07.08.08

Mazur’s Evo Expose ebook: new chapters

Posted in Booknotes, Evolution at 3:53 pm by nemo

Evo Exposé: M. Pigliucci & M. Piattelli-Palmarini
Tuesday, 8 July 2008, 5:03 pm
Article: Suzan Mazur

THE ALTENBERG 16

Will the Real Theory of Evolution Please Stand Up?

By SUZAN MAZUR

AN EXPOSÉ OF THE EVOLUTION INDUSTRY

An E-Book in 6 Parts – Part 3 – Chapter 6
© Copyright July 2008 by Suzan Mazur

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CONTENTS

(Note: links will be added here as additional chapters are published. )
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Forward
Introduction
Chronology
Evolution Tribes

1 The Altenberg 16
2 Altenberg! The Woodstock of Evolution?
3 Jerry Fodor and Stan Salthe Open the Evo Box
4 Theory of Form to Center Stage
5 The Two Stus
Stuart Kauffman – Peace, Love & Complexity
Stuart Newman – The Chess Master
6 The Two Massimos
Massimo Pigliucci – Evolution & Flamboyance?
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini – Evoluzione senza Adattamento
7 The One and Only Richard Lewontin
8 Knight of the North Star: Antonio Lima-de-Faria, Autoevolution
9 The Wizard of Central Park: Stuart Pivar
10 Richard Dawkins Renounces Darwinism as Religion
11 Rockefeller University Evolution Symposium
12 Mainstream Media Doesn’t Get It – Except Vanity Fair

Appendix — Related Stories
A Stuart Kauffman: Rethink Evolution, Self-Organization is Real
B Stuart Newman’s “High Tea”
C The Enlightening Ramray Bhat
D Piattelli-Palmarini: Ostracism without Natural Selection
E Niles Eldredge, Paleontologist

About the Author

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6

THE TWO MASSIMOS

MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI – Evolution & Flamboyance?
Massimo Pigliucci is a man on the move. Yes he’s got three PhDs, and as the New York Times style pages noted earlier this year in covering his marriage, he’s had three of those too. But who is he? And why was he born in Liberia during the regime of William Tubman?

Pigliucci gave me roughly 45 minutes or so of his time on the evolution debate in a meeting in February, when he again reminded me about Altenberg. There was virtually nothing personal about our conversation. And once I began writing about the Altenberg conference, which Pigliucci coordinated with scientists on this side of the Atlantic, he began shutting down communication.

He kept his distance at the May gathering at the 23rd Street library, where the Secular Humanist Society of New York arranged for him to speak about “paradigm shift” and his forthcoming book on junk science. In fact, in responding to my questions about natural selection, there was no indication he’d ever even met me before. Certainly Richard Dawkins would have remembered! (Chapter 10, “Richard Dawkins Renounces Darwinism as Religion”)

Indeed, as one of Pigliucci’s colleagues mentioned, Massimo’s flamboyance gets in the way. Pigliucci had a couple of awkward moments at the Secular Humanist Society talk, for instance.

For some peculiar reason, he referred to a quote from “feminist philosopher” Sandra Harding in the New York Times about the “husband as scientist forcing mother nature to his wishes,” with Pigliucci adding that he didn’t feel he was doing that in his lab.

Made me think about the fact that there’s only one woman in the Altenberg 16.

Pigliucci next attempted a quip about a French philosopher, who he said a lot of postmodernists have claimed as one of their inspirations. The only thing he had in common with the philosopher, he said, was an interest in cooking and that “if you mention the name [inaudible] I’m likely to reach for my gun.”

Pigliucci will need some talented speechwriters if he’s to overtake Dawkins on the evolution stage. As he described the Sokal hoax, for example, I found myself trying to visualize philosopher Paul Boghossian instead reading from his sublime piece on Sokal in the Times Literary Supplement.

Darwin dramatist and author Richard Milner then stole the show from the back of the library with a story about Piltdown, as Pigliucci grew increasingly red-faced.

The second the event ended, Pigliucci fled. I took the opportunity to say hello to his wife, whose previous life as an adventurer and a director of the International Rescue Committee impressed me.

* * * * *

MASSIMO PIATTELLI-PALMARINI – Evoluzione senza Adattamento
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini is intrigued by origin of form. He’s the professor of cognitive science at the University of Arizona who’s co-writing What Darwin Got Wrong with philosopher Jerry Fodor. Piattelli-Palmarini is handling the biology for the book on evolution without adaptation. He’s got a PhD in physics from the University of Rome.

