The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sponsored the work of John Calhoun on social behaviors. Here were the results of one of his experiments:
On July 9th, 1968, eight white mice were placed into a strange box at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Maybe “box” isn’t the right word for it; the space was more like a room, known as Universe 25, about the size of a small storage unit. The mice themselves were bright and healthy, hand-picked from the institute’s breeding stock. They were given the run of the place, which had everything they might need: food, water, climate control, hundreds of nesting boxes to choose from, and a lush floor of shredded paper and ground corn cob.
This is a far cry from a wild mouse’s life—no cats, no traps, no long winters. It’s even better than your average lab mouse’s, which is constantly interrupted by white-coated humans with scalpels or syringes. The residents of Universe 25 were mostly left alone, save for one man who would peer at them from above, and his team of similarly interested assistants. They must have thought they were the luckiest mice in the world. They couldn’t have known the truth: that within a few years, they and their descendants would all be dead.
….
As new generations reached adulthood, many couldn’t find mates, or places in the social order—the mouse equivalent of a spouse and a job. Spinster females retreated to high-up nesting boxes, where they lived alone, far from the family neighborhoods. Washed-up males gathered in the center of the Universe, near the food, where they fretted, languished, and attacked each other. Meanwhile, overextended mouse moms and dads began moving nests constantly to avoid their unsavory neighbors. They also took their stress out on their babies, kicking them out of the nest too early, or even losing them during moves.Population growth slowed way down again. Most of the adolescent mice retreated even further from societal expectations, spending all their time eating, drinking, sleeping and grooming, and refusing to fight or to even attempt to mate. (These individuals were forever changed—when Calhoun’s colleague attempted to transplant some of them to more normal situations, they didn’t remember how to do anything.) In May of 1970, just under 2 years into the study, the last baby was born, and the population entered a swan dive of perpetual senescence. It’s unclear exactly when the last resident of Universe 25 perished, but it was probably sometime in 1973.
The rest of the article is here:
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopia-that-inspired-the-rats-of-nimh
Here is a video of some the experiments with footage of the mice after they injured each other:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z760XNy4VM
The Mouse Utopia experiment shows a population can self-extinct itself without any mutational meltdown under utopian conditions.
But there were some experiments with yeast that showed a population can self-extinct itself through mutational meltdown also under supposed utopian conditions.
So much for survival of the fittest.
In small or repeatedly bottlenecked populations, mutations are expected to accumulate by genetic drift, causing fitness declines. In mutational meltdown models, such fitness declines further reduce population size, thus accelerating additional mutation accumulation and leading to extinction. Because the rate of mutation accumulation is determined partly by the mutation rate, the risk and rate of meltdown are predicted to increase with increasing mutation rate. We established 12 replicate populations of Saccharomyces cerevisiae from each of two isogenic strains whose genomewide mutation rates differ by approximately two orders of magnitude. Each population was transferred daily by a fixed dilution that resulted in an effective population size near 250. Fitness declines that reduce growth rates were expected to reduce the numbers of cells transferred after dilution, thus reducing population size and leading to mutational meltdown. Through 175 daily transfers and approximately 2900 generations, two extinctions occurred, both in populations with elevated mutation rates. For one of these populations there is direct evidence that extinction resulted from mutational meltdown: Extinction immediately followed a major fitness decline, and it recurred consistently in replicate populations reestablished from a sample frozen after this fitness decline, but not in populations founded from a predecline sample. Wild-type populations showed no trend to decrease in size and, on average, they increased in fitness.
And finally E.O. Wilson (as reported by Niles Eldridge) provides estimates on what happens to species under increased selection pressure of habitat removal and destruction. This shows how one species (human) can cause extinction of other species:
E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year — which breaks down to the even more daunting statistic of some three species per hour.
Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this “Sixth Extinction” — is even more severe, and more
imminent, than Wilson had supposed.
Some will take exception that I characterize this sort of extinction as “natural selection”, to which I respond, “well shouldn’t a theory that uses the label of ‘natural’ actually model what happens in nature? Where is the net origin of species by means of natural selection going on. I see a net elimination of species. Shouldn’t population genetics model this scenario since it is so ubiquitous and real? So much for Genetic Algorithms modelling the real world.”
The point of all this is that the label of “natural” selection isn’t necessarily accurate to the extent it implies ever increasing fitness. If the population goes extinct (for whatever reason), fitness won’t increase. There is no inherent reason the idealized models in population genetics (where fitness keeps increasing) will actually be realized in nature. Those models always work except when they don’t. And not to mention, even in real world scenarios where fitness is ever increasing, unless there is something like HGT or plasmid exchange, the fitness increase is usually due to loss of function (reductive evolution) not gain of function — the so called “survival of the sickest” scenario.
