Is Evolutionary Theory a Fallacy?

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Being a newcomer here, I looked over the introduction to the Forum and read the following in a section headed “Disputing Mainstream Science”:

Arguments on the internet between non-professionals rarely (if ever) have bearing on how mainstream science progresses.

This is just not how science works.

Science is not intuitive. It is very mathematical and technical. Science requires very careful adherence to specific logical rules and standards. There are a multitude of rhetorically strong points that convince the crowds, but are totally false.

As a non-professional arguing on the internet I must agree with the first sentence. I also agree with the second. But the last sentence, even if true, seems a bit ironic. I am introducing this topic because I believe the theory of evolution by natural selection, at least as explained by eloquent and meticulous naturalists like Darwin, is rhetorically strong and yet mostly false. (It just convinces a different crowd.)

That said, I want to introduce an argument that I have presented elsewhere, and which so far has been met with two main responses from defenders of evolution: (1) an assertion that evolution is a fact and the science is settled; and (2) a reminder that I am not a scientist. Neither of these can be considered a sound rebuttal to an argument. Given that this forum is dedicated to conversations both peaceful and rational, I thought it might be better received here…

Basically, I think evolutionary theory commits a fallacy of composition. That is, it postulates that because natural selection explains the development of the various components that constitute a functionally complex system (like the vertebrate eye or the flagellum), it explains the emergence of the entire system. For example, biologists at UC San Diego have stated (though it’s been a few years now): “Based on research conducted in hundreds of laboratories over several decades, we can outline how the components within the modular bacterial flagellum evolved from several different sources unrelated to an organelle of motility.” Their conclusion? “Natural selection thus accounts for the development of flagellum-driven bacterial motility.” – Tim Wong et al., “Evolution of the Bacterial Flagellum,” Microbe, 2, 7, 2007, p. 339.

In other words, if natural selection accounts for the parts, it accounts for the whole. One need not (thankfully) be a biologist to recognize a fallacy of composition here. Perhaps than we can address the problem as an industrial engineer might, in that there seems to be an important but often overlooked distinction between fabrication and assembly (some would say fabrication and manufacture) of biological systems. On my view natural selection may well explain, for example, the development (fabrication) of any number of sizes and shapes of beaks among finches in the Galapagos in response to varying environmental conditions; but natural selection would not explain the emergence (assembly) of a finch – a complex system consisting not only of beak, but feathers, talons, organ systems, organs, cells, macromolecules, etc. – in the first place.

To put it another way, if the parts of a complex function have “evolved from several different sources unrelated” to that function, then the emergence of the function itself is little more than a coincidence. But coincidence is never an explanation. I am not saying, nor do I believe, that my argument completely demolishes evolution, but I do contend that it calls attention to a serious explanatory weakness in the theory that ought to be addressed.

Presently I am working on a book with the above as the central argument. But if the argument is a failure I would rather know sooner than later. As I told a philosopher friend who recently declined to review or comment on my book because, as he said, creationism has already been debunked, “My core argument…is not at all typical of creationist arguments. Now maybe it’s a complete dud. If so, I kind of wish someone would go ahead and refute it so I could move on to something else.”

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Hello Don, and welcome to Peaceful Science. :slight_smile:

Technically you are correct - Darwin was wrong about evolution is the same sense that Issacs Newton was wrong about gravity. Evolutionary theory has moved on in the past 150 years. Natural selection is still an important concept, but we know a lot more now than Darwin ever knew.

That’s not exactly a new criticism. The trouble is your are proposing a rhetorical solution to what you see as a rhetorical problem. If you think some aspect of the science is wrong, the solution is always to do better science.

NOTE: We’ve had many discussions on that topic, I suggest sticking to the rhetorical question rather than diving to that argument again.

Can you be more specific about that? Is the problem that the science is somehow incomplete, or that it isn’t sufficiently rhetorically convincing? If you don’t understand all the details that go into the argument then it would be difficult to find it rhetorically convincing, much less scientifically convincing.

Is it a matter of trust? Do you think the authors would try to mislead others with this conclusion about evolution of the flagellum? Trust of science is a pretty big issue these days, and a lot of media sites preying on those mistrustful of science.

Not to be discouraging, but there are already a lot of books out there along similar lines. You may find an audience in the ID and Creationism circles.

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I don’t find your argument at all coherent, so it’s difficult to respond to it. You’re going to have to provide some kind of clear logic. But nevertheless I will attempt something.

It seems to require a scenario in which a Galapagos finch is assembled from separate parts, with no prior history. But all these various parts have long histories of presence in ancestors, going back many millions of years, to earlier birds, dinosaurs before them, primitive amniotes, tetrapods, fish, etc. Few of the parts emerged at the same time, and there was no goal of achieving Galapagos finch-hood, merely the immediate advantages of slight changes in one direction or another. And immediate advantage requires that whatever parts are present in the ancestor be modified so as to leave a viable organism. That’s hardly a coincidence either. Again, I don’t know if that has anything to do with your argument as you conceive it, because the argument is currently opaque.