Through the years Piattelli-Palmarini has been a visiting professor at Harvard, MIT, the University of Bologna and the College de France in Paris. He spent eight years as principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Cognitive Science. It was at MIT that Piattelli-Palmarini first met Jerry Fodor and linguist and beloved activist Noam Chomsky, eventually collaborating with both on books.

He’s also served as Director, Florence Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Director, Royaumont Center for a Science of Man, Paris.

Piattelli-Palmarini is the author of a half dozen or so books, notably Inevitable Illusions and Ritrattino di Kant ad Uso di Mio Figlio (Portrait Kant to Use My Child), for which he received Italy’s Premio Tevere for non-fiction.

He was also awarded the Accademia d’Abruzzo, Premio Il Rosore d’Oro for his work as a public science intellectual. And he’s a regular science contributor to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.

In describing Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, Piattelli-Palmarini tells the story about a boy asking his father why rocks fall to the ground and his father answering that when the Earth was young some rocks floated away from the planet, some suspended in air and eventually floated away, and some fell to the ground. The remaining ones on the ground fell to the ground.

More of Piattelli-Palmarini’s wit is in evidence in this email to me about my interview with Stuart Kauffman:

5/6/2008 “Interesting interview (by the way it’s George Boole, not Bool). Some points really are perplexing. How can it be that “There’s no molecule in Ghadiri’s system” if there are proteins? That’s VERY strange. Also, by the way, the German Nobelist chemist Manfred Eigen developed auto-catalytic cycles of RNA and proto-proteins back in the early Seventies. Maybe he is cited by Kauffman in the book, but the interview gives the wrong idea that he and his colleagues have been the first.

Monod and Jacob’s model is NOT one of reciprocal switching. If the Stu gene can turn the Sue gene on or off, it’s not overwhelmingly the case that the Sue gene can turn the Stu gene on or off. Regulatory genes are distinct from structural genes. Moreover I really do not follow Stu in his anti-reductionist humanism (lovers strolling on the banks of the Seine is a sheer distractor from the main issues). Of course they are not molecules, but who ever claimed they are? He has a bit of hubris that I do not like too much. Interesting anyway. Massimo”

Our interview follows. (Appendix D, “Piattelli-Palmarini: Ostracism without Natural Selection”)

(continuing… )

* * * * *

APPENDIX – RELATED STORIES
Appendix D:

PIATTELLI-PALMARINI:
OSTRACISM WITHOUT NATURAL SELECTION
May 9, 2008
12:20 pm NZ

Suzan Mazur: In the book you’re writing with philosopher Jerry Fodor on evolution without adaptation, do you share his view that we need a new theory of evolution and that the theory of natural selection is “wrong in a way that can’t be fixed”?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Yes, I do. Of course, there is natural selection all around us (just think of the flu virus, mutating and adapting every year, to our detriment) and inside us (just think of our antibodies and our synapses and the pancreas cells and the epithelial cells). The point is, however, that organisms can be modified and refined by natural selection, but that is not the way new species and new classes and new phyla originated.

For that, major changes in regulatory genes and in gene regulatory networks have to occur. All this is perfectly naturalistic and now well documented. Minor changes in the order of activation of master genes can create vast discontinuous morphogenetic changes. Very similar (in the jargon orthologous) genes in insects and in vertebrates produce an inversion in the development of the nervous system.

In essence, in insects the system is ventral, in vertebrates it’s dorsal. Two opposite gradients of morphogenetic factors (one the mirror image of the other) produce this difference. Huge difference to the eye, but minor in its origin early in the development of the embryo.

There will be one day, decades from now, I am persuaded, hanging on the walls of the schools, some equivalent of the Periodic System (Mendeleev Table) showing how these genetic regulatory switches combine to give the different forms of life (this is just a metaphor, of course, but I bet it will become a detailed plan one day).

Suzan Mazur: Jerry Fodor told me you were handling the biology for the book, but you also have a PhD in physics in addition to being a cognitive scientist. Do you have a hypothesis on origin of form? And would you tell me a little about what you’re teaching your class there at the University of Arizona on form?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Yes, I have a doctorate in physics, quite rusty now. And yes, I think that there are fundamental physical and chemical principles operating inside all living systems and partially responsible for the forms of living organisms. Only partially, of course, but at a very fundamental level.

