02.27.06
Ruse/Dembski
Here’s a review by Ruse of Endless Forms Most Beautiful with a reply by Dembski, from ST NEWS.
Ruse blather’s about unsolved problems. Evo-devo is proof Darwinists made false claims for a century. Then changed their story without acknowledging any problem. It is a cynical game, and they know how easy it is to get away with it.
Accessible ‘Endless Forms’ shows the evolution of evolution
Sean Carroll’s Endless Forms Most Beautiful explores “evo devo,” also known as evolutionary developmental biology
By Michael Ruse
(July 29, 2005)Explore evo-devo — evolutionary development.
(Illustration: Kathleen M.G. Howlett)
Related STNews articles • Biology’s third revolutionEndless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom
Sean B. Carroll
New York. W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.
350 pages. $25.95.A major problem with the critics of science is that they have a problem with problems.
Let me be a little less cryptic. The critics — notably the creationists, and more recently their smoother descendents, the intelligent design theorists — are always whining that science has unfinished or unsolved problems.
Immediately, what is unsolved is identified with the insoluble, and the science in question is labeled inadequate or otherwise unacceptable. This, for instance, is the ploy at the center of the critique of Darwinian evolutionary theory by Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe in Darwin’s Black Box. Although his ideas are dressed up in fancier science, he stands right in the tradition of earlier creationists like Henry Morris and Duane T. Gish.
Problem solving
In fact, any real scientist will tell you that the best science is that with unsolved problems. Real scientists want more to do at the end of the day than at the beginning. It is no fun in science sitting around and polishing the achievements of others. They want their own problems and their own chance at prestige and glory. In this respect there has been no more successful science in the past half-century than Darwinian evolutionary theory.
In 1959, a year marked by the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 100th anniversary of the publication of his Origin of Species, it all rather looked as if nothing remained except the shouting: Honorary degrees were being handed out wholesale and there was heady talk of prestigious prizes. It had been 30 years since Mendelian genetics had been blended with Darwinian selection, and it looked as though the result — known in America as the synthetic theory of evolution and in England as neo-Darwinism — was a well-established and essentially complete body of theory backed by empirical evidence.
Fortunately and wonderfully, this was a totally false assumption. Darwinian theory has seen more changes and developments in the past 50 years than in the 100 years before: more than in the whole history of evolutionary theorizing.
Darwin’s changing face
Take three areas. First, there is the matter of the evolution of social behavior, now known as “sociobiology” or (in the human realm) as “evolutionary psychology.” Darwin dealt with social behavior in Origin, but then little or nothing happened. It is incredibly difficult to study — much easier to have a dead fish on the slab and look at its morphology. In any case, with the rise of the social sciences, biologists were firmly ordered off the turf.
However, the then-graduate student William D. Hamilton came up with the explanation through kin selection of hymenopteran (ants, bees and wasps) worker sterility. Basically, he said, because of a funny mating system, females are more closely related to their sisters than to their daughters and so a selfish-gene perspective dictates that female hymenopterans should raise fertile sisters rather than fertile daughters. With this, the field was off and running. This has since grown into a veritable industry, underpinned by the bible of the field, Harvard University entomologist Edward O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Second, there is paleontology, undoubtedly refreshed and invigorated by the new theory of plate tectonics that was accepted in the early 1960s. Evolutionists have looked at the fossil record with whole new perspectives, notoriously producing the jerky theory of change of Niles Eldredge and the late Stephen Jay Gould’s so-called “punctuated equilibrium” — called “punk eek,” in the trade.
More generally, evolutionists have produced a whole subfield — now named “paleobiology” — that looks at history with new ideas and theories. Particularly exciting have been the ways in which evolutionists have peered into the long-distant past, the study of life’s massive extinctions — including the one about 65 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs — and the finding of patterns and trends in the fossil record. Thanks to computers and the indefatigable study mass extinction by the late paleontologist Jack Sepkoski, today we have much understanding about how the overall rhythm of life rises and falls.
