A Better Way to Reject Common Descent

@jongarvey… when you write something like this… you apparently have little appreciation for the craziness you unleash… for no good purpose at all.

You owe your readers the WHOLE story…

I don’t think in one blog post I could do justice to the concept of formal causation on the one hand, or on the other to the various theories that still have traction nowadays in the way of laws of form, cytoplasmic and membrane inheritance, and a number of other things that suggest genetics is a part of the biological story, not the whole of it.

But to give a flavour, consider it from the viewpoint of divinely guided evolution, since we are agreed on that. If we think of that as teleological - that God has in mind, say, Homo sapiens as a “goal”, rather than wondering what some series of mutations might do, then like any idea we have as humans, it will have both a top-down and a bottom-up character.

For example, maybe you think of a great idea for a recipe - a spicy tequila milkshake, say. You think first of the “idea” - the flavour, the look, etc - as a top-down concept (so God, perhaps, thinks of man as a whole). When you come to work out how to make it, you start from the bottom up, with milk, a bottle of tequila, some cinnamon etc, but the whole time your efforts in the kitchen are guided by the overall “form” that drink is intended to take.

In the case of God producing a life-form, the analogy breaks down in that a living organism is not simply a mixture built from a recipe like a milk-shake, but it remains a single, integrated organism. And we don’t know how that works.

So in some way the creature starts as a “holistic” idea in God’s mind, and ends as a “holistic” entity that embodies that idea. This adds a whole layer of significance that is entirely absent from the secular form of genetic evolution - in which the organism is simply the sum of individual genetic changes that happen to work together - literally a molecular machine.

So I suggest that this difference ought to be reflected in our descriptions, as theistic evolutionists, and that it may well also be reflected in reality in the sense that we might expect some physical unifying principle to be involved in life and evolution as well as merely the gene-centred mechanisms that now predominate.

It’s worth remembering that this is nothing new - for many years before the modern synthesis science preferred orthogenesis over Darwinian evolution, structuralism still has a good number of champions, and we already know of non-genetic modes of inheritance, whose importance is hard to judge because all the research money is in genomics.

Everything may go back to incredibly complex interactions of genes - but why should we assume that as a matter of faith, any more than we must assume that human consciousness and free will must go back entirely to incredibly complex interactions of brain cells?

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@jongarvey,

Evolution was a coherent interpretation of speciation… even before we discovered DNA. This should be remembered when trying to defend Speciation as a natural process… and that discovering roles for non-genomic factors does not overturn speciation itself.

No - but it could make a big difference to how much speciation is dependent on genetics. And remember that since phylogenesis has the appearance of being top down rather than bottom up, we have more than just speciation to account for.

That is, rather than seeing in the fossil record the divergence of species until they form orders, then classes, then phyla, as you might expect, we see new phyla apparently splitting off new classes, and orders, and it is these that diversify into genera and species (which either remain more or less the same or go extinct). The biggest differences come first.

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My point on the dangers of genocentrism is made nicely in a video kindly posted by Paul Nelson at BioLogos, from Gerd Muller at the Royal Society Extended Synthesis symposium a while ago - he gave the introductory address. I don’t seem to be able to upload it here, so here’s a link to his post at BioLogos.

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Here is what @pnelson wrote:

One more link, and then I must bow out of this discussion. For those who like listening to podcasts, this November 2016 talk in London by University of Vienna evolutionary biologist Gerd Muller is worth a listen:

Muller opened the three-day Royal Society symposium on the “extended evolutionary synthesis,” attended by several Discovery Institute fellows (Ann Gauger, Steve Meyer, me, and others) and also some BioLogos staffers (Jim Stump was there, as I recall). At about 8:55 in this talk, Muller draws a sharp distinction between what the Modern Synthesis (textbook neo-Darwinism) may explain, versus what it needs to explain, but doesn’t. Macroevolution – the origin, for instance, of animal body plans – is unexplained by current theory.

As I think we have covered many many times, the Modern Synthesis is not neo-Darwinism. That theory of evolution was falsified a long time ago. Remember our discussion on this?

This was a speech delivered by a Scientist in a symposium called to review whether Modern Synthesis needed to be extended.
Perhaps in his field of expertise, that theory of evolution is still in vogue.
I have read papers written recently which seem to think natural selection can do all kinds of wonders, especially in the field of phylogenetics… there are claims of “positive selection” creating unbelievable convergences. Perhaps, your end of the scientific woods is more progressive.

I was interested to hear Muller responding to a commenter who said, “All this has been around for a long time…”, in some cases, even before the modern synthesis. He pointed out that mentioning it is not the same as acting upon it in ones work.

