Progress after the Royal Society conference?

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Back in 2016, a conference was held by the Royal Society with the title, “New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives”, with the following in the summary: “Developments in evolutionary biology and adjacent fields have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution, although the issues involved remain hotly contested.” The Discovery Institute was in attendance! And they noted, “As a prominent German paleontologist in the crowd concluded, ‘All elements of the Extended Synthesis [as discussed at the conference] fail to offer adequate explanations for the crucial explanatory deficits of the Modern Synthesis (aka neo-Darwinism) that were explicitly highlighted in the first talk of the meeting by Gerd Müller.’”

Gerd Müller’s concerns were these:

  • Phenotypic complexity (the origin of eyes, ears, body plans, i.e., the anatomical and structural features of living creatures);

  • Phenotypic novelty, i.e., the origin of new forms throughout the history of life (for example, the mammalian radiation some 66 million years ago, in which the major orders of mammals, such as cetaceans, bats, carnivores, enter the fossil record, or even more dramatically, the Cambrian explosion, with most animal body plans appearing more or less without antecedents); and finally

  • Non-gradual forms or modes of transition, where you see abrupt discontinuities in the fossil record between different types.

So my question here is, what has been accomplished to address these issues, in almost ten years? Has any consensus emerged, on how to revise the standard theory of evolution?

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The idea that a new synthesis is needed is heavily disputed by most evolutionary biologists. The proponents of the “third way” or “extended synthesis” are not a majority whinin the field.

Here is population geneticist Zach Hancock explaining why the claims of the extended-synthesis proponents are misguided and overblown:

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The conference led to a dedicated issue of Interface Focus (a Royal Society journal) in 2017. Müller’s review is linked below, and the rest of the issue is here. Some of the pieces are written by interesting and credible thinkers, some not (cf. James Shapiro). Müller’s piece heavily emphasizes evo-devo and its conceptual framework (at least as advanced by Kirschner and Gerhart two decades before).

IMO it’s still an interesting read, but it is glaringly dated in a many spots, as any scientist would expect of a 9-year-old review article. My position on the EES is that it was (and still is) a useful and somewhat fruitful “movement” to maintain the richness of topics and influences that matter in evolution. I was never convinced that it was a “new way,” at least not to the extent that its less-credible proponents holler about. But I like Kevin Lala a lot: a credible and wise voice, even when/if I think he goes too far. I bought his new book immediately, but have yet to start reading it. The authors are here.

I don’t see any value in a discussion with @lee_merrill but the thesis of Evolution Evolving is interesting and stimulating.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article/7/5/20170015/64164/Why-an-extended-evolutionary-synthesis-is

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A better question: After all the hoopla about this conference (well, in some circles at least), what progress have proponents of the EES made in the past ten years? Have they actually solved any of the problems they claimed to exist with evolutionary theory?

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Yes, I agree, along with asking if their concerns are valid…

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One quote and a question.

“Non-coding DNA elements correlate with organismal complexity (distinct cell types) and are not functionless junk.”

This of course refers to the famous “dog’s ass plot” and similar bogus graphics. Piffle.

How do you know the observer was a well known German paleontologist? Casey only says it was an “ID scientist”.

[Whoops, I see that quote comes from the other link. Bechly, of course. Now there’s a reliable witness.]

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In this critique, we can note the statement that “Accumulated mutations over time explain divergence.” But this is just the point at issue, Gerd Müller’s concerns at the conference had to do with evolution of new forms, and discontinuities in the fossil record, and a perceived weakness in the standard theory of evolution in explaining this. Stating what the standard theory states does not address this.

Then it was said that “Extended Synthesis proposes no new mechanisms of evolution.” And that’s just the problem I was pointing at, how much progress has been made in addressing EES concerns?

Then Zach Hancock’s critique of EES’s concerns was about their discussion of the probability of forming a 100-unit protein randomly. This is a straw man, Gerd Müller’s concerns are quite different.

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I was going to link that exact video. Is Zach here? @talkpopgen? Yes he is!

