This month marks fifteen years since the conclusion of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District trial which ruled that Intelligent Design (ID) is a form of creationism and, therefore, could not be taught as a scientific theory in American public schools. Recently, several of the people involved in the trial have given interviews about it, among them biochemist Michael Behe, the most prominent proponent of ID to testify at the trial.
His testimony provided some of the more memorable moments of the trial, including the exchange re-enacted in the video excerpt below from the PBS documentary Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial:
While the Dover trial was a major setback for Behe and the ID movement, their efforts to persuade the public that evolution is a failed scientific theory have continued. Behe has since published three more books and recently sat down for interviews to share his thoughts on the trial. These interviews took place alongside S. Joshua Swamidass who, while also a Christian, strongly disagrees with many of Behe’s criticisms of evolution. The interviews can be viewed below:
Behe misrepresents his critics
Let me draw attention to one point in the first interview, with Pat Flynn. At around the 8:00 mark, Behe disparages the presiding judge at the trial, John E. Jones III, for, among other things, the fact that Jones’s written decision consisted largely of verbatim quotes from material provided by the plaintiffs. This complaint has been made repeatedly by ID proponents over the years and it is completely invalid. It is, in fact, standard procedure to use quotes in this manner and, when you think about it, this makes sense. The court system is already bogged down enough without judges having to write what would amount to academic papers using entirely their own words. I was surprised that Behe was not yet aware of this but, as it happens, Swamidass was able to clarify Behe’s confusion (having himself recently learned this legal fact through an interview with Eugenie Scott). So, fine. Behe made an incorrect claim, and was corrected. (Edit: Swamidass has since informed me that he actually learned about this through a member of the Peaceful Science forum who is a lawyer and goes by the name Puck_Mendelsssohn).
But now listen to the 4:30 point of the second interview, which was recorded only a few weeks later. Behe makes exactly the same claim about the written decision and, this time, Swamidass does not take the opportunity to correct him. I am not faulting Swamidass for this. Behe covered a lot of topics and it would be difficult to respond to each and every one. But the result is that the uninformed listener would come away believing that Behe’s complaint was valid and that the judge had done something improper.
I have a hard time believing this was accidental. It is a frequent strategy of Behe employs to understate, mischaracterize, or ignore altogether the responses and criticisms that have been made against his work. For an example, listen to 18:50 of the first interview, where Behe summarizes what he claims to be the main critiques of his claims:
- “You’re not allowed to invoke ‘design’, because we say that’s not scientific.”
- “In the future, Darwinism will be able to explain those things.”
- “In the future, some other idea will be shown to explain it.”
Now, anyone familiar with the actual criticisms that Behe has faced will know that is a misleading and far from complete list. But most listeners of the program will not be familiar with these criticisms, and it appears that neither of the moderators of the discussions are, either.
For my part, I will simply provide links to just some of the critiques of Behe that have been published online, and leave it to the reader to decide whether Behe has accurately characterized these:
Kenneth Miller: “The Flagellum Unspun: The Collapse of “Irreducible Complexity”
Reed A. Cartwright: “Theory is as Theory Does”
Gregory I. Lang and Amber M. Rice: “Evolution unscathed: Darwin Devolves argues on weak reasoning that unguided evolution is a destructive force, incapable of innovation.”
Laurence A. Moran: “Of Mice and Michael”
This is in addition to at least two papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals that have directly addressed some of Behe’s claims.[1]Durrett R, Schmidt D. Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution. Genetics. 2008;180(3):1501-1509. … Continue reading [2]Lynch M. Simple evolutionary pathways to complex proteins. Protein Sci. 2005;14(9):2217-2227. doi:10.1110/ps.041171805
As you can see, responding to Behe often requires getting quite deeply into some rather difficult and arcane scientific issues. While Swamidass does a reasonably good job of addressing many of Behe’s claims, there is simply no way to cover all this in a spoken interview. I could easily see a neophyte listener coming away with the impression that Behe is a scientist who, while controversial, has identified some valid problems in what Behe refers to as “Darwinism.”
