And as I’ve already posted, if you really know a good deal about the discussions of current evolutionary theory, you shouldn’t need to read the article to comment on the statement. Doug Futuyma, Gunter Wagner, Andreas Wagner, etc. could comment on the statement without reading the article. The fact that you need more context before you can comment on the statement suggests that you don’t know a great deal about the discussions currently going on among full-time, professional evolutionary theorists. And that’s fine. I didn’t aim the announcement at anyone but those conversant with current theoretical discussion. I intended to lay no obligation on you or anyone to comment on the statement.
But while we’re speaking about “good online discussion”, you might ask yourself whether the behavior of several people here (I’m not referring to you) who attack virtually everything I say or write, apparently because it is I who say or write it, is conducive to “good online discussion”. And you might ask yourself whether carping about how slow I was to obtain an article which the publisher put behind a paywall, and bragging about how much faster they were at finding it, really advances any intellectual end. But these are side points. I hope you have an enjoyable long weekend.
The paper is based on the premise that the EES is a significant “conceptual framework” that is widely discussed and held by many people in the field of evolutionary biology.
I will leave it to the members here who are part of that field to confirm whether that is accurate.
If that’s the case, she is free to read the article. I have now read the article, and can confirm that it provides plenty of context for those who are not familiar with debates in the field. For a Futuyma or a Wagner, such context would not be necessary – they could discuss the statement itself; for those who daily work is not in evolutionary theory per se, but in other branches of biology, the article is available.
Note that after dozens of posts here, almost no one has as yet offered a comment on the statement that was presented. As is frequently the case here, people have spent 95% of the time quarrelling about how we ought to discuss a subject, and only 5% of the time actually discussing that subject.
Since it’s clear that virtually no one here wants to discuss the statement on the table – whether it is true or false or somewhere in between – I would suggest that the moderators kill this thread.
For a more entertaining (albeit probably equally fruitless) discussion, I recommend the “Introducing Boris” thread, elsewhere on this site.
This presumes that a situation in which a tiny group of people who have not made the effort to adequately inform themselves of the last 40 years of developments in a field shrilly proclaim their grievances regarding said field, while those who have made the effort rightly disregard these people and calmly go about their work, can be considered a “debate”.
It is, of course, one of the chief tactics of the Intelligent Design Creationist movement to insinuate the existence of “debate” and “controversy” in the field of evolutionary biology where none actually exists. So @Eddie is here just being true to form.
That does not describe the authors of the quotation, who are fully qualified and published evolutionary theorists, and very conversant with recent developments, so your remark is not pertinent to the discussion.
Yet the authors of the statement (who are not ID proponents) know the field of evolutionary biology a hundred times better than you do, so there is no reason for an outsider like you to doubt their word that controversy exists within evolutionary biology. If you believe otherwise, show where they are wrong. Show that the contrasting views they describe do not exist within the discipline. Otherwise, yield them their claim – or at the very least, declare yourself professionally incompetent to say whether their claim is true or not, and yield the floor to those with knowledge of the field.
Your unwillingness to discuss the statement provides yet another example of the reason why this thread should be closed down by the moderators. Nobody here wants to discuss the statement. Fair enough – then close the discussion down!
I have no idea whether or not the author you quote is in fact an evolutionary biologist, but whether or not he is, “EES, ugh! That about covers my thoughts” is not an argument, and can be dismissed in as cavalier a manner as it was originally offered. Let him refute the characterization of the field with copious references to the field, to show that the debates to which the authors refer do not exist there. Otherwise, he might as well remain silent as say “Ugh”.
@Eddie, I don’t recall any responses on your part to the fact (it is very clear) that this opening statement is plainly hyperbole, crafted to garner interest in the paper. Close inspection of the paper reveals little or nothing to support your fondest wish that, in the larger community of scientists that study evolution, the field is riven with controversy and division so severe as to render all viewpoints as questionable.
One might wonder why anyone would take such an obvious device as representative of a field of study. But such a discussant would be blessedly unfamiliar with the penchant of ID proponents for grasping at straws.
@Mercer wrote that @dsterncardinale is an evolutionary biologist, and most regulars on this forum would already know this. Why are you doubting this?
Have any good reason to doubt that Dan’s reaction is typical of evolutionary biologists (to the extent that they have even heard of the EES at all) as a whole?
Where did I say that the authors said, or even implied, that “the field is riven with controversy and division so severe as to render all viewpoints as questionable”?
The point of the authors is that “the modern theory of evolution” is not a monolithic entity containing no significant differences of opinion, but a work continually in progress, in which perspectives that are at least prima facie in conflict need to be discussed with a view to arriving at a more adequate and hopefully more embracing formulation.
