09.26.05

WashPost kickoff on Dover

Posted in In the News, Evolution at 2:37 pm by nemo

Article in Washington Post
New Analyses Bolster Central Tenets of Evolution Theory
Pa. Trial Will Ask Whether ‘Alternatives’ Can Pass as Science

By Rick Weiss and David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 26, 2005;

Update: This blog entry now also a webpage

As the Dover trial gets under way, the Hype campaign starts, and the Darwin blogosphere starts cheering. I hold no brief for the ID contingent who will probably lose their incompetent case. But the Darwinists don’t deserve to win. Enough’s enough. If half-educated religionists from the Bible Belt are our only protection against Darwin propaganda, heaven help us.

Thus an otherwise fascinating article in the Washington Post appears suspiciously on Day One of the Dover trial promoting new proofs of Darwin’s theory.

If it were any other day than the first day of the new Scopes Trial I would adjourn for some fascinating study. The article notes:

If Darwin was right, for example, then scientists should be able to perform a neat trick. Using a mathematical formula that emerges from evolutionary theory, they should be able to predict the number of harmful mutations in chimpanzee DNA by knowing the number of mutations in a different species’ DNA and the two animals’ population sizes.

"That’s a very specific prediction," said Eric Lander, a geneticist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass., and a leader in the chimp project.

[snip]

Their analysis was just the latest of many in such disparate fields as
genetics, biochemistry, geology and paleontology that in recent years have added new credence to the central tenet of evolutionary theory: That a smidgeon of cells 3.5 billion years ago could — through mechanisms no more extraordinary than random mutation and natural selection — give rise to the astonishing tapestry of biological diversity that today thrives on Earth.

Yeah, yeah. The central tenet of evolutionary theory? What’s that? More illuminating evidence for descent, no final conclusion about natural selection. In fact, the language always gets conveniently scrambled.

The vagueness of language, without any references that I could find,
adjourning after a few paragraphs to the usual boilerplate about the triumphs of Darwin and claims for evolution and the evils of ID, leaves the article stranded. These articles use the ’stun gun’ approach for the opening shot. The reader, even if knowledgeable, is on the defensive paragraph one, new research, proclamations of the experts, tough math noone understands, put the reader in ‘take your word for it’ mode, too tricky to challenge, fold your cards one more time. Then cut to the inability of ID to produce testable predictions. In reality, this is our failed champion population genetics, beefed up with some interesting genomic claims, a subject incapable of fully explaining evolution.

That a mechanism driven by random events should result in perfectly adapted organisms — and so many different types — seems illogical.

"Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise, natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere," Jacques Monod, a French biologist and Nobel Prize winner, wrote in 1970 in the book "Chance and Necessity."

Natural selection was really hard to accept in Darwin’s day. But it has become easier with the discovery of genes, DNA and techniques that have made it possible to watch natural selection happen.

It is illogical! And still really hard to accept, because it is probably
wrong. Why should evolution proceed from a source of noise? We should on the alert that reductionists are forcing evolution into their scientific box, and eliminating something essential. But if they could prove this, that would be the end of it. But look closely, smoke and mirrors at the crucial points.

It is now clear from fossil and molecular evidence that certain patterns of growth in multicellular organisms appeared about 600 million years ago. Those patterns proved so useful that versions of the genes governing them are carried by nearly every species that has arisen since.

I would be the first to acknowledge the complexity of the Cambrian, and resist misusing it, but Darwinists do essentially this by ignoring the
implications of their own data. This evidence clearly conceals the problem Darwinists are having, for it shows a turning point in evolution, which shouldn’t be there,  the achievement of a series of basic structures in a relatively short interval from which a great diversity in unity appeared. We are not required by the evidence to take this as confirmation of Darwin’s theory. The fossil record is skewed with a hump, a level of progression achieved. To simply annex this to Darwinian theory is missing the obvious. The evidence suggests we are in the presence of an elusive key we know nothing about yet. To
put it plainly, the record suggests much more reasonably a complex evolutionary directionality, one that realizes a possible teleology ( a dangerous term that should be buffered by empirical statements about directionality) by moving in a step function progression (not the same as progress, necessarily) of some sort.
In any case we are free to take the Cambrian interval as evidence of non-random patterning in the record (such statements avoiding like the plague that probably false claims for design here, that have driven Darwinists into their foxhole).
At the end of this non-random pattern interval, we see toolkits come into
existence! Come on. Stop destroying all common sense. I know design theorists are trying to steal the Darwinists’ lunch here. But there’s a source of counterevidence here, and it keeps getting covered up.

