The blurb is found under the heading “Rationale” on the page headed “The Third Way”. It doesn’t identify itself as a statement of Shapiro’s view in particular, but as the overall characterization of The Third Way.
I agree with this.
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I agree with John Harshman here. I think the idea is, broadly speaking, “Lamarckian” (though in the current writers we are talking about, it is not exactly what Lamarck himself taught). Natural selection, as conceived of by Darwin, doesn’t occur because of any internal striving of the organism, but because the environment rejects inadequate variations, by killing them off, or limiting their reproductive success. In Darwin’s conception the variations aren’t the result of any organismal striving, but are due either to chance or to unspecified “laws of variation” (which Darwin spoke of, but didn’t know anything about). In modern “Lamarckian” views of evolution, on the other hand, organismal striving is said to play a role of some kind. I’m interested in learning more about the role organismal striving is supposed to play in various modern theorists, e.g., Turner, Shapiro.
(The question whether such an idea is defensible can’t be addressed until we know exactly what it is that is being asserted. That’s why I look forward to finishing Turner’s book, so that I can get a fuller picture of exactly what Turner is claiming about how evolution works. It may be that Turner’s view is clearer and less hedged about with ambiguity than Shapiro’s.)
Why not instead find someone to read who can state his central claims clearly to begin with?
My problem is that neither answer would be particularly interesting. My response to the first answer would be, “You’re slapping a controversial-sounding label on stuff we already know. So what?”, and to the second would be, “There is no evidence for that claim.” Either way, I don’t see the point in making such a big deal about Shapiro.
What makes Shapiro “a nut”? I know he uses terms in a way most scientists wouldn’t like, but what is he saying that is false? I really don’t understand the dislike for Shapiro. He talks about evolution in a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT way than most biologists do. It sounds similar to ID. But what’s wrong with that?
Nevermind, looks like this question was already addressed
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If Shapiro were a bus driver or florist who wrote books about evolution as a crank hobbyist, and self-published his book to reach a total of 23 readers, I’d say it’s not worth interrogating him if he’s not clear. But given that he’s a professor of molecular biology at one of the world’s greatest universities, I think that his colleagues ought to demand clarity from him, in the interest of maintaining standards of clarity at serious scientific institutions.
Precisely my point: if that is in fact the case, then some ID people have been reading more into Shapiro than is there to be read – and they need to understand that. As I said in another reply, I initially thought that Shapiro’s emphasis on organismal self-engineering of the genome was an attempt to bring back teleology and/or vitalism into evolutionary theory. But if that’s not what his purpose is, everyone needs to know that, and he needs to be clear about that.
I am on your side. Let’s be friends. We seem to like the same people. Nature’s Destiny, although written almost 20 yrs ago, seems more relevant than ever. It anticipated Simon Conway Morris, Shapiro and others. And yes, Denton and Sternberg are the two people in ID that I respect the most. You should take a look at our thread on the randomness of mutations.
Seeing these criticisms of Shapiro reminds me of hearing criticisms of Richard Swinburne. People will smirk and go, “ha, Richard Swinburne.” And then when you ask them what’s so funny, they’re not quite sure. Incompetent still seems like too strong a word to describe Shapiro’s work.
His colleagues have expressed their views in reviews.
If they’re the ones who need to understand that, shouldn’t they be the ones asking Shapiro?
Don’t they have a responsibility to understand what he’s actually saying if they’re quoting him?
My point is that no, everyone doesn’t need to know that. Most of us, including most of us who have anything to do with evolutionary biology, don’t need to pay any attention to Shapiro at all. If a professor at a major university(*) says something that’s either uninteresting or wrong (and those seem to be the two choices here), it’s still uninteresting or wrong.
(*) Who in this case doesn’t seem to have been active in research for more than 20 years, incidentally.
