Loopy accommodationist statement of the month

December 8, 2012 • 1:13 pm

Accommodationists will do almost anything to avoid admitting that there’s a conflict between science and faith.  For instance, the Galileo episode, which clearly involves someone being punished for contravening religious authority and scripture, is often fobbed off as merely a political dispute, an internecine squabble between religious authorities, or the wrath of a satirized Pope.  It’s always “much more complicated than a conflict between science and faith.” And so the real conflict gets buried in sociological and political nuance.

But sometimes it’s not more complicated—as in the case of creationist opposition to evolution. Creationist attempts to teach Genesis in public school biology classes clearly represent a conflict between Christianity and science.

Or do they? Not according to accommodationist Audrey Chapman, who has found a way to pretend that this, too, isn’t really a “conflict.” As she notes (reference below):

“Nor can the twentieth-century controversy between strict creationists and evolutionists be reduced to the scenario of conservative Christians opposing science.  Instead, the creationists, some of whom are scientists themselves, specifically oppose the social, moral, and theological implications of human evolution.”*

Now there’s a distinction without a difference! (Chapman, once associated with the egregiously accommodationist Program of Dialogue on Science, Ethics, and Religion of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS], is now a bioethicist at the University of Connecticut.)

Did you see this part: “The creationists, some of whom are scientists themselves”? No real scientist can be a creationist; that phrase is there to buttress the pretense that the conflict is bogus.

The book from which this quote was taken, which includes essays by theologians and reputable scientists, strongly espouses a “dialogue” between science and faith.  But what would be the purpose of that? The only thing science can contribute to faith is the overthrowing of its tenets. On the other hand, religion has nothing—I repeat, nothing—to contribute to science.  Nous n’avons pas besoin de cette hypothèse!  Calls for such dialogue are invariably meant to give unwarranted credibility to religion.  Looks good on the c.v. for faith, not so good on the c.v. for science.  What we need is not dialogue, but a monologue, one in which religion remains silent while science tells it that there’s no evidence for its claims.

Speaking at another AAAS conference (the organization always has a goddy-coddling symposium at their annual meeting), Steven Weinberg refused to endorse such a concordat:

In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.

_________________

*The quote comes from p. 506 of Chapman, A. R.. 2004. Evolution and the science and religion dialogue. (Pp 4-23 in Miller, J. B. [ed] 2004. The Epic of Evolution: Science and Religion in Dialogue). The book gives the proceedings of a meeting held at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago under the aegis of the AAAS, and funded largely by (who else?) the Templeton foundation.

The folly of “The folly of scientism”

December 8, 2012 • 9:13 am

It’s open season on scientism again!

The New Atlantis is an online journal of science and technology (I haven’t heard of it, but I don’t get out much), and this month features an article on scientism by Austin L. Hughes, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina (where I’ll be speaking in early February as part of a 3-university “South Carolina evolution and barbecue tour”). Hughes is an evolutionary biologist with wide-ranging interests, and I’ve really liked some of his papers.

Unfortunately, his ten-page essay in The New Atlantis, “The Folly of Scientism,” is not one of them.  It’s a strongly-worded critique of scientism, which Hughes conceives of as scientists’ claim that they only their fields can provide true knowledge of the universe, and can also answer questions that aren’t really in their bailiwick:

Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. [Peter] Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.”

Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of answering the questions that once were addressed by philosophy? This subject is too large to tackle all at once. But by looking briefly at the modern understandings of science and philosophy on which scientism rests, and examining a few case studies of the attempt to supplant philosophy entirely with science, we might get a sense of how the reach of scientism exceeds its grasp.

(By the way, you militant atheists might want to read Atkins’s great 6-page essay that so angered Hughes. It’s called “Science as truth” and can be dowloaded here; if you can’t get it, email me for a pdf. Atkins, a very famous chemist, is a British national treasure whose popular books and technical books are best-sellers but who is not generally recognized for his “strident” atheism.)

The big problem with Hughes’s essay is that despite his claim that there are other ways of apprehending truth beyond science—ways that involve the three areas of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology—he gives not a single example of a question that those disciplines have answered.  And, indeed, although practicioners of those disciplines may suggest answers to questions like “what is the meaning of life?” or “is it ever permissible to torture someone?,” those answers are subjective, not universally agreed on, and don’t involve “truth” in the same way scientists conceive it. One reader, responding to a suggestion that “truths” be divided into “objective (e.g., scientific) truths” and “subjective truths,” argued that we should just call these categories “truth” and “opinion” respectively!

