I have no firm view on the matter.
I have no firm view on the matter.
I have no firm view on the matter.
I have no firm view on the matter.
I have no firm view on the matter.
How did you determine that I was “this eccentric” when I haven’t expressed my view on any of the questions you’ve asked? Do you consider it sound intellectual practice to ask people questions, and then, without waiting for their answers, declare their views to be “eccentric”?
Can you quote the exact statement this anonymous biologist actually made?
Reading your paraphrasing of it, I think it’s possible you’ve missed off some of the context, as others have already hinted at in this thread. If the question is about the value of mutations to a given period of adaptation, that’s very different to the question of whether or not the last 4 billion years of evolution required mutations. The role of standing variation versus novel mutations in adapting a population is a complex subject, but I don’t think any biologist would deny that mutations were the source of that standing variation to begin with.
Because of your repeatedly expressed refusal to accept the modern evolutionary synthesis, and your repeatedly expressed support of the pseudoscience of ID. That is an eccentric position. It’s the same with your refusal to accept the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. Your view on that subject is equally eccentric.
The problem here is you’ve not only given the statement, you’ve also given what you take to be the implication of the statement. In light of what you take to be the implication of the statement it is difficult to agree with it. But when I read the statement alone and ignore your interpretation of it, it actually isn’t all that disagreeable.
The statement doesn’t purport to be discussing all of evolutionary history(the origin of flowering plants, fish, eplephants, and man, from prokaryotes), but seems to only be talking about what happens now in the present (“Evolution could do all the things it does now , even without mutations”), which at any given moment in time will almost entirely consist of differential reproductive success of carriers of different alleles. In so far as there exists standing genetic variation (that all members of the population are not genetically identical but have different “versions”, aka alleles of their genes), then that variation will be subject to differential reproductive success, and so we get evolution. So in that sense the statement is largely true, with some caveats.
But you’ve polluted the evaluation of the statement by giving your own, very likely wrong, interpretation of it by saying that the implication of it could apply to all of evolutionary history. But that just isn’t clear at all. Now that I’ve thought about it I actually doubt it’s original author intended to imply that at all, and you’ve probably misread or misquoted her/him. But now I’m interested in seeing the proper quote in context please. What is it’s source?
OK, but in the particular rabbit trail, nobody cares what you think about the mechanisms and relative weights. The question was, what do (evolutionary) biologists think. The question was an outside assessment of the consensus of the views of evolutionary biologists around the definition of evolution. It seems that both you and @Chris_Falter agree that there is variability in the relative weights that biologists may place on different evolutionary mechanisms. The difference seems to be you think there is significant variability amongst evolutionary biologists as to the actual list of mechanisms, and Chris does not.
In my opinion, it seems like you are moving goal posts and not understanding the requirements to answer your own question.
If you survey 10 General Chemistry textbooks for Le Chatlier’s Principle you will find 10 different statements. Does that mean no one knows what it is? No. Does it mean that there is wide variability in how practicing chemists will use it? Also no. There is essentially very little difference in the understanding of Le Chatlier’s Principle
among chemists despite there being almost as many articulations of it as there are undergraduate textbook authors and there are even philosophy of chemistry papers written arguing over how to do it “right”. If I was doing something where the precise definition mattered, I would go to the experts in that particular area.
It’s not the number of distinctive ways to define something that matters, it’s the significance of the disagreement and the downstream effect of how it gets applied that matters. If I’m just trying to determine “is Le Chatlier’s Principle a thing?” a group of regular-old chemists should do just fine.
Hey, I read at least half of it – not exactly a page turner. It had no relevance at all to anything I do professionally, and I’m not certain that I remember anything at all from it.
I think you’re confusing two quite different things here. Given what you seem to mean by “evolutionary theorist”, I’d say there’s not even one in most biology departments. I’m not sure I’ve ever met one. But there are likely more than three people studying evolutionary mechanisms, at least in a large department. The kind of theorizing you’re talking about is mostly independent of the day to day study of evolutionary biology by biologists and often irrelevant to it.
Here’s my experience. I attended 10+ years of monthly meetings of the Boston-area evolutionary supergroup meeting – basically everyone who’s studying evolution in the Boston area from a genetic perspective is welcome. I’ve also attended lots of conferences with a strong evolutionary component, like the Biology of Genomes meeting and the Molecular Biology and Evolution meeting. I’ve heard lots of talks on evolution and evolutionary mechanisms. A random selection of topics:
A few of the topics I have never heard mentioned in all of those talks:
Most of the questions you seem to think central to evolutionary theory are of virtually no practical interest to actual evolutionary biologists. That kind of theory is like an additional layer, an attempt at synthesis of the work that constitutes most of the actual science being done.