There is an unintentionally ironic moment at 49 minutes of the second video where Swamidass cites a paper that claimed all the proteins of the infamous bacterial flagellum are variants descended from a single ancestral protein. Behe takes him to task for this, saying that other researchers soon contradicted this paper and, in the 12 years following its publication, neither its authors nor any other scientists have followed up on it. If I were sitting in Swamidass’s chair, I would have responded, “And, remind us: In the quarter century you’ve been writing about evolution, how many scientists have followed up on your ideas?” I don’t really think that is Swamidass’s style, but nonetheless, it remains a valid question: If Behe’s ideas are so persuasively supported by scientific evidence, then why have they had less than negligible acknowledgement from scientists outside the ID Creationist movement? Behe suggests that this is due to an a priori commitment to philosophical materialism. But it is difficult to sustain such a claim when he is sharing the screen with a critic who is not only a Christian but who believes that a literal Adam and Eve were created supernaturally by God.
Is ID theologically sound?
While it is not surprising that Behe was unable to mount a strong scientific defense of his ideas, I found it interesting how badly he struggled when, near its conclusion, the “Unbelievable” interview moved on to theological questions. Unlike most creationists, Behe accepts common ancestry between humans and chimpanzees. His chief argument is that evidence of “design” is found in the complex machinery and novel proteins that arise over the course of evolution. Swamidass correctly points out that there are no such novel features that distinguish us from chimpanzees, and the biological differences from our primate relatives are mostly a matter of rearrangement of existing anatomical and biochemical components, processes which Behe accepts can occur without guidance by a “designer”. Behe actually agrees on this point, and does not give a good answer other than to say he covers this question in his book. We are left with the question hanging in the air: Why is Behe’s god primarily concerned with producing propellers for bacteria and so forth, while the evolution of human beings appears to be nothing more than a lucky accident?
Why does Behe deny evolution?
The theory of evolution continues to arouse strong passions in large part because of the profound truths it reveals regarding how we came to be and who we are as human beings. These truths are particularly challenging to theists and other who view our species as exceptional in a way that sets us apart from the rest of nature. I have already discussed how Swamidass has attempted to reconcile his religious beliefs with his acceptance of evolution. Others have managed to do so by other means.
For his part, Behe seems intent on denying the theory outright and portraying it as a misbegotten idea. He pointedly insists on referring to evolutionary theory as “Darwinism” and those who accept it as “Darwinists”, even though it has been repeatedly explained to him these terms are no longer apt. It is probably not by accident that one particular word stands out so strongly on the cover of his latest book (above). I suspect Behe’s intent is to create the impression that evolution is not a scientific theory so much as it is an ideology conceived of and promulgated by one individual, like Marxism. Despite his 25 year stretch of scientific failure, Behe is likely to continue to receive a sympathetic hearing from some of the many people still discomfited by the idea that we are distinct from other apes through nothing more than a relatively small number of accidental mutations.
References
| ↑1 | Durrett R, Schmidt D. Waiting for two mutations: with applications to regulatory sequence evolution and the limits of Darwinian evolution. Genetics. 2008;180(3):1501-1509. doi:10.1534/genetics.107.082610 |
|---|---|
| ↑2 | Lynch M. Simple evolutionary pathways to complex proteins. Protein Sci. 2005;14(9):2217-2227. doi:10.1110/ps.041171805 |
Excellent post, sir! One small clarification I would add is that not only is it “standard procedure to use quotes in this manner,” as you say, but that the document which Jones was criticized for using quotes from is submitted specifically, and only, for the use in writing the court’s decision. It’s not a brief, or an exhibit, or some such thing: it’s a set of “proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law,” which the parties are asked to submit in order to help the court write its decision. Instead of being an advocacy piece in the ordinary sense, it is simply a set of statements about the evidence which the filing party hopes will be adopted by the court.
And, of course, as you can guess: the Dover Area School Board ALSO submitted such a document, in the hopes that the court would adopt its findings. I’ve never bothered to take the time to do a detailed analysis, but it actually wouldn’t surprise me if Jones also used quotes from those — in most cases the court’s findings will not be exclusively drawn from one side. However, not surprisingly, one would expect that the much larger proportion of these will come from the side that won the case.