If the speculated models of Darwin’s “natural” selection are so ad hoc in the way they are used to explain what happens in the lab and field, if Lenski’s experiments of fitness improvement in simple creatures take so much more attention than the numerous examples where fitness in more complex organisms goes to zero (aka extinction), then the success of Darwin’s theory seems a bit more the result of sampling bias, confirmation bias, and imagination than what actual real time data may justify. Until these issues are resolved, it’s really premature for someone like Dawkins or other ultra Darwinians to argue “natural” selection is a universal acid because what is labeled as “natural” may actually be imaginary, not real.
[I extend thanks to the TSZ admins and moderators for hosting this essay.]
The same applies to your own model. You are attempting to extrapolate a Universal Principle Of Extinction from various extinction scenarios. Some populations go extinct, therefore all do in a ‘natural’ scenario … I find I can get a bus through the hole in your argument, and I can’t even drive a bus.
John Calhoun’s experiment a the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) inspired the book
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Frisby_and_the_Rats_of_NIMH
and the MGM movie, The Secret of NIMH
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_NIMH
Thanks for your comment, but there is no extrapolation needed. Everything will go extinct as the universe burns out, the question is how fast. Life almost seems an anomaly in a universe filled with non-life. If this is the case, then extinction is merely reversion to the mean, so to speak.
Who would take exception with that?
It does. It seems to me that in your references, it is stated that theory predicted what happened in the experiment. Under repeated bottlenecks causing strong drift and relaxed selection, there is extinction due to accumulation of deleterious mutations.
Not during periods of extinction, obviously. That’s why they’re called extinctions, not diversifications.
They do. It’s in the very beginning of the abstract of the paper you reference:
“In small or repeatedly bottlenecked populations, mutations are expected to accumulate by genetic drift, causing fitness declines. In mutational meltdown models, such fitness declines further reduce population size, thus accelerating additional mutation accumulation and leading to extinction. Because the rate of mutation accumulation is determined partly by the mutation rate, the risk and rate of meltdown are predicted to increase with increasing mutation rate. “
The introductions begins with:
“A well-established conclusion drawn from many theoretical studies is that slightly deleterious mutations accumulate in small populations and cause their fitness to decline. Small population size hampers selection and increases the role of genetic drift in determining allele frequencies and fates. Some of the deleterious alleles constantly being supplied by mutation are therefore fixed, reducing population mean fitness. Mutation accumulation (MA) was first recognized as a threat to asexual populations, because in the absence of recombination (and if reverse mutation is rare enough to be ignored), offspring carry all the mutations present in their parent, aswell as any newly arisen mutations (Fisher 1930; Muller 1964). Models therefore predict the eventual extinction of small asexual populations.”
So the modeling predicted the result of the experiment.
So much for you not reading your reference.
When did it ever imply that? That’s just some crap you make up.
And when populations are very small, drift becomes overwhelming (hence bringing up bottlenecks in your reference).
… noooo, really? STOP THE PRESS!
What models are those? What do they model specifically? Are those models thought to constitute the only way evolution can happen, or is it just that you’re just now deceptively trying to make it appear as such?
I’m so glad we have you to state these things. Nobody could have figured this out but you.
Loss of function mutations are usually due to an unchanging and simple environment. You put a wild-type organism in a synthetic and simple lab-environment and it can shed much of it’s genome that would have been important in the wild, but is pretty much useless when it lives in a thick broth of essential basic nutrients and constant temperature indefinitely.
If.
I suggest you resolve them by not trying to force-fit your own personal misconceptions on to the field as a whole.
Who argues this and what do they mean that “natural selection is a universal acid”?
When has Dawkins said “natural selection is a universal acid” and what the fuck did he mean by that, specifically? Have Dawkins been on the record saying something like extinction can’t happen due to natural selection, or that bottlenecked populations despite the bottleneck are functionally immortal due to natural selection?
I’m going to guess:
1. He never said that, no-one said that. No-one ever would say that.
2. It’s just some silly piece of rhetoric you invented you can make up to be anything you want and then poke holes in.
Yes, but then it will go extinct due to the universe burning out, not because extinction is the only mode of evolution, or that natural selection doesn’t work and divisificatin can’t happen or whatever deceptive crap you’re trying to insinuate.
So yes, that IS an extrapolation. Allan Miller points you that you’re trying to extrapolate a general principle of evolutionary change from a few circumstantial (and predicted by models) examples, and your response is “I’m right because the universe will one day end”.
What the fuck man? I wouldn’t even call that a sleight of hand, because it’s so obvious it’s just plain dumb.
