Statement on Current Evolutionary Theory: Comments?

Conversation
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Since the topic was posted I’ve had a couple of days to do some reading on the EES, starting out with no particular dog in the fight. The overall impression gained is this: as a challenge to standard evolutionary theory (SET), it seems very underwhelming. My impression is of a rather wooly assemblage of ideas which, to the extent they are empirical are already explored in SET, and to the extent they introduce an alternative paradigm are dubious. If that is indeed the case, then proclaiming an Extended Evolutionary Synthesis is self aggrandizing at the get go. Granting that there is indeed some element of internecine debate in that a small cohort of EES advocates with credible CV’s do exist, the contest seems vocal and instigated from that quarter. Reminding me of Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction - I’m not going to be ignored - EES comes across as attention seeking, but to me gathering only narrow support.

In 2014 Nature magazine published a short article targeted to a general audience, Does Evolutionary Theory Need a Rethink? in which a pedigree authorship on opposing sides of this question made a brief case. There seems to be some dissatisfaction and meta discussion surrounding the paper, but it is much cited and is a decent starting point, so I will use it to organize my response. The EES side describes the SET approach which they are challenging as:

new variation arises through random genetic mutation; inheritance occurs through DNA; and natural selection is the sole cause of adaptation, the process by which organisms become well-suited to their environments.

They then lay out their criticism and alternative:

this ‘gene-centric’ focus fails to capture the full gamut of processes that direct evolution. Missing pieces include how physical development influences the generation of variation (developmental bias); how the environment directly shapes organisms’ traits (plasticity); how organisms modify environments (niche construction); and how organisms transmit more than genes across generations (extra-genetic inheritance). For SET, these phenomena are just outcomes of evolution. For the EES, they are also causes.

I’m not sold on this. For instance, under SET selection varies as the environment varies. Of course organisms modify environments. Beavers, hermit crabs, and absolutely every creature in coral reefs, all live in worlds defined by previous generations; watching BBC or PBS nature docs are all the education needed to realize this much. I do not see how this is supposed to constitute some oversight in SET. Environments are never static. Whether change is driven by climate, or asteroids, or beaver dams, selection pressures will act to favor traits advantageous to that specific time and place. A creature may be at home, highly adapted to an ecological niche, because genetic variation was selected in tandem with the moving context of ecological development over time, not because there was some teleology or self definition at play. Feedback can be dynamic on selection while mutation remains random and causal. The SET authors respond in the Nature article…

they contend that four phenomena are important evolutionary processes: phenotypic plasticity, niche construction, inclusive inheritance and developmental bias. We could not agree more. We study them ourselves.

But we do not think that these processes deserve such special attention as to merit a new name such as ‘extended evolutionary synthesis’.

and so far, from my lay perspective, that works for me.

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Not “much” but precious little, and only one from an active professional in evolutionary biology. That one was polite and informative, and I thank dsterncardinale. I actually agree with some things that he said. Ron Sewell’s thoughtful late entry deserves honorable mention, too. Most of the rest was pure flak of the usual immature and polemical kind, with your own remark –

– approaching the lowest level. You don’t seem to be able to resist throwing in this kind of put-down, especially where I’m concerned. I think you should consult a good psychiatrist (nyuk, nyuk) and ask him (or her) why you react to me in this Pavlovian manner, and how you could learn to control yourself.

It’s pretty sad when a discussion goes on for 82 posts, and direct answers to the question only appear after about 73 posts in, after four days of posturing and tactical remarks about personalities, alleged motivations, how something was quoted or cited, how another author (not even in the discussion) allegedly mis-employed the statement on the table, etc. This site is clearly 80% dysfunctional, as far as efficiency of conversation goes. This discussion, for example, would be much better if someone went through and deleted all the posts except the opening statement of the question, plus the first two questions after that, plus the replies of jsterncardinale and Ron Sewell. Then it might be semi-useful as a reference tool for future investigators.

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The thesis of the article has been addressed in many other venues, including by Futuyma. It’s a rebranding.

This one?

Because the first thing I always do when approaching a new field is to Google for forum comments, instead of reading relevant reviews…

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This discussion would have been considerably better if you had either
(i) cited your actual source for the statement, rather than pretending you weren’t copying a second-hand quote from Cornelius Hunter, and not even admitting it when caught;
or
(ii) bothered to read the paper you were ‘quoting’, or at least the abstract, if only to check whether the statement was accurate and in context;
or
(iii) commented on the statement yourself rather than just dropping it in unadorned and then demanding that others do what you refused to;
or preferrably
(iv) all of the above.

If this discussion is low-quality, your dishonest approach has to bear a lot of the blame.

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… “Eddie” writes, immediately after writing this sentence:

Uh huh.