That Behe continues to return to this point is saddening; it shows that he really is incapable of taking criticisms on board and dealing with them or amending what he says to bring it into conformity with reality. There’s nothing wrong with holding unorthodox views, but there is something wrong with mischaracterizing those who disagree with you or with falsely suggesting that a US District Judge has committed plagiarism.
Just some thoughts about Behe. He doesn’t refuse evolution (as you wrote he accepts common descent, an old earth and quite a lot of other issues, at least more than any other Intelligent Design proponent does), but certain mechanisms of evolution (‘evolutionary theories’, there are quite a lot of them, but especially ‘evolutionary theory’ as materialistic explanation), at most ‘Darwinism’ (understood as the former standard-theory, often called Synthetic Theory of Evolution, an extended version of Darwin’s selection theory, combined with population genetics but omitting quite a lot of biological disciplines, that theory takes certain evolvable systems for granted and looks for the ‘survival of the fittest’, but totally neglecting the more interesting point being the ‘arrival of the fittest’). Behe is attacking the first step: How are the first components generated? He grants that evolution is possible if these systems are available, but these first steps cannot be made by mechanisms of ‘Darwinism’. In his eyes the only plausible alternative is design.
Behe argued in his first book with irreducible complexity (in his second book you don’t find it in the index, Behe told me that he didn’t make the index, so that’s chance), but since then narrowing his point of view to more basic issues, making the same point as with irreducible complexity. In his third book he explains why he regards that issue as completed. I’ll have yet to read his fourth book …
The concept of Irreducible complexity is often poorly understood by critics (I’ve read through quite a lot of publications), it’s a very powerful argument against ‘Darwinism’ as understood by e.g. Dawkins. You can show that quite easily using the ‘weasel-program’ Dawkins mentions in his ‘Blind Watchmaker’. A possible source code appeared in the internet (Dawkins didn’t confirm that it was the one he used, but it generates an output quite identical to that in the ‘Blind Watchmaker’, so it’s good enough anyway), a toy program just intended to show that a combination of mutation and selection can quite easily achieve what chance alone can’t do. If you implement irreducible complexity in that program (it’s easily done by a few lines of PASCAL code), it does no longer work.
That irreducible complexity is in fact a problem for certain theories of evolution Ussery and Thornhill (both extremely critical about Intelligent Design, Usser operated a webside similar to Catalano, collecting links mostly against irreducible complexity) showed in
Thornhill, R.H.; Ussery, D.W. (2000) ‘A classification of possible routes of Darwinian evolution’ The Journal of Theoretical Biology 203:111-116, 2000
URL: http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/~dave/JTB.html , letzter Zugriff: 21.02.2014
So Behe has quite an argument, not against all naturalistc theories of evolution, but at least against the most important one. Most arguments against that concept are poorly thought, at least by Miller (or even worse by Perakh): they argue that parts of an irreducible complex systems have a selectable function, therefore the whole system could be generated by mechanims of selection theory. That’s at best a necessary condition, never ever a sufficient. As far as I know Behes argument stands even today, as far as certain mechanisms are concerned.
There may be other naturalistic mechanism working fine, but they aren’t discovered yet.
But it’s indisputable that irreducible complexity isn’t an argument for design or even against naturalistic evolution. Behe has used a quite insufficient definition of ‘scientific’: Using just scientific arguments. But that doesn’ make Intelligent Design scientific. That’s another problem. Intelligent Design proponents since Johnson admitted, that they has do implement an new theory of science, because Intelligent Design wouldn’t qualify as science as it’s done at the moment. But they never elaborated on that theory (by the way the founders of modern science, especially Newton, accepted Design).
You’re right that Behe doesn’t consider adequately objections against his theories and even repeats refuted arguments. Behe even conceded logical flaws in his concept and announced to fix them, but that never ever happened.
Just my 0.02 EUR.
You are correct that Behe argues against only one specific model of evolution, one in which each step of generating a new functional gene or gene complex must be subject to positive selection. However, you are incorrect in saying this is the most important mechanism. It is, in fact, one that is not held by knowledgeable evolutionary biologists.