A characteristic of articles on “scientism” is their loud proclamation that there are other ways of knowing truth, combined with a complete failure to cite any questions that been answered by these other ways. Hughes’s essay falls right into this pattern. Oh, he disses science a lot, accusing it of often failing to progress (he argues, for instance, that behavioral ecology “oscillates happily” and never makes progress, a statement that is dead wrong), and of enabling bad stuff like Lysenkosim in the Soviet Union and eugenics in countries like Germany and the U.S.

Hughes even drags in Alvin Plantinga’s argument that science can’t explain why human can do science, for natural selection hasn’t really given us the refined abilities to discern truth the way that modern scientists do. But that’s bunk. Natural selection has given us faculties to perceive truths about what is outside of our brains, and also bequeathed us brains big enough that we can refine our methods of discerning what’s out there in ways that keep us from deceiving ourselves. That involves prediction, replication, and observation or experiment by multiple people. The equipment for our doing science was installed by natural selection, but of course the actual doing of modern science is a spandrel, not an adaptation that was produced by selection.

Hughes makes lots of fancy-pants talk about Quine, philosophy, and positivism, but in the end his essay is a dog’s breakfast that leaves the reader with no idea of what the “other ways of knowing” really are, and what questions they have actually answered. Instead, one comes away with a disquieting feeling that science isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But Hughes’s critique of science (viz., his attack on behavioral ecology) is unconvincing.

His conclusion (you can read the essay if you wish, but I doubt you’ll learn much) is this:

In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer.

In other words—and we’ve heard this before, usually from religious people—scientism is a superstition, a faith akin to religious belief.  But this statement bears no weight since Hughes hasn’t proffered a single question that’s been answered by metaphysics, ethics, or other “ways of knowing.” In fact, he winds up by issuing an idle threat about what will happen if we hubristic scientists continue to ignore those other ways:

Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises — from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics — seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.

In other words, scientism will destroy the credibility of science.  LOL!

I’m not sure whether “scientism,” if it even exists (which I doubt), pretends to be something other than what it is. If it does, what does it pretend to be? Hughes is whistling in the dark here, for nothing is going to happen even if a few scientists do make exaggerated claims about the boundaries of their field.  Science will progress as it always has, answering one question after another, while religion and other “ways of knowing” remain stuck in the mire.  The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Evolution cover boy on a science magazine

December 8, 2012 • 5:37 am

I doubt that this will make many hearts flutter, and there’s no centerfold, but the latest issue of the wonderful Spanish-language science magazine Órbitas Cientificas is all about evolution—50-odd pages worth!. It also has yours truly on the cover, and a longish interview with me (in Spanish).  You can download the whole magazine, which is a free online monthly, here.

Portada 10

Now I have no idea what I said, because the phone interview was transcribed into Spanish and I forgot, but Spanish-speaking readers will understand (let me know if I said anything stupid; I think I managed to get in a few words about religion). Some of the anti-theistic parts of the interview that didn’t make it into Órbitas appear in the magazine’s ancillary site, Sin Dioses (“without Gods”; an atheist/skeptical forum for Spanish-speaking readers).

More important is the emphasis on the truth of evolution throughout the magazine, which is not the easiest thing to convey in a religious country where evolution is a bit anathema (the magazine is published in the Dominican Republic). Check out the list of the “10 most common errors about evolution” on pp. 58-59 (my interview follows it). There’s also a piece on my Chicago colleague and paleontologist Paul Sereno, a dinosaur hunter often called “the modern Indiana Jones”.

The magazine is edited by the energetic and science-loving Glenys Álvarez, and is aimed at the general public, trying to convey hard science—and skepticism—in an accessible and fun way.  The contributors are professionals who write about all manner of topics, including philosophy, quantum mechanics, entomology, and so on.   If you’re a Spanish speaker/reader, you can sign up for free monthly alerts by sending an email to editoraneutrina@gmail.com , which will let you know when a new edition is out. Thanks to Glenys for conducting and translating the interview.

Caturday felids: treadmill cat and a honking big cat

December 8, 2012 • 5:01 am

There are a fair number of treadmill cats on YouTube, but this is the first one I’ve seen in which the owner runs along with her human.  The YouTube notes identify both:

The author of the video and the owner of an amazing cat Lyusya is Marina Panikhina.

