Certain commentators seem surprisingly agitated about pursuing the idea that there is no ‘theory of evolution’. Some mean there is no single theory, although on examination the things they see as separate are frequently simply different components of the same broad process. Or, alternatively, they are referring to evolution in other senses, or in non-biological contexts. Others say there is no theory at all, as if that against which they argue does not even exist.
A theme has emerged that TSZ is somehow suppressing their concerns. So, in the spirit of suppressive dictatorships everywhere, here is a thread for people to say whatever they want about this vital topic. Hopefully without pasting in vast swathes of something already posted elsewhere – a link will suffice.
Here, for my part, is my very broad summary of ‘the’ theory of evolution: Genetic changes (mutation, recombination) are subject to a sampling process, correlated to a greater or lesser extent with their effects on survival and reproduction. This process leads to a simultaneous increase and decrease in frequency for the variants in the population, through to, in the limit, extinction or fixation of a variant. This process proceeds indefinitely, subject to the fuel of new variation. All commonly accepted*** ‘theories of [biological***] evolution’ of which I am aware place emphasis on different components, influences and consequences of this basic process. None, so far as I am aware, are at odds with it, which might be expected if there really were ‘different theories’.
*** The caveats are inserted to try to head off anticipated ‘gotchas’, in a possibly forlorn attempt to reduce opportunities to make semantic capital out of a phrase whose intent should be easy enough to understand without them. This is not ‘biologism’: the ToE which upsets people is (are?) the generally accepted biological one.
I don’t think their objections can be logically parsed. For example, Frankie insists that ID is not “anti-evolution” but also simultaneously insists that there is no theory of evolution.
As such, their objections are not based on the sort of logic described in the OP and consequently logic cannot be used to sway them.
Saying that there are multiple, theories of evolution, is precisely akin to admitting there is no “theory of evolution.”
If there are theories, most of them must clearly be wrong, by virtue of the fact that there are many. So far, however, no one here is able to even articulate one of them.
phoodoo,
1) No, that is semantically and logically invalid.
2) I’m not saying there are multiple theories of evolution. I’m saying that evolution has multiple facets. Having multiple facets does not mean there are no facets.
That would include you. Post after post of similar, vague bluster, referencing nothing in particular, no specifics.
Complete this sentence: “If there are theories, most of them must clearly be wrong, by virtue of the fact that there are many – FOR EXAMPLE … “
Shorter phoodoo: “I am opposed to something, and so far no-one has been able to articulate what that is”. 🙂
Is Newton’s theory of gravity “wrong”?
dazz,
How many theories of gravity are there?
Einstein’s and Newton’s as far as I know
Alan, if you theory of evolution includes ANY changes to an organism regardless of what causes it, it is not much of an explanatory theory.
The changes could come from within, or from without, they could be destined into the plan for the organism, they could be spontaneous new forms arising from smoke dust, …
Furthermore, at least one biologist here thinks that survival advantage has virtually nothing to do with the spread of new alleles. So there isn’t even consensus on the simplest of your points.
did you miss the part where he mentioned mutation and recombination?
It has to be heritable. Only heritable differences (passed on to offspring) will result, due to selection in the niche, in change in allele frequency and thus in phenotype
Only changes that are heritable.
If you are referring to Professor Moran, he’s a biochemist. And, not to speak for him, I suspect he wouldn’t agree with your representation of his view on the importance of natural selection in evolutionary theory. That most variation we find in the human genome may be due to genetic drift rather than selection doesn’t speak against the importance of natural selection.
Another gravity analogy for phoodoo. Gravity doesn’t predict the existence of the Earth, or the Sun, or anything at all. Any conceivable celestial body that could be formed by accretion given the right initial conditions is “included” in the theory of gravity. So according to phoodoo gravity is not much of an explanatory theory.
