store of genetic information through "a phenomenon
|> whose equivalent cannot be seen in the creatures living at the
|> present time (either because it is not there or because we are
|> unable to see it)."  Grasse acknowledged that such speculation
|> "arouses the suspicions of many biologists... [because] it
|> conjures up visions of the ghost of vitalism or of some mystical
|> power which guides the destiny of living things...."

That skepticism is warrented.  It is only the 'uniformitarian' assumption that
allows the historical sciences to progress at all.  If prior processes cannot
be tested today, then all bets are off, there is *no* *way* to verify what has
happened in the past.

|>  As Dobzhansky summed up the
|> situation:
|> 
|>         The mutation-selection theory attempts, more or less     
|>      successfully, to make the causes of evolution acces-
|>      sible to reason.  The postulate that the evolution is
|>      "oriented" by some unknown force explains nothing. 
|>      This is not to say that the synthetic...theory has
|>      explained everything.  Far from this, this theory opens     
|>      to view a great field which needs investigation. 
|>      Nothing is easier than to point out that this or that
|>      problem is unsolved and puzzling.  But to reject what
|>      is known, and to appeal to some wonderful future dis-
|>      covery which may explain it all, is contrary to sound
|>      scientific method.  The sentence with which Grasse ends     
|>      his book is disturbing: "It is possible that in this
|>      domain biology, impotent, yields the floor to
|>      metaphysics."

This is an excellent summary of the scientific approach.
Of course I expected little else from Dobzhansky.

|>      I began with the Dobzhansky/Grasse exchange to make the
|> point that whether one believes or disbelieves in Darwinism does
|> not necessarily depend upon how much one knows about the facts of
|> biology. ...
|>      For example, Pierre Grasse was willing to consider, and
|> eventually to endorse, the possibility that the so-called
|> "evolution in action" which the neo-Darwinists were observing is
|> merely a variation within the limits of the existing genotype and
|> not a source of genuine evolutionary innovation.  To put the
|> point in the language used by some contemporary biologists,
|> Grasse proposed to "decouple macroevolution from microevolution." 
|> Such proposals have generally foundered on the inability to
|> establish sufficiently credible distinctive macroevolutionary
|> mechanisms.

No, they have also foundered on the inescapable fact that no limit to genetic
variation has yet been found - so a profound new mechanism is necessary to
*prevent* microevolution from generating macroevolution.

|> (For example, the widely publicized "new theory" of
|> punctuated equilibrium turned out to be just a gloss upon Ernst
|> Mayr's thoroughly Darwinian theory of peripatric speciation.)

Yep, and Gould even admits as much!  (see his 200th essay in Natural History).
What Gould claims to have seen is the *implications* of Mayr's theories for
paleontology - a major advance in and of itself.

|> Grasse differed from the Darwinists in that he was willing to
|> consider the possibility that science does not know, and may
|> never know, how new quantities of genetic information have come
|> into the world.

Well, he has yet to provide any really telling examples of new genetic information
that violate the premises of neo-Darwinian models.

|>       From Dobzhansky's viewpoint, to consider such a possibility
|> would be to give up on science.  As Dobzhansky saw it, we already
|> know a lot about how plants and animal populations vary in the
|> everyday world of ecological time. 

And he is essentially right.  It is only by restricting oneself to potentially
testable models that one can claim to be doing science.  Anyuthing else is
simply speculation.  This is why the *weak* form of uniformitarianism is essential,
it is the only thing that makes historical statements *testable*.

|>  To be sure, none of
|> these examples demonstrated the kind of innovation that Grasse
|> had in mind.

That has changed in the last 20 years or so.  New *types* of research have
provided such examples.  (Check into some of the 'artificial life' simulations,
for instance, which often generate solution unanticipated by the researchers).

|>  To Dobzhansky, therefore,
|> Grasse's insistence that the sources of new genetic information
|> might be a mystery to our science was pointless and harmful to
|> the cause of science.

Yep, that is because the essence of science is research - testing and probing
models to improve them.  An idea that cannot be turned into a research program
is simply of no value to science.  If, at a later time, it becomes testable,
then it may be useful to reintroduce it.

|>   If physicists were to start to proclaim that belief
|> in the Big Bang has had wonderful political and moral
|> consequences, and we must all work to see that the Big Bang has a
|> wonderful future, surely we would begin to wonder about their
|> objectivity.

Yep, which is why I seriously doubt *Ruse's* objectivity!  But what I doubt are
his metaphysical conclusions from evolution - not his biology.

Ruse's ramblings are just another example of a man making vain pronouncements
in an area outside of his competence.

|>  They also permit Darwinist writers to
|> take the mutation/selection mechanism for granted even when they
|> are describing evidence which directly contradicts it.  This feat
|> of intellectual contortionism is strikingly illustrated by
|> Stephen Jay Gould's book, Wonderful Life.  Gould's bestseller
|> adds a great deal to our knowledge of the "Cambrian explosion,"
|> meaning the sudden appearance of the invertebrate animal phyla,
|> without visible ancestors, in the 600 million-year-old rocks of
|> the Cambrian era.  Unicellular life had existed for a long time,
|> and some multicellular groups appear in the immediately
|> Precambrian rocks, but there is nothing that can be established
|> as ancestral to the Cambrian animals. ...
|>      In recent years the mystery has deepened, because it appears
|> (at least according to Gould) that the Cambrian animal groups
|> were far more varied than had been imagined.  The more distinct
|> groups there were in the Cambrian, the more chains of ancestors
|> there ought to have been in the Precambrian.  Some remarkable
|> Cambrian fossils found in a Canadian formation known as the
|> Burgess Shale were originally classified in familiar groups.

