Once again: misguided calls for a thorough revamping of evolutionary biology

November 23, 2016 • 12:31 pm

On November 7-9 there was a special meeting of London’s Royal Society on “New Trends in Evolutionary Biology: Biological, Philosophical, and Social Science Perspectives.” I believe it was organized by Denis Noble, a physiologist who believes that modern views about evolution are ripe for a thorough revision.  Many of the speakers at the meeting are part of the “Third Way of Evolution” group, in which various mechanisms, supposedly ignored by the rest of us hidebound neo-Darwinists, are said to play major roles in evolution (the other two “ways” are creationism and Neo-Darwinism).

I’ve criticized Noble and the views of his colleagues before (see here and here, for instance). Here I’ll briefly reprise the themes of this new conference, and why I think that, while the mechanisms discussed are of interest, they pose no danger to the existing evolutionary paradigm; nor is there enough data to show that these mechanisms are common in nature—or even operate at all.

First, though, it’s worth noting that of the 26 presenters at the meeting, 10 were funded by Templeton’s “extended evolutionary synthesis” grant—an 8 million dollar grant over three years. Further, a representative of the Templeton Foundation was present at the meeting, presumably making sure his stable of prized thoroughbreds were running well. The grant and the meeting seem to me to represent one aim of Templeton: to show the weakness of the current evolutionary paradigm. Why they want to do this is beyond me, but it’s clear that the researchers funded by the grant are enthusiasts who have an agenda, one that partly includes self-promotion.

A good summary of the meeting, by the estimable Carl Zimmer, appears in Quanta Magazine as a longish piece, “Scientists seek to update evolution.” I won’t go through the issues raised, except to say they include the following four claims; and the critical take on these is not Zimmer’s but mine:

Epigenetics: This is the new “Lamarckian” view that environmentally-induced changes in the DNA, often affecting the methylation of DNA bases, could be an important contributor to evolution. The problem with this is that these changes are not permanent, and are often effaced after one or two generations. The record, I think, now stands at 31 generations before the environmentally-induced changes are wiped clean. But this provides no permanent basis for permanent adaptive change, which is the huge problem with the epigenetics “paradigm.” Further, when real adaptations can be genetically mapped in organisms, they always reside in the DNA sequence itself and not in the temporary alterations of DNA bases produced by the environment. Further, because environmentally induced epigenetic changes are temporary, they can’t participate in evolution by genetic drift, either.

Now there are adaptive epigenetic changes that are coded in the DNA itself: genes that code for instructions like, “Methylate bases at positions X, Y, and Z.” But those instructions evolved by conventional natural selection, and are not the types of epigenetic changes touted by promoters of the New Paradigm.

Development. Zimmer says some speakers emphaszied that development can constrain evolution: only certain evolutionary changes are possible given the evolved developmental system of organisms. (Haldane once used the example that humans couldn’t evolve into angels because they had neither the limb buds for wings nor the moral precursors!). But this is nothing new, and has been discussed for decades in the Modern Synthesis.

Plasticity.  As is well known, organisms can change their appearance, behavior, and physiology depending on their environment. Some of this is simply a “shock response” with no adaptive value, while other forms of plasticity are evolved adaptations that reside in the DNA (cats grow longer fur when it’s cold, rotifers develop predator-deterring spines when put in water with fish “odor”, etc.). But the New Paradigmists say that nonadaptive plasticity can actually initiate an adaptive evolutionary change. It’s not really clear how this would happen, and in fact we have no good examples of it happening. We have, on the other hand, plenty of examples of adaptive plasticity that evolved by conventional natural selection: organisms regularly exposed to different environments can, over time, evolve switchable genetic programs (as in cat fur length) to respond to a new environment.

Niche construction. This is the argument that an organism, by adapting to its current environment, actually changes the selective pressures that impinge on it, thus opening up further evolutionary pathways. The classic example, as Zimmer notes, is the beaver: by adapting to build a pond by cutting down trees and making dams, the beaver now occupies a new habitat, which also includes its lodge. That could present new ways for the beaver to evolve as it now lives in a pond-ish environment.

