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Topic: Phillip L. Engle: New Evolutionary Theory: The End of Ideology
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nosivad
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posted 02. April 2004 18:18
Jeit You have hit upon a very fundamental question. Stephen Jay Gould offered a very simple explanation for intelligence. He described it as "an evolutionary accident". Needless to say, I do not agree. As a matter of fact I see very little in the history of life that could be ascribed to chance. I am sure you realize that chance, coupled with natural selection, is a cornerstone of the neoDarwinian model. One of the first to question the role of chance in evolution was Henry Fairfield Osborn, the head of the American Museum of Natural History. In 1909 he wrote:
"In all the research since 1869 on the transformations observed in closely successive phyletic series no evidence whatsoever, to my knowledge, has been brought forward by any paleontologist, either of the vertebrated or invertebrated animals, that the fit originates by selection from the fortuitous" page 127 of "Nomogenesis or Evolution Determined by Law"
by Leo S. Berg
Berg's own views, which I largely share, are suggested by the title of his book. I recommend it for your enlightenment. In any event, the final arbiter of any evolutionary hypothesis will be the fossil record.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 02. April 2004 21:38
I would like to ask this question of Osborn, but since he is no longer around, I will ask others here: what, precisely, would one expect to see in phyletic series that would indicate that "the fit originates by selection from the fortuitous"?
This is important because I find no evidence from, say, the study of quantum chemistry that the Earth is round. However, I do not assert, therefore, that the earth is flat. Instead, I look for appropriate evidence.
As to the value of intelligence: humans are a pretty successful species. Gorillas and Orangutans, two of our closest relatives, are endangered. (Chimpanzees are not doing so well either.) Mightn't one suppose that some of our success has to do with our intellect? And that, therefore, there may be positive selection for increased intelligence (at least from chimp to human levels)?
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Jeit
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posted 02. April 2004 21:50
RBH: Thanks for the links; I am well aware that my knowledge of said topic is limited. I will continue to read up on the issue, but I would appreciate any assistance in understanding theories put forth which may explain why human intelligence is off the chart when compared not only with other animal species, but also the short time with which it developed.
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nosivad
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posted 02. April 2004 23:44
Rex Kerr I suspect that what one might see would be a kind of random walk without any obvious goal or end. As a matter of fact I believe the term random walk was actually used by Gould who also compared evolution to "a drunk reeling back and forth between the gutter and the bar room door."
Orthogenesis, or evolution in a definite direction, is one of the best documented phenomena in all of paleontology. It represents the very antithesis of chance. My own view, which I have presented in the Manifesto and in my paper "Ontogeny, Phylogeny and the Origin of Biological Information", is that evolution was (past tense) largely an emergent phenomenon, prescribed and driven by forces about which we remain ignorant, except to say that chance was not one of them. In short, I agree entirely with Leo Berg's characterization - "Evolution is in a great measure an unfolding of pre-existing rudiments" a view shared and reached independently by Pierre Grasse as I indicated in an earlier post.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 03. April 2004 02:49
A random walk is fine if you are under no selective pressure, or if the changes have no impact on fitness.
Why do you expect that the morphology visible in fossils would have had no impact on the fitness of the organisms?
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nosivad
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posted 03. April 2004 07:15
Rex Kerr I have no idea what you mean by your question? I made no claims about fossil fitness.
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Rex Kerr
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posted 03. April 2004 13:43
If you look at the paleontological record, and you see a random walk in the appearance of the organisms, it means that there were not selective forces that constrained the appearance. If there were relevant selective forces then the walk would not be random, because some directions of change would be selected against and those organisms would die out before you got a chance to see them.
Why do you think that selective forces would not have been present?
[ 03. April 2004, 16:14: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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Jeit
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posted 03. April 2004 16:27
In order to join this debate, I must have the same definitions as everyone so that we are discussing the same thing. This is my conception of evolution, please comment:
Consider a segregated and exclusive capsule of basic organisms which feed from light. With plenty of food and ample room for development, the organisms would exist happily with no need to evolve.
Now take away the light for half the day and cut off their available room to inhabit. You’ve now created a circumstance were change is necessary. Some organisms will become animals and begin to eat the other organisms. The non predators will need to survive to maintain the food chain and will evolve defense mechanisms. The predators will then lag behind and begin evolving better hunting mechanisms and so on and so forth.
This is how evolution makes sense to me. It could be that the original basic organisms in their utopia would evolve for no apparent reason or chance due to accidents in reproduction?