This has been denied, directly or by implication, many times by certain people on this site. I remember one particularly voluble poster here, who posed as the arbiter of opinion on evolutionary theory, and climate change, and theology, and a number of other subjects, who told me that anyone who does not accept “the modern evolutionary synthesis” does not accept “evolution”, period. But if, as the authors (themselves evolutionary biologists and neither ID theorists nor creationists) claim, “the modern evolutionary synthesis” is itself not a homogeneous, monolithic thing, but rather an umbrella term for a group of competing interpretations regarding evolutionary mechanisms, then it is illegitimate to pick out one of those competing interpretations, call it “the modern evolutionary synthesis”, and demand that one either profess allegiance to that interpretation, or confess to being a creationist who denies evolution altogether.
There are competent physicists who endorse string theory, and competent physicists who do not. Can we say that anyone who rejects string theory must therefore reject “modern physics” and be some kind of creationist? And would a physics review article that reported on the strong differences between string theorists and anti-string theorists be impermissible?
To the best of my recollection, only one person here, John Harshman, resisted the argument that anyone who does not accept some current dominant formulation of evolutionary mechanism thereby rejects “evolution”. If I recall, John said that Behe and Denton, who are critical of aspects of modern evolutionary theory regarding mechanism, could be regarded as people who accept “evolution” understood as a process of descent with modification. It has always been my position that Behe and Denton affirm the reality of evolution (descent with modification from the simplest living forms), but do not agree with a good number of the current explanations of how evolution works.
Just to clarify: I mention Behe and Denton only to make my meaning clearer. I am not suggesting that the authors of the article would endorse the views of Behe or Denton – I am pretty sure they would not! So anyone here who responds to what I just wrote with accusations that I’m calling upon the article to defend ID writers is being petty and quarrelsome. I’ve mentioned the article only to show that there are professionals in the field – and not just the authors of the article, but the many people whose views they report on – who do not think that modern evolutionary theory is a seamless theoretical whole. And you have yet to comment on whether that proposition – that modern evolutionary theory is not a seamless, monolithic whole, but a set of multiple perspectives regarding evolutionary mechanism – is a correct or incorrect characterization of the field, and to give your reasons for saying so.
Again, if no one is interested in commenting on the proposition on the table, let’s close the thread!
I have not denied that controversy exists within evolutionary biology. If you think that is the main point the argument wished to make, you should probably read it again.
What assessment? That the authors are qualified and published evolutionary theorists? If they aren’t, please demonstrate this by showing that have no training in evolutionary theory and have not published anything in the field.
My, that’s convenient. Why don’t you check instead of dismissing his expertise simply because he doesn’t agree with you?
It’s a fine summary of the intellectual content of EES. Is anyone citing it in the context of SARS-CoV-2 evolution, for example?
EES is just a rebranding. End of story.
@Art didn’t say you said. However, by pretending that he did, you are implicitly acknowledging that this is your wish.
Embracing what, exactly? Don’t theories have to make empirical predictions?
Why are you pretending that this is like the humanities, in which discussion is the focus?
So, Eddie, another measure of the importance of this paper is the number of times it has been cited in the 4 years since it was published. How many were there? How many were self citations? Most importantly, if this is truly important, shouldn’t it have inspired some of the empiricists to do something?
I certainly deny the ludicrous idea that the end game is discussion. The point is to generate new knowledge and understanding.
To clarify: they agree with a particular explanation of how evolution works, i.e. god did it. If you’re looking in EES or Third Way or any such for support of that position, you won’t find it. I think you’re looking for a crack in evolutionary theory through which you can drive intelligent design, and you don’t care where that crack is as long as you can slip ID into it.
I neither doubt it nor affirm it. I simply do not know. But it’s irrelevant to my point. My point was that “Ugh!” is an expression of repugnance, not an argument. He could be Ernst Mayr or Doug Futuyma, both of whom definitely are/were evolutionary biologists, and I would still say that “Ugh!” is not an argument.
Do you have any reason to affirm it is typical? If so, please produce the survey you have done of the views of evolutionary biologists on the EES. Tell me what questions you asked, how many evolutionary biologists you administered it to, how you decided who counts as an evolutionary biologist, how many answered the survey, etc. Or, if there is an already existing survey on this question, please point me to it. Not Wikipedia articles, etc., – actual surveys, properly administered, where a sufficiently large sample of evolutionary biologists were surveyed to make their reaction to the EES meaningful. Your subjective impression of what evolutionary biologists think, garnered from your hanging around sites like this one (where the vast majority of the biologists posting are not specialists in evolutionary biology) is of no value at all. As a practicing psychiatrist, who presumably sometimes has to read and interpret survey literature, you surely must know this.