And here’s an astonishingly large cat—a Maine coon cat, of course. Meet Rupert from Australia:

Rupert 1

As MSNBC notes:

Check out the photo gallery above; you can that see Rupert is no ordinary cat. Weighing in at a staggering 20 pounds, the feline is only 2 years old and is expected to pack on another 11 pounds before he’s fully grown, which would make him one of the world’s biggest cats. With three Australian “Cat of the Year” awards under his flea collar, this big boy has loads of street (and stage) cred. Although his owner boasts of his “magnificent, wild look,” we wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley — he’ll be the size of an adult bobcat when he’s grown. But chillax: This Maine coon cat is more likely to curl up in the chair next to you than attack.

Moar Rupert:

Rupert 2

h/t: Karl

Marijuana legalized for personal use in Washington State

December 7, 2012 • 9:44 am

As most of you have heard, a new law just went into effect in the state of Washington legalizing marijuana not for medical use, but for personal use. As CBS News reports:

A new law is now in effect — the first of its kind in the U.S. — allowing adults to own marijuana for non-medical use.

Supporters in Seattle wasted no time celebrating. At the stroke of midnight, there were cheers as marijuana officially became legal in Washington State. [JAC: see below for photo.]

Washington voters passed the law partly because of the efforts of one well-traveled resident of the state. Rick Steves, who for 20 years has hosted his popular public television travel show, was prominent among those campaigning for legal marijuana. Steves has said, “I’ve spent a third of my adult life in Europe hanging out with people who think it’s wacky for locking up people for smoking pot.”

In a show from Amsterdam, Steves gave a preview of what could soon be coming to cities and towns in Washington. He says America should not fear. “Consumption is not going to go up a lot,” Steves said. “By every statistic, our government’s and the Dutch government’s, Americans smoke more pot than the Dutch and the Dutch have the most liberal laws on file.”

Seattle’s City Attorney Peter Holmes also pushed for the new law. He said, “All we have done with prohibition is fill our jails and to make drug dealers quite rich.”

He says legal marijuana — even with high taxes — will be cheaper than illegal marijuana. Holmes said he “absolutely” wants to put drug dealers out of business.

Now that marijuana is legal in Washington, the state is going to start collecting taxes on it. The state hopes to collect some $500 million a year.

And think of how the sales of munchies like potato chips and brownies will skyrocket!

Oh, and Rick Steves! He always struck me as a straight arrow on his t.v. show, but I’d heard that he was in favor of legalizing marijuana. I agree with him, of course: compared to drugs like tobacco and alcohol, marijuana is much less harmful, is not a gateway to stuff like heroin, and should be legalized. If we’re going to legalize alcohol, with all its health risks, then there’s no valid reason to prohibit marijuana.

Only two caveats here:

And while it is now legal for those 21 and older to buy marijuana, it is not yet actually legal to sell it. The state still has to write rules for licensing marijuana retailers.

and

But there is one catch: marijuana remains illegal under federal law.

We’ll see what the feds do, but if they’re smart they’ll leave the state alone.

Meanwhile, here’s a shot of the celebrations in Seattle yesterday:

Only kidding—it's FOG, folks!
Only kidding—it’s FOG, folks!

h/t: Al for photo

Another antiselectionist, Stuart Newman, surfaces at PuffHo

December 7, 2012 • 7:05 am

This time I’m not going to discuss Jim Shapiro’s misguided dismissal of natural selection (I’m done with him), but, like the Lernaean hydra, when you cut off one antiselectionist head, another pops up elsewhere.  This has just happened at PuffHo, where Stuart Newman, a professor of cell biology and anatomy at New York Medical College, has taken arms in support of Shapiro’s views. (He mentions Shapiro explicitly.)

In his new column in the Science section, “Where do complex organisms come from?“, Newman’s answer is this: “Not from natural selection, but from the self-organizing properties of molecules and tissues.”  This is a popular answer among contrarians, creationists, and those who know little about evolution, but it’s wrong. It’s wrong because “self-organization” cannot explain adaptations: those features of organisms which have obviously appeared to aid their survival and reproduction.

