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Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: PZ Myers vs. Adaptationism | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Give neo-atheist blowhard PZ Myers some credit: when he says it's wrong to tolerate nonsense, he doesn't just mean creationist numbnuttery. Myers also takes a dim view of the way people who affirm the validity of species evolution misrepresent it. In a lecture at the Center For Inquiry in LA earlier this year, he took aim at bad evolutionary biology that equates adaptation with evolution.
So you say natural selection is the driving force behind species evolution? That traits or features in living organisms have each been selected for in a vast, ongiong, billion-year-old tournament between selfish genes? In that case, Myers wants a word with you.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Phat writes: why is he taking such a staunch position on it all, anyway? What agenda is he pushing? This is a debate that has gone on for ages, but it's not as high-profile (or lucrative) a battle in the culture wars as that of creationism. Long story short, progress in population genetics has led to the realization among biologists that there are forces that are more important to evolutionary change than natural selection: non-selective processes like mutation, recombination, and genetic drift. Nevertheless, many writers mislead the public with the notions that natural selection is the sole relevant driver of species evolution, and that all biological traits are by definition adaptations, the product of selective wars between selfish genes in their inexorable drive toward self-perpetuation in the struggle for existence, etc. etc. For example, in The Ancestor's Tale, Richard Dawkins asserted: "Natural selection is all-powerful with respect to those visible changes that affect survival and reproduction. Natural selection is the only explanation we know for the functional beauty and apparently "designed" complexity of living things." If that's not unapologetic adaptationism, I don't know what is. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin published a paper in 1979 titled The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme that took this adaptationist thinking to task as the facile oversimplification that it is. One metaphor they used was the spandrel, a feature of a cathedral that was only the decorative workaround necessary for the way a dome fit onto supporting columns, not the main artistic element of the structure. The other metaphor was Dr. Pangloss, the nutty philosopher from Voltaire's Candide whose explanations of everything from human clothing to the horrifying destruction wreaked by the Lisbon earthquake was predicated on the self-validating assumption that things were the way they were because they couldn't be otherwise. Coming up with plausible scenarios for how traits evolved is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. As Gould and Lewontin wrote:
quote: As Myers points out, a much more disturbing problem with adaptationist thinking is that it forms the basis for racist and sexist ideas that make it seem like there are scientific rationales for social inequities and that cultural biases have their roots not in personal prejudice but in biological fact. Edited by MrHambre, : No reason given. Edited by MrHambre, : Changed title. Edited by MrHambre, : Added Dawkins quote.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes: What he's doing is taking an adaptationist view ... of things which actually are adaptations! This is no vice. What it is is a tautology: Natural selection is important in terms of adaptations, which are the result of natural selection. No one, not even Myers, disputes that certain traits are adaptations. It's the emphasis on selection that's the problem. The second sentence in the Dawkins quote is typical of the overstatement inherent in adaptationist thinking: how does he know that natural selection is the only explanation for the phenomena he mentioned? As Myers points out, there are many non-selective processes involved in species evolution, so by definition there are more explanations for features in biology than natural selection.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes: adaptive features could have been, oh, let's say magicked that way by some sort of deity. Or produced by front-loaded orthogenesis. Or Lamarkian evolution. Um, but no one is disputing that adaptive features are the result of natural selection. What's being refuted here is the notion that natural selection is all-important to evolution because it's responsible for adaptation. Adaptation is not synonymous with evolution.
that which is functional will in fact be favored by natural selection over that which is less functional. Another point no one disputes. But the question I asked is, How does Dawkins know natural selection is the only explanation for the phenomena he described?