Unfortunately, Behe’s writings do not acknowledge this and leave his readers, few of whom have a good understanding of modern evolutionary theory, with the impression that he is arguing against the current theory of evolution.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment.
“You are correct that Behe argues against only one specific model of evolution, one in which each step of generating a new functional gene or gene complex must be subject to positive selection.”
yepp, that’s gradualism, one of the central tenets of the standard theory, oftentimes called incorrectly ‘Neo-Darwinism’. Dawkins is one of the most known proponents of that theory. But there are quite some more.
“However, you are incorrect in saying this is the most important mechanism. It is, in fact, one that is not held by knowledgeable evolutionary biologists.”
Of course there are a lot of theories, not the least a new thinking called the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis. All these modern theories have in common that they are not ‘darwinian’. I’m quite sure that even today there are quite a lot of darwinians out there.
It’s a little bit a terminological problem, too. Many people say ‘evolution’, meaning *adaptation* (Dawkins admits that explicitly). That process, the only known mechanism to correlate features of an organism with his needs, AKA ‘survival of the fittest’, is quite well known and formalized mathematically. But that’s not evolution sensu stricto (generating novelties).
The first author with an explicit evolutionary theory, Lamarck, publishing his thoughts in the birth year of Darwin, formulated two mechanisms: one for adaptation, one for evolution. Darwin tried to argue for just one mechanism (selection theory), explaining both adaptation (‘survival of the fittest’) and evolution (‘arrival of the fittest’). Behe’s critique goes in that direction: granting adaptation he postulates a second mechanism (Intelligent Design, of course) for generating novelties. As far as I know there are lots of naturalistic proposals for that, none shown working as needed. I’m no professional biologist, maybe I don’t know these mechanisms. But I’m quite an expert regarding discussion of irreducible complexity, as far as I know no opponent of Behe was able to answer his questions. At the moment we just don’t know exactly, how evolution works. That’s the reason most people criticizing Behe don’t do that by explicitly showing how natural mechanisms are able to generate the systems he discusses. If these would be known these autors would simply cite the literature.
“Unfortunately, Behe’s writings do not acknowledge this”
As far as I know he discusses quite some of them and argues why he believes that they don’t work.
“and leaves his readers, few of whom have a good understanding of modern evolutionary theory, with the impression that he is arguing against the current theory of evolution.”
What do you call “the current theory of evolution”? I know lots of different ‘theories of evolution’, not very compatible checking one against another.
From my point of view the biggest problem of evolutionary theory discussing Intelligent Design proponents consists in lacking definitions what authors mean by ‘evolutionary theory’. That term is often used but rarely defined. As far as I see (I’ve read quite a lot about history of evolutionary theory since Darwin) there was a standard definition from the end of the 1940s to the beginning of the 1970s. In the Darwin-year 1959 you were ‘neo-darwian’ or not knowledgeable. Then new theories spawned. 2009 and at the moment the situation is similar to 1909 with lots of different theories. I guess that Behe even at the moment has some quite good arguments against naturalistic theories but none for Intelligent Design.
Just compare
Tax, S.; (ed.) (1960) ‘Evolution After Darwin. 3 vols’ Chicago, University of Chicago Press
(a collection of articles from the triumphalistic Darwin festivities in Chicago 1959, never before or after that the ‘Synthetic Theory of Evolution’ was the accepted standard of evolutionary theory)
with
Kellogg, V.L. (1907) ‘Darwinism To-Day. A Discussion of Present-Day Scientific Criticism of the Darwinian Selection Theories, Together With a Brief Account of the Principal Other Proposed Auxiliary and Alternative Theories of Species-Forming’ New York, Henry Holt
who collected for the Darwin first festivities 1909 all then proposed theories of evolution. There are quite a lot of books 2009 celebrating Darwin, but they aren’t arguing for the same kind of theory.
Don’t misunderstand me, I’m staunch naturalist, no interest defending Intelligent Design. I’m just interested in good arguments instead of putting the black hat on a person or calling names. In Dover my side was very lucky to find a judge who was persuaded by the arguments of the plaintiffs, being on the side of evolution. In the first trial concerning evolution (Scopes 1925, the only trial where the plaintiffs were against evolution) it was the other way round. With that judge in Dover I’m not sure that Intelligent Design would have been banned from schools.