I’m sure you’ve noticed that I’m losing patience with those biologists who claim that something is deeply wrong with modern evolutionary theory, which needs either a drastic overhaul or a complete junking. Now, it’s clear that there are new discoveries every day that affect our view of how evolution works (horizontal gene transfer is one, the conservatism of gene regulation across long-diverged taxa another), but I haven’t seen anything that makes me think that natural selection is an outmoded way to think about the evolution of adaptations. And yet that’s what is claimed not only by religious people like Alvin Plantinga and philosophers like Tom Nagel, but also by biologists like James Shapiro and Stuart Newman. I’ll start believing them when they show real problems with the idea of natural selection and, especially, propose a credible process that can explain the evolution of adaptations like mimicry, hearts, and flippers.

I’ve divided Newman’s argument into three parts:

Newman’s first contention: natural selection can explain minor evolutionary changes (“microevolution”), but not big ones (“macroevolution”). Sound familiar? That’s a recurring theme of creationists like Michael Behe and Jon Wells. Newman says this:

While it may be an adequate scenario for the refinement of some already-existing characters — the beaks of finches, color intensity of moths — the “microevolutionary” process envisioned by Darwin and his successors does not account in any plausible way for “macroevolutionary” patterns such as the differences between oysters and grasshoppers, fish and birds. In fact, adaptationist gradualism, though still popular in some scientific circles, is increasingly questioned and found wanting by evolutionary biologists working in an expanded set of disciplines. [JAC: Who are those evolutionists? He doesn’t name any.]

But why not? Newman gives no explanation why selection can’t explain macrovolution. And I see no reason why adaptive differences that characterize major taxa, like phyla, must have evolved by a process different from than that changing the beak sizes of finches. Extrapolated over millions of years, natural selection can wreak huge changes in organisms. The evolution of whales from a land-dwelling artiodactyl (even-toed mammal) took about eight million years; this is documented in the fossil record. That’s a pretty short time for substantial change. Our own evolutionary divergence modern chimps and bonobos wasn’t much shorter—it took about six million years—and that involved far less remodeling of the body plan. As the paper of Nilsson and Pelger on eye evolution demonstrates (reference below), one can evolve complex characters in a remarkably short period of time: about 86,000 for a camera eye in their case.

Newman’s second contention: thanks to the labors of developmental biologists and geneticists, we now know that macroevolutionary changes involve saltations and “niche construction” rather than natural selection.

By incorporating embryonic development and its underlying physico-genetic processes into evolutionary theory, investigators are learning that abrupt alterations in body plan and other aspects of organismal form can occur in response to environmental change or gene mutation in ways that affect multiple members of a population and exhibit consistent patterns of inheritance. Furthermore, there is increasing emphasis on the resourcefulness of organisms and their ability to construct their own niches. Having a “phenotype” (the outward manifestation of biological identity), very different from that of one’s progenitors is no longer considered disqualifying for survival.

“Niche construction” is the idea that organisms, by their own behavior, can change the selection pressures on themselves, and in that way forge their own ecological niche.  This is a reasonable idea for some (but not all) cases of adaptation. The classic example is the beaver: by evolving behaviors to cut down trees, dam streams, and build lodges, they have constructed a new environment for themselves (the lake and lodge), which undoubtedly exerts new selection pressures on beaver morphology and behavior.

This idea has occupied biologists recently, and is an intruiguing one. But it is not in any way a replacement for natural selection, any more than is the view that the first “fishapod” that crawled on land suddenly, by that behavioral quirk, exposed itself to a bunch of new selection pressures involving living on land. In fact, the idea that many new life forms begin with a nongenetic change in behavior was suggested by the evolutionist Ernst Mayr in his classic 1963 book, Animal Species and Evolution.

Note that natural selection is still a critical part of “niche construction” theory. It’s not a replacement for natural selection, but the view that, by virtue of their own behavior, animals can expose themselves to forms of natural selection that they wouldn’t experience otherwise.

So how does Newman think that “adaptations” or “macroevolutionary differences” evolve? The paragraph above doesn’t give us much help, for the critical first sentence makes no sense unless you’re a Lamarckian.

Newman’s third contention: macroevolutionary differences result from the self-organizing properties of molecules and tissues. Natural selection is not involved.

By the end of Darwin’s life new physical theories were being put forward to explain abrupt and large-scale changes in such materials, and by extension, the character and transformations of organisms and their organs.

