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Author
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Topic: John A. Davison: Is Evolution Finished?
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Pim van Meurs
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Member # 541
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posted 22. March 2004 12:52
Nosivad: charlie d It is obvious from the tenor of your comments that you have dismissed my views out of hand.
I find the opposite to be true. Charlie not only has added some valuable insight to these discussions, his recent references also seem to resolve some of the issues raised.
Charlie politely and professionally has improved my understanding of many of these issues and I personally thank him. That the number of chromosomal arrangements dropped from at least a dozen to perhaps a few or even just one when new and more reliable techniques were introduced is a fascinating aspect of the story.
Now I have to get my hands on Cavalier Smith's review paper. I found a 2002 reprint in Heredity online
Makes for a good read. Love the internet....
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Doubting Thomas
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Member # 1214
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posted 22. March 2004 16:21
If Darwinian evolution (descent from a common ancestor with modification) operated successfully for billions of years, why should it suddenly stop? A process that is the result of physical laws just doesn't put itself in PARK because the current occupants are self-satisfied. If the first proposition is accepted, the second one can't be rejected. And even Behe accepts descent from a common ancestor.
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nosivad
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posted 22. March 2004 19:54
Doubting Thomas - Evolution has stopped because the Darwinian model is a complete failure and contemporary forms are practicing precisely the form of reproduction which is the basis for Darwin's original hypothesis. Sexual reproduction is incompetent as a macrevolutionary device. Sexual reproduction is an excellent means to keep an animal fine tuned to a relatively stable environment. Natural selection very efficiently eliminates any major deviations from the norm and can even return domesticated varieties to the original wild type from which they were descended. This is nearly always due to back mutations from mutant alleles which had been selected by man. Feral dogs are an excellent example. They come to closely resemble the ancestral wolf. While sexual reproduction can accomplish this, it cannot and apparently never has been able to generate new species, genera, families or orders. In other words the combination of natural selection and sexual reproduction serves to stabilize species not to transform them. To continue to regard natural selection as a creative mechanism is totally without foundation. For an alternative hypothesis I refer you to my home page and my papers, especially the paper "Evolution as a self-limiting process". There is no question that macroevolution occurred in the past, but I am convinced that it could never have transpired using the extremely conservative means which characterize sexual reproduction. What we are witnessing in contemporary organisms are the terminal products of evolution, the vast majority of which are doomed to extinction for the simplest reason imaginable- they cannot evolve.
While I am usually hesitant to apply logic to phenomena as mysterious as ontogeny and phylogeny, I can't resist pointing out how illogical it is for Nature, having been that which has somehow been created, to suddenly and miraculously be transformed into the creator itself. It is very much like trying to lift oneself up by ones bootstraps. It just doesn't work.
[ 22. March 2004, 19:55: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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Pim van Meurs
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Member # 541
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posted 22. March 2004 23:22
Nosivad, I am not sure why you consider Darwinism a 'total failure' when it may explain, even in your world, a large amount of the observable evolution? Succesful for billion years, and only recently and suddenly stopped evolution still would mean that Darwin's contributions were valuable.
The remaining question is if your tentative claims have any relevance, in other words can we find evidence to support your claims. I am not really convinced, partially because as Charlie and others have pointed out much research has happened in the last decade which seems to contradict several of your claims, as Charlie has shown.
Nosivad: I can't resist pointing out how illogical it is for Nature, having been that which has somehow been created, to suddenly and miraculously be transformed into the creator itself. It is very much like trying to lift oneself up by ones bootstraps. It just doesn't work.
Yes at first view, this may seem to be illogical but really when taking some time and effort to think about it, one comes to realize that what scientists call evolvability actually evolved as well. So in other words, evolution got 'bootstrapped' when life started and evolved itself. In this context Toussaint's work is relevant since he showed how the neutrality in mutations is essential for robustness (stability) as well as evolvabibility (innovations). It may at first seem contradictory that neutrality can both stabilize and enhance evolution but when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.