“What do you call ‘the current theory of evolution’?”
This:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2707937/
You’re sure? I’ve read through quite a lot of recent books and articles using ‘evolutionary theory’ without defining this term. I haven’t met Neutral Evolution quite often there.
Okay, Larry Moran (the guy with a blog named Sandwalk https://sandwalk.blogspot.com ) plans a book about Neutral Evolution, but I think he has not too many like-minded followers.
As far as I know at the moment there is no ‘standard theory of evolution’. Some call it ‘Synthetic Theory of Evolution’, ‘neo-Darwinism’, ‘Standard Theory’ and so on, but neither historians nor theoreticians of science know exactly what that means. Acitve researchers usually don’t think about these issues.
Yes, I am sure. The problem seems to me that there are many biologists, not to mention people in completely different fields, who do not understand current evolutionary theory, but think they do. You mentioned the “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”. Check the credentials of the people affiliated with that movement. You will find very few evolutionary biologists, and many people who are not biologists at all. Members of the EES movement correctly identify problems with the traditional Darwninian model. They are not aware that those problems were already addressed and solved decades ago.
So I am not surprised that you have not often encountered the term Neutral Evolution. It depends on how well informed the sources you read are. I would not rely on “historians (and) theoreticians of science” to be the most informed.
The journal Nature has provided a useful backgrounder, intended for high school and university undergrad students, complete with references. You’ll notice this was published 12 years ago. This is not new information. People purporting to write about evolutionary theory should know this. Sadly, too many don’t.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/neutral-theory-the-null-hypothesis-of-molecular-839/
“Yes, I am sure. The problem seems to me that there are many biologists, not to mention people in completely different fields, who do not understand current evolutionary theory, but think they do.”
from my point of view evolutionary theory is an issue for historians and philosophers of biology. Most active researchers bother about theory only as far as they are interested to get articles published. A notion like ‘current evolutionary theory’ is moot. There are dozens of evolutionary theories but no standard more than “a lot of people work under that paradigm”.
“You mentioned the „Extended Evolutionary Synthesis“. Check the credentials of the people affiliated with that movement. You will find very few evolutionary biologists, and many people who are not biologists at all.”
I’m not sure that that’s an argument. There is an old adage: “You don’t have to be able to lay eggs to recognise that one is foul.” Or Bacon: “Argument is like an arrow from a crossbow, which has equal force shot by a child”. There is even a name for that informal logical fallacy (argumentum ad verecundiam).
“Members of the EES movement correctly identify problems with the traditional Darwninian model.”
No, they criticize exactly what you mean with “current evolutionary theory”. BTW, I’m no proponent of the EES, for different reasons. At the moment I write a review of the first German book about EES, I’m quite sure to know what these people represent and why that’s quite problematic, sometimes.
“They are not aware that those problems were already addressed and solved decades ago.”
Ups. Just for fun a list of problems:
“At this point in our discussion I may challenge the adherents of the strictly Darwinian view, which we are discussing here, to try to explain the evolution of the following features by accumulation and selection of small mutants: hair in mammals, feathers in birds, segmentation of arthropods and vertebrates, the transformation of the gill arches in phylogeny including the aortic arches, muscles, nerves, etc.; further, teeth, shells of mollusks, ectoskeletons, compound eyes, blood circulation, alternation of generations, statocysts, ambulacral system of echinoderms, pedicellaria of the same, cnidocysts, poison apparatus of snakes, whalebone, and, finally, primary chemical differences like hemoglobin vs. hemocyanin, etc. Corresponding examples from plants could be given.”
This list was published in 1940. Which of these problems are solved yet? Which of theses problems the Neutral Theory could solve even in principle? Does Neutral Theory propose anything other than “by accumulation and selection of small mutants”?
“So I am not surprised that you have not often encountered the term Neutral Evolution. It depends on how well informed the sources you read are.”
It depends on at which level you try to understand evolution. I guess you realized that Neutral Theory argues at the level of the DNA and macromolecules (‘Null hypothesis of *molecular* evolution”). But thats only a part of evolutionary theory. What evolution is and what evolutionary biologists try to research you can easily see comparing the four editions of Futuyma’s “Evolutionary Biology”. There are quite some details about developments in “current evolutionary theory” since 1979. Look there for example for ‘Neutral Theory’.
