Barry Arrington should stick to what he’s good at — banning blasphemers.
Instead, he has disinterred the corpse of the “natural selection is a tautology” argument, propped it up in a chair, and is now attempting to engage it in conversation.
Trust me, Barry – that corpse is dead, dead, dead. Among the coroner’s findings:
1. Even the dimmest of IDers and creationists accepts that “microevolution” occurs. Insects become pesticide-resistant. Finch beaks change in response to drought conditions. Microbes acquire antibiotic resistance. How does this happen? Through natural selection. It ain’t a tautology.
2. The tautology mongers miss a basic point about fitness. Fitness is <i>not</i> defined in terms of the reproductive success of an individual. An unfit individual who gets lucky and reproduces successfully does not get reclassified as fit. A fit individual who gets hit by a meteorite isn’t reclassified as unfit. To claim that “the fittest” are “those who survive”, as the tautology mongers claim, is ridiculous.
Back to hunting down blasphemers, Barry. Leave the science to those who understand it.
He could not pass the first praragraph without writing nonsense:
“Darwinian theory “predicts” that the “fittest” organisms will survive and leave more offspring. And what makes an organism “fit” under the theory? Why, the fact that it survived and left offspring.”
How is it so difficult for some to distinguish between the condition (very suitable characteristics of an organism to cope with a certain environment) with the consequence (larger probability of survival and/orleaving offspring).
Check later, second paragraph: “For example, if a wolf runs faster, it will be more fit”. Didn’t you just said that organisms are fit IF they survive and leave more offspring?
Anyway, I fail to see how “certain features of life are intelligently designed because they show all the signs of being caused by something that was intelligent, since it caused certain features of life” is not a tautology.
Finally, he loses the battle in the field IDiots always choose, human design:
“In summary, because all engineering decisions involve tradeoffs, there is no way to tell whether a particular engineering trait, in isolation, caused an organism to be more fit”
Then, how on Earth do we improve the functions of our machines? How do we get safer cars, faster computers, more precise clocks, higher definition screens, cheaper tools?
“because all engineering decisions involve tradeoffs, there is no way to tell whether a particular engineering trait […] be more fit”
Is this an argument against evolution or is it an argument AGAINST DESIGN? Watch your feet while holding the gun, Barry.
Excellent! 🙂
Good resource:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/tautology_org_ver.html
If fitness is a tautology, how come we measure it for genotypes, then use those inferences to see whether the change in subsequent generations fits the predictions? There is a lot of activity in studies of experimental evolution in organisms like yeast, and in field studies of organisms that can be followed year by year, all estimating fitnesses and testing predictions. That’s an awful lot of substantive work for a topic that doesn’t exist.
I should mention that the “engineering” analogy that Barry dismissed is a point made well by John Maynard Smith, who himself used to be an engineer. He pointed out that if we can make an engineering analysis of a function and predict what combinations of traits will best achieve it, we can make substantive predictions and test them.
The argument was also made in Barry’s thread that Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini dismissed selection by arguing that we can’t tell which of several correlated characters is under selection. There are a number of ways to avoid that problem, including measuring fitnesses of individuals while measuring all the relevant traits, and making genomic observations of genes which affect different combinations of traits.
So how do engineers decide the balance of tradeoffs, if they don’t actually have pretty good ideas about how each aspect compromises other aspects yet lends advantages in the end?
Of course we know (if not perfectly) what elements of engineering are “worth” to the final design, which is why design is possible.
Natural selection isn’t engineering, of course (produces life forms that often can’t utilize “engineering choices” available to other organisms), but the analysis of elements and overall aspects is much the same as in design. What is more, non-quantitative comparisons of something like Archaeopteryx with modern birds is relatively easy, the all-too-(non-avian) dinosaurian body clearly being second-rate by comparison to modern birds.
Of course there are color changes (mice, moths) that have little trade-off issues at all that have been demonstrated to be naturally selected. We’re not stuck with just these easy examples, however, any more than engineers are. To be sure, engineers might do something that appears like a good idea at the time, only to find out that unforeseen consequences mean that it’s really not a good idea. Likewise with analyzing natural selection. That doesn’t mean that designs can’t be worked out, or that analyses of natural selection aren’t possible.
Glen Davidson
I think Im the one referred to when ‘banning blasphemers’. I used the phrase ‘your god Dembski’ or some such, and wham! Barry brought the hammer down. I may resurrect myself (yet again) as graham3 but it doesn’t seem worth the effort.