Sexual reproduction is a fascinating topic to me, especially when looking at animals which can reproduce sexually and asexually. We come to realize that when faced with competitors, in the case of snails these competitors were parasites, sexual reproduction, despite being 'more costly' was also more effective in being able to out-evolve the parasites.
Fascinating examples exist:
Teaching critical thinking in the classroom shows a good example of how students can be encouraged to think critically about these concepts.
Let me know if you are interested in more recent research.
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nosivad
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posted 23. March 2004 06:56
Pim, you seem to be an intractable Darwinian. I have thought about it a lot and the sexual, mutation/selection model makes no sense whatsoever, just as it has never made sense to so many scholars of the past who realized the complete failure of the Darwinian model. The neoDarwinians continue to operate in a milieu of total denial of their many critics. We simply, and I am but a contemporary example, do not exist, except on forums such as this one which of course are unpublished in hard copy.
Charlie, do you really mean to claim that Prakash and Yunis published artifacts in the paper I cite in the Manifesto? From what you have said it seems that cytogenetic techniques have become less discriminatory over time. The Yunis and Prakash figures either represent reality or are remarkably reproducible artifacts. If the latter, it represents a scandal and should be exposed. Cytological techniques are no better than the scientists that employ them.
[ 23. March 2004, 10:17: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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charlie d.
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posted 23. March 2004 11:37
quote:
Charlie, do you really mean to claim that Prakash and Yunis published artifacts in the paper I cite in the Manifesto? From what you have said it seems that cytogenetic techniques have become less discriminatory over time. The Yunis and Prakash figures either represent reality or are remarkably reproducible artifacts. If the latter, it represents a scandal and should be exposed. Cytological techniques are no better than the scientists that employ them.
If the latter were the case, our knowledge of chromosomes and karyotypes would be as good today as one hundred years ago, since I doubt the pioneers of cytogenetics were technically much worse than today's scientists. In fact, however, techniques improve and with them our knowledge. Classical karyotiping techniques, such as G-banding, were subject to some artifacts and certainly prone to interpretation issues - this is no fault of the fine scientists who used them, simply a fact. I imagine there must be some good reason, besides the vast darwinian conspiracy of course, for the increasing reliance of clinical cytogenetics labs on advanced techniques (FISH-based chromosome "painting", "bar codes" etc). [Added in edit, for those who may have to deal with diagnostic issues related to karyotype analysis: this is not to say that classical cytogenetic techniques are not more than adequate for most routine purposes - new approaches just have higher resolution and accuracy, plus eliminate much of the "human factor" related to the interpretation of subtle differences in banding patterns in chromosome micrographs often less than an inch long. This is particularly an issue when dealing with karyotypes from different species, as is the case here.]
As for the darwinians' "total denial", I just invite anyone to look back at this thread, and see whose factual arguments were ignored.
Frankly, I think your semi-meiotic hypothesis (SMH) falls far shorter at explaining biological change than modern evolutionary theory, with all its limitations. This is not, however, because I have dismissed your views "out of hand", but because I see objective problems with them. Indeed, this thread has barely scratched the surface.
As I described before, SMH does not explain the phylogenetic evidence for common descent of the Y chromosome in mammals, unless bizarre, enormously unparsimonious scenarios are envisioned. It does not explain, or is openly contradicted by, trivial biogeographical evidence for speciation consistent with current theoretical models, such as ring species and the extensive biodiversity of small, isolated populations. (SHM would predict sudden reproductive isolation to arise stochastically in a single individual, and therefore speciation to be more frequent in large, rather than small populations). SMH, based as it is on speciation from a single individual, is also inconsistent with the genetic finding of multiple trans-species alleles at highly polymorphic loci (i.e., the presence at one gene of multiple alleles which are shared among two or more species, and therefore predate speciation); examples of this are found for the major histocompatibility complex in humans and other apes, and for some polymorphic loci in Lake Victoria cychlid fish species. (SMH, as I mentioned before but didn’t have the time to elaborate, predicts at most 2 alleles/locus to be inherited in each new species.) And of course, SMH is based on a mechanism that has never been observed, and most likely would not even possibly work in organisms, such as mammals, in which sex determination is quite tightly genetically determined (unlike your organism of choice, frogs). The burden of proof to demonstrate such mechanism, which you claim universal, is clearly on you, and has been since you came up with your hypothesis.