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nosivad
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posted 03. April 2004 16:30
Rex Kerr
I am on published record that natural selection never had anything to do with speciation or the formation of the higher taxa, thereby joining with Reginald Punnett, Leo Berg. St George Mivart, William Bateson and Pierre Grasse. All that natural selection has ever been able to do is to maintain the status quo. Unnatural (artificial) selection can only modify the phenotype within narrow limits and has never been demonstrated to exceed the species barrier when physiological criteria are applied. A well documented case involving the spontaneous cross between a male St Bernard and a female Dachshund produced fertile offspring as I demonstrated in the Manifesto. Dobzhansky's failure with Drosophila speaks for itself. How a competent geneticist like Dobzhansky can admit the failure of selection yet still remain a Darwinian escapes me completely. I can only agree with Engle's interpretation, which incidentally is the subject of this thread, that the reasons are ideological rather than empirical. Scientists are supposed to recognize the results of their experiments. I also concur with Robert Broom, Pierre Grasse and (of all people) Julian Huxley, the author of "Evolution: The Modern Synthesis", that macroevolution is finished. I have published my conclusion that the primary role for sexual reproduction is to terminate evolution and stabilize the species. That is precisely what led me to the Semi-meiotic Hypothesis, an hypothesis that remains untested. Selection had (past tense) nothing to do with the emergence of species and cannot be demonstrated in that role today. I find it remarkable how much seems to be known for certainty about an event which has never been observed: namely, the production of a new kind of living thing. Even if the Semi-meiotic Hypothesis should fail, there is still evidence accumulating that evolution has been a prescribed phenomenon which occurred independently of the environment. The simple fact is that all the real palpable evidence indicates that speciation and the formation of all the higher taxa resulted from endogenous and predetermined forces about which virtually nothing is known. That is why evolution is not yet an experimental science at least in the hands of the Darwinians. Schindewolf claimed evolution was not an experimental science. Speaking as a bench scientist, I am not yet convinced he was right.
I refer you to Davison, John A. 1998 "Evolution as a Self-Limiting Process" Rivista di Biologia 91, 199-220
[ 03. April 2004, 17:30: Message edited by: nosivad ]
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Rex Kerr
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posted 03. April 2004 18:41
Never mind. You didn't answer my question at all. Maybe you didn't understand it at all, or maybe you couldn't be bothered, or maybe you saw that "evolution in a definite direction" is exactly what you'd get from a random walk plus selective pressures and didn't want to have to grant any points to Darwinism, or maybe you got bored and decided to talk about speciation instead of random walks, or maybe you're trying to imply that you don't expect a random walk at all because the limits are too narrow, or maybe you put my name at the top of your post by accident. I don't really know. In any case, it's very difficult to have a discussion when almost nothing I say relating to evidence and science gets an on-topic response.
When it comes down to it, I don't really care what Broom or Darwin or Grasse or Gould or Schindewolf stated as their conclusions. I'm more interested in their premises, in the consequences of different theories, and the degree to which those theories match the data that we have collected. Maybe Grasse concluded that macroevolution is finished, but if he concluded that for good reason, I want to know the reasons. If he didn't conclude that for good reason, I may as well take my next-door neighbor's advice on whether macroevolution is finished.
Since this is a thread largely on ideology, I posit that we are seeing exactly ideology right here (and in the thread that was closed). There is lots of rhetoric saying that Darwinism has no factual support, but little discussion of the facts; there is appeal to authority rather than evidence; contradictory points are quickly ignored rather than addressed and refuted on topic.
I'm sure that there are ideological components to modern evolutionary theory, as ideology is a common factor to human endeavors, and modern evolutionary theory is a human endeavor. But what's continually missing is the evidence that it is only an ideology.
Some claims that were made in the previous post include "All that natural selection has ever been able to do is maintain the status quo." I'll spare you the list of Drosophila references, Darwin's finch beak references, and so on, showing changes in wing length, beak shape, etc., as a result of environmental pressure. The statement is either false or misleading, depending on what "status quo" means.
Despite the claim that "artificial selection can only modify the phenotype within narrow limits and has never been demonstrated to exceed the species barrier", there is a list of cases (including those in Drosophila) in the talk.origins speciation faq (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.html). And there are recent papers, e.g. by Orr's group, isolating specific genes responsible for hybrid sterility in D. melanogaster/D. simulans crosses and showing that these genes show the statistical fingerprint of positive (divergent) selection (Presgraves et al., Nature 423:699 (2003)).
I'm unaware of what "Dobzhansky's failure" was, so I cannot meaningfully address that point--except to point out that postmating isolation has been generated in Drosophila (see the talk.origins article).
I just listened to a talk yesterday about how recombination (which is what you get with sexual reproduction) speeds up the accumulation of mutations generating new functionality in response to a selective pressure--and note that this result was hardly surprising given that sexual reproduction provides a mechanism to consolidate separately-developed beneficial alleles--which makes one wonder how one would claim it does the opposite.
Coevolution of host/parasite or symbiotic species provides good examples of how speciation can be driven by pairwise selective forces. The vast adaptive radiation observed after the KT event flies in the face of the claim that "evolution has been a prescribed phenomenon which occurred independently of the environment". One might postulate that more than environmental effects were required, but to deny that they played an essential role is silly.