More and more papers, from different quarters (laboratories and researchers still that remain for the most part isolated from one another), show that there are physical principles of optimization, and of optimal compromise, acting on biological forms.

For instance, Christopher Cherniak and colleagues at the University of Maryland have computed literally millions of alternatives to the way the nervous system is organized, from the ganglia of the earthworm (the nematode) to the auditory cortex of macaques, and found that none of these can improve to what we have in reality. Nature has found an optimal solution for the density of connections that is better than the most advanced engineered chips we find on the market today.

A few years ago, in Santa Fe (yes, the Insitute so dear to you and Kauffman), West, Brown and Enquist discovered that the natural ramifications in all circulatory systems (the sap and lymph circulation in trees; the veins, arteries and capillaries in mammals) follow a maximal fractal law. Best transport with minimal distance. Something that evolution has “rediscovered” over and over.

Other instances of optimization are found in other components of biological systems. In phyllotaxis (the geometry of leaves and of flower petals), we see reproduced the Fibonacci perfect spiral, our phalanges have lengths of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 (the Fibonacci series), and so on.

Now, it just cannot be the result of natural selection that biological forms show the same forms we also witness in spiraling minerals and in spiral galaxies. And when we find a “solution” in living being that turns out to be optimal with respect to many millions of conceivable (and computable, these days, with fast computers) alternatives, it cannot have been selected out of random trials. There have not been dozens of millions of generations of macaques trying out all sorts of cortical patterns of connections, such that only the best survived. That’s ridiculous.

Suzan Mazur: Why has American science been slow to accept a reduced role for natural selection in evolution? Is it the physics that people just can’t grasp?

Massimo Pitatelli-Palmarini: It’s not just American science, but rather Western science, though indeed France has, in this respect, a different story, not quite a noble one.

Some consider Darwinism to be quintessentially “Britannique” and they had Bergson suggesting a different approach to evolution, then the mathematician Rene’ Thom and his school, stressing the role of topological deep invariants. They may have come to anti-Darwinian conclusions for rather idiosyncratic reasons.

Anyway, even if we take the many, many biologists in many countries who have contributed to the new rich panorama we have today of non-selectionist biological mechanisms (including the masters of the Evo-Devo revolution), they are reluctant, in my opinion, to steer away from natural selection. They declare that the non-selectionist mechanism they have discovered (and there are many, and very basic) essentially leave the neo-Darwinian paradigm only modified, not subverted.

I think that abandoning Darwinism (or explicitly relegating it where it belongs, in the refinement and tuning of existing forms) sounds anti-scientific. They fear that the tenants of intelligent design and the creationists (people I hate as much as they do) will rejoice and quote them as being on their side. They really fear that, so they are prudent, some in good faith, some for calculated fear of being cast out of the scientific community.

There are, however, also biologists who do not fear to declare, as Gregory C. Gibson (the William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Genetics, North Carolina State University) wrote in Science (2005), reviewing a book on robustness and evolvability: “[this book] contributes significantly to the emerging view that natural selection is just one, and maybe not even the most fundamental, source of biological order”.

“Robustness must involve non-additive genetic interactions, but quantitative geneticists have for the better part of a century generally accepted that it is only the additive component of genetic variation that responds to selection. Consequently, we are faced with the observation that biological systems are pervasively robust but find it hard to explain exactly how they evolve to be that way”. G.C. Gibson SYSTEMS BIOLOGY: The Origins of Stability. Science, 310 (5746), p.237.

And the distinguished evolutionary biologist Massimo Pigliucci, in an excellent book co-authored with the philosopher Jonathan Kaplan, writes:

“It is unwarranted to think that adaptation, diversification and evolution more generally are closely related phenomena that take place via the same mechanisms in the same populations [. . .] Adaptation can, and verifiably does, take place without speciation, as does nonadaptive evolution more generally”. Massimo Pigliucci & Jonathan Kaplan (2006), Making Sense of Evolution: The Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Biology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. (Chapter 9, Box 9.2).

There are other expressions of discontent with canonical neo-Darwinism, but, all in all, prudence prevails.

Suzan Mazur: It’s interesting that there’s been a meeting of minds among biologists, philosophers and linguists about language in evolution. Didn’t you, MIT linguist Noam Chomsky and the late paleontologist Steve Gould at one point all share similar thinking that language was due to laws of structure and growth and not natural selection?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Yes, that’s exact. Gould’s untimely death did not allow him to develop fully this side of the issue, but cogent reasons for not trying to explain cognition and language along neo-Darwinian lines have been iterated by his main co-author, Richard Lewontin.