The article thus proceeds to the question of evo-devo, which probably resolves, or could resolve, many of the confusions, but which so far has been pressed into service in Darwin mode, when it should be grounds for liberating theory from Darwin. The strong suggestion of teleological mechanisms in DNA processes, these reduced to mutations in regulatory genes to generalize out of existence the question of  macroevolution, is surely grounds for dissent.
Darwinists are changing their story here. And a complex factor of regulation doesn’t even strike them as discordant with their original claims. The whole thing is thrown into the Darwin stew. To suddenly find toolkit genes, the antithesis of pure natural selection, described in the very language of design, and marry this to natural selection, using the ‘testable predictions’ in isolated cases, and be unable to account for such genes arising, ought to at least give someone pause to reflect. But the momentum of the Hype machine is unstoppable. Everyone has become so confused by the Darwin debate it is impossible to make any sense of it. Contra Darwin, powerful evidence has emerged from the genetic revolution for teleological processes of a natural kind in the
realm of DNA structures. That should make us wonder if something equivalent is not present in the non-genetic range of full evolution.

Thus, with respect the whole article’s claims,  Darwinists are producing more evidence for the claims of microevolution. This is now sitting ambiguously with the new discoveries of developmental biology.  The missing element, more than probably a factor of macroevolution (which should be more than speciation, evolutionary directionality), is simply unmentioned in the
discussion, because it is not supposed to exist. But the question of the
Cambrian, most probably, powerfully suggests it. But the most important case is that of the descent of man, where we now know that the Darwin scenario won’t work. First they claimed natural selection explained (away) macroevolution. Now they claim that natural selection/mutation in regulatory genes does this job, without pointing out they have changed their story, and without the correct proof.

You know what? I think a harmful mutation in Lamarck’s original two level theory produced a degenerate ideological version of evolution adapted to Darwinian Whigs, attempting to survive as classical liberals. As S. J. Gould pointed out (without quite doing him justice) in Structures of Evolutionary Theory, Lamarck, his nonsense about adaptation in giraffes’ necks apart, had the correct form in potential for a true theory of evolution, which requires a two-level approach that avoids the hopelessly confusing one-level monism of
Darwin and his descendants. Moral: mutants may well prove viable, but real evolution will have to pick up from the beginning and leapfrog a dead end mess.

Thus population genetics has never been shown to really explain the
phenomenon of evolution,  which is well established, but whose full mechanism defies simple or complete understanding so far. Note that claims for microevolution do establish the fact of evolution. The critics of Darwin in the creationist/Id camp make life easy for Darwin defenders. All they have to do is show the clear evidence for microevolution, then change the subject. A true theory must explore the context of these genetic events, and show the sole efficacy of natural selection for the total organism, over the whole stretch of time, and show that speciation, not just in one, but in all, cases, follows the
adaptational scenario. Microevolution could be simply the bass note in a broader picture where evolutionary directionality or other factors are at work.

But decoding chimpanzees’ DNA allowed scientists to do more than just refine their estimates of how similar humans and chimps are. It let them put the very theory of evolution to some tough new tests.

