I’m sorry that you have so misinterpreted the writings of Gould and others. I’m especially sorry that you have so completely misunderstood evo devo. Don’t know what I can do about it, though.
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Gould’s been dead for some time now and Dawkins hasn’t been an active scientist for decades. I’ve attended hundreds of professional talks about evolution and read scads of papers. In all of those, Gould may have been mentioned a handful of times and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a reference to Dawkins. The controversies you’re referring to have very little to do with what most evolutionary biologists are interested in.
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What’s wrong with the search function here? I think I just pulled up every post written by @Mercer with ‘debat’ in it. Are you saying that that’s flawed somehow, or are you unaware of the search function?
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I am citing the best sources. And it’s you who are misinterpreting the writings of Gould. He and Niles Eldridge invented the punctuated equilibrium theory. And I understand his approach to moral progress very well, am exactly on the same page there as Michael Ruse, world expert on evolutionary science, its implications for human behaviour, and what is known in moral philosophy as ‘The Darwin Wars’. It’s you who, with your scientistic mindset, think in an alarmingly reductionist way. Either that or you have totally misunderstood Gould. And I do understand evo devo and it’s contribution to our plasticity as a species. I won’t be responding to you again “Never argue with fools or fanatics!” 
So far you haven’t actually cited any sources. You have only dropped names. Your assertion that you understand science better than the scientists is a problem for you. But feel free to flounce.
Now, if you want to know what PE is, you have to read Eldredge N., Gould S.J. Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. In: Schopf T.J.M. editor. Models of Paleobiology, 1972. p. 82-115. PE is the application of Ernst Mayr’s theories of speciation to the fossil record. Mayre proposed that coevolved gene complexes created stasis in species most of the time, and that change could only be affected by breaking up those complexes in “genetic revolutions” in small, peripherally isolated populations. PE has two main elements: 1) stasis is the usual condition during a species lifetime and 2) most evolution is coincident with speciation. Now, Mayr’s ideas are not supported by evidence and are generally rejected by evolutionary biologists, leaving PE without a mechanism. Further, it’s hard to support contention 2 from the fossil record, since biological species can’t easily be distinguished, and paleontology relies on morphospecies. In that light, PE is reduced to stasis and the claim that morphological change is coincident with morphological change. Moreover, at no point was PE advanced as an explanation for the Cambrian explosion.
As for human evolution, the very idea of stasis and punctuation in our lineage is unsupported by the data too. There is in fact an unpunctuated change in a number of important characters, including brain size.
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It is “debate”, sort-of. What it usually is, is disagreement followed by argument. Disagreement about what the data implies. But it is overwhelmingly not in the form of debates.
I just checked his academic profile. He is not an expert on evolutionary science, but a philosopher of science. I don’t think it’s hard to figure out the difference.
If you think Gould supports your claims, a few quotes from any of his writings would be really helpful in seeing if this is really the case.
John might just take your own advice.
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Either I’m using the wrong search function, or I don’t know how to use the one that is here. I’ve several times tried to find phrases or words from across the site, in order to avoid spending hours finding some old discussion I want to reference, and have come up blank or nearly so. Can you direct me by a link to the page with the search function, and then tell me how you selected the combination of Mercer and debate? I know how to do this on Google Advanced Search, but not with the software here. I didn’t see the ability to combine terms like that, the last time I looked.
Of course, the problem with BioLogos is that they buried most of the old comments when they switched to their current system, and so whatever search capacity they have can reveal only more recent comments text, and much of the juicy stuff is from several years ago.
Anyhow, whether I unintentionally misrepresented Mercer’s past comments or not, we’ve now all agreed that scientists debate things, so we’ve made some progress. 
More importantly, scientific quandaries are resolved with high-quality data, not debates.
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Agreed. So suggesting that the data, once obtained, will automatically settle things, a claim I’ve sometimes heard from scientists on the internet, is an oversimplification. Sometimes the data don’t settle things, and intelligent practitioners can disagree over what it proves. Which of course makes intellectual life all the more interesting.
Agreed, not in the form of two people standing behind podiums on opposite sides of a stage, and each having their allotted number of minutes for statement and rebuttal, etc. I don’t know anyone who ever suggested that scientific dispute proceeded in that way.
Its not an oversimplification. Insufficient or poor quality data don’t answer scientific questions to the extent most scientists want. For example, there are different ways to interpret the results of the double-slit experiment in physics, leading to the debate about what quantum mechanics really means. These different interpretations persist due to the absence of extra data to rule out one or more of them. When Darwin brought forth his theory of evolution by natural selection, it was hotly debated among scientists. Fast forward to 2020, it is no longer a debate as to whether evolution by natural selection happens, because it is strongly supported by very robust and high-quality data from independent sources.
The point is clear. With crappy or little data on some particular problem, we argue, otherwise, we agree.
