On Facebook recently, my brother asked why, if “macroevolution” is real, there aren’t more variety “in between” the species that exist today. I thought the answer to that question might be worth posting here.

The context of the question, was as comments to a tweet in which I thanked Richard Dawkins, citing his The Selfish Gene and The Ancestors Tales as having been instrumental in my scientific re-education, coming from a creationist homeschooler’s background (which my brother shares).

Among other things, all those in-between species did exist, and we’ve found scads and scads and scads of their fossiles. Most didn’t survive to today (except as fossils), because they were far less fit to compete with both descendents and cousins who were much better suited to their respective environments than today. Evolutionary jumps tend to happen when something in the environment or situation changes in a way that effects survival rates. This tends to provide strong death rates in the members that are poorly suited to deal with the change, providing a huge opportunity for members who are even just slightly better-suited to reproduce exponentially. Every small variation that is introduced that provides any sort of benefit in the new environment, reproduces quickly, because of its usefulness.

But the biggest evidence is in our genes. Continue reading →

If man bases ideas on his logic, than all he says will be all there is. Mans Logic is Man’s, where as Gods Logic, though given to some men, is Gods. So, either choose logic given by man, or logic given by God.

Found in the “Favorite Quotes” section of my brother Joseph Cowan’s Facebook profile. I suspect it’s of his own authorship.

I was going to comment further on it here, but thought better of it after realizing it’s a waste of breath. But really, if you can’t instantly find several glaring things wrong with this *cough* logic, then you are already beyond hope. You are a slave to your emotions, and have no ability, or even the desire, to use the mind “God gave you”.

All that logic is is a definition of the words “true” and “false”: those words have no meaning outside of “man’s logic”. You can say that the existence of God is “true”, or that God exists outside/defies logic¹, but to attempt to claim both simultaneously is to not even know what the word “true” means. What can I do at that point? It’s exactly like trying to convince someone that 1 + 2 isn’t 6¾: if they won’t accept your definitions of 1, 2, and +, there’s nothing further to say.

¹ Although, the latter amounts to meaninglessness, while the former is actually provably incorrect for any meaningful definition of God.

These sorts of quotes always get my goat, because one of the few things in this world that can consistently and reliably piss me off is irresponsible ignorance, especially willful ignorance. Quotes like this are like saying, “I’m fine with my ignorance, I have no interest in thinking about anything. I’ll believe whatever I want to, whether it adds up or not, simply because it’s what I want to believe in.”

Prefacing disclaimer: obviously, I’m not a geneticist, biologist, or any other expert qualified to speak authoritatively about evolution.

My attention was caught by the title of a recent lecture from University College of London Professor of Genetics Steve Jones: Human Evolution is Over (here and here), which I first found via Digg. I was disappointed by the lecture, or at any rate by summaries of the lecture in the news, since I can’t find the text of the actual lecture; but it caught my attention because I’d actually been thinking for a while about human evolution, and the rather unique spot we find ourselves in now.

According to the articles, the lecture essentially makes the argument that human evolution is at a near-standstill, because natural selection pressures are low, and because older fathers aren’t as commonplace as they once were (older fathers’ sperm-manufacturing cells being the product of more cell divisions, giving greater opportunity for genetic mutation).

I’m baffled by the argument that the pressures of natural selection from extremes of heat and cold, or famine, are nullified by modern heating and air conditioning, and food plentifulness. Current heating and AC technologies are not so perfect as to effectively nullify the selective effects of environmental extremes (and anyway not everyone in the world has access to these technologies), and food is far from universally “plentiful”. Even ignoring those, there is plenty of opportunity for competition and natural selection, through population growth pressures present in many areas, and epidemics of disease in many corners of the world.

Meanwhile, the argument that younger fathers have eradicated the opportunity for genetic mutation rather ignores how we got where we are, and the fact that a 35-year-old father has more years than the entire lifespan of the bulk of our ancestors; in many cases by a huge margin. Though it is true that our cells’ mechanisms for guarding against infidelity in genetic copying have become more advanced now.

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And yet, despite these flaws in the arguments (at least as represented in news sources), I wonder whether there’s still some (limited) truth to the conclusion?