Let’s see if this helps, “Eddie”:

Suppose @Boris_Badenoff had posted the first sentence of an article that went “Contemporary New Testament studies comprises a plural landscape of multiple co-existent conceptual frameworks and strenuous voices that disagree on the nature and scope of New Testament studies” and asked whether it was accurate.

You go read the entire article to determine context and find it is primarily about Jesus mythicism and argues that the idea Jesus never existed is an increasingly influential and significant one which should be incorporated into mainstream Biblical scholarship.

Would you respond by saying “Yes, that sentence is perfectly accurate” and leave it at that?

Be honest.

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86

A solution exists: Start a new thread and copy those comment over.

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The omission, in the brief description of “SET”, of any mention of ideas associated with neutral theory is hard to understand. Genetic drift has been a part of mainstream evolutionary theory for a long time.

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The word “it” (third from last) is ambiguous. The antecedent is unclear. “It” could refer to the statement or the article. My original posting was not ambiguous in that way. It was clearly asking about a statement, not an article. So your paragraph should be re-written as:

Why would I need to do that, if my field happened to be New Testament studies, and I was familiar with all the major currents of thought in the field from reading books, reading journals, going to conferences, corresponding with scholars from around the world, etc.? Why wouldn’t I just assess the statement as it stood?

If I knew from firsthand acquaintance that the landscape of the field was not “pluralistic” but monolithic, if I knew from being on the scene daily that there were not “multiple co-existent conceptual frameworks” but one overriding conceptual framework to which all scholars kowtowed, I would be able to say this directly without reading the article from which the statement came. On the other hand, if I knew from firsthand acquaintance that the landscape was pluralistic, that there were “multiple” conceptual frameworks being employed, frameworks which had not been synthesized into one overarching approach (and maybe even incompatible frameworks), I could say that directly without reading the article.

If I were a competent New Testament scholar – rather than, say, some other kind of scholar (e.g., a Judaic Studies scholar who dabbled a bit in New Testament work, or a Hebrew Bible scholar who twenty years earlier had done a bit of work on the New Testament but hadn’t kept up with the discussions since) – I would be able to say whether or not the statement was true without reading any article.

If Jesus mythicism were in fact an increasingly influential and significant view, or even an increasingly influential and (in my view, or the view of many others) not very significant view, or neither increasingly influential nor significant, as long as it was a view that existed in the field, even as a minority view, then if I were a New Testament scholar who kept up with the field, I would know that without reading the article.

No competent New Testament scholar would need to read any particular article, not even the article from which the statement came, in order to assess the accuracy of the statement as a characterization of the field.

To be sure, if I knew from my expertise that the statement was largely wrong, I might become interested in why a New Testament scholar would misreport what was going on in the field. I might then read the article from which that statement came, in order to determine how the author of the paper ended up misinterpreting the field. And if I thought that such a misinterpretation would confuse others, I might write an article refuting the misinterpretation. But I would not need to read the article in order to know whether or not the statement, as given, was correct.

To use a medical analogy, suppose a patient walked into your office with a high fever, and vomiting, and coughing, serious shortness of breathing, violent headache, shaking limbs, etc. Suppose I asked you, “Is this man ill?” Would you be able to answer that question, before proceeding to determine the cause of the illness? Or would you have to suspend judgment on whether or not the man was ill, until you had analyzed all the symptoms to determine if they were in fact symptoms of illness, rather than symptoms of health? If you answer, “the latter”, then I certainly would not choose you as my medical doctor. Similarly, if I could not tell you, without reading the article, whether or not the statement about New Testament scholarship was an accurate characterization of the field, you would be very wise not to consult me on matters of New Testament scholarship.

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I don’t believe he has ever claimed to have received a Masters or PhD. But otherwise, yes, most of these questions have been asked. The answers remain shrouded in mystery.

And from this Clintonesque point, it just goes downhill from there. It is extraordinary how many words you can write without remotely addressing the point of the initial comment. Oh well.

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Um, shortness of breath, high fever, shaking limbs, etcetera are symptoms associated with a good number of diseases and that’s enough to make a differential diagnosis. Since you don’t know (hence, your strawman analogy of medical practice above), medical diagnosis is iterative, starting from whatever piece of information you have to generate testable hypothesis or potential diagnosis. Collect data (symptoms, clinical history, etc.), integrate that data, refine diagnosis list, and repeat until the most consistent one is found. Works pretty much the same way we do some type of scientific research.

Prior to sharing that quote, you already knew evolutionary biology (from a lot of previous discussions on the forum) is not “monolithic” in certain contexts, so what was the point of asking us to discuss the quote?

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Some of us know more about Eddie than any of us know about you. :wink:

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Like you, Eddie is using a pseudoname, and nobody knows who he is or what he’s done.

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