It only takes a little tinkering to get around this. Let’s grant that as originally formulated fitness means “the survival of those who survive.” Does that catch the real import of the theory? I don’t think so. I prefer to say “increase” of the fittest, rather than “survival.” That gives us “the increase (relative or absolute) of those who survive.” In sum I suggest replacing “survival of the fittest” with “increase of the fittest.”
A few things worth pointing out:
(1) The phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer; Darwin added it to the fifth addition of Origin. So it couldn’t have been central to how Darwin conceived of his theory or presented it to the public.
(2) The theory only appears tautologous if one doesn’t understand the background of experiments and theorizing that went into producing the tautology. (Perhaps any theory can be reduced to a tautology? I don’t know.)
(3) Arrington steals this thought from Talbott, apparently not noticing (or caring?) that Talbott himself is quite critical of intelligent design. This indicates a further feature of the intelligent design movement in its current phase of degeneration: that they will gladly grasp at anything not ultra-reductionistic, ultra-adaptationist “selection uber alles” and use that as “evidence” that “the paradigm” is about to be over-turned and replaced by I.D. There’s a lot of really interesting theorizing going on in evolutionary biology these days — the extended synthesis, evo-devo, eco-devo, developmental systems theory, and so on. (I cut my teeth on Oyama’s The Ontogeny of Information back in college. Utterly brilliant work. The rest of us have been slowly catching up to her.)
But, unfortunately for the ID movement, design theory has nothing at all to contribute to the discussion, and everyone not already committed to design theory for (admittedly fascinating) sociological reasons realizes this.
@KN
Thanks for the facts. Here’s a little effort to streamline the point.
Darwin’s mistake was to incorporate Herbert Spenser’s phrase *survival of the fittest* into a later edition of *The Origin of Species*. Why? Two reasons. First and of lesser importance, the phrase turns out to be a tautology. It amounts to saying that fitness has to do with “the survival of those who survive.” But more importantly, the phrase doesn’t fit the theory. *Increase of the fittest* would have been better. That’s what the theory is really about, surviving to reproduce, not simply surviving.
Right, it’s a phrase that better fits Social Darwinism than actual biologic evolution.
Glen Davidson
Selection is also a bad word, in that it can be interpreted to imply agency.
Constraint might be a better word. It implies differential reproductive success, regardless of cause.
I think that when Darwin coins the term “natural selection,” he is developing a new concept by analogy. We can read him as saying something like, “intra-specific competition for scare resources plays a role in shaping environment-specific phenotypes over the generations that is analogous to to the role that human intention plays in breeding.”
The development of new concepts in science by way of analogy is hardly new, or even faulty. When Bohr constructs a model of the hydrogen atom based on analogy with the solar system, it’s not correct — but it does work, to a limited extent, and it paved the way for later and better concepts.
And it must be stressed that though Darwin’s work shows us how to cash out the analogy, it wasn’t until population genetics that we had a rigorous mathematical way of describing it. And I suspect that the rise of evo-devo will shed new light on one of the most difficult problems in contemporary biology: the sources of morphological novelty, upon which the different kinds of selection can act.
I.D. appears intuitively plausible — and no more than “intuitively”! — only so long as one has an exceedingly simplistic conception of the non-design account of morphological novelty.
Without realizing that he’s contradicting himself, Barry now says that yes, natural selection explains things like chloroquine resistance in the malaria parasite — but no better than explanations that don’t invoke the magic phrase “natural selection”.
Make up your mind, Barry. Is natural selection a tautology or not? (Hint: it isn’t.)
And do you really think that if a specific explanation can be substituted for a general one, that the general one is somehow invalidated? That’s as foolish as criticizing someone for saying that “Phil traveled to Europe”, on the grounds that Phil actually flew there.
And he’s just been caught in the quote mine again. Let the Butthurt commence!
I don’t agree with “survival of those who survive”. Fittest are those individuals who have the best qualities to carry on in a certain envionment. Though it is quite obvious now “those with best characteristics survive”, when Darwin published his work people was not really aware of the implications of the “survival of the fittest”. I mean, the focus of “survival of the fittest” is not “to survive you have to be fit” but “only A PART of the population will make it to the next generation” (which means that maybe not all the traits will be inherited).
In any case, I agree that the real mistake was associating fitness with survival, when reproduction is a much more relevant consequence of fitness. But it was a good starting point.
Let’s check what our friend Barry says:
“Explanation 1: When a strain of Plasmodium develops antibiotic resistance due to a fault in a transport protein that moves the poison into the organism’s vacuole, that strain has comparatively higher reproductive success than strains that have not developed such resistance.