Anyway, on the basis of past experience, I don't really expect any of my technical points to be addressed, and I don't find it productive to read or produce rhetoric for its own sake. So this will likely be my last post in this, and all similar threads.
(I note with some chagrin that other technically competent regular contributors to Brainstorms have avoided these threads already.)
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Jeit: Your utopian situation could be an example of what is called "neutral evolution", depending on the details. However, I'm not sure that this thread is the place to discuss neutral evolution (and besides which, utopia is hard to deliver, even in a laboratory--organisms with unlimited food still tend to die if they are missing critical developmental genes, for instance). The simple answer is "you could see some evolution (but nothing drastic like development of flippers from forearms)", but the complex answer is more complex than I'd like to go into here. You can probably find more information on talk.origins.
Fixed a typo.
[ 04. April 2004, 00:21: Message edited by: Rex Kerr ]
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nosivad
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posted 03. April 2004 20:04
Rex Kerr
If you want to know the reasons why Grasse, Berg, Schindewolf or Goldschmidt drew their conclusions or what their premises were, I suggest that you, as I have done, read their works. Each of these authors has offered an overwhelming body of evidence discrediting every aspect of the Darwinian model. Grasse in particular has been particularly effective in exposing the total failure of the mutation/selection model. If you choose to ignore the carefully considered conclusions of these investigators, there is of course nothing I can do to dissuade you. I can only conclude that Engle has properly identified the continued adherence to one of the most failed hypotheses in the history of science as exactly what it has proven to be - an ideological barrier to the search for the truth.
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Serge Patlavskiy
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posted 05. April 2004 12:22
Comments on Phillip L. Engle's essay "New Evolutionary Theory: The End of Ideology"
I must confess that Dr. Engle's essay has drawn my particular attention. The case is that developing the theory of complex and consciousness-related phenomena I could not ignore the general evolutionary problematic. Below is an excerpt from my own paper:
"The emergence of the new animal species may be formalized utilizing the controlled (or, in this case, stipulated by the environment) FMS[2-3-4] transition which may require millions of years to occurs. But, objectively, the Darwinian theory does not take into consideration the possibility of the spontaneous, conscious, and enforced FMS[2-4] transitions, which, as was stated above, are also theoretically possible. My meta-theory, being built on some objective prerequisites and which, to this extent, is scientific, nevertheless leaves room for a bio-object (after achieving FMS-4) to change its biological species. For a human this means a possibility of a conscious transformation into another animal. (I repeat that the laws of energy and mass preservation are not valid in the B-type cognitive space). Speaking strictly, the Darwinian theory of evolution is not a scientific theory but rather a scientific hypothesis (the GS-level intellectual product). And, to become a scientific theory (the AT-level intellectual product) it must constitute a non-contradictable triad with the Theory of the origin of life and the Theory of consciousness, which both, as it stands to reason, must be simultaneously constructed". [1]
From Dr. Engle's we read:
" Nonlinear physical systems have remarkable properties that make them significantly different from linear physical systems. For example, often a nonlinear physical system will continue on a smooth, predictable trajectory for a time, but then will suddenly and holistically reorganize itself into an entirely different structure!"
This correlates with my view that the elements of decompositional (DEC) and dissociational (DIS) models have quite different properties (see [2], Table 2). Next we read:
"In other words, for their own separate ideological reasons, both sides have sought to inseparably wed the theory of Darwinism to the fact of evolution: Creationists and ID people do so in order that the considerable evidence against the theory of Darwinism will tell against the fact of evolution as well, while Darwinists do so in order to claim that Darwinism is a fact, not a theory, and thus to immunize it from all criticism."
As I have pointed above in the excerpt from my paper, Darwinism is not a fact, nor a theory - it is only a working scientific hypothesis with all that it implies (including criticism and rejection). But here is another problem: if Darwinian's theory is untenable, then which theory can replace it? In connection with this I would like to draw attention to some idea. The case is that when preparing my "Comments on Robert Jahn's article "The Challenge of Consciousness", JSE, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2001" [3] I've found one interesting thing therein. Dr. Jahn writes: "Here we resort to an intriguing proposition by Harald Atmanspacher(19) and several others that the long-neglected negative-time solutions of the dynamical relations of scientific theory be activated to allow some degree of teleological influence or "final causation" to be imposed on the prevailing physical system. In other words, just as we are accustomed to compute the dynamical evolution of a physical system in terms of its positive-time progression from specified initial conditions, we now would allow further contribution to that evolution to be imposed from the desired final state or goal that the mind wishes to achieve. But how can the physical system accommodate both these initial and final causations in a self-consistent behavior?" (p. 453). So, I ask myself, must we understand this in such a way that the possibility exists for the complex mind-matter system not to obey the "blind" laws of chance mutation and natural selection but to evolve in consciously selected direction? The above cited idea is close to such one expressed by Roger Uchtmann in his article "Visions of the Emerald Beyond" (JCS, 10-8, 2003). Dr. Uchtmann says: "Humans, as I suppose, emerged within the dreams of apelike ancestors. These dreams and the following myths are the missing links that connect us to the animal kingdom as well as to the realms of mind and spirit." So, the question is a valid one: did the human (as the complex mind-matter system) appear in the result of fulfilling somebody's (or his own) previously formulated conscious plan?!! If YES, then it would mean the end of the epoch of Darwinism.
