You’re going far beyond what those people say. A better way, because more weaselly, is that they’r unconvinced that those mechanisms completely explain some major changes. And if I recall, Erwin and Valentine are more interested in explaining why changes of the magnitude seen in the Cambrian explosion haven’t happened much since, not why they happened then. They also think that those particular changes happened over a period of around 25-30 million years, much longer than you seem to credit.
Not familiar with Ron Amundson, and I don’t recall what Koonin’s views are.
It’s not at all clear to me that they’re not talking about species selection. In fact as I re-read the quote I think they are.
So I think you’re misrepresenting their statement when you try to levy it to argue against microevolutionary processes as being capable of explaining " the rise of major new organismal form"
What you mean by “The rise of major new organismal form” =/= what they are referring to wtih “the events of the Cambrian”, because “the events of the Cambrian” really can mean they’re referring specifically to patterns in the rates of extinction and speciation as seen in the cambrian.
So no, I’m not buying it.
No I think it’s actually incumbent upon you, as a person levying quotations from these authorities in rebutting @Michael_Okoko, to make sure the people you’re quoting are actually saying the same things you are. It’s not my job to hunt down that book and determine if you’re correctly representing the material therein, it’s your job to show that you really are. You’re the one quoting them.
That’s not clear to me at all, and I now strongly suspect you might not even know what they’re talking about in that quote, nor it’s relation to what @Michael_Okoko said.
You seem to be invoking that quote from their book in an attempt to argue that certain large-scale morhological transitions cannot be explained by microevolutionary processes, but nothing in the quotes you have supplied can really be said to actually support that statement. I think they’re talking about patterns in the rates of extinction and speciation, rather than the scale of morphological change being accounted for by things like mutation and natural selection.
I’m not concerned about your frustrations with having your statements scrutinized for their merits or veracity. I’d much rather you just proceed to show that you actually know what Erwin and Valentine are speaking about specifically in that quote.
Short comment: if Michael injudiciously used a universal (‘all’ or ‘no’) in describing human opinions (something he’s acknowledged) then sure, it’s probably quite easy to find counterexamples, if that’s your only goal.
If it is, though, it’s probably not worth a whole thread.
If you’re seeking to use his mis-speaking to make a more substantive claim about the inability of ‘microevolution’ to explain speciation or the diversity of life, though, I’m not sure the sources quoted make that case.
On what basis did you come up with that, based on the quotation I provided? Don’t you think it’s irresponsible to impute contents to a book you have not read?
I think my interpretation of their stated words is reasonable, but if you don’t trust it, note that I showed that the same idea can be found in other authors as well.
I suspect you just don’t like the idea, and that you disagree with any evolutionary theorist who takes it seriously. But that’s irrelevant to the question whether any theorists do take it seriously.
Reasoning correctly about the meanings of words and concepts.
If they are not saying what I think they’re saying, but instead are saying what you appear to think they’re saying, then they’re not making sense. And I suspect that they’re actually making sense, and that as a corollary you are wrong about what they are saying, and wrong about it constituting support for your statement that microevolutionary processes do not explain “the rise of major new organismal form”.
What an utterly ridiculous question for you to ask, since you’re the one who brought the quote here instead of the entire contents of the book. Thus you must have been perfectly okay with people imputing the contents of the book from that quote alone into support for your statement.
I suspect you’re saying this to try to distract from the entirely legitimate point I am making, that you are likely misrepresenting the author’s statement from what you have quoted, into supporting a statement of your own which they didn’t actually make. So perhaps you can go and find some more of the material surrounding the quote you lifted from the book, so that we can properly assess the meaning and context of it.
I’m calling your bluff. Please provide some context for the quoted bit. If you have a phone, perhaps you can take pictures of the page on which that quote appears, and the previous and folling one too. If you are really right, I will concede the point and admit that I was wrong.
I wasn’t bluffing, because I honestly thought that the passage meant what I said it did. Especially given that the idea is found in other evolutionary theorists, as I documented. I may have misunderstood the passage, but I’m not “bluffing”, which suggests fakery or dishonesty. The meaning of the passage struck me as obvious.
I checked the chapter you quoted from in Koonin’s Logic of Chance, and he is criticizing the Modern Synthesis advocates not for merely extending the mechanisms of microevolution to macroevolution, but because they believed it was sufficient to explain all macroevolutionary patterns (which we all clearly agreed could be wrong, so why did you quote Koonin?).
On page 14 (Logic of Chance) he attempts to list the principles of the Modern Synthesis:
To proceed with the further discussion of the evolution of evolutionary biology and its transformation in the age of genomics, it seems necessary to succinctly recapitulate the fundamental principles of evolution that Darwin first formulated, the first generation of evolutionary biologists then amended, and Modern Synthesis finally codified. We return to each of these crucial points throughout the book.
On page 16, he lists the 5th principle of the Modern Synthesis, which argues that processes which drive microevolution are also the only ones which operate on a macroevolutionary scale:
5. This key principle is logically linked to gradualism and uniformitarianism: Macroevolution (the origin of species and higher taxa), is governed by the same mechanisms as microevolution (evolution within species). Dobzhansky, with his definition of evolution as the change of allele frequencies in populations, was the chief proponent of this principle. Darwin did not use the terms microevolution and macroevolution; nevertheless, the sufficiency of intraspecies processes to explain the origin of species and, more broadly, the entire evolution of life can be considered the central Darwinian axiom (or perhaps a fundamental theorem, but one for which Darwin did not have even an inkling of the proof). It seems reasonable to speak of this principle as “generalized uniformitarianism”: The processes of evolution are the same not only throughout the history of life, but also at different levels of evolutionary transformation, including major transitions. The conundrum of microevolution versus macroevolution is, in some ways, the fulcrum of evolutionary biology, so we revisit it repeatedly throughout this book.