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Taq writes:
Even Darwin said "natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification," and spent the rest of his career battling misrepresentations of his theory. Contemporary biologists know a lot more about population genetics than Darwin did, and realize that natural selection has been given pride of place for many reasons aside from scientific evidence. Darwin was originally trying to explain why life physically changed through time. Natural selection is the main driver of those observations. The notion of adaptation lends itself very easily to theorizing about what a trait or feature is "for," and the allure of this boundless horizon has led to a lot of bad thinking in a self-validating Panglossian fashion. Unfortunately, this bad thinking has also taken the form of scientific rationales for prejudices about race and gender. The idea of competition among organisms (or genes, in Dawkins's view) jibes with our Western democratic ideal of a meritocracy, the best of all possible worlds coming about not through divine fiat but individual success. Last but not least, the concept of selection satisfies the need for simplification of the staggeringly complex matter of the development of life on Earth. In Stephen Jay Gould's words: quote:
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
AZPaul3 writes:
I don't believe so. In the lecture, Myers quotes Michael Lynch to the effect that an adaptive evolutionary force is one that is a function of the fitness properties of individuals. In that sense, your distinction between having a nose and the specific shape of the nose is relevant: if the organ itself has selective value, it's an adaptation; if the shape doesn't have a selective value, then it isn't.
quote: Maybe I'm reading this wrong but isn't this exactly what Prof. M is disputing?
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Dr Adequate writes:
Nope. I've said a few times (per Myers in the video) that adaptations are the result of natural selection. The tautology I described was Dawkins's saying that natural selection was important when it came to 'changes that affect survival and reproduction,' (i.e. adaptations) when the definition of adaptation presupposes that the changes have been selected for. Much as I'd love to play But Then I Said with you all day, I'll have to pass.
You said that attributing adaptation to natural selection was tautologous. Because he is talking about adaptation, not about all evolutionary phenomena.
Okay. But he only mentioned 'beauty' and 'complexity,' which aren't in and of themselves adaptations. If you assume they're adaptations, then I guess natural selection is the clear explanation.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Cat Sci writes: quote: Because they look designed. The stuff that results from things like genetic drift doesn't look designed. According to biologists, it's not that easy, because drift and selection aren't always competing forces. Evolutionary biologist and herpetologist John O. Reiss considers the processes nearly indistinguishable in practice. In Not By Design: Retiring Darwin's Watchmaker, Reiss notes that the concept of naturalized design has all the teleological vestiges of the intelligent design paradigm that Darwin's theory supposedly demolished. Selection as the engine of a population's uphill struggle in an adaptive landscape is just the sort of goal-oriented rhetoric that's inappropriate in describing evolution by natural selection.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
caffeine writes:
And the fact is that there continues to be heated debate about these matters in biology. Maybe the reason we can dismiss the entire issue as irrelevant is that we're far removed from the academic battlefields in which it takes place, and the controversy is just not sexy enough for major media attention. It could also be that we're much happier browbeating religious people for their incoherent grasp of modern biology than delving into subjects that real scientists like PZ Myers and John O. Reiss (among many others) take to heart.
I can't help but feel that this is one of those arguments about absolutely nothing that plague many fields.[...]the whole topic is just a bunch of empty words.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
caffeine writes: Or, there could be no meaningful debate going on at all. which seems much more likely to me, having heard Dawkins and Gould argue about adapatationism without giving any sign that they actually disagreed on anything substantive. Or, it could be that the distinctions are too subtle for people like us, who are more comfortable having arguments with people who think the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that species were each created de novo by a Big Magic Guy. Philosophical differences we consider meaningful and substantive and those that generate debate in the expert community are probably very different. People like PZ Myers and John O. Reiss aren't religious nutbags or Discovery Institute cranks. But maybe that's exactly why you can't work up interest in understanding their arguments. In any case, since they're PhDs in evolutionary biology, I have no qualms about giving them the benefit of the doubt for the legitimacy of their gripes.