We’re in a weird place in evolutionary history—really, completely-uncharted territory. We are the first creatures to have become aware of the underlying mechanisms of our evolution, the first to be in a position to actually manipulate genetic material directly—both our own material and that of other plants and creatures. I wonder whether natural selection will soon be made irrelevant through our own increased powers of artificial auto-selection.

Even aside from our fledgeling ability to govern our own genetics, our modern medical technology is already starting to turn the tide of natural selection through artificial compensations. I suspect penecillin, which might at first glance seem to be a good example, is actually a poor one: it’s not an example of our ability to conquer natural selection, but only our latest short-term triumph against it in our perpetual battle with disease. After all, it’s only been around for eighty years, and there are already plenty of examples of diseases that have evolved immunities to it. Before too long, we’ll have to invent it all over again. And again.

On the other hand, in a world where prosthetic legs are available, the effects of natural selection on a “clumsiness” gene that makes people more apt to lose a leg is diminished (though not if the “clumsiness” also produces greater risk of direct loss of life 🙂 ). Genes that would otherwise have become extinct due to unpleasant aesthetic effects (lessening sexual desirability) are given a reprieve by cosmetics and (in more extreme cases) cosmetic surgery.

We already screen fetuses for common genetic diseases; how long before we start ensuring their absence through direct manipulation, a lá Gattaca? I don’t really think we’ll ever find ourselves in a world where, as in the movie, genetic discrimination ensures that unmanipulated individuals cannot obtain white-collar jobs or decent girlfriends; but I do think it’s likely that at some point, it will become somewhat routine for parents to screen their children’s genes, or the genes that they contribute toward child-bearing.

And that, in itself, disturbs me. Not because it’s unethical or somehow violates the sanctity of natural human reproduction, but because, from an evolutionary standpoint, it’s probably a really bad idea. The genes that we would tend to filter out because they’re responsible for sickle-cell anaemia or cystic fibrosis, when we are unlucky enough to obtain that gene from both of our parents, provide protection against malaria and cholera when we obtain just one copy of the gene. In our zeal to weed out genes that confer confirmed negative effects, we are very likely to strain out genes whose undiscovered positive effects actually outweigh their known negative effects in some environments.

The problem is that artificial selection is guesswork: we presume to be able to deduce when our manipulations are for the best, but we rely on faulty human reason and incomplete understanding to make these decisions. Natural selection, on the other hand, has complete understanding and flawless, unconscious reason, in that it always guarantees that the surviving genes (over sufficient spans of time) are those that confer the greatest advantages

Of course, natural selection’s perfect ability to decide which genes should be eliminated and which survive, comes at a price. For one thing, it’s awfully slow, and the knowledge that natural selection will provide us with an immunity to such-and-such a disease over the course of a number of generations is small consolation when we’re dying from it now. For another thing, it comes at the cold and calloused cost of human lives. Natural selection depends on death, in combination with reproduction and variation, to achieve its ends. There is no selection, natural or artificial, if some things aren’t dying while others survive.

Human sensibilities, meanwhile, demand that all human life is sacred, and not just those that nature would select. So of course we will continue to intervene on individuals’ behalfs—we must. To not do so would be unfeeling, uncaring, and more than a little reminiscent of Nazi eugenics.

And yet, interference comes with a price of its own. As we relieve the effects of natural selection on individuals through our efforts to use technology to cure humankind’s ills, we condemn ourselves to evolve dependencies on those same technologies. Preventing natural selection from filtering out weak genes through quicker death to the possessors or, alternatively, taking nature’s responsibilities on ourselves and doing a lesser job of filtering out weak genes before birth, ensures that weak genes will proliferate where they otherwise would not. This in turn forces us to continue to use our medical technologies perpetually, lest we suffer nature’s belated compensation for our weakened genetic resilience.