Third, most recently and perhaps most excitingly of all, there has been the use of molecular biology to trace the development of the organism from the gene to the finished whole, and how this can affect and drive the evolutionary process. Already evolutionary development — called “evo-devo” for short — has made some incredible discoveries. Who could possibly have thought there could be a major sharing of genes between humans and drosophila, the little fruit flies that hang around rotting fruit? But there is, and remarkably, the same genes in both cases often do exactly the same things.
If ever there was a proof of the unity of life, and of how nature recycles rather than starting anew, this is it.
Evo devo
Sean Carroll, a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a leader in the field, has now written an attractive and accessible introduction to the field of evo-devo. Endless Forms Most Beautiful is aimed at the non expert, and it succeeds magnificently. It takes the reader through the background to the main subject, on to the ways in which genes help in organic development, and concludes with the implications for our understanding of the history of life, including the history of humankind. If you want to understand how organisms are put together, such as how the wing of the butterfly got its spots, then this is the book for you.
In line with what I have said above, there is much work to be done, not just on individual organisms but also on the basic structure of evolutionary theory. Carroll is a committed Darwinian, but others have questioned whether we are now in line for a paradigm shift.
In Development as an Evolutionary Process, Rudy Raff, a professor of biology at Indiana University and at least as important a figure as Carroll, has written: “The homologies of process within morphogenetic fields provide some of the best evidence for evolution — just as skeletal and organ homologies did earlier. Thus, the evidence for evolution is better than ever. The role of natural selection in evolution, however, is seen to play less an important role. It is merely a filter for unsuccessful morphologies generated by development. Population genetics is destined to change if it is not to become as irrelevant to evolution as Newtonian mechanics is to contemporary physics.” Undoubtedly there is much work — and probable fireworks — in the future of those who care about matters evolutionary.
Finding religion
Is there anything of specific interest and relevance to those of us who focus on the interactions of science and religion? Carroll has a short section on these issues at the end of his book. He suggests, and I suspect that he is right, that his and others’ works have had a direct impact on some of the claims of the intelligent design, or ID, theorists.
The ID people argue that the world is just too complex to have come about through blind law — intelligence must have intervened. However, evo-devo today is starting to fill in the gaps — the gaps that, in the opinion of Michael Behe and his friends, demand miracles. Existence is a miracle and life is a miracle, but increasingly it seems that the gaps do not need special miracles. Regular science can do the job.
More generally, I would go back to where I came in. The best of all arguments against the critics of science is the wonderful world that the best science reveals and explains. Offense is the best defense. Richard Dawkins is surely right when he argues against the cramped little medieval world of Genesis taken literally, and for the wonderful land of evolutionary studies. Sean Carroll’s book on evo-devo is a great passport to that land.
Michael Ruse is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and director of the Program in the History and Philosophy of Science at Florida State University.
Dembski replies:
The problem with Darwinian solutions
Michael Ruse argues that “evo devo” undermines intelligent design, but ID advocate William Dembski begs to differ
By William A. Dembski
(July 29, 2005)New developments: Can evo devo explain squid evolution?
(Photo: Department of Zoology, University of Hawaii-Manoa)Despite its early potential, evolutionary developmental biology — evo devo for short — has yet to make good on its promise.
In his review of Endless Forms Most Beautiful, Sean Carroll’s new book on evo devo, Michael Ruse faults intelligent design (ID) for harping on evolution’s unsolved problems. Moreover, Carroll as well as Ruse suggest that evo devo has now resolved one of the major problems on which design theorists have been harping.
Wrong on both counts. Intelligent design does not have a problem with problems. It has a problem with bogus solutions that Darwinists like Ruse and Carroll dress up as real solutions to the problems of biological origins.
Evo devo is a case in point. This term, coined in the mid 1990s, attempts to merge two sub-disciplines of biology: evolutionary biology, which studies the mechanisms by which populations of organisms change over generations, and developmental biology, which studies the mechanisms by which individual organisms grow from conception to mature form.