It is undoubtedly true, and fascinating that the DNA of chimps and man are very similar, a powerful argument for the reality of descent, but not an argument for the mechanism of natural selection. Man and chimpanzee are brethren in evolution, fine, a point I find cheering,  but they are also dramatically different species, in their potential and realization, and the similarity in their DNA gets suspicious. So what? Something is missing in the whole methodology of genetics if it can’t explicate any of these differences. This isn’t a funny question. The issue of ethical man is so amputated by this approach that we know almost sight unseen something is goofy here. They must account for the emergence of an ethical agent, whose potential to act transcends
adaptation, almost by definition. They simply declare this problem beyond the realm of science. But then science cannot account for the evolution of man.

Thus reductionists routinely deny aspects of man that don’t square with the futile effort to produce one-dimensional continuity. If that’s their game, fine, but they should be quarantined from the public and not be allowed to usurp the issue of evolution.

In fact, a theory of microevolution is unable to explain why one or selected lines of simians became hominids, or why one or selected lines of hominids became homo sapiens, while all the other branches remained relatively static. Microevolution was constant through all of this, predictably so, we have the Seven Daughters of Eve data, but behind all this a massive change in evolutionary direction occurred that noone has even documented, let alone explained in a theory. 

Thus bashing ID/creationism for lack of testable predictions is par for the course, but fails to consider that most of the claims for Darwinian accounts of the descent of man make testable predictions that can’t really be tested. Did language evolve by random mutation and natural selection? At least discipline the argument to acknowledge the evidence is so far insufficient.

Students of the eonic effect know the hogwash lurking in such claims, btw. We know almost certainly now that, as far as the descent of man is concerned, purely genetic evolutionary theory is insufficient.

It is an understandable wish to define the problem as one of science, but even that won’t work. What is a science of evolution? As we look at the sequence chimps/man we find the transition from evolution to history emerging, and the adaptational scenario is highly problematical as evolution closes on the present. We know already that a science of history gets into contradictions, that evolution and formally defined history overlap, and that therefore the same doubt about a theory of evolution for man, at least, is going to exist. And the
evidence is there, almost.

The data of the eonic model predicts that something like an eonic effect is going to appear in the earlier evolution/history of man, and sure enough it is there  in the evidence for the Great Explosion. Such statements, we must be honest where Darwinists are not, are not yet at a critical threshold in early evolution. But the evidence exists in recorded history. The point brings home
that Darwinian claims on the descent of man make a host of claims ‘testable in the abstract’ but never verified in practice, and probably false. The whole scenario of microevolution goes on and on, but is not likely to account for the emergence of man from chimpanzees. If that is not true, at least provide some proof. Or have the humility to stand back and say you don’t have a real theory yet. 

It is not enough to force evolution in a scientific standard. To say that something isn’t science might mean that the claim so made means a science of evolution is not possible for that data. The assumption that there is a full science of evolution is itself under trial. That doesn’t justify going off the deep end with metaphysical design claims, but it does remind us that the very gesture of doing science can restrict the domain of discourse to the point where the phenomenon in question is shrouded in reductionist confusions, far short of its full scope.

One might note in closing that the article nicely references Wallace, for once. Let it be noted that Wallace actually beat Darwin to the gun, and was the first to publish a theory of natural selection. The record got rigged by Darwin and his cronies to highlight Darwin’s priority. Apart from that, Wallace had the honesty later in life to renounce natural selection in the emergence of man, because he could see that it won’t work. His confusions over spiritual explanation harmed his case, but his basic point is clear. Man has a complex potential (which might be embryonically present in chimps, we don’t know) that could never have emerged from selectionist scenarios.  The point is clear
from the simplest attempt to account for the evolution of ethical man. To sweep this into the category of random mutation/selection is a sign of either reductionist obsession or complete stupidity. But to claim that a real theory of evolution exists as yet is the height of brazen distortions.

All this talk about testable predictions and evidence confirming natural selection as a macro agent. It isn’t there. It won’t work on the descent of man. Students of the eonic effect are aware of evidence of the one thing Darwinists dread most, the full scale context behind the low gear microevolution of genetics. The real evolution of man is secondarily genetic. Real evolution, at least in the human case, shows a complexity and range beyond anything Darwinists could imagine. http://www.history-and-evolution.com/introduction.htm

 

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