Meanwhile, natural selection will continue to have its way with those peoples for whom the wonders of modern technology are out of reach. After all, all these arguments from modern medical and genetics technology suffer the same flaws I noted for Jones’ arguments from central heating and plentiful food: they can’t completely eliminate natural selection, and (more importantly) not everyone has them. While the middle- and upper-classes of  the affluent nations of the world develop a dependence on their savior technologies, those who can’t afford these miracles will continue to depend on nature to provide them with the protections they need, the hard way. But, interbreeding between the privileged and unprivileged will help reintroduce healthy genes to the “privileged” who otherwise might find themselves in an ever-escalating battle against their own degrading DNA, and beginning to dwindle in numbers in comparison to the healthier “unprivileged”.

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Whether or not human evolution has effectively ceased (cough), our tools have certainly been evolving lately at a much higher rate than we ourselves have been. Perhaps the tools we have created will increasingly exert selective pressures of their own on human survival statistics, resulting in an accidental artificial selection. There are those that suggest that this has already played a large role in guiding our evolution to the current state; we start using a tool that benefits us, and suddenly the people best equipped to be using these tools have the best chances for survival.

In our current digital age, more and more professionals are finding themselves having to think about multiple tasks simultaneously (or as nearly so as we are currently capable), and of dealing with multiple channels of information. These are both things that we are currently fairly poor at handling, as a species; but perhaps evolution will produce people with true multitasking capabilities, handling multiple simultaneous conscious thoughts, or at least able to take better advantage of what multitasking capabilities the subconscious mind already posseses. Could the human brain eventually become “multicore”? 🙂

As our tools continue to evolve, I expect we’ll eventually do away with such impediments as keyboards, and be capable of communicating thoughts much closer to the speed at which we actually think them. In that event I imagine that rapid thought might become an evolutionarily favored trait. That might in turn result in an eventual (very eventual) reduction in the complexity of our vocal capabilities, as they fall out of necessity, much in the same way that we lost our (external) tails, or that whales lost their legs.

…I worry that, contrary to popular belief, human powers of reason may not be especially favored by evolution. A lot of people believe that humans are more intelligent because we are “more evolved”; but of course on reflection that’s simply not the case. We are not “more evolved” than chimpanzees, because we did not evolve from chimpanzees; chimpanzees and ourselves both evolved from some common ancestor, which means that we have had precisely as much time to evolve from that point as chimpanzees have had. We are both the result of generations of adaptations to become quite well-suited to our respective, different environments. Ours just so happened to favor greater intelligence. It doesn’t follow that we’re “more evolved”, just because the thing we’re most proud of happened to be favored (after all, it’s what we’re most proud of because it’s what natural selection favored).

And humans are not especially logical. We may be much more so than our evolutionary cousins, but we’re still not especially bright. Evolution appears to have favored quite a few mental aberrations over and above any favor given to logic and reason. Our brains are built to strongly prefer

• conclusions that align well with beliefs we already hold
• conclusions that facilitate a positive self-image
• conclusions that facilitate our desires
• conclusions that align with our emotional reactions to things
• conclusions that provide us with hope and a positive outlook, even when such an outlook is unrealistic

All of these, over conclusions that arise logically from the available facts. If the available facts are in conflict with any of these—especially the top couple—it may be a minor miracle when we actually manage to arrive at the truth. Add to these a propensity for finding patterns, that is so strong that we regularly find them where they don’t actually exist (number “patterns” in sequences of random numbers, faces of religious figures in food items, tree knots, and whatnot…), and tendencies for weighting some data far too greatly, and other data too lightly (“Counting the hits but not the misses”, leading to convinctions of prophetic truths, or miraculous answers to prayer, etc).

The way I see it, the human race has finally become just intelligent enough to begun to realize just how unintelligent we really are.

And many of these impediments to intelligence and reason appear to be the result of natural selection, indicating that these are flaws in human reason that tend to increase chances of survival, in which case there’s small hope to reach higher levels of reason until whatever selective pressures produced these flaws cease (or are overruled by still greater selective pressures, and perhaps that is already the case).

The following is reposted, with permission, from The Barefoot Bum; it makes some good points that I’d have liked to have made here at some time, except that he’s already done an excellent job of it, so why bother? It includes a list of several examples of both items that proponents of Intelligent Design believe that evolutionists believe or teach (but, in fact, don’t), such as radio-carbon dating; and items that they believe are true (but which, in fact, are false), such as the myth that evolution from one species into another hasn’t been observed. These are very widely spread myths in the creationist community, and it’s nice to debunk a few of the most common of them. Most of these items don’t have links or citations; however, you can find a wealth of information about them at TalkOrigins (which has a longer list, and citations to back up its claims). [Update: reworded the above to more accurately represent the list of creationist myths.]