Note how the next paragraph, which follows right after the sentence above, does not explain “by extension” how evolution proceeds. It explains, perhaps, how some mechanisms of development work:

Here is a partial list of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century physical concepts that have proved relevant to developmental processes (with the phenomenon they explain, at least partly, in parentheses): dynamical systems (ability of cells having the same genome to switch between different “types”), phase separation of liquids (capacity of embryonic tissues to form several non-mixing layers), chemical oscillations (propensity of embryonic tissues to organize into tandem segments), “Turing-type” reaction-diffusion systems (the formation in tissues of regularly spaced structures like feather and hair buds, pigment stripes, or the bones of the limb skeleton). All or most of these processes (termed “mesoscale,” being most relevant to objects the size and texture of cell clusters), along with several others, are harnessed and mobilized by the secreted products of specific genes during embryogenesis in every one of the animal phyla (e.g., arthropods, mollusks, nematodes, chordates and so forth).

Yes, maybe a “Turing-type” diffusion system can explain how stripes are formed in zebras or reef fishes (we’re not sure about this yet), but that’s a proximate explanation: how the genome produces a phenotype. It doesn’t provide an ultimate explanation: why does the genome produce that phenotype in the first place? And if the phenotype is an adaptation, like the stripes of zebras may be (again, there are ideas about this, but we’re not sure), then you still have to invoke natural selection as a cause of those “Turing-type” patterns, i.e., the particular evolutionary process that has altered the genes to produce such patterns.

Finally, Newman gives a list of observations about evolution that, he says, can’t be explained by natural selection or conventional evolutionary theory. Here it is:

What can the existence and action of such protean generative processes tell us about the origin of organismal complexity? First, let’s look at some of the expectations of the natural selection-based modern synthesis: (i) the largest differences within given categories of multicellular organisms, the animals or plants, for example, should have appeared gradually, only after exceptionally long periods of evolution; (ii) the extensive genetic changes required to generate such large differences over such vast times would have virtually erased any similarity between the sets of genes coordinating development in the different types of organism; and (iii) evolution of body types and organs should continue indefinitely. Since genetic mutation never ceases, novel organismal forms should constantly be appearing.

All these predictions of the standard model have proved to be incorrect. The actual state of affairs however, are expected outcomes of the “physico-genetic” picture outlined above.

ORLY?  Let’s look at Newman’s three contentions that supposedly violate the “standard model” of evolution. On examination, none of them hold up.

1. Gradualism.  Modern evolutionary theory does predict that complex adaptations (like the evolution of whales from land-dwelling artiodactyls) can’t occur instantly; they take thousands to millions of years. And that’s what we see in the fossil record. Remember, the Cambrian explosion, which produced many phyla still extant today, was not “instant” but probably took between 10 and 50 million years. That is a long time—certainly a time during which selection, if it were strong (as many paleobiologists think), could produce diverse phyla. Just think of all the changes that humans have wrought via strong artificial selection in plants and animals in the last 10,000 years, and that’s only about .03% of the duration of the Cambrian explosion.

Now there is a strain of thought in modern evolutionary biology that evolutionary change can proceed more rapidly and jerkily than people like Darwin thought—that it need not involve a gradual and insensible change in form over millions of years. It can be faster than that, with change sometimes not occurring at all. Indeed, Allen Orr and I were one of the first people who suggested this possibility (Orr and Coyne 1992; reference below), and of course rapid and sporadic evolutionary change was an important part of Eldredge and Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium.

Perfect gradualism—the continual and insensible change of phenotype due to changes in many genetic factors—is no longer a tenet of evolutionary biology, though a modified form of gradualism still is (“complex adaptations take time; they don’t occur instantly or within a few generations”). But we’ve seen no adaptive changes in the fossil record or otherwise that force us to reject natural selection as the causal process.  A million years is a long time!  And we have no evidence that any complex feature evolved instantly (by “instantly” I mean, say, a thousand years).

2.  Conservatism of genes.  Newman thinks that the long periods of evolutionary time separating major groups predict that there would be no similarity between the genes controlling development among these groups. Yet genes like the Hox genes are generally conserved among phyla separated by hundreds of millions of years.  The gene Pax6, for example, controls eye development in both mice and fruit flies, groups separated by nearly 800 million years of evolution. But does this refute natural selection or any tenet of evolution? Certainly not! If a gene is useful in recruiting other genes to produce a feature, natural selection in the form of “stabilizing selection” (selection retaining genes that are useful for something), can maintain them.  And Newman doesn’t mention that Hox genes are the exception: the genetic differences between flies and mice involve many more drastically changed or new genes than conserved ones.