“The journal Nature has provided a useful backgrounder with references. You’ll notice this was published 12 years ago. This is not new information.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/neutral-theory-the-null-hypothesis-of-molecular-839/”
There you find even that this kind of solution was found shortly after Kimura proposed his theory in the 1960s. I’m quite informed about the discussions then.
I’m not sure that Neutral Theory is “current evolutionary theory”, not even for evolutionary biologists.
“No, they criticize exactly what you mean with ‘current evolutionary theory’”.
Feel free to cite any of their publications where they address and refute neutral/nearly neutral theory. I would even be satisfied with a citation that shows they are so much as aware of and understand the theory.
“Which of these problems are solved yet?”
Pretty well all of those have been answered. You are free to research them yourself is you wish.
“Does Neutral Theory propose anything other than ‘by accumulation and selection of small mutants’?
Yes. I have already provided you with sufficient resources to correct your misunderstanding of the theory. I suggest you read them.
“I guess you realized that Neutral Theory argues at the level of the DNA and macromolecules (‘Null hypothesis of *molecular* evolution”). But thats only a part of evolutionary theory.”
Evolution is well defined as the change in heritable attributes of populations of organisms over time. That can be reduced down to the level of DNA. Any attributes that cannot be reduced to that level are not the concern of evolutionary theory.
“There you find even that this kind of solution was found shortly after Kimura proposed his theory in the 1960s.”
Exactly the point. Neutral theory is the established mainstream paradigm for evolutionary biology and has been since the 1960’s. That so many people who claim to understand evolution are not aware of this only speaks poorly of their knowledge, not of the theory itself.
“„No, they criticize exactly what you mean with ‚current evolutionary theory’”.
Feel free to cite any of their publications where they address and refute neutral/nearly neutral theory. I would even be satisfied with a citation that shows they are so much as aware of and understand the theory.”
isn’t it the other way round? Look in usual textbooks of evolutionary theory, e.g. Futuyma, about the space neutral theory is given. Doesn’t contain the rest of the book ‘evolutionary theory’?
“„Which of these problems are solved yet?“
Pretty well all of those have been answered. You are free to research them yourself is you wish.”
I’m sure you wouldn’t succeed finding any literatur proving that any of these problems is solved. Maybe you’re not interested in that kind of evolution? My question was a little bit ‘deeper’: How do you find a solution, even in principle, using the neutral theory of evolution? It would be interesting how that is possible.
“„Does Neutral Theory propose anything other than ‚by accumulation and selection of small mutants‘?
Yes. I have already provided you with sufficient resources to correct your misunderstanding of the theory. I suggest you read them.”
I’m not sure that my unterstanding of evolutionary theory is insufficient. Maybe you know only a little aspect of evolutionary theory?
“„I guess you realized that Neutral Theory argues at the level of the DNA and macromolecules (‘Null hypothesis of *molecular* evolution”). But thats only a part of evolutionary theory.“
Evolution is well defined as the change in heritable attributes of populations of organisms over time.”
That’s the definition of population genetics. It’s very insufficient as the biston-story tells. That’s evolution by that definition, but no evolution at all. You remember? That story was successful in convincing Popper that evolution is more than a “metaphysical research program”. But was that evolution? You found black morphs in the oldest collections, what changed was only the proportion of theses morphs, and it was reversible. If you call that ‘evolution’, okay. That’s not very ambitious and most people wouldn’t regard that as evolution. Same with Darwin finches on Daphne.
“That can be reduced down to the level of DNA. Any attributes that cannot be reduced to that level are not the concern of evolutionary theory.”
That’s a quite idiosyncratic definition of ‘evolutionary theory’. Maybe you should call that population genetics? There are many others and better ones.
But you’re perfectly right: “Any attributes that cannot be reduced to that level are not the concern of evolutionary theory.” if you constrain ‘evolution’ to *that* theory.
