I wish. There may be some out there that I am not aware of. But this pushes students to really think about things - how evolution and development intersect, how to test very different models, etc. It’s a challenging thought “experiment” (as if thinking about experiments might itself be an experiment).
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Oh, I see. I misread your original statement. I thought you were making a statement of fact about Arabidopsis evolution, not offering a hypothetical for pedagogical purposes.
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Heh heh. If I’m on your advisory committee, you have just seen your qualifying exam question. 
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There are a number of tests for selection at the molecular level, and they all assume neutrality as a null hypothesis.
I think the discussion about the common ancestry of humans and other primates got a bit muddied by trying to figure out (or pin down) just who holds to which position. Here is my attempt at a question Axe should have asked:
If humans and other primates share a common ancestry, and given Josh’s affirmation of the neutral theory, which features of humans might be the results of neutral evolution? Any that define what it means to be human?
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That was very much the approach of his book. While he does attempt to make a quasi-scientific argument there, what he mostly does is urge his reader to use “common sense” (in the most slack-jawed-yokel sense of the expression) to see what a load of codswallop it all is. I found that really quite bizarre. There are ordinary demonstrable facts of physics that defy my “common sense,” but I don’t think I’d get very far arguing to a physicist that demonstrable phenomena can’t actually be happening because I find them unacceptably non-intuitive. Rather, I just have to accept that certain explanations that don’t make much sense to me are, nonetheless, apparently true.
He says at one point:
“However, if the decisive matters in this discussion belong not to the technical disciplines but rather to common sense and common science, as I’ve claimed, then this picture of nonscientists as spectators at a sporting event – where most players are wearing the Darwin jersey – is all wrong. When it comes to simple intuitive reasoning, the playing field is level, and everyone is qualified to play.”
This is one of those marvelous statements that’s absolutely true in one sense, and absolutely false in every useful sense. If all that’s involved, start to finish, is intuitive reasoning, then we are all standing in the same spot and it’s hard to say who’s right. But one of the merits of science is precisely that it provides us tools by which the products of our intuition may be evaluated, and if that’s involved, then the strength of our arguments will depend not on the power of unaided intuition but upon the facts and inferences upon which they rest. No amount of argument will undo a fact.
And the book just gets weirder and worse as he goes. One of my favorite forehead-slap moments is this statement, which we have discussed previously here, where he attempts to characterize the views of mainstream biology:
“The current stance is that evolution was so successful that it perfected life to the point where modern forms no longer evolve, making the whole process even further removed from the category of observable phenomena.”
Wow. Words fail, especially when used by Doug Axe.
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That sounds to me a lot like something Ann Gauger has said about Axe’s research:
Exactly. As I have often said, the reason we have science is because human intuition is fallible.
If you can’t refute a theory, invent a new theory and attack that one.
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Of course, creationists criticize intuition when scientists use it. I recall having quite a bit of fruitless back-and-forth with one who had seized upon something Mayr had once said about formation of hypotheses in paleontological work; this fellow felt that Mayr was essentially admitting that paleontology was all speculative story-telling, but what he did not understand was that Mayr was saying that while one may FORMULATE a hypothesis intuitively and speculatively, one does not then TEST a hypothesis in that manner. I don’t seem to be able to lay my hands on the original quote from Mayr at the moment, but it really wasn’t the slightest bit unclear in context.
So, intuition is bad if it leads to undesired answers; however, intuition is good if it leads to desired answers. Science is wrong if it leads to undesired answers; however, science is right if it leads to desired answers. I suppose that there is a certain sort of consistency in that, but it’s not the most admirable sort.
Indeed. It’s very much like the old game of “I define ‘Darwinism’ as meaning such-and-such, and by this definition, ‘Darwinism’ is wrong.” Of course, it’s never stated in these terms, but that’s what so many of the DI books are: pretend that evolutionary theory consists of a handful of simple dogmas (and ONLY of those simple dogmas, admitting of no supplementation or amendment), leaving out both a good explanation of those subjects and any reference to any of the additional things evolutionary biologists know. Once you’ve done that, “evolution” so defined will be false, and, congratulations: you’ve debunked a ‘theory’ to which nobody actually subscribes.
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I enjoyed this dialogue. To me it felt like it had the right ingredients for advancing peaceful science. In particular, the authenticity and openness of Dr. Swamidass’ approach seemed to show through. I look forward to a second dialogue.
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3 posts were split to a new topic: Giltil Asks about the Origin of Life and Evolution