You may find it sufficient to blame any skepticism of your ideas on militant atheism, Darwinian conspiracies, incompetence, lack of familiarity with the Manifesto or whatnot. The fact is, it is utterly impossible to have productive discussions with you unless you try to fairly address the evidence, instead of using sarcasm, quote-quipping and appeals to ancient "sages" and outdated literature as your standard response.
In the meanwhile, pardon us if we keep thinking that any claims about the "end of evolution" appear vastly exaggerated.
[ 23. March 2004, 13:23: Message edited by: charlie d. ]
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Pim van Meurs
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Member # 541
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posted 23. March 2004 12:03
Nosivad: Pim, you seem to be an intractable Darwinian. I have thought about it a lot and the sexual, mutation/selection model makes no sense whatsoever, just as it has never made sense to so many scholars of the past who realized the complete failure of the Darwinian model.
I am an intractable scientist who is willing to revise his viewpoints based on the available evidence. That a few scholars have argued against Darwinism and the sexual, mutation/selection model hardly invalidates Darwinism. It should be their arguments, updated to our present day knowledge which should determine if their claims hold. I have yet to see such happening.
Charlie has done us a great favor by showing some of the update knowledge and how it affects some of the earlier objections to Darwinism.
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nosivad
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posted 23. March 2004 13:25
Pim There is nothing "up to date" that will in any way repair Darwinism. It was a naturalists fantasy at its inception and remains so to the present. There has never been an hypothesis (it is definitetly not a theory) in the history of science that has survived so long on the basis of so little evidence. It survives for one reason only - it denies any role for a Creator.
"Science commits suicide when she adopts a creed"
Thomas Henry Huxley aka "Darwin's bulldog"
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Doubting Thomas
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Member # 1214
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posted 23. March 2004 15:18
quote:
Doubting Thomas - Evolution has stopped because the Darwinian model is a complete failure
I am amazed at this news. Has this been communicated to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard? The American Museum of Natural History in New York? The Natural History Museum (London)? The person who can demonstrate that evolution has stopped in a shoe-in for a Nobel Prize! And these institutions should be alerted to the fact that they are teaching out-of-date science.
quote:
and contemporary forms are practicing precisely the form of reproduction which is the basis for Darwin's original hypothesis. Sexual reproduction is incompetent as a macrevolutionary device. Sexual reproduction is an excellent means to keep an animal fine tuned to a relatively stable environment. Natural selection very efficiently eliminates any major deviations from the norm and can even return domesticated varieties to the original wild type from which they were descended. This is nearly always due to back mutations from mutant alleles which had been selected by man. Feral dogs are an excellent example. They come to closely resemble the ancestral wolf. While sexual reproduction can accomplish this, it cannot and apparently never has been able to generate new species, genera, families or orders. In other words the combination of natural selection and sexual reproduction serves to stabilize species not to transform them. To continue to regard natural selection as a creative mechanism is totally without foundation. For an alternative hypothesis I refer you to my home page and my papers, especially the paper "Evolution as a self-limiting process". There is no question that macroevolution occurred in the past, but I am convinced that it could never have transpired using the extremely conservative means which characterize sexual reproduction. What we are witnessing in contemporary organisms are the terminal products of evolution, the vast majority of which are doomed to extinction for the simplest reason imaginable- they cannot evolve.
While I am usually hesitant to apply logic to phenomena as mysterious as ontogeny and phylogeny, I can't resist pointing out how illogical it is for Nature, having been that which has somehow been created, to suddenly and miraculously be transformed into the creator itself. It is very much like trying to lift oneself up by ones bootstraps. It just doesn't work.
Absolutely amazing stuff!