it's a sexed-up argument about labels between people who do not disagree on things that actually matter. If you're defining things that actually matter as topics that generate flamewars between peevish amateurs on message boards, I suppose you're right. But I think this subject is one that can't be dismissed in such a cavalier way. Yes, the people debating all affirm the notion of common ancestry and the rough outline of the random-variation-natural-selection idea. But the problems in the way we atomize organisms and conceptualize the relation between adaptation and evolution remain, and they rankle scientists like PZ Myers who insist on people getting it all right.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
caffeine writes: I’ll need more than an appeal to authority to convince me. Well, as long as we're talking about convincing, it's not like you offered anything other than your own opinion to support your claim that "the whole topic is just a bunch of empty words." I at least posted a video of a talk PZ Myers gave, outlining his reasoning. He's talking about things that go to the heart of how we understand natural history: the way we explain fitness in organisms and populations, the way we conceptualize design in nature, and the way we define the relationship between adaptation and evolution. You haven't addressed a single one of his points. You just said that since there's a large amount of agreement among biologists, by definition this isn't a substantive debate. Later you added the corollary that since PhDs argue about things you consider silly, there's no reason to think they argue about anything you wouldn't consider silly. Am I allowed to ask why your opinion is assumed to be the standard for relevance in this matter? Is argumentum ad caffeinam really that much better than appeals to legitimate expertise?
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
caffeine writes: That's because I haven't watched the video. I don't stand for argumentum ad videum, either. So you don't feel obliged to understand what the discussion is even about before you declare it to be completely meaningless. I think I see the problem here.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Cat Sci writes: How would drift, sans selection, yield a phenotypic feature that looks designed? Pretty loaded question, isn't it? You're using a vague (and suspiciously teleological) definition of design to support the notion that such-and-such a feature is the product of selection, just because you've decided that that's prima facie evidence of a selected-for trait. As Myers and others are saying, in most cases we have no other evidence that it's the product of natural selection; there's plenty of evidence that such traits may have originally served different functions, rather than that they conveniently arose to ensure the organism's survival. We just make assumptions like these because of the pervasive influence of adaptationist thinking.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
bluegenes writes: imagine self-replicators in a void evolving with the three processes other than natural selection that Myers identifies as important. In the void, there are no environmental constraints; nothing to promote or preserve what Dawkins describes as functional beauty and apparently "designed" complexity, leaving natural selection as the best explanation of those things without claiming that it is the sole cause of evolutionary novelty. "In a void"? Setting up a completely unrealistic hypothetical situation doesn't prove a point about natural selection, all it does is allow you to deal yourself a winning hand. You've already decided that "functional beauty and apparently designed complexity" are properties that can only be attributed to natural selection, so in your hypothetical setup, it's by definition impossible for such things to evolve. It looks like you're the one who's misunderstanding what Myers and others are saying. They're not saying natural selection isn't important to evolution, just that other nonselective forces have to be considered too, particularly when they're necessary precursors to selective processes having any truly adaptive effect in many researched instances.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1420 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
I'm not trying to make any hypothetical scenarios whatsoever. Over and over I've said that this matter didn't spring fully-formed from MrHambre's overheated imagination. Myers, and Gould and Lewontin, and John O. Reiss are describing the flaws in the way people conceptualize the relationship between adaptation and evolution. Unfortunately, the way we conceptualize such things has consequences in terms of the way we define well-being in individuals and society.
And the problems with adaptationist thinking are easy to see in the matter of evolutionary medicine or EN. Michael Cournoyea at the University of Toronto describes the way an adaptationist approach to medicine has been of limited use to the discipline.
quote: So according to the adaptationists, the evolutionary heritage of traits or processes is the most important thing to understand about them, and the key to clinical practice. However, it turns out that even when EM isn't completely speculative, it's of very little relevance in practice:
quote: Again, no one is disputing that humans are the products of evolutionary processes or that certain traits are adaptive. What's being disputed is whether we should define well-being in terms of adaptive importance, or whether the evolutionary legacy of a biological function is more relevant to clinical practice than the sociocultural or personal context of the patient's condition and treatment.
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