At BioLogos yesterday I responded to a moderator claiming that evolution is “change of gene frequency”… I mentioned the discussion Joshua had there a couple of years ago, and cited the “common decent” definition from NCSE’s website. But actually, Googling “evolution definition” to find that source turned up more variations on “allele frequency” than “common descent” or “descent with modification.” The Synthesis is still alive and wheezing, especially at BioLogos.

But it’s true - population genetics may have abandoned adaptationism, but it still reigns, and seems to take little account of (for example) systems biology, or to account for, for example, coordinated variations (also said on the audio to have been recognised even by Darwin).

Incidentally, the moderator in question graciously backtracked, saying that her own knowledge of the science comes from children’s books and the wise folk commenting at BioLogos, rather than reading scientific papers. Maybe that’s why some of us get into so much trouble there.

EDIT: I’m pleased to say Jeff Schloss turned up and corrected both the poor definition of evolution, and the myth that “macroevolution” and “microevolution” are terms only used by Creationists. Both the points I made before being shot down by the wise folk at BioLogos!

I may have a go at the myth that “devolution” doesn’t ever appear in the literature either at some stage.

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@jongarvey

I’m sure you will find incidents when someone who should know better writes about Devolution.

So ? It is a bankrupt concept… one that is far more often used by Creationists.

Well, I found some instances in the literature - whether they should know better is above my pay grade.

It’s usually been used in cases where a function gained is then lost. Of course, in the context of evolution conceived as directionless and short term, it’s an oxymoron. But then terms are often used to get an idea across, rather than in a completely technical way.

For example, the common idea of “increased fitness” is a bit dodgy if one defines differential fitness and differential survival, in which case a creature is fit because it survives, and it can’t survive any more than that.

@jongarvey,

Language can be a clumsy tool.

A scientist can easily end up using a phrase that will only later reveal some underlying presuppositions that are actually wrong… for example intermediate forms.

The lay population frequently misunderstands the nature of the comparison.

Too right, but there are those only too keen to allow the misconception to continue for the good of Educating the Masses in the Right Path. My discussion of “intermediate forms” v “transitional forms” began with someone brandishing a paper showing that we now know giraffes did gradually evolve long necks because at long last an intermediate species had been found… meaning, in fact, a species not closely related that happened to have a slightly longer neck than others in its genus.

My interlocutor insisted that intermediate species can provide valuable information to scientists. And so they can. But not about confieming the gradual transition from short necked giraffid to long-necked giraffe.

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@jongarvey

  1. I fixed my typo. I wrote “LAY puplation” and autospell turned it into “late population”.

  2. I don’t know a scientist that thinks intermediate vs. transitional is a meaningful distinction.

What they say is that the term transitional leads to confusion because the term IMPLIES an unintended meaning.

Well, I guess I don’t know as many scientists as you, but anyway it’s a meaninful distinction logically. My grandparents are short, and I am tall. My cousin is medium-sized. It may be of some significance, but it doesn’t show my parents are medium-sized.

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@jongarvey

You have converted the IMPLICATION into an intended meaning.

But when a paper uses the term TRANSITIONAL… it is almost ALWAYS intended as a synonym for “intermediate”!

How many of the late, woops, LAY public realise that “transitional species” are unrelated to ancestry?

The term “intermediate” refers to the physical features of the species, not their placement in a direct lineage. Transitional and ancestral are two different things, so they shouldn’t be confused. A transitional fossil is simply a fossil with intermediate features or a mixture of features from two other taxa. As Darwin explained:

“In looking for the gradations by which an organ in any species has been perfected, we ought to look exclusively to its lineal ancestors; but this is scarcely ever possible, and we are forced in each case to look to species of the same group, that is to the collateral descendants from the same original parent-form, in order to see what gradations are possible, and for the chance of some gradations having been transmitted from the earlier stages of descent, in an unaltered or little altered condition.”–Charles Darwin, “On the Origin of Species”
(quoted from T_aquaticus’s reply to me at BL)?

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@jongarvey

For every peer-reviewed article that you might find that treats INTERMEDIATE in a different way from TRANSITIONAL…

I’m confident I could find 10 articles that had no intention of invoking such a distinction… and originally simply used the terms interchangeably.

@swamidass,

I am actually a little fuzzy about your 9 points for a better way to reject Common Descent.

@Revealed_Cosmology… maybe you can help. There is a lot if subjunctive mood in Joshua’s post. Is it essentially describing your position?

I think I need a translation!

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That’d be like “coming to peace” with the theory of gravity without affirming that rocks fall down when you let go of them.

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