Would All Evolutionary Theorists Agree with This Statement?

There is no spokesman for modern evolutionary theory – nor, for that matter, is there a spokesman for any actively researched science. There is a range of competing views. And it is healthy for science to have a range of competing views, typically surrounding a widely accepted core.

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Mutations actually happen. The statement that you presented is a hypothetical.

Yes @NLENTS wrote a nice book about them called Human Errors.

Sure, it is a problem when people with fringe and crackpot opinions but PhD in front of their names speak confidently and purportedly authoritatively on matters, and state their own opinions as if they constituted mainstream or consensus views within some scientific field when in fact they are far from it. And like any scientific field, evolutionary biology has it’s share of such people.

It is particularly problematic when there are individuals (such as science journalists with axes to grind), not to mention political and religious organizations (Disco Tute) who take such statements and knowingly present them as if they really were mainstream views, or as if they are so frequent and diverse so as to make it seem like there is no or little meaningful consensus within the field, or to summarize the mainstream view as some absurd claim, to try to undermine and cast doubt on the whole thing. Divide and conquer so to speak.

A particularly egregious example is “science journalist” Susan Mazur, who isn’t shy from interviewing every outsider, lunatic, crackpot, or “maverick”, paradigm shifter, revolutionary, and “outside the box” thinker, and goading them into making as outrageous and provocative statements as humanly possible, in addition to the occasional otherwise mainstream and competent biologists.

Take a look at her attempt at this nuttery in her interview of Eugene Koonin, who seems to have been somewhat prepared for her crap by saying this:
“Not only the fact of evolution itself but the existence of deep evolutionary connections between different domains of life — to be concrete — evolutionary connections between, let us say, mammals, such as humans, and prokaryotes, bacteria and archaea, have become indisputable. These findings make questioning not only the reality of evolution but the evolutionary unity of all life on earth completely ridiculous and outside of the field of rational discourse.”

I agree with you, but Chris Falter doesn’t. See his Venn diagram on the other thread. He thinks that on 95% of the questions about how evolution works, there are no competing views, only a monolithic agreement. He thinks that all evolutionary theorists are singing from exactly the same page of the hymn book, almost all of the time.

Hear! Hear!

I agree, but it is a hypothesis that was presented as a fact about evolution, i.e., as a fact about “what actually happens.” So it is important to determine whether that statement of fact corresponds to reality. Science is about checking statements for their correspondence to the reality of nature, and about generating new and better statements which more accurately capture the reality of nature.

But note that in this case, I wasn’t even asking whether the statement corresponded to the reality of nature. I was asking whether it corresponds with what most evolutionary theorists think about nature. And Steve has answered: “No, it does not.”

Art Hunt, on the other hand, refuses to say whether or not it corresponds to what most evolutionary theorists think about nature. And that’s where things sit so far. Maybe some of the other biologists will chime in.

Thank you. That is exactly how I felt about the statement I reported when I first encountered it. And apparently Steve agrees with me.

Actually, in this particular case, the writer’s view is opposed to that of Discovery, since he is targeting Discovery when he argues that mutations are not very important in evolution (aware that Discovery places great emphasis on random mutations). He is saying that in “consensus” evolutionary theory, mutations are hardly important at all – which disagrees with Discovery, and also (if Steve is right) with mainstream evolutionary theory.

Yes, I know that Mazur specializes in leading questions, and I don’t take her own thoughts on evolution seriously, but her first book was useful in that 90% of the text was lengthy quotations from the Altenberg biologists she was interviewing. It was interesting to read what Newman, etc. had to say, in their own words. I just ignored Mazur’s attempts to generate controversy and concentrated on their own statements. Generally speaking, they avoided taking Mazur’s bait and just said what they wanted to say.

I guess that’s one interpretation of what Art said.

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Eddie> Art Hunt, on the other hand, refuses to say whether or not it corresponds to what most evolutionary theorists think about nature.

Neil> I guess that’s one interpretation of what Art said.

I didn’t offer my remark as an interpretation of what Art said. I offered it as a report of what he did, i.e., he refused to answer the question I asked.

I took Art is expressing serious doubt that any evolutionary biologist would make that statement (the one you asked about in this thread).

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I recall reading the comments Eddie describes, or something similar. As I recall though there was a qualification. The overall point was that if at any time mutations in a normal population ceased, the standing variation, adjusted by drift, natural selection, recombination, etc. would be sufficient to cause evolution to continue to occur.
Whether my recollection is any more accurate than Eddie’s I couldn’t say, but in any event my recommendation would be that if you are seeking to know what is the core of mainstream evolutionary theory that 95% of evolutionary biologists would agree on, the place to look is not an internet discussion board.