Steve and I taught twice, several years ago, at Harvard, a course together and we had mighty opponents attending it (notably Steve Pinker and Daniel Dennett) giving life to quite animated discussions.

Chomsky gave a guest lecture in that course, with the Nobelist David Hubel also attending (you see how lucky I have been, a dwarf among such giants) and the debate was intense, though friendly. In essence, at the time Chomsky cogently argued (and I reinforced this in some publications of mine) that the very structure of language has peculiarities that cannot have been shaped by (naturally selected as) sub-products of communication, not thinking. They appeared then (around 1985) too idiosyncratic to be the result of a functional selection.

Today (ever since, approximately 1995) the message is basically the same, but with a change of emphasis. There appear to be in language, at a suitably high level of abstraction, properties of elegance and maximization that explain those peculiarities as applications. What once were considered to be explanations (the principles of a restricted set of syntactic modules) now are considered themselves data to be explained. This is called the Minimalist Program, something that has fascinated many linguists, who have engaged with Chomsky (though sometimes there are points of technical dissent) in this program very thoroughly, with what I consider to be very interesting new results.

But it has distanced, in some case even repelled, other linguists. Time will tell whether this research program is right or wrong. I think it’s right, though still very preliminary. At any rate, there is no place in this program for any adaptationist, gradualist, neo-Darwinian explanation. This much has not changed.

Suzan Mazur: Do you also think that structure, i.e., form is due to a language as Stuart Newman and Ramray Bhat hypothesize in their recent Physical Biology paper “Dynamical patterning modules: physico-genetic determinants of morphological development and evolution?

Newman & Bhat describe the role of a pattern language – DPMs (dynamical patterning modules) – in the self-organizing formation of all 35 animal phyla around the time of the Cambrian explosion a half billion years ago.

Would you comment briefly on the Newman & Bhat paper?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: I find this kind of morpho-dynamic approach immensely productive. The term “language” could be left out, but the basic ideas are right and very interesting.

Similar ideas have been expressed, among others, by Eric H. Davidson and collaborators (at Caltech) arguably the leading expert today of genetic regulatory networks.

Modularity and entrenchment in development are mature fields and discoveries towards discontinuous patterned changes in developmental constraints are being published very month (see Psujek, S. And R. D. Beer (2008). “Developmental biology in evolution: evolutionary accessibility of phenotypes in a model evo-devo system.” Evolution & Development 10 (3): 375-390. Just published).

A biochemist at Boston University, Michael Sherman, has proposed the idea of a “universal genome”, so akin to Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar (then unbeknownst to Sherman) that Michael is now reading some minimalist linguistics and tells me he finds that field extremely interesting and congenial.

Symmetrically, Chomsky told me about Sherman’s approach that he thinks decades from now will become “mainstream biology” (his words).

[Noam Chomsky emailed me that he was not endorsing the Michael Sherman paper. He noted that Sherman’s ideas were “plausible” but that “serious commentary” on specific proposals requires more background and knowledge than I have”.

He also said: “Since the ‘50s, I’ve assumed (and occasionally written) that something like the Thompson-Turing approach, with its roots in rational morphology, ought to be the right track. . .”.

Curiously, however, it is Stuart Newman’s and Ramray Bhat’s theory of form paper based on DPMs (Dynamical Patterning Modules) that’s in the D’Arcy Thompson – Alan Turing tradition, not Michael Sherman’s on the Universal Genome. –SM]

As I said earlier, my way of depicting what will happen decades from now, is a sort of universal chart of morphogenetic pathways that will be displayed like today’s Mendeleev’s table is. I think too that this will be the mainstream biology of the future.

Look, when Sherman stresses that the sea urchin has, in-expressed, the genes for the eyes and for antibodies (genes that are well known and fully active in later species), how can we not agree with him that canonical neo-Darwinism cannot begin to explain such facts?

Suzan Mazur: Who are some other evolutionary thinkers with views along this line you find interesting?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Well, of course, Stuart Kauffman, whom you have recently interviewed, a pioneer in the search for physical bases of biological morphogenesis (his name and his earlier work were pointed out to me by Steve Gould around 1985). Eric Davidson, mentioned above, Gerd Mueller and Stuart Newman, just mentioned, Gunter P. Wagner and the whole idea of entrenchment and modularity, Massimo Pigliucci, and of course the main authors in Evo-Devo (for instance Sean Carroll, Mary Jane West-Eberhard and Marc W. Kirschner), though they are sometimes over-prudent in keeping within a neo-Darwinian frame.