Seems to me It may mean tha NS is not as prevalent as once thought to be, but it doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Here’s an attempt to make sense of what I’ve been reading from Prof. Moran, Felsenstein, Miller, etc… Any input/correction from the experts is appreciated:
It’s an observation that we’re born with 100-130 mutations in functional DNA
IIRC the maximum number of deleterious mutations we can take before incurring in genetic meltdown is something between 1 to 3.
So most of those mutations are neutral or nearly neutral because beneficial mutations are known to be somewhat rare (not impossibly rare, just much less frequent)
Therefore, about 100 neutral mutations are fixed each generation, while the occasional beneficial mutation gets fixed more easily due to selective pressure.
It follows that most of the genetic differences are due to random genetic drift, while beneficial ones have “important” phenotypical implications
Right, right. In other words, if natural selection is not important in the evolution of chimps to humans, that does not mean natural selection is not important in the evolution of chimps to humans.
Got it Dazz!
I think that there probably is a conceptual problem behind the “there is no theory of evolution” claim, aside from the usual “throw as much shit at evolution and hope some of it sticks.”
After all, many of the anti-evolutionists are still calling “Darwinism” dogma and pretending that any sort of non-Darwinian change threatens the dogma. What happens when it dawns on some of them, though, that Darwin’s Origin isn’t the only thing that the “dogmatists” accept, that evolutionary theory really is open to new ideas and change?
Then evolutionary theory no longer fits their own little BS about it, so then there’s no evolutionary theory. It’s really an old claim–if there are disagreements about evolution, then it must be nonsense after all, just like they said. That there’s “no theory” is just another version of the response to the fact that there are disputes and disagreements about it, and since that doesn’t fit with their theological view of a single dogma which they think it should be (“Darwinism” is religion, or what-not), well, it must not even be a theory.
It’s the scientific method that’s the problem for them. What, there can be disputes? Heresy. Yet ID is so meaningless that it can include YECs and quasi-evolutionists like Behe, while it should be taught (or the “weaknesses of evolution” should be taught, which continues the ID program of criticizing evolution rather than discovery on its own) because it always includes a “Designer” who we all know is God, and that’s enough. Since it is about “saving God” it is enough for their purposes.
So ID is a single idea, while evolutionary theory is not? Well, actually that’s kind of true, which is again a problem for people who criticize incessantly without learning much. ID is about God, while evolutionary theory is about processes that occur, all within inheritance and reproduction. Again, that’s not what they think about, actual things that happen, so why should so many different things be included in evolutionary theory? Surely there’s no one evolutionary theory, at least?
Well, if you’re a splitter you could probably say that there are many evolutionary theories (I mean, who cares really?), but that’s going a bit far considering that there’s rather broad acceptance of most of the processes of evolution, that are interrelated in any case. Neutral changes and selection aren’t about actually different processes, after all, they’re about similar changes and how they’re affected by the environment. It’s all one process of reproduction with changes, after all.
IDists/creationists just don’t get science very well, with possibly a few exceptions. They think there needs to be a single dogma, like the Designer, or it all falls apart and isn’t a theory at all–or at best it’s a theory that’s divided against itself that must fall eventually. That’s their dogmatic sense of how things should be, and what science is remains a foggy notion at best.
Glen Davidson
Those are your words, not mine. Try reading for comprehension
OM:
Umm there can be a concept/ definition of evolution, there doesn’t have to be a theory. ID is OK with a change in allele frequency over time, ie evolution- no theory required. ID is OK with descent with modification, ie evolution, again no theory is required.
Evolution can be defined without a scientific theory of evolution. And, as I have said and supported, ID is only anti one unscientific definition of evolution, the blind watchmaker thesis, which is what is being promoted in schools.
So there may be several or many general theories of evolution, when it comes to universal common descent and the production of protein machines, there isn’t a scientific theory of evolution.
Your projection is duly noted
Ernst Mayr identified five theories in Darwin’s Origin, including the Lamarckian theory of use and disuse, along with the theory of common descent and the theory of natural selection.
People who have difficulty accepting that theory sometimes serves as a mass noun presumably insist that they eat foods, not food, and breathe airs, not air.