But this is not new, either, and fits well within the Modern Synthesis.  As Ernst Mayr once pointed out, many new adaptations evolve not by a change in the external environment itself, but by the organism behaviorally entering a new environment when that environment offers adaptive advantages. By making forays on land, for instance, lobe-finned fish suddenly were able to access a bunch of new food types previously unavailable. And of course once you’re moving about on land, selection will favor all kinds of new adaptations, like shelled eggs and big lungs that handle air. Similarly, warm-blooded animals, by evolving homeothermy, acquire a thin layer of warm air around their bodies, providing a good niche for ectoparasites, to which the animal must now adapt. I am in fact surprised that niche construction is seen as something radically new, since it follows ineluctably from adaptation itself.

While most of the participants in the Royal Society meeting espoused these kinds of revisions, you can see that they’re neither new nor nor have much EVIDENCE supporting them as strong challenges to the existing evolutionary paradigm.

After Carl Zimmer summarizes some of these matters, he mentions the pushback that people had against the idea that evolution is in trouble. I’ll just give one excerpt from his piece, involving a claim by Dennis Noble that organisms have an ability to detect stress and then rapidly rearrange their genomes to respond adaptively to that stress:

To illustrate this new view, Noble discussed an assortment of recent experiments. One of them was published last year by a team at the University of Reading. They did an experiment on bacteria that swim by spinning their long tails.

First, the scientists cut a gene out of the bacteria’s DNA that’s essential for building tails. The researchers then dropped these tailless bacteria into a petri dish with a meager supply of food. Before long, the bacteria ate all the food in their immediate surroundings. If they couldn’t move, they died. In less than four days in these dire conditions, the bacteria were swimming again. On close inspection, the team found they were growing new tails.

That didn’t sound right to Shuker [David Shuker of the University of St Andrews], and he was determined to challenge Noble after the applause died down.

“Could you comment at all on the mechanism underlying that discovery?” Shuker asked.

Noble stammered in reply. “The mechanism in general terms, I can, yes…” he said, and then started talking about networks and regulation and a desperate search for a solution to a crisis. “You’d have to go back to the original paper,” he then said.

While Noble was struggling to respond, Shuker went back to the paper on an iPad. And now he read the abstract in a booming voice.

“‘Our results demonstrate that natural selection can rapidly rewire regulatory networks,’” Shuker said. He put down the iPad. “So it’s a perfect, beautiful example of rapid neo-Darwinian evolution,” he declared.

This exemplifies the problem:  enthusiasts for the Third Way blather on about new mechanisms, and write dataless paper after dataless paper about them, but when the mechanisms are examined closely they’re found to be not so revolutionary after all.

Why, then, are people suddenly touting a revision of evolutionary theory? (This isn’t all new; Steve Gould tried it with punctuated equilibrium, proposing a mechanism for episodic evolutionary change that has now been discarded.)  One reason is, of course, that Templeton is funding this project big time. Where the money goes, so goes the research. The other was suggested at the meeting by my friend Doug Futuyma, not only an evolutionist but someone with  a deep knowledge of the history of evolutionary thought. As Zimmer reports:

“We must recognize that the core principles of the Modern Synthesis are strong and well-supported,” Futuyma declared. Not only that, he added, but the kinds of biology being discussed at the Royal Society weren’t actually all that new. The architects of the Modern Synthesis were already talking about them over 50 years ago. And there’s been a lot of research guided by the Modern Synthesis to make sense of them.

Take plasticity. The genetic variations in an animal or a plant govern the range of forms into which organism can develop. Mutations can alter that range. And mathematical models of natural selection show how it can favor some kinds of plasticity over others.

If the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis was so superfluous, then why was it gaining enough attention to warrant a meeting at the Royal Society? Futuyma suggested that its appeal was emotional rather than scientific. It made life an active force rather than the passive vehicle of mutations.

“I think what we find emotionally or aesthetically more appealing is not the basis for science,” Futuyma said.

Still, he went out of his way to say that the kind of research described at the meeting could lead to some interesting insights about evolution. But those insights would only arise with some hard work that leads to hard data. “There have been enough essays and position papers,” he said.