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If that is the point at issue then I must take pity on the people who have an issue with that. Populations change, and diverge, by independently accumulating genetic changes, that is mutations, over generations. Like, we directly observe that this is indeed the case. You are different from your sibling because you inherited non-identical genomes. To take issue with that is to take issue with observational reality. It’s on the level of yelling at the clouds.

Flat out ridiculous.

Perceived. It would be nice if every organism that ever lived left a nice intact fossil for paleontologists to go and dig up. That just isn’t the world we live in. It’s not clear this is an issue with the theory of evolution. Is the theory now supposed to account for geological and material processes like erosion and fossilization too?

EES proponents, in attempting to posit new mechanisms, generally fail to demonstrate that they are 1) needed, 2) how they would work. This is a problem of their own making, and the field is under no obligation to try to satisfy invented needs.

Since Zach is giving specific criticisms of the claims of specific EES proponents, it isn’t a straw man. Zach directly quotes from a paper written by EES proponents (one of which is a medical doctor, and the other an engineer). These people are EES proponents, with fatuous and inept concerns, and Zach is right to point out the abysmal state of their arguments. Nobody is being strawmanned when he does this.

Yes. Each EES proponent has their own pet subject of concerns, and each have their own need for their specific pet area of interest to become the Next Big Thing In Biology.

It’s almost like a sort of crank magnetism. Deeply concernedTM people band together to advance their individual fringe ideas. All their ideas are different, but they are united in the message that they think the “standard theory” is wrong/incomplete or something to that effect.

The EES people held a conference, and the DI being anti-evolution, was there to take notes and have been working to prop this up as a subject of Deep ConcernTM. You fell for it and now you’re here yelling at clouds.

Story as old as time.

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Your question presumes there is any validity to their concerns in the first place. Most of their concerns could have been addressed by reading a good, undergrad level textbook on evolution. Maybe they all did that, and that’s why most of them have disappeared. (Denis Noble, however, still has some reading to do it seems.)

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But he was summing up standard evolutionary theory, which includes universal common descent, which implies that he was stating that all divergence is explained in this way.

This is the “artifact hypothesis”, which has been abandoned in regard to the Cambrian explosion, which now is considered a real event, we don’t expect more sampling will discover the intermediates that Darwin predicted. And I think Gerd Müller would not have had any concerns, if the answer is as simple as you say it is.

Well, that new mechanisms are needed is evidently becoming an issue among evolutionary scientists, as evidenced by having a conference about this issue. I agree that the proposed remedies don’t seem to work very well! Thus this thread to ask about what satisfactory proposals have been adopted.

Well, it is, if it doesn’t address concerns such as the ones brought up at the conference. Does every paper by an EES proponent have be taken as a good summary of their concerns?

One of his concerns was the non-gradual forms or modes of transition, seen in the fossil record. As evidenced by Gould’s Punctuated Equilibrium, which Hancock mentions. And then dismisses, saying Gould’s proposal for how this happened has not found traction, and was not adopted. But this does not dismiss the concern about this aspect of the fossil record, and Hancock, unaccountably, does not seem to be concerned, or think this needs an explanation. Implying the standard narrative accounts for this, but it doesn’t. As in Müller’s second concern, phenotypic novelty. These are not just “pet areas of interest”, they cannot just be dismissed, they require explanation.

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Well, see my reply to Rumraket, the fossil record needs explanation, and so on.

Really? Why then did Gould propose punctuated equilibrium, and what textbook addresses his concern? I could go on and on, but the very existence of this conference, by the Royal Society, makes this a silly response. Of course the evolutionary scientists there knew basic evolutionary theory. You seem to imply that they didn’t.

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As I’ve mentioned before, we have discovered those intermediates, and they’re in the Precambrian where Darwin expected them. This is obscured by the fact that the beginning of the Cambrian has moved since his time. It used to start with the first appearance of trilobites in the fossil record, but now it’s 20 million years earlier. And that time has lots of intermediates and other clues like ichnofossils. Since Darwin’s time we also have several Cambrian Lagerstatten that preserve other intermediates in great detail. So Darwin was right, and you’re wrong.