3.  Evolutionary theory predicts that organisms should evolve indefinitely: “novel evolutionary forms should constantly be appearing.”  This is Newman’s most ridiculous “refutation” of evolutionary theory.  Whether natural selection causes adaptive change depends on two things: whether a change would facilitate the organism’s reproduction, and whether there is genetic variation for that change.  While genetic variation for most traits is ubiquitous, it’s not always true that it’s in the organism’s best “interest” (I’m speaking in shorthand here) to change. Organisms like deep-sea fish, for example, may be well adapted to their environment, and that environment might not change much over time! So why on earth would they constantly be spawning new forms?

Second, it’s certain that a lot of evolutionary change creating “novel forms” is happening, but it’s simply too slow for us to see.  The kea of New Zealand may be evolving into the world’s only carnivorous parrot.  The hippo may be becoming fully aquatic, and in a few million years will no longer be tied to the land, but evolve into a sort of freshwater whale, like the manatee. If Newman had seen Indohyus 48 million years ago, he’d have said “Why aren’t new forms developing?” But it took the small deerlike Indohyus 8 million years to evolve into modern whales. Humans have been categorizing life for only a few thousand years; evolution takes millions. It’s simply dumb to say that “novel evolutionary forms aren’t appearing.”  And does Newman know what is happening in organisms that live in the deep sea, or underground? Where does he get the notion that the production of novel species and taxa has simply stopped?

In short, none of Newman’s three “observations” mandate that we toss modern evolutionary biology on the scrap heap along with the idea of natural selection.

Further, there are predictions that natural selection makes which Newman’s “physiochemical” explanation doesn’t, and these predictions are met. Here are three:

1. If there is no genetic variation, there will be no evolution, for both natural selection and genetic drift require variation for evolutionary change.  And this is met: inbred or highly genetically uniform species are resistant to artificial and natural selection.

2. “True” genetically-based altruism, in which genes mandating that behavior sacrifice their ability to replicate (i.e., organisms do something without their genes getting anything in return) should be nonexistent. (“Reciprocal altruism”, like blood regurgitation in vampire bats, doesn’t count, as the organism that sacrifices also reaps benefits.) Indeed, I know of no cases of true altruism in animals outside of humans, where it’s almost certainly a cultural rather than genetically hardwired behavior. Chalk another one up for natural selection.

3. We should not see “adaptations” in one species that are useful only for a second species.  One example I use is the presence of nipples on one animal (say, a wild pig) that can be used only to suckle young of another species, say a wild deer.  Natural selection predicts that that can’t happen, and we never see such things. In cases where species have “adaptations” that help another species, natural selection predicts that the first species should benefit too. And that is what we see in the many cases of mutualisms like cleaner fish and their “cleanees” or symbiotic flagellates in the gut of termites.

Newman’s final paragraph, which sums up his thoughts, seems impenetrable and garbled to me:

With a 19th century notion of incremental material transformations no longer relevant to comprehending the range of organismal variation that has appeared throughout the history of life on Earth, the other pillar of the standard model can be discarded along with it. Specifically, if, as affirmed by niche construction theory, phenotypically novel animals or plants can invent new modes of existence in novel settings, rather than succumbing to a struggle for survival in the niches of their origin, there is no need for cycles of selection for marginal adaptive advantage to be the default explanation for macroevolutionary change.

Yes, niche construction can create new forms of selection, but by itself does not and cannot create new genetically-based adaptive change.  And niche construction can’t always work, because some animal behaviors simply cannot change important aspects of their environment. Does the color of a polar bear’s coat affect the reflective properties of ice and snow?  Does the shape of a chamois’s hoof affect the granitic structure of the Swiss Alps? Does the shape of a fish affect the hydrodynamic properties of water? In many cases animals simply must adapt to static and unchanging features of their environment.

At any rate, Newman’s argument for discarding modern evolutionary theory is, like Shapiro’s argument, totally unconvincing. And it irks me no end that PuffHo continues to give voice to such people, misleading the public about the solidity of evolutionary theory.

_____________

Nilsson, D.-E., and S. Pelger. 1994. A pessimistic estimate of the time required for an eye to evolve. Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. B 256:53-58.

Orr, H. A., and J. A. Coyne. 1992. The genetics of adaptation: a reassessment. Amer. Natur. 140:725-742.