Not one of Darwin’s is a scientific theory as he never said how to test them. No one knows how to test the claim that vision systems arose via natural selection or any other stochastic process.
Scientific theories have to make testable claims
Natural selection is impotent with respect to universal common descent and creating protein machinery. NS is an eliminative process meaning whatever is good enough to survive gets the chance to reproduce. And whatever is good enough can be just about anything, even those with a loss of function. NS is nothing more than contingent serendipity.
Toss in a number of flavors of string theory and quantum gravity. There are dozens of theories of gravity. All of them mathematically coherent, and all of them predict that if you jump off a cliff, you will fall.
Just as all flavors of evolution are consistent with an old earth and common descent from LUCA, several billion years ago.
Just as all the flavors of
dazz:
AFAIK, this is somewhere near the upper bound estimates for ALL new germline mutations present at birth.
Note that I’m not a biologist. My source is Prof. Moran:
“This rate has been confirmed by direct sequencing of parents and children”
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com.es/2013/03/estimating-human-human-mutatin-rate.html
http://sandwalk.blogspot.ca/2013/03/estimating-human-mutation-rate-direct.html
Looks like the lower bound would be about 50-60 mutations, doesn’t seem to make a huge difference
Speaking of weird theories, the “ID” front-loading “theory” is one of the wildest. All future forms are coded into the initial genomes, and somehow they don’t degrade by mutation while waiting hundreds of millions of years for it to be time to have, say, an elephant show up. Also they’re in there even though no one can find them.
It is a modern reworking of the 1600s-1700s preformationism according to which inside of an embryo there would be gonads, containing the next generation of embryos, and inside them the same, and so on.
“Speaking of weird theories, the “ID” front-loading “theory” is one of the wildest. All future forms are coded into the initial genomes, and somehow they don’t degrade by mutation while waiting hundreds of millions of years for it to be time to have, say, an elephant show up. Also they’re in there even though no one can find them.”
yeah, Front Loading is…special.
And onions must be Front Loaded as all hell.
That settles it:
There are many theories of gravity
So there’s no “theory of gravity”
Therefore there’s no theory of gravity
Therefore God
That is the strawman version. Perhaps you should talk to Mike Gene to get the real version
So I guess LUCA had to carry the DNA of all it’s successors, but of course the sequence length is not an issue here, LOL
I’ll don my “pretending to be a philosopher of science” hat for the moment.
On my read of Darwin, his intention was to present an hypothesis. Generally speaking, scientific theories are not grown up hypotheses. The role of a theory is different from that of a hypothesis.
A theory should be a guide to research and should set standards for that research. A theory should be, primarily, a pragmatic instrument, while an hypothesis is a tentative truth claim. From my perspective, TofE is not a particularly good scientific theory. However, biologists have taken it as a theory, and have filled in the gaps with their practices. So it has become a pragmatic instrument and does guide their research. Mendel’s genetics comes closer to meeting my expectations for a theory, and much of genetics has become incorporated into what is now considered the theory of evolution.
Creationist objections are mainly driven by their disagreement with the hypothesis (with the tentative truth claim), though they have expanded that into objections to the pragmatic instrument.
ID has failed to provide anything that would be useful as a pragmatic instrument to guide research.
You’re welcome to invite him over. I’m still waiting for the sequel to The Design Matrix, in which he promised he was going to provide the evidence for his unsupported claims regarding his version of “front loading”.
Why don’t you post the “real version” here? Where in the genome is this “front-loaded” data kept? How was the “front loaded” data maintained through 3.5 billion years of life’s history? How did the “design” make it through at least 5 major mass extinction events and dozens of smaller ones in the last 500 MY?
It’s no coincidence that Dawkins started out as an ethologist. There are two ways of looking at the phenomenon. We can look now at the genotype, and with modern biochemistry, the DNA sequences, the protein conformations, the enzyme cascades, and so on or we can look at the phenotype, the organism and its relationship to the niche. But I think we now need to join the dots.