Doug is right–new insights could be in the offing. But, like him, I’d say, “Where’s the beef?” (The “beef” constitutes data and evidence.)

Doug has written a paper that summarizes and rebuts many of the supposedly serious challenges to modern evolutionary biology, and you can get it free by going to this link. The screen provides three items that can be read on SpringerLink for free; the second is Doug’s chapter.  Just go to “Download Sample Pages 2 PDF” at the bottom of the page, and you’ll get Doug’s whole paper for free. If you’re an evolutionist, this is a must-read paper, but I’d suggest that evolution-friendly readers have a look as well. The whole paper is worth reading, but if you want to just get Doug’s take on challenges to modern evolutionary theory, read section 4, from pages 53-70.

Finally, Suzan Mazur, a journalist who has long touted a total scrapping of modern evolutionary theory, wrote a piece about the conference at PuffHo (wouldn’t you know?) called “Pterosaurs hijack Royal Society Evo meeting.” It’s a bizarre piece, all over the map, but Mazur seems to have given up her crusade against modern evolutionary biology, now appearing to be on another (and better) crusade against Templeton’s funding of this kind of nonsense.

Bottom line: Modern evolutionary theory is not in trouble–far from it. Maybe sometime a New Paradigm will come around, but this isn’t it. The noise we heard from London, outside of a few papers by people like Futuyma, is the noise of Templeton’s prize horses jockeying for money and fame.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

November 23, 2016 • 6:30 am

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, November 23, and in the U.S. it’s the day before Thanksgiving, so most people will either be taking off today or working in a desultory way. And for once it’s a decent food day: National Espresso Day. I’ll celebrate by putting an extra shot into my quotidian latte. It’s also Buy Nothing Day, an American protest against the rampant consumerism that follows Thanksgiving (“Black Friday”).

On this day in 1963, according to Wikipedia, “The BBC broadcasts the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ (starring William Hartnell), the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world’s longest running science fiction drama.” Someone said yesterday that episode was broadcast on November 22, so we have a divergence of opinion. On this day in 1992, the first smartphone, the IBM Simon, debuted at COMDEX in Las Vegas. How far we’ve come since then; in my childhood I thought that phones that showed video of your caller were something of the far distant future—the Jetson Era.

Notables born on this day include José Clemente Orozco (1883), Susan Anspach (1942 ♥, one of the stars, along with Jack Nicholson, of a favorite movie of my twenties, “Five Easy Pieces”), and Bruce Hornsby (1954, known for his excellent song “The Way It Is”, which you should definitely watch here) Those who died on this day include Roald Dahl (1990) and Junior Walker (1995). Let’s remember Walker with his most famous Motown hit, “What does it take (to win your love)” (1969). I love the saxophone bits and the way Walker says, “Gonna blow for you now” before his solos. This is a great song; here’s a live version from Letterman (the original recording is here).

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili Saw Something:

Hili: I have a vision.
A: And what were you eating?

p1050112-1 In Polish:
Hili: Mam wizję.
Ja: A co zjadłaś?
And out in Winnipeg, the snow has fallen. Staff Taskin sends a video of his first encounter this year with the white stuff. Her notes:

Here’s a video of Gus’s first foray. This one is really for the diehard Gus fan, it’s a bit long, but he’s so slow sometimes. I do like the bit when he really doesn’t want to put down his front right paw and the bit at the end when he zigzags back toward the house in my footprints.

Finally, someone made a TrumpCat by putting a ginger tabby’s collected fur on his head. It was inevitable.

https://twitter.com/RandomGraham/status/801126965981822976

Kelly Houle’s Darwin cards available again

November 22, 2016 • 3:45 pm

I’ve sent out tons of Kelly Houle’s fantastic Darwin greeting cards, and was disappointed to learn that they were out of stock and that no more were available. Here’s what they look like: they are gorgeous, with Darwin’s famous “I think” phylogeny, and the memorable phrase from the final paragraph of The Origin—all in heavy raised gold ink. The plastic box with a gold band comes with matching heavy envelopes and a gold sticker to seal each one. (The cards are blank inside so you can write your own Darwinian message.)