That’s what cranks want. AIDS deniers, for example, constantly challenge scientists to public debates to create the impression that there is debate among scientists on whether AIDS is really a consequence of HIV, when in reality that is not the case. The typical response from scientists to such invitations is to decline and inform them that whether HIV causes AIDS or not can only be resolved via scientific enquiry and not through formal debates in public.
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I just clicked on the magnifying glass dohicky in the upper right, then on ‘options’, and entered both a search topic and something in ‘Posted by’. It may be you have to make separate searches for ‘debate’, ‘debates’, and ‘debating’.
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The key word in my statement was “automatically.” It’s an oversimplification to assume that more–and more accurate–data, are always enough to give a decisive answer to a question. There are areas of physics where the precision of data is to several decimal points, but where physicists still aren’t in agreement about what the data show about nature. I suspect that many of the biologists here could point to examples from biology as well.
But enough of this. We all agree that data, empirical facts, etc. are a necessary part of science and that any arguments scientists make must take into account the facts. So when scientists debate over things, they debate armed with facts – observations, experimental data, and so on. No argument from me against that. But it’s not the raw facts, no matter how accurate, that produce the science – the systematic knowledge of nature. It’s the stringing together of the facts into a coherent picture of how nature works that makes science science, as opposed to stamp-collecting or bean-counting.
Why do so many statements on this site sound like product advertisements? Sentences like this just roll off the keyboards of many people here. Not contesting the conclusion here, just noting something about the rhetorical style. 
It is not an oversimplification. DNA competed with proteins as an explanation for heredity a long time ago, because the data at the time was pretty ambiguous. As more and better data emerged, it became clear that DNA was the magic molecule. That’s how data resolves scientific issue.
Despite our great advances we are limited in some ways. This means we will never be able to extract enough data to better understand some aspects of the natural world, implying that questions revolving around such problems may never get good answers, leading to more arguments among scientists.
I disagree. There are disagreements among physicists in places where data is insufficient, unreliable or not available at all. Did the universe have a beginning? Is there a multiverse? These are questions for which we have no data. Of course, physicists disagree on the answers to these questions because they have no way, yet, of confirming their proposed answers.
Its the same in biology. For some time, it was difficult to determine whether Chimps or Gorillas were more closely related to humans. The data then didn’t do a good job at telling us what the right placement was. That story is different today, as better data has consistently placed chimpanzees as our closest relative among the great apes.
Its worth repeating. Scientists don’t debate or disagree when data points strongly in a particular direction.
First, science is a process and also a body of knowledge.
Second, it is raw facts that determine what gets accepted into or ejected from the scientific body of knowledge. These facts are useful for hypothesis building and testing. When the facts (repeatable and observable) support a hypothesis, that hypothesis stands and explains that aspect of nature being investigated. If the hypothesis survives further testing, it may go on to become a theory. Theories are useful because they have explanatory power and make predictions. These predictions are tested by looking at more facts.
Evolutionary theory began with Darwin observing and documenting the morphological changes experienced by the finches on the Galapagos Island. After gathering facts or data about the finches, he constructed his hypotheses of evolution by natural selection, as well as common descent of all organisms. Both hypotheses were tested by looking at more facts. Needless to say, both are powerful theories now.
Cell theory also had a similar origin. It started from observing dead cells in a cork under a microscope leading to the hypothesis that all life forms are fundamentally composed of cells. This hypothesis was extensively tested by looking at more facts. Today it is a universally accepted theory (are there cell theory deniers? Just curious).
Theories explain facts, but are built on those facts.
Well its not rhetorical. It has happened many times in the history of science
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I didn’t say that such things never happen in science. I think they happen quite often.
Again, the crucial word in my statement was “automatically.” You aren’t letting the word soak in, and thus you aren’t giving it its due weight, before you react.
It’s often the case that new information tips the balance one way or the other. It isn’t always the case. Sometimes new information, even gobs of it, still leaves theorists debating. Even when the information is very precise, arrived at by careful experiment, etc. Doubling or even quadrupling or octupling the body of confirmed scientific knowledge about a phenomenon doesn’t always or necessarily drive all scientists in a field to agree completely about causality. There isn’t an automatic movement from: “We have acquired much more knowledge than we used to have” to “We no longer disagree about anything.”
Sometimes, also, in certain fields, e.g., of physics, a theory may be preferred not because there is any more data in support of it than in support of alternatives, but because it is more “mathematically elegant” or the like. I’ve heard trained physicists say such things. Perhaps biologists don’t, but if so, this goes to show that the word “scientist” isn’t unequivocal, and can include a range of practices and attitudes.