Not many of them, with the exception of Kauffman, point towards physical invariants in morphogenesis, but their important data offer the basis that any such approach will have to take into consideration.

Suzan Mazur: Do you consider self-organization or autoevolution, as cytogeneticist Antonio Lima-de-Faria calls it, a kind of self-determination? And if so, why would people resist that idea regarding evolution?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Well, Lima-de-Faria wants to do without selection altogether, an extreme view.

The difficult issue, as Kauffman had emphasized years ago, is to integrate physical principles, genetics, development and different kinds of selection, acting in different ways at different levels.

Self-organization is of course an important component, but not much has been discovered beyond generalities. The immense amount of intricate detail that geneticists and developmentalists have been discovering over the years dwarfs general metaphors like autoevolution and even self-organization.

The challenge now is to integrate, not to substitute these metaphors for hard work over many years.

Suzan Mazur: Do you think the Konrad Lorenz Institute’s July symposium about an “Extended Evolutionary Synthesis” – where theory of form and non-centrality of the gene will be an important part of the discussion – will help to steer the scientific community and the public toward a better understanding of how form arose without selection?

[Stuart Newman will present his paper, co-authored by Ramray Bhat, at the KLI symposium in Altenberg on how all 35 animal phyla self-organized a half billion years ago at the time of the Cambrian explosion, with selection coming into play as a “stabilizer” after the highly plastic multicellular organisms formed.]

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: We said [evolution] without adaptation, not without selection.

There is selection, there has to be selection, though not the macroscopic, uni-level selection of classical neo-Darwinism. How genes interact with the physical factors we saw earlier here still remains to be determined. How evolution and selections (plural here) “ride” so to speak the narrow channels of what is physically possible is still a mystery.

It does not help to depict the genes as inert stuff, dead material. Of course the whole cell is needed for them to be activated, expressed and so forth. But genes can be transplanted, cut, spliced, duplicated, etc.

It’s silly to preach anti-geneticism. The real new synthesis will have to be between all these components, none excluding the others.

Suzan Mazur: How long do you estimate it will take for theory of form to be understood and gain credence within the scientific mainstream?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Well some 20 years for the elite of the scientific community. Maybe 50 before it becomes high-school textbook material.

Suzan Mazur: Developmental biologist Stuart Kauffman, one of the pioneers of self-organization, rejects reductionism in his new book, Reinventing the Sacred, saying that a couple in love walking along the Seine are not just particles in motion. What are your thoughts about this?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: I like him and his work, but this is not a sensible remark. Who ever claimed they are? Perfusing his quest for the basic laws of morphogenesis with this kind of holistic humanism does not help, sorry.

More interesting is to ask whether a chromosome is a giant molecule or a society of interacting modules. We do not know zilch about the meaning of the number of chromosomes in the different species.

That number cannot be altered (chromosomal aberrations in humans, even minor ones, produce well known syndromes, some lethal), but nobody has an explanation of what it means for us to have 46, for the platypus to have 52 (of which 10 are sexual), and for the chimp to have 48.

One day, I bet, these data will be part of the mural table I anticipate, but as of now no one has the faintest idea.

Reductionism is bad when it’s bad, when it destroys what is to be explained. But it’s mighty good when it’s good, when the assembly of the parts does explain the property of the whole.

I resist humanistic anti-reductionism. Without intelligent reductionism we would not have the science we know and like. Mendeleev’s table is also a kind of reductionism, a welcome one.

Suzan Mazur: Of the theories on origin of form out there at the moment that you’ve reviewed – which do you find most plausible?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Factorial discrete changes in the regulation of master genes, and topological invariants in living forms. A bit of what D’Arcy Thompson and others had in mind, but with close integration of genetic regulatory networks. No simple overarching solution will work. Many factors will have to be integrated.

Suzan Mazur: Have you seen any convincing new illustrations and evolutionary models?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: The idea of a universal genome, a’ la Sherman, is the most interesting I have seen recently. Not a single key, but an important key.

Suzan Mazur: Would you comment on Stuart Pivar’s animations of body parts?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Very interesting, though his idea that the torus is the mother of all forms is not persuasive. There must be a dozen of such mothers, not just one.