Explanation 2: Plasmodium strains that develop antibiotic resistance due to a fault in a transport protein that moves the poison into the organism’s vacuole are more fit, and that fitness is selected for by natural selection.
How is explanation 2 superior to explanation 1? If it is not superior, why is it necessary?”
Great point, Barry!!!! You are right.. You are definitely right. Explanation 2 is not superior AT ALL to explanation 1. They are just the same.
Here’s a suggestion: the tautology arises because of a conflation between a definition of a theoretical term and the operational measure of the property it names.
Differential reproductive success (which is in turn contextually dependent on the kind of species it is, e.g. if is an r-species or a K-species) is how “fitness” is operationally measured, which is different from theoretically defining what fitness is.
For the messy details, fitness in the SEP.
Huge amount of obfuscatory bullshit in the Arrington piece.
Say, the theory of “survival of the fittest” entails that
Species X is more likely to survive than some competing species Y, iff Xs have more qualities that promote survival capacity than Ys do.
That isn’t tautologous; it’s just evident, obvious, hard to deny.
The Arrington response to that is, basically, that our manner of determining just which survival qualities is defective, because (he claims) it’s circular. To wit:
We determine the relative size and effectiveness of X’s batch of properties providing survival capacity as compared with Y’s batch largely from the fact that X’s survived while Y’s did not.
The thing is, that is NOT circular: we aren’t DEFINING “survival enhancing” here. We are giving a quite sensible approach for determining which properties have that feature. We don’t deny the possibility that a species could survive with fewer or less potent survival enhancement properties than a competitor, since weird happenstance can produce such results. We simply note what should be obvious–that one would not expect such results. They’re counter-intuitive because we expect survival enhancers to enhance survival–even if they need not always do so.
Attacking the theory of natural selection on any such basis is really stupid. Let me give an analogy.
Suppose someone says that a professional basketball player has “staying power in the league” just in case he has long-lasting basketball skills.
That is pretty obvious, I think, but it’s not tautologous. Somebody might last a long time in the NBA because, e.g., he’s a GM’s son or has incriminating pictures or something.
Do we generally determine which players have long lasting basketball skills by whether they have managed to stay in the league a long time? Sure. Why wouldn’t we? It’s a very sensible test. So what?
Ridiculous.
If the term “fitness” and its accompanying vague, hand-waving “definition” had been introduced by the design community instead of the Darwinism community, there would be no end to the derision and dismissals. It’s a slogan designed to satisfy the intellectually lazy and ideologically committed .. like “natural selection” and “random mutation”.
Darwinism offers emotionally appealing slogans to the materialist/atheist/naturalist, nothing more. None of that has anything to do with conducting science.
I think that’s the right track, but it it’s not, strictly, a tautology in the first place.
Barry’s position on the use of “natural selection” seems to be that it is not superior to giving a more detailed account, and therefore is useless terminology.
I guess we’re never supposed to say that Barry “made a post” at UD. No, instead of saying that we have to say “Barry sat down at his chair, turned on the desk lamp, opened the cover of his computer and typed …”
There’s one simple word for Barry’s position on this:
Silly.
Its actually measurable. Unlike CSI / FSCI/O, Jesus per square inch….
How about “organism / environment alignment” is that better?
That’s no criticism at all, coming from you, since you’ve already admitted that, according to you, that’s all anyone does anyway: select a belief that they personally find most useful, appealing, etc.
In fact, according to your own radical subjectivism and voluntarism, there is no such thing as science in the first place. If consistency amongst a set of more-or-less arbitrarily selected beliefs is all anyone has got, then there’s no room in your epistemology for reality to get any voice at all in what we say about it.
So unless “conducting science” means something other than “subjecting our claims about reality to testing in light of what reality discloses about itself under specific conditions that are loosely correlated with the content of the claim”, you’ve got no room in your epistemology for the idea of “conducting science” in the first place.
Bearing in mind that the alignment is almost always adequate-but-suboptimal — “satisficing” rather than “optimizing” — then yes.
Can you point me to where I “admitted” this?
Can you point me to where I said anything of the sort?
Silly is a word I once used at UD and earned a stay in the moderation pen.
You must have been evil or wicked or… 😉
Barry at UD:
“Before I get into the specifics of kieths’ post, I would like to offer some free and unsolicited advice to all of our dear friends over at the Zone: Scoffing is a very poor substitute for argument.”
Barry, sweetheart, censors like you are the *death* of argument and discourse in general.
Bonus: “And from that I conclude that someone who is really confident in their position sees little need to launch personal attacks on their opponent.”
How many people have you called wicked or stupid, recently, Barry?