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What exactly is seen in the fossil record? How would you recognize a non-gradual transition? I am fairly certain that you know nothing about this.

PE is a theory about gradual transitions between similar species, not transitions between disparate body plans. And the transitions take thousands of years. The original PE paper, which you should read before spouting off, discusses two of these transitions, between a couple of species in one genus of trilobites and a between some snails, which may or may not be separate species.

Contra Eldredge and Gould, most so-called abrupt transitions can be explained by the fragmentary nature of the record both in space and in time. Eldredge and Gould were forced to come with a straw-man to argue against, which they called “phyletic gradualism”; rather like Bechly’s straw man of a uniform rate of origin of body plans.

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Weren’t you just saying the Cambrian explosion is now considered to be a real event? That the artifact hypothesis has been abandoned as far as this event is concerned?

And so is the book The Cambrian Explosion, which was recommended to me? Where various solutions to this dilemma were proposed, none of them being “we need to sample more”, or “we have the needed samples of intermediates now.”

I wasn’t talking about what I know, though, I was talking about Gerd Müller’s concerns, based on what he knows.

So either there are no abrupt transitions to speak of, or there is an explanation for them. If it’s the first, why did Gould spend most of his career on a misperception of the fossil record? And why did no one simply just point out the missing intermediates? If it’s the second, then why has PE been generally abandoned, as Zack Hacock seems to imply? And why then do you apparently not subscribe to PE?

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It is.

Has it? Was this concluded by some researchers somewhere, or what? The only thing I could find that claims this has occurred is Gunther Bechly. So I’m just going to call BS on that claim.

No, that isn’t evidenced by that at all, for reasons already explained.

Your thread has not established any such need, so nobody is under any obligation to satisfy it.

It is not for the reason just explained.

But it does. And he explained why.

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Yes, but you appear not to understand that all that means. It’s a real event, but it wasn’t a sudden event, as it unfolded over 20 or 30 million years, depending on what you want to count as a part of it.

No. What are you even talking about?

Again, you have no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t think you have any notion of what the Cambrian explosion was or what we know about it.

What are Gerd Müller’s concerns, and what does he know? I can’t discuss this with him, so you will have to stand in for him.

You have no idea what PE is, and I suggest you 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. Should be easy to find on the internet. Anyway, it doesn’t involve abrupt transitions unless you count 10,000 years as abrupt, and it doesn’t involve new body plans unless you count one additional row of ocelli in a trilobite eye as a new body plan.

For the intermediates between species, they’re mostly missing because of the holes in the fossil record. For intermediates otherwise, listen to Gould, here:

“Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.”

Because it’s a poor model of how evolution is observed to work, and it’s not supported by good evidence. We could discuss this at great length, but the important point is that PE has nothing to do with what you imagine, so whether it’s accepted or not is irrelevant.

Many reasons, none of them relevant to our discussion here.

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Well, if I understand what he means by “the artifact hypothesis”, which may or may not be what you’re talking about, then I can’t think of anyone these days who supports it. But the alternative isn’t the instant springing of Athena from the forehead of Zeus that he seems to believe. The Cambrian explosion was gradual, over 20-30 million years. What’s real is that this is a fairly short time as earth history goes, and that many, perhaps most, modern phyla evolved during it, probably including most of the ones that have no fossil record. That our record is incomplete is obvious based on that, and on the prevalence of disarticulated fragments, burrows, and trails, and the absence of full body fossils through most of that time.

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Thank you. I agree that that’s the standard view. This whole thread is about people, evolutionary scientists, who say it has problems.

Ah, a claim of victory. But this does not address my point.

Then why did Gerd Müller, not include this in his list of difficulties to discuss?

Why do you resort to continual claims of victory, without addressing my points? I’ve given responses to Harshman’s points, and you and he need to respond to them, that is how you have a discussion.

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And in nine years, AFAIK none of them have published anything in the primary literature supporting what they say. That’s really all we need to know.