Click image to enlarge:

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After I hectored Kelly about this for a while, she finally contacted the printer and found out that the price has gone up, but they’ll print a run if she can get 10 boxes or more pre-ordered.  You can order them at this link on eBay at Kelly’s site for $45 a box of 8 with envelopes and gold seals, along with $5 shipping,  An extra: if you order one or more boxes before midnight GMT on Sunday, 11/27, you will be entered into a drawing for one of Kelly’s original paintings.

Kelly didn’t ask me to put up this post, but I think evolution people should have a chance to get these unique cards. They make an extra-special greeting to the naturalists and evolution lovers in your life. And they’re a gazillion times better than the ordinary card you’d pay $5 for in a store.

Out today: Ali Rizvi’s “The Atheist Muslim”

November 22, 2016 • 3:13 pm

Ex-Muslim Ali Rizvi‘s new book. The Atheist Muslim, is out today, and if you click on the screenshot you can go to the Amazon link.  I read the book in draft form and provided a blurb for the back cover, so I obviously think it’s worth reading. It’s an interweaving of his personal journey away from Islam combined with more theological and political arguments against the religion—from one who was an adherent. Since none of the Four Horsepersons was a Muslim, this is a good addition to the New Atheist literature—a complement to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s more personal narratives in her first two books (and her more theological/political arguments in her latest).

There’s a review at Publisher’s Weekly that is pretty much spot on.  Read the book more for the arguments against Islam, which are very good, than for the personal stuff.

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Trump arouses the sleeping Nazi-lovers

November 22, 2016 • 12:45 pm

When Trump was elected, most of us expected that we’d see an upsurge of racist acts and words, and that indeed has happened. It’s as if suddenly the darker side of many Trump voters was given license to come out into the sun.

It’s reprehensible, but nothing is more reprehensible than what happened in Washington on Saturday, when the right-winger and white-supremacist Richard B. Spencer, described as a leader of the “alt-right” (I don’t know what that term really means) gave a display of such disgusting racism before his followers that it turns my stomach. Indeed, it was nothing more than a paean to the Nazi version of Nordic superiority, complete with Nazi words (“Lügenpresse,” or lying press, “hail Trump”), criticisms of the Jews, and even Hitler-style salutes, which Spencer incited in the 3-minute video below.

Here are a few articles from today’s New York Times article on the meeting

In 11 hours of speeches and panel discussions in a federal building named after Ronald Reagan a few blocks from the White House, a succession of speakers had laid out a harsh vision for the future, but had denounced violence and said that Hispanic citizens and black Americans had nothing to fear. Earlier in the day, Mr. Spencer himself had urged the group to start acting less like an underground organization and more like the establishment.

But now his tone changed as he began to tell the audience of more than 200 people, mostly young men, what they had been waiting to hear. He railed against Jews and, with a smile, quoted Nazi propaganda in the original German. America, he said, belonged to white people, whom he called the “children of the sun,” a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were “awakening to their own identity.”

As he finished, several audience members had their arms outstretched in a Nazi salute. When Mr. Spencer, or perhaps another person standing near him at the front of the room — it was not clear who — shouted, “Heil the people! Heil victory,” the room shouted it back.

Have a look at this 3-minute excerpt of Spencer’s speech from The Atlantic:

More quotes:

But as the night wore on and most reporters had gone home, the language changed.

Mr. Spencer’s after-dinner speech began with a polemic against the “mainstream media,” before he briefly paused. “Perhaps we should refer to them in the original German?” he said.

The audience immediately screamed back, “Lügenpresse,” reviving a Nazi-era word that means “lying press.”

Mr. Spencer suggested that the news media had been critical of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign in order to protect Jewish interests. He mused about the political commentators who gave Mr. Trump little chance of winning.

“One wonders if these people are people at all, or instead soulless golem,” he said, referring to a Jewish fable about the golem, a clay giant that a rabbi brings to life to protect the Jews.