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I don’t understand why any individual amateur would choose to criticize evolution. Any amateur is hopelessly outnumbered, probably by a factor of 10,000 or 100,000 to 1. Scientists have been working on the various hypotheses and theories under the evolutionary paradigm for more than fifteen decades. Even if they were completely, egregiously wrong, the attempt to prove them wrong seems a Sisyphean task for any individual, much less an amateur. Of course it doesn’t help that organizations such as the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis and Harun Yahya have been so frequently caught in inexcusable sloppiness and outright lies. But amateurs do try to criticize evolution, so it’s worthwhile going over some basic points.First, The Barefoot Bum is a philosophy blog, not a science blog. Although I’m scientifically literate, I’m not a professional scientist: I’m a professional engineer and an amateur philosopher. Professional scientists such as PZ Myers, Shalini and the denizens of the IIDB Evolution/Creation forum (and many others) have forgotten more biology than ten people like me will ever learn. If you want to discuss evolution here, I’m much more interested in discussing things like scientific epistemology, metaphysical naturalism, and the ethical implications of evolution. Still, I am scientifically literate, and I’m willing to discuss the science of evolution.If you’re going to criticize what scientists say, it’s very important to criticize what scientists actually say, rather than what you want them to say. I understand that demolishing a straw man is easy and satisfying. But straw men are not only fallacious: evolution and its criticism have been around long enough that there is simply no excuse for misrepresenting the scientific position. Misrepresentation is justifiably characterized as a lie.

There’s also the pernicious practice of quote mining, taking a statement made by a scientist or philosopher out of context and thus changing its meaning to be critical of evolution. Any time an advocate of evolution seems to say something deeply critical of the endeavor, any reasonable person must be suspicious that something is amiss. Quote mining is lying.

I have better things to do with my time than correct lies about evolution. If you want to lie, do it on your own blog or in a more appropriate venue; I refuse to publish lies.

Here are some specifics:

Evolution is not a scientific theory about the origin of terrestrial life. The origin of terrestrial life is an interesting scientific field in itself (all the more interesting because the evidence is buried under billions of years of history), but it has nothing to do with evolution. Even if the first living thing were intentionally created by a space alien, a deity or the systems administrator of the computer we’re all inhabiting, evolutionary theory would not change at all.

No scientific theory in the field of evolution says that the characteristics of modern organisms arose by chance alone. All evolutionary theories discuss the interplay between chance changes to organisms and natural selection; natural selection is driven by physical law, the opposite of chance.

Yes, there have been instances of scientific fraud as well as honest mistakes. Science is an error-correcting endeavor, precisely because errors do arise. What “error” actually means and how errors are corrected is an interesting topic of philosophical inquiry, but Piltdown Man and Haeckel’s embryology are not by themselves probative of anything… except perhaps in the sense that scientists have actually discovered and corrected such errors.

Scientists have actually observed speciation.

Radiocarbon dating is accurate to only tens of thousands of years. Scientists employ other methods, including other types of radiometric dating, to establish ages on the order of mega- and giga-years. The validity of radiometric dating is established primarily by nuclear physics and quantum mechanics.

Charles Darwin was not baffled by the eye. His “bafflement” in The Origin of Species was a rhetorical device: he goes on to explain how the eye actually did evolve. This assertion is probably the most famous instance of quote mining. Nor did Darwin renounce evolution on his deathbed. This claim is an outright lie.

Regardless, science is not theology, and no scientist is an authority. Nothing in science is believed just because some scientist, however well-respected, has asserted it. Even Newton, Einstein, Darwin and Feynman had to show their work, and the idea stands or falls on its own merits, independent of the reputation of the person. Darwin himself made mistakes, and those mistakes have been discovered and corrected.

