So poof go the problems? I don’t think that follows, from subsequent silence. I ask again, how have their concerns been addressed? Or how are they not valid concerns?
Indeed. As usual, @lee_merrill is struggling to make a coherent point. In one thread, he falsely claims that no progress has been made in OoL research and, therefore, the ID people are correct.
Here, he seems to be acknowledging that the EES have made no progress. But, somehow, this also proves the ID people (who strongly advocate for the EES) are right.
Hnnghhh?
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Not in any effective or even on-target way. Usually you just post irrelevant mush as if it answers anything. This is frustrating.
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One of the participants at the conference, who happens to be the author of the most widely used university textbook on evolution, explains why they are not valid concerns:
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What efforts have the Third Way people made to advance evolutionary biology? Why don’t they contribute to the primary literature?
Science isn’t high-school debate.
Silence in the primary literature.
It’s their job to address their own concerns. To test their own hypotheses. That’s how real science works.
Obviously not valid enough to the Third Way people to do anything empirical. If they don’t do anything, why should anyone else?
Just like the IDcreationists, they will continue making money by writing books aimed not at their peers, but at credulous laypeople like you.
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A question: where did that list come from? Is it second or third hand? And does it have anything to do with common ancestry, which it seems not to?
The list came from a DI attendee at the conference, and common ancestry was not one of the concerns. A link to listen to Gerd Müller’s talk, the opening talk, is here. And the link given to the published papers appears to be broken.
Actually, I’m simply asking what progress has been made in almost 10 years. If there is none to speak of, this implies either their concerns are invalid, or there are no good answers yet. So which is it, please?
Thanks! Well, let’s see…
“This model has been almost universally rejected, but Eldredge and Gould called attention to the important and still not fully explained pattern of stasis, and raised a possible role for speciation in fostering long-term character evolution, which is a topic of ongoing research [[39–42](javascript:
].”
So this actually states that Eldredge and Gould’s concerns were valid, and a current topic of research, and I note that these concerns correspond with some of the EES concerns.
“So far, no new, general theoretical principles that promise to guide novel empirical research have been articulated by proponents of niche construction.” And similarly for phenotypic plasticity, etc.
But this part of the discussion only states that no good progress has been made in these various areas proposed by EES proponents. This does not address whether their concerns are valid.
“Macroevolution: ES explains by microevolutionary processes, the EES by additional processes such as developmental bias and ecological inheritance. I have noted that developmental bias is not a new idea, and no evolutionary biologist who studies macroevolution would deny it. The role of ecological inheritance in macroevolution is speculative and unnecessary until shown otherwise.”
That’s fine, but I wonder still what progress has been made in the field of macroevolution, overall, that corresponds to one of the EES concerns. The fact that there is such a field still, is evidence that there is still a valid concern here, and a mention of what the macroevolutionists are doing would be helpful, instead of just a rejection of a proposal by the EES people here.
“Overall, I have seen little evidential support for challenges to the basic tenets of the ES.”
So here finally, we have a direct evaluation of the challenges made by the EES people, and I must say I don’t see how the preceding discussion here gives any reason to reject their challenges.
“John Maynard Smith [[152](javascript:], one of the most broad-minded of great evolutionary biologists, wrote, ‘It is in the nature of science that once a position becomes orthodox it should be subjected to criticism…It does not follow that because a position is orthodox, it is wrong’.”
Of course, that doesn’t make it right, either. Nor does this actually address whether EES concerns are valid, either.
Certainly, and I agree that it appears that not much, if any progress has been made on the concerns raised, by the Third Way people or by anyone else. But this doesn’t make the concerns disappear.
Well, certainly, that is the place for it, but that doesn’t somehow erase the problems, if no answers have been forthcoming.
And it appears the consensus is, their proposals have all been failing. And again, concerns don’t go away, if they are not addressed. Please tell that to the people who think global warming will go away if we all hide our heads in the sand.
Well, they have tried to address their concerns. And this failure to give satisfactory solutions doesn’t mean their concerns are somehow invalid.
So you don’t actually know what Müller said or what his concerns were. And you agree that none of what you think he said is any sort of challenge to common descent.
No, it isn’t. Have you even tried to access it?
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If you are talking about the papers from the conference, they are mentioned in my earlier post where all the links are working just fine.
What makes true scientific concerns disappear is the combination of the absence of any publications in the primary literature with the continued production of books aimed at laypeople. That’s how pseudoscience works.
If they think there are problems, they should address them scientifically. They haven’t and I’m confident they won’t.
I wrote nothing about proposals. Stop with the misrepresentations. Do they have any hypotheses to test, or is this just a relabeling?
Who are “they”? The Third Way people have done nothing to address their own concerns in the primary scientific literature.
It certainly does, if you know how science works. The Third Way group is failing, not anyone else.
It seems to me that people here are using the Third Way as a synonym for the EES. The EES is advocated by a group of people who mostly are unhappy that the Modern Synthesis does not pay enough attention to the phenomena they study. It is mostly a matter of renaming. The Third Way website is much less coherent. It is a list of authors, with each making a statement of their unhappiness with the First Way. Some are unhappy that the Modern Synthesis does not emphasize their concerns as much as they’d like. They are mostly fine with the usual processes that the MS discusses. Others are Lamarckians, ID advocates, folks who are into epigenetics big time, etc. The incoherence of the Third Way is illustrated by the fact that the First Way of evolution is the modern synthesis, but the Second Way is creationism. Which is not at all a “way of evolution”. I’ve complained about the Third Way as not being “a way” at all, before at Panda’s Thumb. The Third Way is adequately described by the classic account by the famous Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock:
Lord Ronald said nothing; he flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.
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Well, yes, I could arguably be doing that. But I’m taking their concerns to be adequately summarized in Gerd Müller’s talk at the Royal Society conference.
I think that’s clearly not the case, given that the conference was done because “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.”
But nobody knows what gravity is yet, and it’s a current concern, and has been for a while. Are you saying because nobody has published an explanation for phenotypic novelty that has been convincing yet, that it therefore is not a valid concern. Darwin thought it was a concern, was he wrong? “…as this process of extermination has acted on an enormous scale, so must the number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed, be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely-graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory.”
Yes, a number have been presented, and none have been convincing.
They organized a whole conference, with papers being presented. And you answered your first question, “they” is the Third Way people.
So are you saying there are no valid, unsolved problems in science, where no progress has been made? I guess we should tell Wikipedia to take down their page titled “List of unsolved problems in physics”, for starters.
He was certainly out of date with respect to the current catalog of the fossil record.
The man has been dead for 150 years. What is with you ID guys and your fixated obsession with Darwin? Is it about the quote mines?
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No, I am not. I said what I said and you are avoiding addressing what I said.
Hi, Lee. I’ve been away a few days.
What refutations do you have for the points raised in this article?