Biologists use evolution as a framework because it works. Grand generalizations about the relative importance of different mechanisms to the history of life or about how best to conceptualize evolutionary processes are nice but have little practical importance to biology.
Not 100% sure which ones I saw, but I found several comments from benkirk at BioLogos that relate to the topic. Here are two of them; plenty more could be found by searching BioLogos for benkirk variation:
Quantum evolution: New mutant alleles are NEITHER necessary nor sufficient to produce evolution.
How much variation in a population: I think that a bathtub metaphor may be helpful.
Roughly, if evolutionary mechanisms have a bathtub full of existing heritable variation (aka polymorphism) to act upon for diploid organisms like us, new mutations add only a single drop of new water (one-millionth) to that bathtub each generation. This does not hold true for haploids such as bacteria.
So if mutation magically stopped tomorrow, this tiny ratio suggests you wouldn’t know it by looking at the products of natural selection and drift for thousands of generations.
There is zero way one can go from what Benjamin Kirk was saying in those two discussions to “The implication of the statement was that evolution could bring life “from bacterium to man” without a single mutation occurring.”. None whatsoever.
When I first read the quote from Eddie’s bogus “challenge” first thing I thought was the statement is discussing human breeders using artificial selection. Such selection is drawing from a limited gene pool using sexual recombination for the variety on a limited time scale with little to no chance of new desirable mutations being present. Lord only knows how Eddie extrapolated that to the entire evolutionary history of life on Earth.
My first thought was that this comes from somebody who believes that all mutation is degradation. That’s a very common view among creationists and ID proponents.
That’s not the word I used, and it’s not how I feel.
This seems to be a perfectly obvious statement that @glipsnort has made, that we would be hard pressed to find a single biologist to disagree with on these points.
@eddie agrees!
Please show us even one “evolutionary theorist” (whatever that is) who would disagree with this statement. Of course they do not “subscribe” to a specific formulation of an obvious concept of evolution that they, nonetheless, have not been specifically presented. Which of them disagree with @glipsnort here? I submit the answer is precisely zero.
I explained in detail above that I can’t find the original source, because it is buried in hundreds-of-posts long blog comments sections for which I can’t remember the title or the date. It would take me several hours, maybe several dozen hours, to try to dig them up. But as the same author (pseudonymous, of course) made similar comments more than once, and they were always stated in the same terse, absolute manner, I believe my memory is accurate enough. Regarding your comment, the biologist did not ever acknowledge that mutations were the source of the standing variation to begin with. I remember that clearly, because I was stunned that a biologist would not think of that. Nor did he explicitly distinguish between short-term and long-term. His statement was general and therefore he left it open to be understood that it applied to the long term as well as the short term. Further, his tone was truculent; his comments were offered as if to put down ID people who put too much emphasis on mutations in their criticism of evolutionary theory. It was as if, in order to counter what he thought was an ID exaggeration of the importance of mutations, he was irresponsibly swinging the other way, and claiming that mutations weren’t necessary at all, or at most might be helpful in speeding up the process by 10% or the like. I wanted to hear from people here whether that claim was typical of modern evolutionary theory. I don’t believe it is.
Steve has confirmed that the statement is not one held by most evolutionary theorists today. Would you agree with Steve on that?
Really, all I’m asking you is whether the statement as given is consonant with mainstream evolutionary theory today. Even if I have misinterpreted the original statements (which I don’t think I have), someone with your knowledge should be able to say whether my summary statement as given is or is not compatible with mainstream evolutionary theory today. If I were naming someone personally and claiming that he made an error, then it would be important to track down the original words, to clear the name of the accused, but I haven’t named anyone and therefore there is no one whose name needs clearing. All I’m asking at the moment is whether that statement, supposing it were ever made, would be a correct rendering of mainstream evolutionary thought regarding the role of mutations.
I think the identity of the person you’re talking about, and especially the exact content of their comments is relevant if you want to make the point that people claiming authority are actually making statements like that, as you did here:
If you just wanted to know who in this forum disagreed with the statement, why bother prefacing it with all the background about how some biologist said it to you?
Have you read Gunther Wagner’s book yet then?
I stand corrected. I would have guessed that if anyone here had attempted to read the book, it would have been you. 
That’s fine, but that hardly proves it has no relevance to evolutionary theory, and in particular to the questions Wagner is interested in.