Eddie shifts both the goalposts and the burden of proof:
The third part of @Eddie’s claim has mysteriously disappeared, possibly because while he can easily show the authors are published, and find their qualifications without too much trouble, assessing their knowledge of recent developments in the field of evolutionary biology is a great deal harder.
That’s not necessary. @Eddie has not shown that the authors are qualified in evolutionary theory. Claims made without evidence can be rejected without evidence. The burden of proof here is squarely on @Eddie, and he has abandoned his burden by the side of the thread.
Let it be remembered that when @Eddie first introduced this article, he didn’t even know the authors’ affiliations, let alone their qualifications, knowledge or experience. He couldn’t glean any information from their abstract, let alone their complete paper, since he hadn’t read them. All he had was their names as copied from Cornelius Hunter’s paper, and he didn’t even notice they were mangled.
Which leads to wondering how he knows this:
How @Eddie reached that conclusion from reading just one article by them - and possibly before reading it - has to be left as an exercise for the reader.
But then again, @Eddie thinks Hunter’s arguments are “ subtle and require detailed treatment” . His ability to evaluation expertise in evolutionary biology is sorely deficient - as explained by David and Justin.
Apparently you don’t understand what a “review article” is for. Its purpose is to offer a broad discussion in order to characterize positions and discuss unsettled questions and entertain possibilities for dealing with those questions, not to produce new data or propose particular experiments. I know you are allergic to broad discussions – your internet contributions over the past 10-12 years, under 6 or 7 (at least) different names, are proof of that. But many scientists are interested in such discussions. Hence, Futuyma reads “big picture” books on evolutionary theory all the time, and praised the “big picture” book of Gunter Wagner as one of the best. Founders of the modern synthesis such as Mayr and Gaylord Simpson, and many others, such as Gould, Conway Morris, Andreas Wagner, etc. were/are all “big picture” thinkers. I see very little of that synthetic interest in the contributions of most of the people posting here. Mostly I see little nit-picking to catch people out in technical errors which in most cases don’t affect the overall argument. So it doesn’t surprise me that very few people here are interested in an article which discusses broad trends and issues in evolutionary theory, as opposed to, say, an article containing a calculation of how many generations it will take for a certain allele to achieve fixation.
Be that as it may, do you agree that it is intelligible English usage to say that Behe and Denton accept “evolution”, meaning that all living things have descended from earlier living forms? The contrary view, creationism, says that at least some living things (maybe even every individual species, depending on which creationist you ask) were created de novo, having no ancestry in earlier living forms. I believe you agreed with me, against Faizal, that Behe and Denton are not creationists in that sense. They might be “guided evolutionists”, but they are not creationists as that term is typically used.
Your speculations about my motives are gratuitous. The question on the table is not about me, but about whether the statement quoted is a correct, incorrect, or partly correct statement regarding the current state of evolutionary theory. How I would apply your answer, if you were to give it, is another matter entirely. But I suspect you aren’t going to answer it, which is perhaps unfortunate, giving that you are one of only a very few people posting here who could actually qualify as an evolutionary theorist. In any case, it’s clear that no one else here is going to answer the question. (As I suspected would be the case, before I even posted the item, but it’s always good to see one’s predictions confirmed.)
@Eddie, I believe you are simply parroting the source of the original quote, and that my representation of your view/opinion is spot on.
Here is the context you are drawing from (I have added emphasis to support my assertions):
This situation is reminiscent of the early twentieth-century debates between irreconcilable views. While these debates have, at times, been exaggerated, there nonetheless was a plurality of opposing views. ([Largent 2009, p. 6]) It is difficult to see how that is any different today. As a recent review paper reported, “Contemporary evolutionary biology comprises a plural landscape of multiple co-existent conceptual frameworks and strenuous voices that disagree on the nature and scope of evolutionary theory.” ([Fábregas-Tejeda and Francisco 2018, p. 127]) Such a plurality of views and fundamental disagreements is hardly a sign that the field had at last “come of age” in the 1950s with the modern evolutionary synthesis and that with the coming of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the origin of species was “now known,” as Bowler claimed.
No, @Eddie, you were not asking about a paper that compares two approaches towards an understanding of evolution. You were clearing implying “irreconcilable views”, “fundamental disagreements”, and a field in as much disarray today as Hunter imagined it to be in the early 20th century.
. His ability to evaluation expertise in evolutionary biology is sorely deficient - as explained by David and Justin.