08.17.08

Punctuated equilibrium: solution to the mystery

Posted in Third Edition, World History and The Eonic Effect at 7:46 pm by nemo

World History And The Eonic Effect has what is probably one of the most illuminating discussions of ‘punctuated equilibrium’ anywhere. There has been so much confusion on the subject that its real significance has been lost. Here’s one selection from the text:

1.4.3 Punctuated Equilibrium
The Darwin controversy frequently breaks down into a debate over continuous or discontinuous evolution. Proponents of discontinuous evolution tend to be their own worst enemies, and we will tend to avoid the terms ‘continuous/discontinuous’ except as façon de parler. The action of a feedback device is discontinuous, but not grounds for supernatural explanation. The foundation for all claims about evolution lies in the fossil record. But the question of the fossil record is not so simple. One of the most persistent criticisms of Darwin has always been that of the so-called ‘gaps’ in this record. There can be no doubt that the record is incomplete, and that something suspicious lurks in the data Darwinists give for the theory of natural selection. Over and over we see the phenomenon of rapid emergence followed by relative stasis. The record of human evolution itself is ambiguous here. The fossil record isn’t really homogenous, in the sense that random evolution should not show sudden changes in direction. Nonetheless considerable progress has been made here by paleontologists. And many of these supposed gaps have been filled, or, if not filled, given some inkling of a transitional something (e.g. dinosaurs with feathers, or the basilosaurus), so at least to a some degree the record is filling out, although this does not prove anything about the claims for natural selection.
Here critics of Darwin have too often fallen into confusion themselves, because the whole idea of a ‘gap’ in the record suffers from misdefinition, if not incoherence. Fatal theological temptations induce hallucination here in many otherwise sincere minds aware of the problems of the fossil accounts. Although it is certainly true that the fossil record is very sparse, too sparse to maintain Darwinian certainties, it is not likely that one will find ‘gaps’ in the record. Some form of macromutation (i.e. a sudden change in developmental genes), for example, might well produce what looks like a gap. What is a gap? It is highly likely that there is a continuous sequence of organisms showing an unbroken lineage of bodily forms. That is not the same as saying that natural selection alone is at work. But these critics have a point, and a refinement of the ‘gaps’ argument is easy to provide, hence the challenge to Darwin’s theory remains in some form. Taken over all, without claiming gaps in the record, we should suspect that something is speeding up the process of evolution beyond the rate entailed by natural selection.
Indeed, conventional Darwinians such as S. J. Gould upgraded this argument with the various claims for so-called ‘punctuated equilibrium’, which amounts to seeing that emergence is often very sudden, followed by a period of stasis where the rate of change is small, or nonexistent. Granting that such data is hard to interpret, the basic issue simply won’t go away. These theories suffered from the inability to disassociate themselves from the fallacies of natural selection, as they attempted to have their cake and eat it too, by proposing various ‘levels of selection’. But real evolution is altogether likely to be something different. And it might well ‘punctuate’, this being followed by some sort of ‘equilibrium’. The issue is bound up in distinctions of microevolution and so-called macroevolution, or speciation. The existence of microevolutionary processes is not in doubt, but the elusive factor of macroevolution remains unclear.
Those who propose this issue of ‘gaps’ in the record, then, are onto something, but need to consider that the fossil record is always going to be continuous in some sense. This does not preempt the possibility, not of ‘gaps’, but of some other evolutionary process that creates a real discontinuity in some definable sense on top of that continuity. Think in terms of acceleration, as artificial as physics logic might be applied to evolution. Acceleration is not a ‘gaps’ argument, and its discontinuous action is not in contradiction with continuous motion. To propose discontinuity as antithetical to continuity is logical in the abstract, but in this case leads to the hopeless quagmire of miraculous interventions of one kind or another in the creationist vein. We cannot say in advance what that kind of process it would be that generates this sense of discontinuity, but its existence is something that we must suspect based on the evidence that we have. The discovery of complex genetic components such as the developmental genes suggests one way of resolving the seeming paradox. But that is not enough.
Remarkably, the perfect example of the discontinuity factor, and its elusive basis, lies in the attempt to resolve the mystery of the descent of man. There the (not very adequate) evidence of the so-called Great Explosion stands out as a question about the basic Darwinian claims. Something very sudden occurred in the emergence of man, or so it seems from the evidence. The descent of man is beset with the issue of continuity/discontinuity dead center in its dataset.
Consider again the analogy of acceleration, and beyond that the definition of science in the case of biology. On the one hand, biologists wish to make evolutionary theory compatible with physics, and yet to do so they must fail to do what physicists do: build a science around a type of’’force’. This question was very clear in the eighteenth century, but the result was the emergence of vitalism, which was not up to the job of explanation. It is this search for the missing process that Darwinists find unacceptable, because there are no candidates for this in the thinking of reductionist science.
Mystery Force X Part of the problem with Darwinian theory is that we are unable to detect the real ‘force’ of evolution, all we see being the processes of natural selection. Science gives us the fundamental forces, then demands that everything be reduced to this. This may the source of the problem, for ‘natural selection’ is taken as the ‘force that isn’t a force’ that does evolution, a role it cannot play. This unknown factor requires a new scale of observational detail. As we move to examine history, with its relatively rich dataset, we should be on the look-out for this ‘mystery force’. The term ‘force’ might turn out to be the wrong one, but by a principle of sufficient reason a ‘something that does evolution’ is what we are after.
There is something peculiar about this limitation in the Darwin scheme, in the sense that any science is going to have a ‘force’ argument, this force is going to show itself in terms of its own action, archetypically ‘acceleration’, and this action will seemingly be short acting (in some ambiguity between ‘machine’ and ‘engine’, perhaps). Such language is heuristic and must be set aside as at best metaphor once we have real data to examine, but the point is that Darwinists constantly remind us of the right way to do science, even as they propose a science with no substance to it. This example of the missing ‘force’ uses the language of physics, but the basic issue must remain. Various candidates from population genetics are sometimes metaphorically pressed into service here, but the void remains.
Of course, we have already criticized the physicalism that created reductionist thinking, and there is no reason why biological evolution should conform to a force argument. But there is likely to be an analogue, in a principle of sufficient reason, to a force argument, and here natural selection seems instead to be the analogue to Newton’s First Law. The dynamic factor is entirely absent. This is the oddity of Darwinism. The surrogate substitute of natural selection for a true ‘explanation’ of what drives evolution leaves it with a strange void at its core. The point is that Darwinism is quite anomalous as a ‘science’ in the sense that this process that actually ‘does evolution’ is missing, and the strong suspicion is always there that natural selection, however real in the survival struggles of organisms, is simply the microevolution we see in the absence of ‘real evolution’. Darwinists become adamant here, or change the subject, but the sword of Damocles has always stood over Darwin’s claims for this reason. It is like confusing Newton’s first and second laws. We begin to suspect that the regime of natural selection too often perpetuates continuity, and is really the opposite of ‘evolution’! The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky remarked, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” There is a corollary to this, “Evolution makes little sense in the light of natural selection.”

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