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Look at the last paragraph from Thrid Wave website:
It has come to our attention that THE THIRD WAY web site is wrongly being referenced by proponents of Intelligent Design and creationist ideas as support for their arguments. We intend to make it clear that the website and scientists listed on the web site do not support or subscribe to any proposals that resort to inscrutable divine forces or supernatural intervention, whether they are called Creationism, Intelligent Design, or anything else.
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You worry too much. Relax a bit. Joshua has vetoed any attempt to charge “Confusion Fines” …
Well, his website at his university lists about 35 articles published in the past 20 years. Does not a single one of those articles contain any research results?
I’d say that they and anyone else who either champions or rejects his conclusions has the responsibility to get straight what he is claiming before offering either endorsement or refutation. So if it is not clear what he means by self-engineering of the genome, anyone who wants to respond to him should ask him to clarify his thesis, and then, once it’s clear, respond accordingly.
Based on my reading of it, I understood Shapiro’s book to say, among other things, (a) that classical neo-Darwinian theory grossly oversimplifies evolution, and (b) that it has now been shown experimentally that organisms can modify their own genetic material, in their own lifetimes (with the modifications being heritable), in response to environmental stresses (something classical neo-Darwinism didn’t allow). If (b) is correct, there is at least in principle the possibility of intentionality or striving in the evolutionary process.
I’m going to try to find out from the ID people I know if Shapiro has ever explicitly affirmed or denied organismal intentionality or striving in conversation with them or in his writings. I will report back what I find. It may take a few days to gather up responses.
Yes, I’m aware of this statement. But it doesn’t contradict what I said. If organisms can to some extent control their own evolution by controlling their own genomes, then “supernatural intervention” would not be required, while neo-Darwinism in its classical form would be false (since from Weismann on, changes in the genome were thought to be independent of any needs of the organism generated by environmental pressures). So the question is whether the Third Way people, in stressing the ability of organisms to rewrite their own genomes, are advocating some form of vitalism or of “Lamarckian” inheritance. Maybe they aren’t, but talking about organisms being able to “engineer” their genomes leaves them open to that interpretation. And while that doesn’t endorse ID (and I’m not claiming that Third Way people do), self-engineering organisms are not inherently incompatible with ID thinking; they would make the designer the organism rather than God – but that’s OK, since ID theory can’t specify the designer anyway.
So it’s not surprising that ID folks are interested in what the Third Way people are saying. But I agree with others here that ID folks should be pressing the Third Way folks for a clearer account of what they have in mind, before embracing the Third Way.
The big difficulty here has to do with intentions. Is the organism intentionally modifying its behavior to deal with environmental stresses? Or are the environmental stresses themselves directly causing change in behavior? People will disagree about this, and I don’t think there’s any sure way to settle those disagreements.
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Judging from the titles and journals, it looks like 1999 would be the year of the last research results, which means I overstated somewhat.
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So you are saying that all of the later articles are review articles, discussion pieces, etc. – none of them reporting any new research conducted by Shapiro?
Also, do you believe that articles which review, discuss, provide historical context of past theorizing, etc. are of no value at all in science? Granted that the main body of scientific literature will be the presentation of new results of research – does stepping back to take a look at the shape of the current forest, as opposed to the detailed anatomy of individual trees, never have any intellectual value?
Sure, but Shapiro started the cite. If you read the statements from the others, I think you’ll find that the only thing they all have in common is a conviction that they know the big way in which evolutionary biology has to change in the future, and that the big ways are all different.
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It’s not behavior we’re talking about here. It’s genomes.
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I sure can’t see any in there. If you can find some, by all means point it out and I’ll be happy to retract my comment,
No, I don’t believe that, nor did I suggest that such is the case. It is, however, unusual to step completely away from research for such an extended period of time. It was his research that earned him his position and his podium, not his thoughts on evolution.
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Note that he’s not a professor of evolutionary biology. Now at UC, there is no Department of Evolutionary Biology, but the equivalent function is performed by an interdisciplinary group called the Committee on Evolutionary Biology, which functions more or less as a graduate department. He isn’t in it. Do you suppose the evolutionary biologists are just jealous?
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