Suzan Mazur: When do you expect your book will be published?

Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: Sometime in late 2009. But mind you, it contains some of these ideas, but also other important ideas I did not mention here. Notably that the strict analogy between Behaviorism and neo-Darwinism is quite fatal to the second, though few seem to have noticed.

How can the first be agreed to be defunct but not the second? Also, the ineliminable intensional (mentalistic in some unrecognized way) character of notions such as selected for and ecological niche. But for these, you have to wait to read it.

Finally, it will be called What Darwin Got Wrong. Not final yet, but probable.

# # *** # #
Appendix E:

NILES ELDREDGE, PALEONTOLOGIST
February 13, 2008
Phone Conversation, unpublished

Suzan Mazur: So you don’t think there’s any alternative to natural selection? You call them “additonal ways”.

Niles Eldredge: I don’t think there’s any alternative. You know, I’d have to. We hung up. I said to myself, I don’t even know much of the literature of self-organization at all, so I can’t even really speak about that.

Suzan Mazur: Body form arises from a pattern in the cell membrane not from DNA.

Niles Eldredge: Right. But how do you modify that through time and so forth. Yeah, I’m sure that there’s something to that. It’s actually nothing that I’m really familiar enough with to even be quoted on.

Suzan Mazur: Well, what about the. . . I was talking with Massimo Pigliucci. Do you know him? He’s a geneticist out at Stony Brook.

Niles Eldredge: Yeah. I know of him.

Suzan Mazur: He was saying he sticks with natural selection but thinks we’ve gone as far as we can go regarding finding any more genes for humans. And we need to explore other areas. He thinks self-organization is really worth looking at.

I was also talking with philosopher and zoologist Stan Salthe. Do you know him?

Niles Eldredge: Yes.

Suzan Mazur: He describes self-organization as “up & coming”.

Niles Eldredge: You might want to talk to Dan Brooks at the University of Toronto about this.

Suzan Mazur: Dan Brooks.

Niles Eldredge: Yeah. He’s much more up on this stuff than I am.

Suzan Mazur: Right. But you worked with Steve Gould on punctuated equilibrium. You wouldn’t characterize Steve Gould as being part of the self-organization school?

Niles Eldredge: I certainly wouldn’t and he would have said to you what I said. If he were alive right now, he’d probably be more up to date on that stuff. Because these things intrigued him. But, if you want to see what I say to Steve and about punctuated equilibrium, you can check it online at – I have an online article on – we have a new journal called Evolution, Education and Outreach. We’re trying to connect the lab with teachers.

I’m editing this journal with my son, who’s a teacher. And if you go to Springer.com, you’ll find that journal. The next issue is partially up. It would be Volume I, no. 2. And you’ll find – I just looked at it myself and downloaded a copy – my article about the early evolution of punctuated equilibrium.

You’re going to find out that it’s very conventional. It’s talking about speciation. It’s talking about natural selection. And it’s talking about stasis, which is the tendency of species not to change that much once they first appear.

Suzan Mazur: I’ll definitely take a look at it.

Niles Eldredge: But it’s not the radical sort of thing. I mean it was radical in the sense that everyone was a gradualist. But there was a lot of smoke that was generated into the fire that was there. When our essay came out in 1972.

Apparently the blogosphere in the last couple of weeks has been full of this all over again, that punctuated equilibrium was a macromutational theory and all this and that and it’s simply not true.

Suzan Mazur: What about Richard Lewontin’s story in the New York Review of Books about Steve Gould?

Niles Eldredge: Somebody sent that to me. . . . Steve was interested in exploring new ideas. He was not saying things for the sake of saying them, which is almost what people are accusing him of having done. And the thing that he was best known for was that paper that I did with him, which was actually based on an earlier paper that I wrote. And I’m telling you – it’s very conventional biology. It just seemed unconventional at the time.

And then Steve also had written separately in Natural History magazine seven years later or so about Richard Goldschmidt’s theory of macromutations. So he suggested in there and I think he was one of the earliest ones to do this. This is really like evo-devo, not self-organization.

He suggested that if you get slight changes in the regulatory apparatus of the genome, which was then only beginning to be known, that it might have cascading relatively larger effects in the phenotype. And so that was macromutation. And that’s what the blogging is about because people say punctuated equilibrium was a theory of macromutation and it certainly was not. It was a theory of speciation for natural selection.