Then on pages 18-19, he lambasts the Modern Synthesis proponents for their dogmatic stance on the sufficiency of microevolutionary mechanisms to explain macroevolution and other reasons:
The Modern Synthesis of evolutionary biology completed the work of Darwin by almost seamlessly unifying Darwinism with genetics. As it matured, Modern Synthesis notably “hardened” through indoctrinating gradualism, uniformitarianism, and, most important, the monopoly of natural selection as the only route of evolution. In Modern Synthesis, all changes that are fixed during evolution are considered adaptive, at least initially. For all its fundamental merits, Modern Synthesis is a rather dogmatic and woefully incomplete theory. To name three of the most glaring problems, Modern Synthesis makes a huge leap of faith by extending the mechanisms and patterns established for microevolution to macroevolutionary processes; it has nothing to say about evolution of microbes, which are the most abundant and diverse life forms on Earth; and it does not even attempt to address the origin of life.
I hope its obvious you did not interpret Koonin’s words well. He nowhere argues that microevolutionary mechanisms cannot produce major morphological changes or other macroevolutionary patterns, but that it may be insufficient to explain all cases.
Evolutionary biology has advanced beyond the modern synthesis and new mechanisms have been integrated into evolutionary theory.
I would not say you read and interpret very carefully.
(emphasis added)
It is for Koonin a “glaring problem” that MS “extends the mechanisms and patterns established for microevolution” to “macroevolutionary processes”. Nothing in the rest of the passages you provided alters the meaning of this. What any normal English reader would take out of this is that the legitimacy of “extending the mechanisms and patterns” of microevolution into the discussion of macroevolution is at the very least questionable.
Now, “major morphological changes” aren’t what we see in microevolution. A slightly longer beak, a different fur color, etc. aren’t “major morphological changes.” But the fossil record shows that “major morphological changes” have occurred on the macroevolutionary scale. And if it’s questionable at best to extend the mechanisms of microevolution to the macroevolutionary scale, it’s questionable whether microevolutionary mechanisms can explain major morphological changes.
So, to quote your words back at you, “it’s obvious you did not interpret Koonin’s words well.” Koonin would not agree with your original unmodified statement, i.e., “Macroevolution is microevolution plus microevolution plus microevolution plus plenty time.” When I quoted Koonin, it was your original unmodified statement I was responding to. I stand by my interpretation.
Okay, I think that is fair enough. You took that to be their meaning, and though I have to say I doubt it, it’s possible it really is.
Yes. But as for your two other quotes, at least Prothero is being very clear that he really is talking about species selection. Koonin’s seems more in the ballpark, but it’s apparently focused specifically on the Modern Synthesis and it’s incompleteness in light of later findings (such as neutral theory and the rampant microbial horizontal gene transfer).
Yes well, sadly on these matters, they’re some times not even when they appear to be on a first glance. Some times in part because we can all make errors in reading comprehension, some times because scientists themselves aren’t being all that clear communicators, and any range of combinations thereof.
I can’t get access to the book myself through my university library to check the full context.
I was excoriated early in the thread for not having read the book, or at least not being aware of the work of the authors. I’m mostly a physics and education guy, with interests in extreme metal, politics and motorcycles. I don’t have time to read all the things, or really the relevant interests.
I’d be interested to know whether @Eddie has read the whole book himself, or acquired the quote already stripped of context from another source. No allegation, just curiosity.
It does. Koonin is not criticizing them for merely extending those mechanisms, but as the passages I cited showed, for believing they were sufficient.
You are going beyond what Koonin said.
What exactly do you mean by major morphological changes? Let’s clear this up.
This was your original purpose, but you have gone beyond it. You obviously did not read Koonin’s book and see the thought process leading to his synopsis.
No, I started this thread in part because the original statement I was responding to was not correct (and the author has since admitted that the unqualified statement was “sloppy”), and I could not respond on the thread it was originally on, because that thread had been closed. But also, I have seen the “macroevolution is nothing but microevolution repeated over and over for long periods” trope many times on the internet, and I thought it was a claim deserving of critical examination: did all evolutionary theorists really believe that? And it turns out that some of them don’t. I think that is worthy of pointing out.
Fair question. No, I haven’t read the book, and didn’t claim that I had. I normally would not make reference to a book I hadn’t read, but in this case the meaning of the passage seemed obvious to me. And I was not trying to give a thorough account of the Erwin and Valentine book, but merely to indicate that doubts about any simple “macro is just micro writ large” formula were found in many evolutionary theorists. For that purpose, I thought it was all right to take a number of (what seemed to me to be clear) statements from different authors on the same theme. I never deliberately take things out of context to try to win an argument; if I had not thought that the meaning of all the authors was very clear, I would not have quoted them at all. I was in good faith reporting what seemed to me to be a view within the profession, making use of such pointed statements as I could gather on short notice. Of course, if I were going to talk in depth about Erwin and Valentine specifically, I would never do so without reading their book first.