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To continue to occur for some period of time, not forever.

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That is not the impression I got from @Chris_Falter’s statement. I took him to say that in most of the major components, evolutionary biologists agree, however in the detail or relative weights, there is variance. That doesn’t mean the whole project is highly variable.

A couple analogies/stories to illustrate:

  1. I was once at the chemistry national meeting (30,000+ chemists) where a room full of PhD physical chemists argued passionately for a whole hour on the precise understanding of the rotation of ethane around the single bond:

    Now, it would be ludicrous to say that chemists don’t understand bonding in hydrocarbons just because there is still things about it that they disagree on, but if a novice walked into that room just then they’d think quantum mechanics was a “theory in crisis”.
  2. More of a theological example. If you polled Christians in the U.S. and asked, “Do you believe that the death of Jesus is important to the Gospel?” I would expect pretty high agreement. If you ask “What is the primary mechanism we should use to understand the Atonement?” I’m guessing you will get a much broader range. Is the take away from the later question that the Cross probably isn’t important to Christian theology?
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Yes, you understood exactly what I was saying.

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But I didn’t say that “an evolutionary biologist” (meaning a biologist whose specific area of research was evolutionary theory) made the statement. I said that “a biologist who claimed to know a great deal about evolution” made the statement. The two are not necessarily synonymous terms. And what I was asking was whether that statement in fact showed a great deal of knowledge about evolution, or, more precisely, reflected the dominant view in current evolutionary theory. And Art Hunt still hasn’t answered. But it’s all right, since Steve has answered the question, in the negative. I await the comments of T. aquaticus, John Harshman, and others who claim to know the current consensus of evolutionary theory, to see if they concur with Steve.

Welcome, Walter. Glad to hear from you.

Where do you think you saw the paraphrased statement before? I don’t recall the qualification you mention. You could be right, but I don’t recall it. In any case, I agree with Steve that without the qualification, the statement does not reflect the majority opinion of evolutionary theorists.

Tell that to several other people here who are insisting on the existence of such a core, but won’t specify what it is, or who holds to it! :slight_smile:

Hi, Jordan. Here is what Chris said:

"You are vastly overemphasizing the disagreements at the periphery of biology and thus are missing the large consensus at the heart of the field, in my opinion. That consensus is not a mathematical average; it is more like the large area of overlap in the middle of this Venn diagram…:
venn

“…except that the disjoint area is even smaller in the field of biology.” [emphasis added]

So the two circles will almost completely coincide. In other words, on the subject of evolutionary mechanisms, evolutionary theorists are in virtually complete agreement. And it’s this I dispute. I think the amount of disagreement is much higher than that.

Again, I am not talking about disagreement over common descent. I’m talking about disagreement over (a) what mechanisms are involved and (b) the relative weighting of the mechanisms. There is greater disagreement than Chris acknowledges. But it’s hard to get him to see this, because he is apparently averse to reading articles and books by Stuart Newman, James Shapiro, Gunter Wagner, Andreas Wagner, etc. and prefers to make his judgments based on secondhand reports of an existing consensus, rather than by surveying the individual views of evolutionary biologists himself. If the biologists here (almost none of whom are evolutionary theorists) tell him there is a massive consensus, he accepts that. I prefer to let the specialists in evolutionary theory speak for themselves, rather than to accept the summary of others who aren’t active in that field.

And I never suggested any such thing. I said only that there was disagreement regarding the mechanisms and their ranking, and that the disagreement was not mere trivial detail out in “the periphery.” If someone thinks that self-organization or self-engineering of the genome or some teleological causes are operating, that is no mere detail out in the periphery; it goes to the heart of the subject. That is not saying that these scientists are dolts who don’t know what they are talking about; it’s merely saying that their differences are real, and sometimes profound.

Of course not. But don’t you see? That’s exactly my point. Look how this all started. I said to Chris that I accepted descent with modification, but reserved judgment (not rejected, but reserved judgment) regarding what set of mechanisms were involved and their relative weighting. This is like saying, “I accept the centrality of Jesus’s death on the Cross, but reserve judgment regarding various theories of how the Atonement works.” Now Chris would be the first to say that I had the right to reserve judgment regarding how the Atonement works. But regarding evolution, he won’t give me that breathing space. It’s not enough for him that I accept descent with modification. He demands that I bow to what he imagines to be the current consensus regarding mechanisms.