Suzan Mazur: So you don’t find it problematic that we’ve only found 25,000 genes or so and that we’re not going to find anymore? That we have to look in another direction for answers?

Niles Eldredge: Well, I’m really not a geneticist so I really don’t know. But yes I have to assume that’s largely correct. Are there cytoplasmic effects of development? Sure. How they get ensconced so that all the members of a single new species all look alike and it’s different from their ancestor if it’s not genetic, I’m not sure.

Suzan Mazur: You don’t believe natural selection had no role in form?

Niles Eldredge: Absolutely not. I certainly don’t believe that it had no effect. I’m a very conventional evolutionary biologist. I disappoint people sometimes.

Suzan Mazur: In January, the National Academy of Sciences came out with Science, Evolution and Creationsim. It’s a very general book. The people behind the discoveries are not really discussed to any extent. The books of Steve Gould are listed, but not his controversial writings. Do you find any problem with the approach of that book?

Niles Eldredge: I’ve seen it. I haven’t studied it. I gave it to somebody to write a review for our journal.

Suzan Mazur: So you haven’t heard any buzz about its “simplicity”.

Niles Eldredge: No. I mean, look, when you’re fighting school boards who want to adopt Intelligent Design, you’ve got to write in very basic terms. It is a political problem. And there’s always a problem, as you know . . . in communicating science to the public and being clear about it.

Suzan Mazur: But the thing is they didn’t put in any, as you termed them, “additional ways” to consider regarding evolution.

Niles Eldredge: No, because it’s all regarded as speculative and on the forefront and stuff. . . . What they’re trying to do is say where we are now, where we’re comfortable, where we can actually say that this is the way people really do think for the most part.

Suzan Mazur: Meantime some of the public money that has gone to NAS wound up in secret arms research, which is something Richard Lewontin resigned from NAS over.

Niles Eldredge: You have to ask him about that. Yes, I think he did. So what does that have to do with. . .

Suzan Mazur: No, these are issues.

Niles Eldredge: I think the problem of people trying to teach religiously-based ideas as if they were true science and valid science in the classroom is a serious issue in and of itself. And I’m glad that the National Academy of Sciences once again tried to do something to provide some material so people can reach an informed decision [emphasis added] in school boards around the country. How effective it is, I couldn’t tell you.

Suzan Mazur: On the other hand, the Astrobiology Primer that NASA/NAI supported in 2006 and is supposed to be updated next year – the editor-in-chief is an Episcopal priest. [Philosopher Jerry Fodor says “Astrobiology doesn’t exist. What are its laws?”]

Niles Eldredge: Uh huh. So.

Suzan Mazur: At the time he was a seminary student. I find that kind of unusual. Inside there’s no mention of alternative or additional ways of evolution. It’s about natural selection. It does mention Komua [neutral selection]. But there’s no real space given to “additional ways”. And there’s no mention of you and Steve Gould.

Niles Eldredge: So they’re giving the conventional view. If you open Doug Futuyma’s book, the guy at Stony Brook who is probably one of the most famous evolutionary biologists in the country now, if for no other reason than he wrote that widely used textbook – you’re not going to find that Steve and I get a very good shake in that book. And you’re not going to find, I don’t think, an extended discussion of self-organization, if it’s even mentioned. So this is not government. This is Doug Futuyma selling textbooks to the kids of the United States. . . .

Suzan Mazur: Do you see it as problematic that scientists from one field, say in biology, and scientists from mechanical engineering, chemistry, etc., are having a difficult time communicating?

Niles Eldredge: Absolutely. It’s a problem. I’m a paleontologist and most of the people who make a living as evolutionary biologists, teaching it or whatever, are geneticists. There’s a big problem because we don’t speak each other’s language all that fluently.

It’s a struggle. That’s why I’ve been reluctant to comment on some of the things you’re bringing up because I’ll tell you right off – I don’t know that much about it.
Suzan Mazur: Because there might be something happening there but not everyone feels comfortable talking about it.

Niles Eldredge: Exactly.

Suzan Mazur: Maybe we need to move in the direction of a new language.

Niles Eldredge: Absolutely. I wrote a paper for our new journal called “Hierarchies and the Sloshing Bucket, Toward the Unification of Evolutionary Biology”. In it I talk about how difficult it is for us to talk to one another because we’re dealing with phenomena that are these diverse spatio-temporal scales. Everything from molecules to ecosystems. Species to phyla. We’re talking about all of geological time.