Unfortunately for your argument Gould is only half-right here.  Many of his
examples have even been refuted.  Hallucigenia is now known to have been
an only slightly unusual Onychophoran, for instance, and even Wiwaxia is now
placed securely in a modern phylum.

Gould is in many ways an extremist.  He sees randomness and indeterminacy
in places where most others do not.

|> Gould explains that the discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils,
|> Charles Walcott, tried to "shoehorn" the odd creatures into
|> familiar taxonomic categories because of his predisposition to
|> avoid multiplying the difficulties of what is called the
|> "artifact theory" of the Precambrian fossil record.  As Gould
|> explains the problem:

However the matter is becoming much clearer now - and proper intermediates
are being found in many cases.


|>      Readers familiar with Gould's writings know that he has at
|> times expressed great skepticism concerning the neo-Darwinian
|> theory that Dobzhansky proclaimed so confidently. 

I rather think this is a misrepresentation of Gould's position.
He may be skeptical of naive reliance on *selection* to explain all
differences, when random processes may also be important, but that
is a very different thing.

|>  In place
|> of the dead orthodoxy Gould predicted the emergence of a new
|> macroevolutionary theory based on the views of the geneticist
|> Richard Goldschmidt, another heretic whose views were every bit
|> as obnoxious to Darwinists as those of Grasse.  The new theory
|> did not arrive as predicted, however, and Gould subsequently
|> seems to have heeded Dobzhansky's admonition: if you can't
|> improve on the mutation/selection mechanism, don't trash it in
|> public.

Perhaps because he realized that he had *misunderstood* Goldschmidt's
theory.  Goldschmidt's mutationism was a far cry from Gould's punctuated
equilibrium model, it could just be discussed using many of the same phrases
(at a superficial level), and Gould was misled by this superficial similarity.

|>  Instead, he indulged freely in just such
|> speculation himself, rightly judging that his audience of
|> intellectuals would accept an atheistic interpretation of the
|> evidence uncritically.

Oh really?  Than why is his interpretation of the Burgess fauna so controversial
amoung paleontologists?  This hardly sounds like "uncritical acceptance' to me.

|>  That for Gould means that Pikaia
|> might be our ancestor, which implies that, unlike many other
|> Burgess Shale creatures, it left descendants.  If Pikaia had not
|> survived the mass extinctions that killed off so many other
|> Cambrian fossil creatures, we would never have evolved.  The
|> existence of humans is therefore not a predictable consequence of
|> evolution, but a never-to-be-repeated accident.

Yep, and this is where Gould parts company with the majority of paleontologists.
Most do not see mass extinctions as being *random* with respect to survival.
Thus it is quite possible that some features of Pikaia enabled t to survive
when its other contemporaries did not.  If so, then the subsequent sequence
of events is hardly 'never-to-be-repeated'.

I, myself, in studying later mass extinctions have found a profound pattern,
in which large, K-selected species die off, and smaller, opportunistic, r-
selected species survive.  This suggests that the key factor in surviving
a mass extinction is the ability to rapidly respond to new opporunities
starting from a minute population.  (BTW, this tends to support catastrophic
models of mass extinction - since that is the most likely way to reduce alll
populations to small sizes).

|> this reflection, and the book, with the following sentence:      
|> 
|>      We are the offspring of history, and must establish our     
|>      own paths in this most diverse and interesting of
|>      conceivable universes -- one indifferent to our
|>      suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to     
|>      thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.
|> 
|>      Of course there is absolutely nothing in the Burgess Shale
|> fossils to support Gould's speculation that the universe is
|> indifferent to our sufferings, or to discredit the belief that we
|> are responsible to a divine Creator who actively intervened in
|> nature to bring about our existence.

Quite - I could not agree more.  Metaphysical speculation based on scientific
data is rarely, if ever, conclusive.

|>  On the contrary, the
|> genuine scientific portion of Wonderful Life provides ample
|> grounds for doubting the expansive notions of metaphysical
|> naturalists like Theodosius Dobzhansky and George Gaylord
|> Simpson.

Only if you have a seriously distorted view of what thier positions were.

|>   The neo-Darwinian synthesis is a vague and flexible
|> conglomeration that readily incorporates any seemingly non-
|> Darwinian elements -- such as the molecular clock, or punctuated
|> equilibrium, or even the ability of bacteria to summon needed
|> mutations -- that appear from time to time.  

Let's see - the molecular clock is still quite controversial, and punctuated
equilibrium is just Mayr's very Darwinian parapatric speciation model carries
to its logical conclusion; where is the non-Darwinian element that has been
incorporated?

As for the directed mutations in bacteria - if that is indeed shown to be a
general mechanism of change it *would* cause the rejection of the Darwinian
model in favor of a new form of orthogenesis.

But so far it has shown up only in one series of experiments, in one group
of bacteria, under very odd circumstances.  The effect is not even particularly
strong - it is barely detectable statistically - which makes it questionable.

*If* it is ever confirmed more strongly, *and* is shown to be much more widely
occuring than is now suggested, it will be time to revise our theories of
evolution.

-- 
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  or
Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com
Newsgroups: talk.origins