Your notion of science seems to be one that you have arrived almost exclusively by taking high school and undergraduate courses in science. I was on that path, and I know the way you were trained in such courses, and I know what is not discussed in such courses. It wouldn’t hurt you to read a little bit of the history and philosophy of science, and of the sociology of science, to get a broader picture of how scientists outside of your subject-area behave, and how scientists in the past, and scientists in other cultures, have behaved. There is much more going on in the thought of scientists, or at least of some scientists, and some of the greatest ones, than the simple experimental empiricism that you portray. Your account – which is entirely familiar to me, as it was my catechism as a young man, 40 years ago – is pretty much “motherhood” stuff, the classical portrait, beloved of popularizers, of what science is supposed to be like. And it’s not that your account is entirely wrong, but it’s not the whole story. Read some Kuhn, Feyerabend, Polanyi, etc. Read some Burtt, Lovejoy, Hooykaas, Oakley, etc.
Some people here, when it has been suggested that life started with a “first cell,” have indignantly protested that the first life was almost certainly sub-cellular. I won’t give any names, lest I be once again accused of paraphrasing what someone said without being able to prove it, but anyone who has been paying attention to our endless debates about the origin of life here will admit that such a claim has been made. And even today, a virus – though whether it is “alive” or not is debatable, and depends on definition – is sub-cellular. So it’s not even clear that all life today requires cells, and even if it were the case today, it’s not necessarily true of the past.
Of course, that the overwhelming amount of life on earth today, and in the fossil record, is cellular in basis, nobody doubts. Scientists do often reach consensus. I never suggested anything different.
PS – your “history” of Darwin’s thought and the finches is inaccurate and approaching the mythological, or at least the hagiographical. I’ve read the very short and sketchy passage in the Voyage of the Beagle on the finches, and I’ve read two full academic biographies of Darwin that discuss the progress of his evolutionary thinking, and many other related articles and books besides, and you’re promoting a sub-scholarly popular account. Actually, most of what we think we know about the finches and evolution doesn’t come to us from Darwin but from the work of later people such as the Grants, whose detailed work has been back-read into Darwin’s very slim account. And we know that Darwin was already aware of evolutionary ideas before he ever set foot on the Galapagos. The finches were only one of thousands of things he observed on the Beagle voyage that solidified his views, and were hardly the “Eureka moment” that popular history makes them out to be. Again, a little reading in serious scholarship regarding the history of science could not do you any harm.
I did not ignore your use of the word “automatically” and if you read through my previous replies, you would see I never argued that data automatically settles scientific problems. Resolving scientific questions takes times.
True. There are some aspects of the natural world for which we may never get any data for. In those cases, speculations and arguments will mostly dominate discussions.
For other aspects, current data is simply not enough to satisfactorily answer the disturbing questions. Future improvements in technology or thinking usually help generate plentiful and clear data to resolve any lingering questions.
This misses the point. Science proceeds by testing hypotheses. Hypotheses make specific claims which must be tested to verify their validity. In the time of Darwin, the hypothesis was that natural selection drove organisms to adapt to their different environments. This hypothesis was tested, again and again, and today the data overwhelmingly supports it, establishing it as a successful theory. No evolutionary theorists debates the existence or role of natural selection anymore. Today, we recognize that natural selection is not the only evolutionary force acting on populations, and now these theorists argue about the relative contribution of natural selection to historical and real-time evolutionary events. Interestingly, this question is currently tackled on a case-by-case basis and we know which forces tend to dominate under specific conditions in some cases. However, in other cases, it is simply not clear which forces dominate because of either insufficient or crappy data, leaving theorists to argue.
We saw something similar play out with hydroxychloroquine in the early days of the pandemic. When preliminary data came out on the efficacy of the drug, there was some confusion on whether it really worked. Some researchers said it worked, others said it didn’t because the data wasn’t good enough to tell us what was really the case. Today it is a different story. The best clinical data available from properly done randomized controlled trials have consistently shown the drug to be no no better than placebo for mildly or severely ill Covid-19 patients, leading to its removal from the list of drugs recommended by health agencies to treat Covid-19.
Merely acquiring data doesn’t sway scientists, but acquiring good data to properly test hypotheses does. When a hypothesis passes verification again and again, it gets to a point where it is no longer debated on.
Give examples.
No Eddie, I no longer read only textbooks or just regurgitate what I heard my professors say back then in university. My reading list now includes actual scientific papers and I am quite conversant with the history of many scientific discoveries and theories. The successful theories I know of started out from the level of hypothesis, followed by extensive testing which spanned decades leading to their establishment. At the early stages of all these theories, debates raged among scientists on many aspects because of insufficient or low resolution data.
For example, after DNA was sufficiently shown to mediate heredity, the next question centered on the pattern of its replication. Molecular biologists argued about the exact mode of DNA replication, with several proposing different hypotheses. The hypothesis suggesting a semi-conservative mode or pattern of DNA replication eventually won out and no one today argues about it.