Mr. Trump’s election, Mr. Spencer said, was “the victory of will,” a phrase that echoed the title of the most famous Nazi-era propaganda film. But Mr. Spencer then mentioned, with a smile, Theodor Herzl, the Zionist leader who advocated a Jewish homeland in Israel, quoting his famous pronouncement, “If we will it, it is no dream.”

. . . “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”

But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.”

“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.

More members of the audience were on their feet as Mr. Spencer described the choice facing white people as to “conquer or die.”

If Trump is truly a leader, he will denounce this kind of odious racism, strongly, immediately, and in no uncertain terms. He did say this through a spokesman:

A spokesman for Donald Trump’s transition team sent a statement Monday night saying the president-elect condemns racism, following an “alt-right” conference over the weekend where white nationalists cheered his election.

“President-elect Trump has continued to denounce racism of any kind and he [was] elected because he will be a leader for every American,” Bryan Lanza, a spokesman for the Trump-Pence Transition said in a statement, according to CNN.

“To think otherwise is a complete misrepresentation of the movement that united Americans from all backgrounds.”

Well, that’s better than nothing, but imagine what Obama would have said. We’ll be facing a lot more of this, I suspect, and it’s now our brief to call it out, to protest to Trump, and insist that he denounce the wave of hatred that his candidacy has unleashed.

University of Virginia students and faculty object to the University President using quotes by its founder, Thomas Jefferson

November 22, 2016 • 11:11 am

It was only a matter of time before one of the greatest Presidents and statesmen this country ever had, Thomas Jefferson, came under the Knife of Offense because he owned slaves.  And indeed, that was a terrible form of oppression, one that caused Jefferson himself some cognitive dissonance, but he kept his slaves till he died, and of course fathered children by one of them. But he also called slavery an “abominable crime.” Many famous people engaged in morally repugnant activities, but I think we have to understand them, though not excuse them, as adhering to “regular behavior” at the time. And we shouldn’t, I think, let these flaws completely efface the good works such people did.

But now, as reported by The Washington Post, reason.com, and the University of Virginia (founded by Jefferson) student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, University of Virginia students have told the University’s president that they didn’t like his use of a Jefferson quotation in emails to the faculty

Several professors on Grounds collaborated to write a letter to University President Teresa Sullivan against the inclusion of a Thomas Jefferson quote in her post-election email Nov. 9.

In the email, Sullivan encouraged students to unite in the wake of contentious results, arguing that University students have the responsibility of creating the future they want for themselves.

“Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that University of Virginia students ‘are not of ordinary significance only: they are exactly the persons who are to succeed to the government of our country, and to rule its future enmities, its friendships and fortunes,’” Sullivan said in the email. “I encourage today’s U.Va. students to embrace that responsibility.”

The temerity of President Sullivan! And if that weren’t enough, she’d quoted Jefferson before. From the Post:

It wasn’t the first such email quoting Jefferson that Sullivan had written to the student body. As The Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga reported, a week earlier she sent one out after someone scrawled the word “terrorists” on the door of a dorm room where two Muslim students resided.

In that letter, Sullivan advocated peace on campus, writing, “Thomas Jefferson was the first American president to wrest power from an opposing party, yet he also provided a potent precedent for the peaceful transfer of power and the healing of a divided nation.”

Well, there’s nothing in either email about slavery, but merely quoting a slaveowner (who happened to have written the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom) was enough to arouse the Perpetually Offended.  Noelle Hurd, an assistant professor of psychology at the University, drafted an open letter to the President, which was cosigned by 469 people:

Dear President Sullivan,

We are writing in response to the e-mails you have sent out to the university community in regards to civility in the current political climate. We appreciate you taking the time to acknowledge the issues facing our community and to encourage unity and inclusivity. We also wanted to take the opportunity to provide you with some constructive and respectful feedback regarding your messages.

We are incredibly disappointed in the use of Thomas Jefferson as a moral compass. Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves. Other memorable Jefferson quotes include that Blacks are “inferior to the whites in the endowments of body and mind,” and “as incapable as children of taking care of themselves.” Though we realize that some members of our university community may be inspired by quotes from Jefferson, we also realize that many of us are deeply offended by attempts on behalf of our administration to guide our moral behavior through their use.