Some people are only looking at the present. They’re not trained to look at the past. Other people are inferring the past by looking at the present. Other people are looking at the past, the fossil record.

And these are fields that are based on real phenomena, real systems that exist at these different spatio-temporal scale. So the first thing we have to do in trying to communicate, to come up with a more complete evolutionary theory, is to realize that there are all of these kinds of phenomena, these entities and systems and the interactions between them. You have to acknowledge that first, and then you have to decide – well how are you going to go about. . .

I don’t think anybody says Darwin actually grasped what was known in his own lifetime about biological systems in their entirety. And now we know more – about microbiology and molecular. There was nothing known about genetics in Darwin’s day at all. . . . I’ve never met anybody who could grasp all this stuff.

Suzan Mazur: Is it possible to communicate about the evolution debate to the general public in a significant way? Some think it can’t be done.

Niles Eldredge: Yes. That’s why founded this journal. I grew up in an era when people hardly paid any attention to communication at all. And it was left to people like Isaac Asimov and some really good writers to do it. And they either succeeded or failed according to their own skills and the luck of the marketplace.

And now you cannot get a grant from the federal government in what I would call evolutionary biology – I think this is true – from the National Science Foundation – you cannot apply for funding for research in evolutionary biology now without having an outreach component to your proposal.

Suzan Mazur: What do you mean by an outreach component?

Niles Eldredge: You’ve got to explain in the body of the proposal how you’re going to educate other people beyond the confines of your narrow discipline.

Suzan Mazur: Also, everything is getting so visual. Are you familiar with Stuart Pivar’s torus model? . . .

Niles Eldredge: You’re talking about morphology and its modifications. If you look at D’Arcy Thompson’s stuff from the early part of the 20th century, you’ll see the same thing. He was deforming fishy-looking fish into ocean sunfish by just deforming the coordinates, but that doesn’t really tell you how it happened. It’s a way. It’s a very clever way of describing what did happen, but it doesn’t tell you how it happened.

When Darwin came along, most of the anatomists aside from Huxley didn’t even go for it because they thought that basically the anatomical configuration of something like a human being or a leopard, or something like that, was so built into the program they had no idea what the program was. But it would be hard to modify any of the parts without having the whole thing messed up.

So anatomists are very conservative. But then some of them got bitten by the bug. They understood that evolution must have happened and they still tend to be sort of describing static states and how they get deformed and modified into other ones. But they are not theories of how that happened. Or not convincing ones.

Suzan Mazur: This experiment back in the 50s – Miller-Urey where they created amino acides in the laboratory. Could you address that in relation to the current evolution debate?

Niles Eldredge: They made chains of amino acids. Not even all functional proteins. But I do think that that sheds a lot of light on the early chemistry of the Earth. They did not create life however.

Now there are other ideas about the importance of clay molecules and shaping DNA. And a big argument is whether RNA came first. Proteins afterwards or vice versa and so on and so forth. And it’s not nailed down.

The other thing I’d like to say about the origin of life, because you just shifted the frame of reference here, and I think Darwin was right when he said that the origin of life is a different subject from the consequence evolution of life. That’s a molecular biology, biochemical problem basically. The origin of the early molecular thing that went on to become living systems.

Suzan Mazur: Do you know Bob Hazen, the George Mason University mineralogist? He seems to be open to the idea of self-organization.

Niles Eldredge: Yes. I know Bob. I like him. Right. He’s a mineralogist. He’s not an evolutionary biologist. So be careful.

He’s been in my house here where I’m sitting now. I’m looking at a huge collection of antique cornets that I own. And I sold one to Bob. He’s a great trumpet player also. But he’s not an evolutionary biologist.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Suzan Mazur’s interest in evolution began with a flight from Nairobi into Olduvai Gorge to interview the late paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey. Because of ideological struggles, the Kenyan-Tanzanian border was closed, and Leakey was the only reason authorities in Dar es Salaam agreed to give landing clearance. The meeting followed discovery by Leakey and her team of the 3.6 million-year-old hominid footprints at Laetoli. Suzan Mazur’s reports have since appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Forbes, Newsday, Philadelphia Inquirer, Archaeology, Connoisseur, Omni and others, as well as on PBS, CBC and MBC. She has been a guest on McLaughlin, Charlie Rose and various Fox Television News programs

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