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This is, in fact, “typical of creationist arguments.” I think what you’re describing is the problem of irreducible complexity, which has been addressed many times. I suggest that you look up critiques of this argument to see why evolutionary biologists reject it as a problem for evolution.

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Logically, this is a non sequitur. Scientifically, it is a falsehood. If this is the core of your argument, then it is neither coherent nor relevant to evolutionary theory.

Evolutionary thought and theory are diverse and subject to error (including fallacies of various kinds). If your goal is to find some theorists who have employed fallacious arguments, you will succeed. But you have not described one here, and you should (my opinion) endeavor to avoid quotemining as a means of identifying the core of evolutionary theory. If I were to guess at your foundational error (and this is indeed a guess) I would say you are employing the Sharpshooter fallacy. This one is common, and it’s a totally understandable mistake to make, even for those who know a lot about evolution. Someone should write a book about that. I’ll be glad to explain that fallacy in the context of opposition to evolutionary theory, if you are interested.

Welcome to the forum.

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I’ll invoke Betteridge’s law before anyone else does.

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If anything, you have that backwards. Evolution is about the whole organism, not just its parts. The parts (such the eye or the flagellum) arose because those were needed for the whole organism. And yes, the organism could have evolved differently with different parts – and that’s what we see with the great diversity of biological systems that we find.

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Kindly state this “evolutionary theory”?

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Hello Don, welcome to the forum!

I would agree with you that the article referenced does a poor job of describing a model of the gradual evolutionary history of the entire flagellum from simpler systems. I’m not even sure the article could be said to put forward an argument. It merely describes the evidence that supports the inference that individual components of the flagellum derives from other systems. In the way it is worded, their “conclusion” doesn’t follow from the premise.

But to be fair, that article you’ve found isn’t “the theory of evolution” by any stretch of the imagination (even if it’s authors presume to write to defend it), nor does it actually represent the best model for the evolution of the flagellum.

I find that Matzke’s 2003 article is still the best piece of literature that attempts to put it all together into a single account for the gradual evolution of the flagellum:

It’s important to understand that the flagellum has been invoked as something evolution by natural selection cannot explain in principle, and that Matzke’s article is basically a response to such a claim. It is not intended to be taken as a statement of fact that we know, or that we can prove, that this is how the flagellum evolved. It is a rebuttal to the claim that the flagellum represents a problem for the theory of evolution.

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Only to the extent that, e.g., any theory of gravity commits the same fallacy. Just because it explains how a rock falls to the ground on earth, why would we presume the theory applies to all objects in the universe?

I somehow suspect you don’t hold the same degree of skepticism towards gravity as you do towards evolution.

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I can try to summarize the gist of your point, and it is possible that in this very brief summary I may have left out something critical. You are saying that evolutionists have not completely modeled the evolution of entire complex organisms, but have succeeded at modeling some parts of them (a flagellum here, a beak there, etc.), so their broad argument that evolution is true is automatically a fallacy of some kind because it hasn’t explained everything.
I will add in passing that evolutionists do a lot more than model an anatomical part here and there. They study genetic networks, embryonic development, population dynamics, ecosystems, and so on. But anyway, no one can study a whole system.

If that is your argument, that evolutionists don’t model whole evolving systems and so they have no right in claiming that the theory of evolution is (at least broadly) a settled science, then you can also indict every aspect of every other science with the same flaw. Meteorologists have not analyzed every square foot of all hurricanes, so you may as well say that any claim that hurricane modeling is largely settled is cast in doubt.

I would like for you to think about this: For ANY area of science that studies something complex – leaving evolution aside for a moment – is it valid to try to model a whole complex thing by breaking it down to some manageable components, work to understand those, and to extrapolate from there? When we do this, and find No Contradictions, are we still Not Justified in gaining some confidence in the model? If this is done especially for some 100 years, passing with flying colors thru all technological advancements of science, are we still supposed to say that we might be terribly wrong?

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I haven’t been able to find the full text of that article,[1] so can’t comment on that article specifically.

But based on what you’ve said, you seem to be extrapolating the fallacy of composition from one article, where it may apply, to the whole of evolutionary theory, where it doesn’t. Evolution does explain the “emergence (assembly) of a finch” as a complex system, although you wouldn’t find that explanation in a single place, since all but one of the features you mention (feathers, talons, organ systems, organs, cells, macromolecules, etc) already existed as parts of a complex system in the long history of precursors to birds, and an article on the evolution of beaks in finches is unlikely to also describe how talons evolved in theropod dinosaurs or lungs evolved in fish, and extremely unlikely to cover the adoption of RNA/DNA/protein macromolecules billions of years earlier.

Finches didn’t emerge/assemble as a complex system. They emerged as a modification to a pre-existing complex system.

It’s a failure. Move on to something else.

  1. I did find what looks to be a reprint in Saltman quarterly but the wording is different. Where did you find the Microbe article? Do you have a link? ↩︎

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Rumraket,

It’s getting late for me, but I did quickly want to say thanks for the friendly welcome and for your remarks.

I will look up Matzke’s article when I get a chance, and (if I get another chance) let you know my overall take.