Evo devo takes as its starting point that genetic mechanisms are the key to both evolutionary and developmental biology. The merger of evolutionary and developmental biology, therefore, looks to key genes that influence development and could in principle also influence changes in development and, thereby, lead to macroevolutionary change.
What if, for instance, a gene that controls development could somehow induce a change early in development? Even a small change early in development might have huge consequences for the organism’s anatomy and physiology. Think of an arrow aimed accurately at a target. Left to fly unperturbed, the arrow will land in the target’s bull’s-eye. Yet the earlier in flight that the arrow is diverted from its trajectory, the wider it will be off the mark when it lands.
The promise of evo devo is that genetically induced changes early in development, though small and easily attainable in themselves, might nonetheless lead to macroevolutionary changes.
In other words, just as the arrow diverted early from its course will land wide of the mark, so development diverted early from its course might lead to significant evolutionary change. In this way evo devo seeks to do an end-run around the more traditional neo-Darwinian approach to macroevolution, with its steady accumulation of microevolutionary changes leading to macroevolution. Evo devo, by contrast, promises rapid evolutionary change at a small cost, namely, the cost of mutating a few key genes that control early development.
To be sure, evo devo’s study of genes that control development continues apace. And the field is making some progress in understanding how genetic developmental mechanisms assist in microevolutionary change — such as changes in butterfly eyespots. The problem is that evo devo looks to conserved genes, which are genes that are essentially the same across widely different organisms, to study how macroevolutionary change might have occurred.
But that raises a fundamental problem. Elizabeth Pennisi, in a report about evo devo for the journal Science, dated Nov. 1, 2002, stated the problem this way: “The lists [of conserved genes give] no insight into how, in the end, organisms with the same genes came to be so different.”
The very universality of these genes invalidates the grand claims that are made for them. Here’s why: if biological structures are determined by their genes, then different structures must be determined by different genes. If the same gene can determine structures as radically different as a fruit fly’s leg and a mouse’s brain, or an insect’s eyes and the eyes of humans and squids, then that gene really isn’t determining much of anything at all.
My colleague, the biologist Jonathan Wells, put it this way in my book, Signs of Intelligence:
Consider the analogy of an ignition switch in a vehicle. One might find similar ignition switches in vehicles such as automobiles, boats, and airplanes — vehicles which are otherwise very different from each other. Perhaps, in some sense, an ignition switch can be called a “master control”; but except for telling us that a vehicle can be started by turning on an electrical current, it tells us nothing about that vehicle’s structure and function. Similarly, except for telling us how an embryo directs its cells into one of several built-in developmental pathways, homeotic genes tell us nothing about how biological structures are formed. As homeotic genes turn out to be more and more universal, the “control” they exercise in development turns out to be less and less specific.
To sum up, developmental geneticists have found that the genes that seem to be most important in development are remarkably similar in many different types of animals, from worms to fruit flies to mammals.
Initially, this was regarded as evidence for genetic programs controlling development. But biologists are now realizing that it actually constitutes a paradox: if genes control development, why do similar genes produce such different animals? Why does a caterpillar turn into a butterfly instead of a barracuda?
If evo devo actually resolved the problems raised by these questions, then more power to it. Yet the real problem here is that Darwinian biologists like Carroll and Darwinian philosophers of biology like Ruse are pretending that evo devo has resolved fundamental problems of evolutionary biology when in fact it hasn’t.
Regardless of whether such failures provide an opening for ID, they must be honestly admitted. Certainly, they must not be swept under the rug for fear that they might open the door to ID. Ironically, by overselling evolution, misleading reviews and interviews like those here are hastening the reception of ID among many thoughtful scholars.
William A. Dembski is the Carl F. H. Henry Professor of Theology and Science at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he heads its new Center for Science and Theology. He is also a senior fellow with Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.