The attitude of scientists and scientific philosophy regarding the “supernatural” is not unique to evolution. I’m more than happy to discuss scientific philosophy, methodological and metaphysical naturalism, in as much (or more) detail as you wish, but philosophically, any argument concerning naturalism applies to all science, not just the sciences of biology, archeology, paleontology, genetics, ecology, etc. which adopt an evolutionary paradigm.

In general, I’m going to evaluate any criticism of evolution by first investigating what Talk.Origins has to say about it. I don’t demand that anyone accept Talk.Origins uncritically or at all, but you will save us both a lot of time if you examine their arguments before you comment, and address them within your comment.

And, lastly, the complaint that scientists and advocates of science tend to bury criticism in a flood of information is a non-starter. Rational people settle these sorts of arguments by evaluating the evidence. If there’s a ton of evidence against your position, boo hoo, too bad for you.

As I mentioned previously, I have recently subscribed to Answers magazine, produced by Answers In Genesis, famous for their recent opening of the Creation Museum.

I received my first issue a couple months ago. The chief reason I subscribed was that I wanted to keep abreast of anti-evolutionary arguments, and Creationist reactions to recent scientific discoveries as they occurred. The issue I first received was almost entirely dedicated to the stories of the global flood and Noah’s Ark.

I was rather disappointed to discover that there was actually rather little in the magazine for me to actually evaluate, as most of the writing offered no references to back up their claims and assertions; thus, there was nothing for me to reason about—only rhetoric. I have just received the next issue, which I have not yet opened; I’m hoping there will be more interesting arguments in that one, and hopefully some references to back up a few of the claims.

However, I was struck by this very brief snippet of an article (it was, IIRC, less than half of a page in length). I think it illustrates rather well the extreme lack of understanding of basic principles of evolutionary theory or mechanics, or even terminology:

The textbook authors recognize that the resistance is already present in the bacterial population (Fig. 15.5) and then claim that selection for resistant bacteria in a population is direct evidence for evolution. Selecting for something that is already present does not provide support for the information-gaining change required for evolution.

Of course, this text completely ignores the question, how did the variations between resistant and non-resistant bacteria arise in the first place? No biology textbook will claim that the selection itself is how an individual organism becomes stronger: selection only explains why the percentage of resistant bacteria will tend to get stronger. But, evolution does explain how the variation arose that allowed some of the population to become more resistant than the others.

Of course, I have to wonder about a group who struggles with the idea that a colony of bacteria can develop minute changes allowing some of them to become resistant to antibiotics, but clings to the concept that lions and house cats evolved from the same animal “kind” (which was represented by a population of two to seven on Noah’s ark), and dogs and foxes from another, in the last 4,000 years, while, of course, rejecting the idea that evolution could have caused any transition from one “kind” to another.

The article also claims that evolutionary biology textbooks say there is support for the claim “that molecules can change into completely different kinds of creatures.” So much for proof-reading.

It appears I may have been a tad optimistic in expecting to find some shred of reasoned argument in this periodical…

Digg posted a link to this article at SciAm: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. It gives a pretty reasonable list of some of the top claims made by proponents of “Scientific Creationism” and some very good answers to them. Many of the items on this list are similar to what I’ve seen on the alt.talk origins FAQ.

(Sorry I haven’t posted in a month; I’ve been busy with programming projects. I’ll post more about them when I’m more ready. This article seemed worth citing.)

Summary: Despite Gore’s “vast majority of scientists” agreeing, the actual community of scientists whose profession and experience actually have to do with understanding climate change are in disagreement regarding the existence of global warming as a phenomenon.

http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm

Update: if you look at the comments, you’ll see that I was pretty much immediately notified that the article’s veracity is in question. Thanks to Bruce Perens for doing a follow-up and looking closer, and to thickslab for bringing Bruce’s retraction to my attention (otherwise, I wouldn’t have noticed until the next Crypto-Gram!).

I had wondered how that tied in with observations I’d heard from people who really are in the climate-change-causes field. Though, the article only claims that that community of scientists have not reached a “consensus,” not that they all think that global warming is bunk.

Here’s a rebuttal to the content of the article.

While it would be an ad hominem argument to discount the article entirely merely because it turns out that its author is a paid political PR agent, and the article does actually raise some important points, it also seems clear that some of the points are deliberately misleading. Take it with about a pound of salt…