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Logically, this is a non sequitur. Scientifically, it is a falsehood. If this is the core of your argument, then it is neither coherent nor relevant to evolutionary theory.

I suppose you’re right, in that my conditional was not really an argument but more of an observation. Let me try an analogy: “If the people living in the house down the street are unrelated to one another, then their all having the last name Smith is little more than a coincidence.” In principle there could be some other explanation for everyone in the house having the last name Smith, but their being born into the same family is the only one we are aware of that makes sense.

If I were to guess at your foundational error (and this is indeed a guess) I would say you are employing the Sharpshooter fallacy. This one is common, and it’s a totally understandable mistake to make, even for those who know a lot about evolution. Someone should write a book about that. I’ll be glad to explain that fallacy in the context of opposition to evolutionary theory, if you are interested.

Actually, I would like you to explain that fallacy in the context of opposing evolutionary theory. I ran across the Sharpshooter fallacy the other day (it may have been while perusing various posts on this forum), and thought it might be relevant to my argument.

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This is, in fact, “typical of creationist arguments.” I think what you’re describing is the problem of irreducible complexity, which has been addressed many times. I suggest that you look up critiques of this argument to see why evolutionary biologists reject it as a problem for evolution.

Andrew, in fairness I first began thinking seriously about the fallacy of composition as a problem for evolutionary theory when reading The Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins many years ago (around 2001). To me Dawkins’ theory of cumulative natural selection suggested that if a highly and specifiably complex biological system can be broken down into enough parts, each of which in principle may have evolved independently of the others, then the entire system somehow has a valid evolutionary explanation.

As it happens I don’t believe functionally complex biological systems are irreducible, in the sense that they “could not possibly evolved.” I do believe their evolution by natural selection to be improbable, in the sense that I have found no good reason to think they actually did evolve, and good reason to think they did not.

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Thanks for the welcome, Dan. I’m answering you first because you replied first and your reply seems worth answering. But there are other good responses here. I honestly wish I had more time for this stuff…

That’s not exactly a new criticism.

So far I have not found where anyone has either argued that evolution is a fallacy of composition or explained why it’s not. If you have sources in mind I would like to see them (that’s not a “challenge,” but a sincere request for relevant sources that I could probably use). In any case it doesn’t appear to be a common criticism. In fact when I Google “evolution” + “fallacy of composition” the only relevant sources I can find are blog posts or papers that I have written. Lol

The trouble is your are proposing a rhetorical solution to what you see as a rhetorical problem. If you think some aspect of the science is wrong, the solution is always to do better science.

But I don’t see it as a rhetorical problem; I see it as a faulty logical inference from parts to whole. If the solution to an invalid inference is to do better science, then I am hereby calling for someone to do better science.

Can you be more specific about that? Is the problem that the science is somehow incomplete, or that it isn’t sufficiently rhetorically convincing?

Since you (and John Harshman) have asked for more clarity in the argument, I will try to comply:

  1. Biologists (taking Wong and the others at UC San Diego as typical) say that because natural selection accounts for the components of a flagellum, natural selection accounts for the whole flagellum.
  2. In other words, biologists argue that what is true of the parts (components of the flagellum) must be true of the whole (the structure of the flagellum, hence its function).
  3. To argue that what is true of the parts must be true of the whole, is to commit a fallacy of composition.

Here’s another example. In reply to Behe’s argument from irreducible complexity (which most everyone here knows well enough), Ken Miller said: “Darwin’s answer, in essence, was that evolution produces complex organs in a series of fully functional intermediate stages. If each of the intermediate stages can be favored by natural selection, then so can the whole pathway” – “Answering the Biochemical Argument for Design,” from Neil A. Manson, ed., God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science, New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 295.

While Miller’s last statement sounds logical, strictly speaking it’s not. It’s no more valid than me saying that if each of the parts of my prefab bookshelf was made in China, then the entire bookshelf was made in China – when actually I assembled it myself in my living room and I’ve never been to China.

Not to be discouraging, but there are already a lot of books out there along similar lines. You may find an audience in the ID and Creationism circles.

Maybe there are but I haven’t found them. Otherwise I can tell you I would not be writing mine. Meanwhile I’m holding out hope that I can find an audience beyond the choir. I see a need for more dialogue and less conflict (one reason I’m happy to have found this site).

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Welcome to Peaceful Science, Don.

This forum is a good place to test your ideas with a well-informed audience. I think you will find the dialogue very useful.

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Hi Don
Universal common descent is the working inference for evolutionary theory. Is this inference what you are trying to challenge?

The paper you cited from UCSD is using evidence to help support the inference.

The inference exists partly because of methodological naturalism. Have you looked into this?

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That’s a bad analogy. Miller (and Darwin) were referring to a connected pathway, a temporal sequence of steps, not a set of discrete parts. That makes your bookshelf analogy inapplicable. If you want to argue that the sequential pathway idea is invalid, you will need a quite different argument.

I notice that various people have quite different notions of what your argument is. I think that’s a problem for you, and you need a great increase in clarity.

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