Does that mean KF has stopped posting at UD?
Barry:
“People who call themselves “skeptics” act with a rigid orthodoxy and intolerance of dissent that would have made a medieval churchman blush.”
I am skeptical of this broad brush statement. It’s shame Barry doesn’t do open dialogue.
That’s odd. I’ve used the concepts of natural selection and fitness to do quite a bit of science. This kind of makes me suspect you don’t know what you’re talking about. (Oh, and I’m not even an atheist — something must be wrong with me.)
Barry,
That says more about your (motivated) lack of reading comprehension than it does about the content of the OPs and comments at TSZ.
Any idea is fair game for criticism here, and we disagree with each other all the time — as you would know if you had actually read several of the recent threads here. Not only that, no one gets banned for dissenting! You should try that at UD.
The scoffing isn’t intended as a substitute for argument. The arguments stand on their own, and the scoffing is just a bonus. Don’t be modest, Barry — you’ve earned it!
If your God exists, then he is powerful enough to stand up for himself. He doesn’t need you or the mullahs to defend him or his believers. And if he doesn’t exist, as seems to be the case, then blasphemy is about as significant as dissing the Easter Bunny.
keiths:
Barry:
Yes, it is. You claim that natural selection is a tautology. If that were correct, then all we could ever say would be “the organisms that survive are the ones that survive.” Yet you acknowledge that there are actually reasons for differential survival and reproduction, as in the case of chloroquine resistance in P. falciparum.
You contradicted yourself, which means that someone is wrong — either Barry, or Barry, or both.
keiths:
Barry:
It does. Suppose a mammal is born without lungs due to a genetic mutation. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that the animal is unfit. Lungless animals are not going to take over the population, and we know that even before we observe the survival rate of animals with the mutation.
keiths:
Barry:
Your skin is as thin as tissue paper, Barry. That’s why you habitually ban people who make you and your fellow IDers look foolish.
Must I also explain the difference between blog posts and academic papers?
Says the guy who just labeled stenosemella a “troll” and deleted all of his or her comments:
Barry, put the gun away. Your foot has suffered enough.
Steve Schaffner said:
I seriously doubt this. The “fitness” and “selection” concepts that do anything of value in science are those loaded with goal-oriented information. Absent that, “fitness” and “selection” are concepts without scientific value.
“If fitness is a tautology, how come we measure it for genotypes, then use those inferences to see whether the change in subsequent generations fits the predictions?”
Joe, How exactly do you measure this concept of fitness?
Well, of course you seriously doubt it. But since I’m the one who did the work (along with many others), I don’t see why your serious doubts should carry any weight at all. Exactly how much of the scientific literature on natural selection have you read, anyway? We learned new facts about the real world by applying the concepts of selection and fitness; we did this while being paid as scientists out of scientific grants, publishing our results in scientific journals with names like Science. I’m pretty sure that means what we did had scientific value, your serious doubts notwithstanding.
In most venues, poisoning the well is frowned upon.
keiths:
1. Even the dimmest of IDers and creationists accepts that “microevolution” occurs. Insects become pesticide-resistant. Finch beaks change in response to drought conditions. Microbes acquire antibiotic resistance. How does this happen? Through natural selection. It ain’t a tautology.
Stuff happens. Stuff happens through natural selection. Therefore that stuff happens though natural selection isn’t a tautology.
Mung,
What about UD?
There’s a rule. Address the comment, not the author. Currently, we are experimenting with moderation on request. (This may involve an admin wearing two hats!)
Then do something about it that is not writing posts on a blog.
Publish or perish, child.
“Differential survival of alleles” or even “environmental design” could replace the phrase “natural selection”. It’s the concept that’s important; what you call it, less so.
I’m not Joe F but fitness is relative to niche. In an environment where nothing was changing, you’d expect to see stasis. But the environment is everything that affects a population. (Long list could follow!)
Steve Schaffner said:
None of this is an explanation of how you applied the Darwinian concepts of fitness or natural selection to any scientific work; it’s just reiteration of your prior assertion. I have no doubt that you believe you utilized such Darwinian concepts in your work, but until you offer an explanation otherwise, I think what is more likely is that you have erroneously characterized design-concept fitness and selection as Darwinian fitness and selection.
This **is** the skeptical zone, is it not? I’m skeptical of your claim, and you’ve offered nothing but assertion to make your case.
William J. Murray,
What’s “design-concept fitness”, William?
I look forward to your paper.
Odd how different standards apply for you here and at UD.
Alan Fox,
But I didn’t ask what it was relative to, I asked how do you measure it.