But that’s *adaptation*, not evolution. All usual aspects of evolution are just concurrencies (‘Nebenläufigkeiten’ in German) then. But that’s the real stuff, not proportions of alleles in populations. That’s the confusion of a measuring unit with a mechanism. The difference between ‘survival of the fittest’ and ‘arrival of the fittest’.
“„There you find even that this kind of solution was found shortly after Kimura proposed his theory in the 1960s.“
Exactly the point. Neutral theory is the establshed mainstream paradigm for evolutionary biology”
Just from the point of view of some theorists and please write *population genetics*, not evolutionary biology.
“and has been since the 1960’s. That so many people who claim to understand evolution are no aware of this only speaks poorly of their knowledge, not of the theory itself.”
And there are much more people knowing just one version of evolutionary theory ignoring the rest. You’re correct by definition: If you understand ‘evolution’ as ‘change of freqency in alleles in populations over time’ that’s quite older than the neutral theory and neutral theory was integrated into that concept, not the other way round.
Feel free to read articles about the history of evolutionary theory. There are quite a lot of them. Maybe you’ll be corrected.
Interesting that you cite Futuyma as an authority. My definition of evolution is based on the one he uses in his textbook, so I am not sure why you are questioning it:
“Biological (or organic) evolution is change in the properties of populations of organisms or groups of such populations, over the course of generations. The development, or ontogeny, of an individual organism is not considered evolution: individual organisms do not evolve. The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are ‘heritable’ via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population, such as the alleles that determine the different human blood types, to the alterations that led from the earliest organisms to dinosaurs, bees, snapdragons, and humans.”
Also contrary to your claim, Futuyma recognizes the importance of neutral theory:
“Evolutionary research in the 1950s and 1960s greatly increased information on genetic variation in natural populations, the seeming ubiquity of natural selection and speciation. In the 1960s, efforts to synthesize ecology with evolutionary biology were renewed as ‘population biology’ [17,18], the beginning of a flourishing field of evolutionary ecology [19]. The development of kin selection theory and the distinction between individual selection and group selection gave rise to fields such as behavioural ecology and life-history theory. The abundant evidence of natural selection and the development of optimality models for characters that almost unquestionably affect fitness may have led to a broadly held view of selection as an almost exclusive factor of evolution. But the all-important role of selection was challenged by interpretations of molecular polymorphism and evolution in neutralist terms [20–22], and the ‘neutralist–selectionist’ debate ultimately resolved itself into rendering unto Kimura and unto Darwin those provinces of variation that each best explains. In the 1980s and 1990s, the field of molecular evolution grew so massively as to warrant its own society and journal. This expansion was accompanied by the maturation of phylogenetic analysis and its long-deferred integration with the study of evolutionary processes [23–25]. Thus, evolutionary theory has undergone enormous expansion since the ES [26,27], with the neutral theory of molecular evolution its most radical extension.”
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsfs.2016.0145
“Interesting that you cite Futuyma as an authority. My definition of evolution is based on the one he uses in his textbook, so I am not sure why you are questioning it”
I told you to *compare* his definitions changing through the four edition of his book and looking in that book about the role of neutral evolution.
The most extensive definition you find in the first edition and Futuyma was quite careful in his wording then. When you think over why he wrote
Futuyma, D.J. (1983) ‘Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution’ New York, Pantheon Books
you should know why.
That changes a bit to the fourth edition, also easy to explain. It’s interesting to compare these definitions.
You used the definition in the third edition, the content of the book a bit downgraded compared with the second. I could cite the other three ones if you’re interested.
But let’s take a look at the definition you quoted:
“„Biological (or organic) evolution is change in the properties of populations of organisms or groups of such populations, over the course of generations.”
Why uses Futuyma *property* and not DNA, allele, gene ore someting out from molecular biology? BTW that’s exactly the point the EES is reflecting: DNA isn’t all, the developmental system is at least as important.
Take a zygote, tweak off the nucleus and replace it by that of a different species. What do you think will happen? Does the DNA of the new nucleus control the development?
“The development, or ontogeny, of an individual organism is not considered evolution: individual organisms do not evolve.”
Correct. But a string of DNA doesn’t either.
“The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are ‘heritable‘ via the genetic material from one generation to the next.”