So where did the dual nested hierarchy of life come from? The one that happens to agree with gene homologies? All those wonderful fossils in museums and living creatures in the world point to only one of two conclusions: evolution worked and continues to work, or God 'salted' the strata to 'throw us off the scent that he really did it.'
Let's dismiss the latter because God probably has better things to do with his time than play games. And why do all creatures today share the same basic biochemical systems of amino acids, enzymes, ribosomes, RNA, DNA, etc? Could it be that we all descended, via Darwinian evolution, from a common ancestor? Just maybe?
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nosivad
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posted 23. March 2004 17:50
Doubting Thomas
As a matter of fact much of what I have just said was transmitted to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. For some short time I had an interesting correspondence with Ernst Mayr which ended when he found it necessary to remind me of how many hundreds of thousand of words he had written on the subject of evolution. At the time I had only written about 20,000. My experience with Stephen Jay Gould just down the hall from Mayr was quite different. He steadfastly refused to respond to me when I sent him reprints asking for his appraisal. Finally, I offered to come down to Harvard at my expense to present a free seminar to the faculty and students there. Still there was no response and never was since. So it is not surprising that there was no record of my papers in Gould's magnus opus "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory". Of course there also was no reference to Berg's "Nomogenesis or Evolution according to Law", Grasse's "Evolution of Living Organisms", Broom's "Finding the Missing Link" and Schindewolf's "Basic Questions in Paleontology" and "Palaontologie,Entwicklungslehre, und Genetik" and only passing reference to Goldschmidt's "The Material Basis of Evolution", all of which served to devastate the Darwinian paradigm.
Since you insist on bringing God into the picture, it should be pointed out that Gould was a professed Marxist atheist like another of the inhabitants of the museum, Richard Lewontin. Another professed atheist is William Provine at Cornell who of course coauthored with Ernst Mayr. I was never able to discover Mayr's religious views if even he ever had any. And then we have the most rabid anticleric of all time at Oxford, one Richard Dawkins. I find it fascinating that Harvard and Oxford both began as Christian seminaries. Look at what happened to them. I can assure you that Dawkins, Gould, Mayr, Provine and I suspect Lewontin were all very much aware of my contributions which were built squarely on rhe contributions of those to whom I dedicated the Manifesto. I am simply a more recent critic of the Darwinian fable and, like my many distinguished predecessors, am apparently doomed to nonexistence. I simply cannot believe you would write under the pseudonym of Doubting Thomas. What exactly is it that you doubt? It certainly doesn't seem to include neoDarwinism.
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Moderator
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posted 23. March 2004 18:41
If the discussion does not move to substantive scientific issues, it will be closed tomorrow.
Additionally, this is a public warning to Doubting Thomas. Though some of your contributions have been welcome, much is peppered with insults, hand-waving, and war-mongering. If you don't stop this tendency, you will be banned from our board. We're not here to be your "sounding board."
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Evan
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posted 23. March 2004 19:52
Post deleted so as to aid charlie d in having nosivad stick with the science.
[ 23. March 2004, 21:34: Message edited by: Evan ]
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charlie d.
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posted 23. March 2004 20:34
I think responding to nosivad's blanket attacks only furthers his tactic of diversion from the actual questions. I made the same mistake myself before, when I got carried away by this kind of provocations, and allowed the thread to get carried away. If we can please just stick to the issues and avoid the mud-slinging (both the throwing and the responding to it), I'd love to hear nosivad get to the point.
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Pim van Meurs
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Member # 541
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posted 23. March 2004 21:42
I fully agree with Charlie. Charlie's contribution to this thread have been impressive, showing how modern research addresses many of the issues and objections raised by Nosivad. In the end Charlie is right, it is up to Nosivad to present, explain and defend his claims. At least his scientific claims, not his unsupported claims about Darwinism which just do not belong on a forum like this.
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Jurie
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posted 23. March 2004 22:56
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If the members of two populations do NOT breed when in contact, for whatever reason, you have two species.
Is this true? What if you have two human ethnic groups who find each other so repulsive for whatever reason, that interbreeding does not exist?
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