I can’t speak for “most biology departments”, but Chicago has Coyne and Shapiro, Princeton has Wagner, Zurich (or is it Vienna) has the other Wagner, Stony Brook has Newman, someplace has Orr, Oxford had Dawkins, someplace in Britain has Conway Morris, Lewontin was parked somewhere, Margulis was parked somewhere, John Maynard Smith was somewhere, the modern synthesis “New York mafia” (Mayr, Dobhzhansky and Gaylord Simpson) all held chairs in New York, etc. And all the evo-devo theorists must hang their hats somewhere. I’m sure you would find lots of such people if you attended the annual (biennial?) Evolution conference held in the USA where all the evolutionists get together in the thousands. I’d be surprised if most universities where the full-time biology faculty numbers more than twenty don’t have at least one faculty member whose special focus is evolutionary theory, though the actual title of the position may vary somewhat (e.g., “Evolution and Ecology”) from place to place.
If I may make an observation, it sounds as if the kind of conferences you attend are not frequented much by evo-devo people, and that may be why Newman and several others are not mentioned there. I would guess that there are many conferences on evolution, national, regional, and theme-based, and that some of them are organized by evo-devo people. I suspect that the subjects discussed at each conference will vary, and I don’t know that your experience covers all the dimensions of modern evolutionary theory. I notice that one very important subject – the origin of innovations in biological form – does not seem to be heavily covered in your list of topics, but that is precisely the subject that many modern evolutionary theorists are interested in. It might be that your “gene” focus leads to a kind of intellectual provincialism.
But that’s simply false. You have recently said that you yourself are not exactly an evolutionary biologist (as opposed to a biologist whose interests often touch on evolution). But Gunter Wagner is an evolutionary biologist (or at least, Yale thought he was, when they hired him to research and teach), and the questions are of interest to him. You are making a sweeping generalization which implies that people like Wagner don’t exist (or that if they do exist, what they are doing isn’t very important). It is this steady supply of misinformation about the field that I continue to object to. If you aren’t interested in what Wagner does, then fine, but don’t tell the world that what Wagner does isn’t evolutionary theory, or isn’t important, or isn’t of interest to many biologists who study evolution. Futuyma thought Wagner’s book was excellent. Or doesn’t Futuyma count as an evolutionary theorist for you?
And what is wrong with attempting a synthesis? What is the alternative? To treat science as a pile of disjunct experimental results, that have no coherence or interrelationship? If so, then science is just high-level stamp collecting, not a genuine theoretical pursuit. It is the attempt to synthesize that makes science into a coherent body of knowledge, as opposed to a pile of unrelated facts. The Library of Congress would be useless if all the books were piled haphazardly. It’s the arrangement of knowledge in accord with some view of the whole body of knowledge that makes a library useful. Darwin, Wallace, Dobzhansky, Mayr, Gaylord Simpson, Gould, Wagner, and countless others have written works of broad synthesis regarding evolution. You seem to belittle such works, as if you think they are a waste of time. I don’t understand that. I don’t see how any academic discipline can cohere without periodic attempts at synthesis.
I’m planning to get to it. So far I have only read excerpts, but they look quite interesting. I have also read another short essay of his (and I curse the fact that I can’t find my internet bookmark for it), which was very stimulating. Also I am keen to read some of Andreas Wagner, whose ideas again seem quite interesting. I will let you know when I make some progress on these fronts. Then maybe we can have a discussion about these works.
When you get around to reading the works of the evolutionary biologists you keep talking about, then by all means, let’s talk about how “radical” their ideas are. I think it’s best that you stay off that topic until you actually familiarise yourself with what they’re proposing.
No, it doesn’t. It comes from someone who is viciously opposed to ID and creationism, and attacks them every chance he gets. So your first thought was not very accurate.
Thanks for trying to find the passages. Neither of these are the ones I had in mind. The ones I had mind were much blunter and shorter statements. I distinctly remember the statement that evolution would proceed “almost as fast” even without mutations. Possibly the author had some qualifications or timeframes in the back of his mind, but he did not present them. The statements were naked and the most natural interpretation of the naked statements, to me, was what I presented.
But let’s say the statements in question can all be explained, given context the author failed to provide, as well within mainstream evolutionary theory. Fine. There still remains the ongoing problem of communication. The confrontational atmosphere of blog sites on origins tends to produce statements about “what evolutionary theory holds” that many readers will find confusing or misleading.
That’s fine, because I wasn’t referring to those two discussions.
You neglected the context, Joshua. It was not Glipsnort’s statement that I was referring to (obviously, since I said I agreed with him!); it was the statement I presented at the beginning. I was agreeing with Glipsnort that contemporary evolutionary biologists would not subscribe to that statement.
I, on the other hand, do attend evo-devo conferences. I attended one last year, and both Wagner and Newman were there and gave presentations. I also attended the largest evolutionary biology conference in history last year (~2700 attendees from ~60 countries): the 2nd Joint Congress on Evolutionary Biology in Montpellier. I was going to attend the Royal Society meeting in 2017, but had to drop out at the last minute, so I settled for listening to the recorded audio of all the talks. I feel like I’m pretty up to date with my understanding of where the field is at.