Joe Felsenstein,
Of course, front-loading isn’t necessarily exclusive of meddling. Front-loading is the fallback position of Marks, Dembski, and Ewert. “You can pay Him now, or you can pay Him earlier.” Dembski says in Being as Communion that it’s pretty hard to accept that all of the “active information”
we seehe sees in nature was present in the origin of the universe. But he doesn’t rule out the possibility of it.Genetics and population genetics.
Selection is troublesome. It seems after the fact. There doesn’t seem to be any coherent way to deal with interactions, except to say that they must happen.
But that is a problem for design also.
Damn right. Especially sexual selection!
I think phoodoo’s position is tantamount to somebody saying that since there are both roses and carnations, there are no such things as flowers; or since there’s both red and green, there’s no such thing as color.
There are different determinate theories under the determinable theories of evolution. They are all required to have certain essential characteristics in common to be a theory of evolution, as Allan has explained. They may differ in some particulars, however.
Is the theory of universal common ancestry one of the theories of evolution?
If someone is skeptical of universal common ancestry they might say they are skeptical of the theory of evolution.
This. I may be a bit of a weirdo, but I don’t think that neutral mutations exist. There are mutations whose phenotypic effect is so utterly miniscule as to be invisible in amongst the noise of random sampling. And it turns out that a (vast?) majority of de novo mutations fall into this category. But there is a continuum from “undetectable” to “lethal”. The debate is around what proportion of fixed mutations, and separately what proportion of phenotypic changes, are the result of these “indistinguishable from neutral” mutations. It’s an argument over the shape of distribution curves, not a dichotomy. By way of example, synonymous codon changes generally have very low selection co-efficients, yet some organisms have far from random codon usage.
That is your opinion and it is wrong. Evolutionism has failed to provide anything that would be useful as a pragmatic instrument to guide research.
Dembski has said what research ID would guide. Here is another- if ID is right then living organisms are not the product of physics and chemistry. That means there is something else and ID research would uncover that
Umm he has supported his version of front-loading. OTOH you have never supported your version of evolution
He certainly called it a theory plenty of times:
pp. 161-162 1859 edition. Bolding added. Just two of many cases where he speaks of “my theory.” Darwin speaks of different theories, like the theory of natural selection and the theory of common descent. But then, most today would prefer basically one theory, and wouldn’t be very pleased with all of the invocation of “laws” that Darwin effected either.
I think it’s a great theory, for biology. Far messier and with much more detail involved than with a physics theory, the integration of information under this theory is also far more extensive (in a non-trivial sense) than in a typical physics theory.
Evolutionary theory is the main explanatory resource for biology.
Glen Davidson
Looks like FrankenJoe is going to dodge providing his explanation of “front-loading” too. His record of running from every last question is intact.
GlenDavidson,
It isn’t a scientific theory as he never said how to test his claims. And that still stands today
More empty bluster from FrankenJoe. ID has no testable hypotheses, no lines of research, no clue at all as to how to go about their ID “research”. Totally impotent.
Not only has he not presented evidence for his claims in The Design Matrix, he is on record as confirming that he intends (this was some time ago) to put his evidence in a sequel he has planned. This was in an exchange with me at BioLogos. I have it filed somewhere.
Luckily for me, I don’t need to. The list of contributors to evidence for biological evolution is impressive, the resources available to anyone who cares to look is vast.
Neil Rickert,
I strongly disagree with this. The cell follows design concepts and when you discover one it is often repeated. My experience is I was trying to find the trigger for cancer metastasis and assuming design I looked for the same mechanism controlling cell division and this turned out to be right and simplified the research.
Whether ID is right or not biology follows strict design concepts. Assuming a blind unguided process is useless.
Alan Fox,
Is this inside the rules?
Evolution isn’t a blind unguided process. It works through feedback from the environment provided by selection and the retention of heritable traits.
You’ve only had that explained to you about a hundred times too yet you insist on making the same stupid claim over and over and over.
Good job we don’t do that, then. Natural selection is not random – there is bias. The environment is the design template.