CONCLUSIONS
It is a good popularizing paper; the only pity is that the author does not give bibliography at the end of his essay. For example, I would much like to see links to Robert F. DeHaan and John A. Davison'salternative evolutionary theories.
REFERENCES
[1] "The Key Ingredients of a Specific Interdisciplinary Approach to Conaciousness" at http://geocities.com/serge_patlavskiy/ Second target article (full illustrated version).
[2] "Elaboration of the New Paradigm of Interdisciplinary Investigations", Journal of Conscientiology (ISSN 1520-4049), Volume 1, Number 4, pp. 305-36, 1999 or at http://geocities.com/serge_patlavskiy/ First target article (full illustrated version).
[3] see http://geocities.com/serge_patlavskiy , OTHER PAPERS-2
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nosivad
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posted 05. April 2004 15:52
Dear Professor Patlavskiy, Thank you for your interest in my work and that of Robert DeHaan. You will find my views by searching under "Evolutionary Manifesto" and Dehaan's work under "Macrodevelopment". My handle, nosivad, is my name - davison - spelled backward which someone found very appropriate as many of my references are quite old. Let me assure you however that they have lost none of their significance.
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Phillip L. Engle
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posted 07. April 2004 09:45
Sorry for my long absence from this thread, but I have not had internet access for the past 4 days or so. Meanwhile, John Davison has been responding pretty much as I would had I been available to participate in the discussion (except that his knowledge of the science involved here is far better than mine!) Two comments though:
First, the reason this essay is not footnoted is that it was originally written to be a Forward to John Davison's Manifesto, and I did not feel that footnoting was appropriate in that context. Hence the essay, as it stands now, is more of an informal essay rather than an academic paper.
Second, with respect to the question raised a while ago as to whether the theory of macrodevelopment is consistent with ID, I think that the answer is "yes", except that ID then becomes a transcendent teleological theory, rather than a theory of "hard science". Here is how I think we should proceed:
1) Develop a nonlinear, far-from-equilibrium science of biology (including macrodevelopment and semi-meiosis) independent of any teleological considerations whatsoever. (In other words, "bracket out the subjects", whether earthly or divine.) Such a revolutionary approach to biology would be to linear, uniformitarian Darwinism what Einstein's nonlinear General Theory of Relativity is to linear Newtonian dynamics.
2) Next, switch from a "bracket out the subjects" approach to a "bracket out the objects" approach and consider what analogies there may be between the nonlinear, physical biological entities discovered in step 1 and corresponding IMMANENT subjects. During step 2 we may regard these immanent subjects that correspond to biological entities (from amoeba to humans) as "deciding" to do things in accordance with certain "goals". Also, during step 2 "group subjects" become important in organizing the immanent teleological universe. (Step 2 is, of course, a "throwback" to the Middle Ages and "primitive" cultures, but I'm convinced that it is also a "throw forward" to the future, beyond the impoverished teleological views of the so-called "Enlightenment".)
3) Finally, consider TRANSCENDENT teleogical hypotheses, such as theism and ID, as a way to ultimately make sense of the rich, IMMANENT teleological world discovered in step 2.
By the time we've gotten to step 3, we've gotten to ID, but not in such a way as to threaten the basic "bracket out the subjects" methodology of "hard science".
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nosivad
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posted 07. April 2004 19:02
The horse series, the elephant series, the Titanathore series, the hominid series were all "goal directed" although the paths were not necessarily linear. All of evolution in terms of a tendency toward higher complexity and an increased independence from the environment has been "goal directed". It would seem that the major goals have been reached. Are we really to believe that there will be a new class of vertebrates with five chambered hearts? Evolution, like ontogeny and ecological succession, stops when the definitive goal has been reached. Sexual reproduction would seem to be the device that brings it to a standstill. That is what led me to postulate the semi-meiotic hypothesis to which I still adhere.
"Aren't the small variations which are being recorded everywhere the tail end, the last oscillations of the evolutionary movement? Aren't our plants, our animals lacking some mechanisms which were present in the early flora and fauna?"
Pierre Grasse "Evolution of Living Organisms" page 71
Please note the apparent contradiction between Grasse's comment and the title of his book.
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