If Chris wants to end this dispute, all he has to say is: “I’m glad you accept descent with modification, and I grant that you have the right to intellectual caution regarding acceptance of any particular account of evolutionary mechanism, even if it’s the majority account.” If he would say that, our dispute would be over. But I get the strong sense he is trying to bully me into accepting (a) his imagined notion of what the “consensus” is (and he has never spelled out the contents of the alleged consensus) and (b) his own belief that the imagined “consensus” is the correct explanation (e.g., 95% certain) of how evolution has occurred. And I don’t take well to intellectual bullying, no matter how politely the bullying is expressed.

So @Chris_Falter said he agreed when I said I interpreted him to say:

To me that means you both agree on relative weights (yay!) but disagree on the level of agreement about mechanisms (boo!). That is a sufficiently nuanced topic that I think all 3 of us, being non-experts, should defer to the experts (biologists).

From what I’ve seen there is not much debate as to mechanisms, only their relative importance, bit again, I’m not an expert. Sometimes there are studies on this kind of thing. I saw a report on a survey of physicists to see how common the various interpretations of quantum mechanics were, maybe there is a similar one for evolutionary mechanisms. My guess is, it may depend on the particular system and environment and so the lack of uniformity reflects the flexibility rather than “unsettledness” of the theory.

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@Eddie,

Are you one of those people who think "all the genetic diversity we need is “packed in” with the current chromosomes?

[1] Do you think SOME mammals have the genetic diversity to eventually make a whale population without any additional genetic changes?

[2] Do you think all mammals have the genetic diversity to eventually make a whale population without any additional genetic changes?

[3] Do you think all mammals and some reptiles have the genetic diversity to eventually make a whale population without any additional genetic changes?

[4] Do you think all mammals, all reptiles, and a few other tetrapods have the genetic diversity to eventually make a whale population without any additional genetic changes?

@Eddie, I had no idea that you were this eccentric on the issue of Evolution … None of these are true.

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@WalterKloover

Evolution would continue to occur because Evolution is any change in the allele percentages … which can happen through random processes. Populations don’t just remain frozen in time.

The problem is that if there isn’t a constant addition to genetic diversity, the population becomes more vulnerable to any significant change in circumstances wiping out all the individuals before a new combination of alleles can be uncovered.

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Well, no; I neither agree nor disagree regarding either the list of mechanisms or the relative weighting of the mechanisms; I suspend judgment, and it’s that neutrality that Chris apparently finds intolerable.

But not all biologists are experts on evolutionary mechanisms. In fact, if you look at the composition of the average biology department at a large university, let’s say, one that has 30 biology professors, only about 3 of them, if even that, will be specialists in evolutionary theory. The others will all know something about evolution, but will not have their primary research or teaching focus in that area, and so they don’t count as experts in the area of evolutionary mechanisms.

How many of the biologists posting here have their primary research and teaching focus in the area of evolutionary theory? I suspect no more than three, and maybe less. Do the biologists here regularly attend conferences devoted to evolutionary theory, regularly read the journals which focus on evolutionary theory, and regularly publish articles specifically dealing with evolutionary mechanisms? Did any of the biologists here attend the Royal Society conference? Or the Altenberg meeting? Or any of the regular Evolution conferences in the USA (where 2,000–3000 scientists focused on evolutionary theory gather, I think once every year or every two years)? Or is their knowledge of the latest developments mostly secondhand? It’s already been established in previous conversation that a book regarded by Doug Futuyma (revered by some here as a sort of patron saint of evolutionary theory) as one of the most insightful works of evolutionary theory of the past few years, Wagner’s book on homology, genes, and evolutionary innovation, has been read by precisely zero of the biologists posting here. Is there anyone here who can with any credibility claim to be right at the heart of contemporary evolutionary theory, to cruise with the bigwigs and be in daily touch with developments? Frankly, I doubt it. Yet it is the people here, apparently, whom Chris takes as his guide to what is going on in the specialist discussions.

Again, my claim is not that none of the biologists here know anything about evolution; that would be an idiotic claim. Obviously, many of them know something about it. But most of them aren’t professors of evolutionary biology, and don’t work primarily in that field. So I don’t regard them as trustworthy guides regarding what the current consensus is regarding mechanisms, any more than I would regard a motley crew of chemists from various branches of chemistry (thermodynamics, analytical chemistry, organic chemistry, etc.) as capable of giving an accurate picture of the “current consensus” in quantum chemistry.