In medicine, this happened with the practice of bloodletting which was used at the time as cure for virtually all ailments. It took years, after the gathering of good data, to stop the dangerous practice. Of course, early on, doctors debated on its efficacy and safety due to the paucity of data.
I could go on and on. Using data to solve issues is what got me enamored with science. From my little experience and what can gleaned from the history of science, there is no doubt that data can always solve scientific disputes, but in the real world, scientists don’t get always the golden data they wish for. So arguments persist among them on those undecided issues.
Good reading suggestions. I will look into as many as possible.
It depends on how you define life. Cellular life certainly didn’t exist on the early earth at the start, just the organic molecules that compose them. If you view self-replicating RNA as alive, then its obvious life began at a subcellular level. If you don’t, then you would have to wait for these self-replicating molecules or proto-metabolic reactions to form the first protocells, which may be regarded as the first life forms.
Please point out exactly the parts you think are “approaching the mythological”.
I believe I said something to this effect. See the emphasized segment below:
I knew what I was talking about.
It is not news that Darwin did not invent ideas about evolution, but he was the one who formulated it in a way (by carefully documenting the morphological changes experienced in population of finches and their distribution on the islands) that made it acceptable to scientists. its in this sense, that evolutionary theory began with him. I did not clearly state this because I assumed you knew and would not call me out on it. My bad.
We’re actually agreeing on most things, and you didn’t need all the examples, since I’ve already admitted that very often science proceeds as you say it does. So I won’t respond point by point here.
Regarding Darwin, here is what you wrote:
This is misleading about the sequence of Darwin’s thought on evolution (his evolutionary theory did not begin there, nor did evolutionary theory generally begin there, since it was already around), and about the importance of the finches in the genesis of Darwin’s thinking (which the statement greatly overrates). These are the points I wanted to make. But I don’t want to spend more time on this.
Regarding your question, I would gladly answer it, but I can’t recall which physicists, mathematicians, chemists, astronomers, etc. that I have conversed with over the past 45 years asserted or touched on the idea of “mathematical elegance” as a strong indicator of truth. And even if I could, the names of the people would mean nothing to you, many of them dead now, and none of them from any university you have attended or in your scientific field. And in any case, you could always say that anecdotal evidence “doesn’t count.” Nor can I remember exactly where, in all the books on the history and philosophy of science, and biographies of scientists etc., that I have read, the idea of “mathematical elegance” has been raised, though I’ve seen it discussed many times. So I don’t see the point in debating my statement. If you don’t believe I ever heard or read these things, if you think I’m just making it up, you’re making a rather un-Christian assumption about the motivation of another Christian (I think you have only recently become agnostic, so I’m sure you still have some Christian sentiments). On the other hand, if you are not questioning my intellectual honesty on this point, but are just eager to find such statements because they sound interesting to you, then I’m sorry I can’t document my statement at the moment. If I come across a book or article where the idea is expressed, I will gladly send it along to you via a private message here.
Thanks for the conversation, and now my time has absolutely run out for this side-discussion. I must get back to my editorial duties.
Since we are wrapping up, these are probably my final remarks.
First, I agree that an uninformed person could think I meant that ideas about evolution first began with Darwin from reading my statement of interest at face value, but like I said, I was responding to you and just assumed you would understand and ignore my loose writing. For the sake of clarity, what I really meant was that Darwin formally began evolutionary theory by applying a scientific approach to it.
Second, the Island finches were extremely important to Darwin because they enabled him generate testable hypotheses of evolution by natural selection and common descent. With his preliminary findings suggesting the plausibility of natural selection and common descent, he provided scientists the opportunity to further scrutinize his claims. The research done by the Grants and hundreds of other scientists only fortified his ideas, cementing them into the broader framework of evolution.
I am a Catholic Christian but agnostic about issues we can’t verify in Christianity.
Anyway, I wouldn’t label you dishonest, because I would have no grounds for that too and because I have been in your shoes in the past. But you made a strange claim though, so it demands good evidence. Maybe other physicists here might back you up on it. Otherwise, its remains an unsuppported assertion.
Its been a pleasure. God bless.
Eddie frequently uses straw-man fallacies and false attributions.
And the consensus in those cases is, “We don’t know yet.”
Several examples would be useful here.
Eddie doesn’t like hypothesis testing.
Most of those who said it worked were either not researchers or quacks.
Eddie likes to frame everything as training, while showing contempt for hands-on experience and productivity, suggesting that he has little scholarly productivity to show for his training.
Eddie doesn’t seem to want to read any scientific papers. In fact, he just realized that PubMed is free to use after offering lack of access as a fake excuse for not reading the primary scientific literature:
Hey, Eddie, that took me less than 10 seconds to find with the search function that you are unable to use. That late realization about PubMed is consistent with decades of deliberate, active avoidance of the primary scientific literature.
I think that such active avoidance is the only way a belief in IDcreationism can be maintained by an otherwise rational person.
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