In the spirit of inclusivity, we would like for our administration to understand that although some members of this community may have come to this university because of Thomas Jefferson’s legacy, others of us came here in spite of it. For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotes undermines the messages of unity, equality, civility, and inclusivity that you are attempting to convey. We understand desires to maintain traditions at this university, but when these traditions threaten progress and reinforce notions of exclusion, it is time to rethink their utility. Thank you for your time.

I presume that means that we should no longer quote the Declaration of Independence, for it too was written largely by Jefferson. And remember that Darwin, though an abolitionist, saw blacks as inferior to whites, so we shouldn’t quote The Origin, either, should we?

As the Post further reports, at least one signer said that quoting Jefferson was sufficient to “undo progress.” I don’t believe that for a minute; it’s just cant from the Regressive left:

Politics professor Lawrie Balfour, who also signed the letter, said that a simple mention of Jefferson is enough to undo progress — a cycle that’s oft repeated during her decade and a half with the school.

“I’ve been here 15 years,” Balfour told the Cavalier Daily. “Again and again, I have found that at moments when the community needs reassurance and Jefferson appears, it undoes I think the really important work that administrators and others are trying to do.”

Here’s Sullivan’s in response to the letter (my emphasis):

In the long-standing tradition of open discourse, UVA faculty, staff, and students are free to express their opinions, as they did in a letter to me last week. I fully endorse their right to speak out on issues that matter to all of us, including the University’s complicated Jeffersonian legacy. We remain true to our values and united in our respect for one another even as we engage in vigorous debate.

Words have power. To quote any person is to acknowledge the potency of that person’s words. In my message last week, I agreed with Mr. Jefferson’s words expressing the idea that UVA students would help to lead our Republic. He believed that 200 years ago, and I believe it today. Quoting Jefferson (or any historical figure) does not imply an endorsement of all the social structures and beliefs of his time, such as slavery and the exclusion of women and people of color from the University.

We respond to the challenges of our times, and equity and inclusion are urgent leadership issues today. UVA is still producing leaders for our Republic, and from backgrounds that Mr. Jefferson could not have anticipated in 1825, when he wrote the words that I quoted. Today’s leaders are women and men, members of all racial and ethnic groups, members of the LGBTQ community, and adherents of all religious traditions. All of them belong at today’s UVA, whose founder’s most influential and most quoted words were “. . . all men are created equal.” Those words were inherently contradictory in an era of slavery, but because of their power, they became the fundamental expression of a more genuine equality today.

I think that’s a good response.  Remember that morality has changed, as Steve Pinker documented so well in The Better Angels of our Nature. What is considered unacceptable by today’s lights was often acceptable in the past. That doesn’t mean that if someone thought hard and long about slavery back then, and witnessed it, that they should have been okay with it. What it means is that morality is not only biological but cultural, and the cultural part, which changes over time, is transmitted to us from our parents, peers, and other important figures. If they tell us that slavery is okay, as many did in Jefferson’s day, then we’ll be brought up thinking that it’s okay, and it would be hard to think your way out of it—just as it’s hard to think your way out of long-inculcated religious beliefs and moral strictures. Now that we’ve realized that slavery is not okay, it has become unacceptable to own slaves or speak about other groups the way Jefferson did.

We have to remember these issues before we begin demonizing figures of the past. And we have to balance their indoctrination by their milieu against the genuine good that people like Jefferson did. It’s simply unacceptable to ban any quotes by Jefferson because they undo progress. They don’t. One can hold progressive views on some issues (i.e., Jefferson’s views on religious freedom, which are now part of American law) and ones now seen as immoral on other issues.  Words like those below are the crying of spoiled children, even if they be faculty; and they’re a failure to recognize that the world, especially when we consider the values of the past, is complicated.

For many of us, the inclusion of Jefferson quotes undermines the messages of unity, equality, civility, and inclusivity that you are attempting to convey.