Okay, there are epigenetic factors, nobody knows exactly what evolutionary meaning they have. Why Futuyma wrote ‘heritable’ and not heritable? Any suggestions?
“Biological evolution may be slight or substantial;”
Even neutral? SCNR
“it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportions of different forms of a gene within a population, such as the alleles that determine the different human blood types,”
That’s what you understand by ‘evolution’. But don’t forget the real stuff:
“to the alterations that led from the earliest organisms to dinosaurs, bees, snapdragons, and humans.”
Of this kind were the problems in the list I mentioned from 1940. It’s an open questions if they can be answered by molecular data. That’s a philosophical question concerning levels of explanations. Do you think that there was anything like the Hardy-Weinberg-Equation (the core of population genetics) at the Big Bang? If yes, that would be big news. If not, you should reflect if you can explain an developmental system using only terms of molecular biology.
Maybe evolution is quite a lot more than changes in allele frequencies?
I answered yet to that what I got via Email notification only. I’ll answer to the rest in due time.
Thank you very much for linking Futuyma’s article. Didn’t know it yet, but followed the discussion he mentioned with
“Against this background, I will consider the major themes of
the proposed extended evolutionary synthesis (EES), drawing
largely on the position paper by Laland et al. [14] and the oral
presentations at the discussion meeting sponsored by the
Royal Society and the British Academy (November 2016).”
Concerning the background there was no news for me, I read through quite a lot of the articles and books about history of ES he quoted, even quite a few he didn’t. Futuyma did a very good job in telling the history of the ES, regarding little space. BTW, he did that in the first edition of his Evolutionary Biology also.
I told you that I’m not a proponent of the EES, I’m agreeing almost totally with Futuyma’s conclusion, so the article isn’t any problem for my position.
The issue between us was the importance of Neutral Theory and concerning this I’m quite sure the article doesn’t support your position.
I never proposed that Futuyma didn’t recognize the importance of the Neutral Theory, I told you to check the four editions of his book about his treatment of that issue.
The quote you used is the first part of ‘Extensions of the evolutionary synthesis’ in the article quoted. In that context “with the neutral theory of molecular evolution its most radical extension.” doesn’t read as “the Neutral Theory is the central piece of modern evolutionary theory”. If you research a little bit about theory structure and replacement in the history of science you’ll see what these notions mean. At first Weismann’s ‘Allmacht der Selektion’ was central for the ES and it was quite a shock when Kimura proposed his Neutral Theory. It was a quite an achievment to integrate that into the ES and exactly that is the meaning of “its most radical extension”.
Futuyma wrote
“But the all-important
role of selection was challenged by interpretations of
molecular polymorphism and evolution in neutralist terms
[20–22], and the ‘neutralist–selectionist’ debate ultimately
resolved itself into rendering unto Kimura and unto Darwin
those provinces of variation that each best explains.”
Do you see any difference to my wordings? If you’re interested I can expand on “ultimately resolved itself into rendering unto Kimura and unto Darwin those provinces of variation that each best explains”. But I wrote that already mentioning *molecular* in a former posting.
BTW, did you see at the end of the article
“To remain vital, a
field of science requires challengers who aim to topple traditional
views; but if it is not to be knocked about and
smashed by unruly children (I am thinking of current politics
in my country), the science also needs traditionalists.”
Actually, “it is not to be knocked about and smashed by unruly children (I am thinking of current politics in my country)”, written in 2017 was prophetical regarding 1/6, the capitol “knocked out and smashed” by “unruly children” (an euphemism, of course) in the US.
But “the science also needs traditionalists” shows the intention of Futuyma concerning the EES and I tend to agree. But that’s another issue than the relative importance of Neutral Theory in evolutionary biology.
Behe, like all of ID, argues against evolution by means of blind and mindless processes. That concept is untestable nonsense. It looks like you don’t know anything about ID nor science.
Dr, Behe responed to the ignorant judge: https://www.discovery.org/m/2018/12/Whether-Intelligent-Design-is-Science-Michael-Behe.pdf
@JoeG
Evolution has been tested and it doesn’t matter if Behe responded to the judge, his argument is still an argument but it’s not science.