Let’s cut to the chase, Sal: what roll will those demonic UFOs play in global extinction?
To me this is a great argument against ID.
Why did the designer not step in and nudge mutations from generation to generation to allow them to survive?
Why did the frontloaded responses to this situation not activate and save the population from extinction?
Sal, on what basis does the designer pick a population to manage? It seems to me as if the designer would have managed this population if it had been larger and in the wild. After all, mice still exist.
This may be an ID research project after all – what size population is required to avoid extinction by forcing the designer to act?
Any thoughts on why frontloading did not step in Sal? Any thoughts on why the designer allowed this population to expire when others do not?
All natural selection – indeed, drift too – results at the limit in extinction of something, be it a genetic stretch in a recombining population, or an entire lineage. Loss of a population is a gain for those that remain.
Allan, you’re not listening. “Some will take exception” he said, so get with the program already. Please, PLEASE take exception to his characterization. By the power of Jesus Christ, COMPLY! wave hands
The model for when things go right is what happens when things go wrong, according to Sal. At least when the issue is evolution.
It’s not an opportunity to study what went wrong, it’s another chance to try to knock out evolution. All’s fair in love and in trying to rubbish the theory that you dislike for religious reasons.
Glen Davidson
Sal,
What research do you propose that could decide the matter one way or the other?
Ahem, the net loss of species was referred by E.O. Wilson, not the paper on mutational meltdown. The elimination of species which E.O. Wilson speaks is not about mutational meltdown.
What I’ve done is cite 3 different ways a population goes extinct:
1 the Calhoun scenario (mouse utopia)
2 mutational meltdown
3 elimination of species by competition with other species for other resources (E.O. Wilson)
You confused the mutational meltdown (#2) with the mechanism discussed by E.O. Wilson (#3, the sixth extinction).
That was Dennett who used those words specifically, but if you read carefully I didn’t make that comment as a quote and specifically attribute it to Dawkins. I said someone “like Dawkins or other ultra Darwinians” and merely echoed Dennett’s word choice to describe Universal Darwinism.
But that said from wiki on universal Darwinism:
With such loose definitions of what evolution means, even a miraculous transformation could count as evolution. Descent with modification could also include descent with miraculous modification, and it would still be evolution!
The implicit suggestion is the transformations are not that extraordinary, even “easy” to quote one evolutionist. I’m merely pointing out, certain diversifications suggested as being ordinary or “easy”, don’t really look that way when we examine real time evidence in the lab and field.
Sure it works, except when it doesn’t. And it also does a better job of eliminating species than originating them in real time field observations. Furthermore it does a good job of reducing complexity than creating it. So where does natural selection create more species on net average and more complexity on net average? Not in any direct field or lab observations, only in the imagination of evolutionists and irrelevant computer simulations like Avida.
Some other mechanism created diversity. Uh, I can think of at least two, like mutation followed by reproductive isolation. Maybe even special creation.
As far as emergence complexity, like say a eukaryote from a prokaryote, or an animal from a single-celled organism — who knows exactly what mechanism was involved….
Strong selection pressure reduces diversity, it doesn’t create it, does it? How do things diversify by having diversity selected against. If something is selected for, other things are selected against, and hence diversity is reduced.
LOL! Sal’s so funny! All these years and he’s still looking for that one experiment to misrepresent, that one scientists to quote mine, which will give him his silver bullet to use against evolution. 😀
Funny then that after each of the Earth’s five major mass extinction events in the last 500 MY there was a huge re-radiation of life, a huge growth in the number of new species which appeared to fill in the empty ecological niches.
I’m sure the ID-Creationists have a good explanation, they just can’t say what it is.
stcordova,
Who says NS is expected to have a significant effect on the rate of cladogenesis, or fuel a universal drive to complexity?
From Calhoun’s 1973 Royal Society of Medicine paper that describes his experiments which are in the NIH archives:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/procrsmed00338-0007.pdf
stcordova,
… and?
Seeing that natural selection is a process of elimination we should expect it to lead to at least some extinctions. However this was an artificial scenario…
The Ultra Darwinians says NS creates complexity, I wouldn’t say they imply it affects the rate of cladogenesis.
If I were a die hard evolutionist, I’d think mutationism would be a better school of thought that selectionism since selection would appear to resist innovation and diversity, not foster it.
The following researchers unfortunately equate diversity with complexity (at least complexity the way an engineer would understand it), but they do describe the effect of removing selection and the creation of diversity:
As I said, they conflate diversity with what an engineer would view as true complexity. In any case, I think it is fair to say, the stronger the selection pressure, on average there will be less diversity, not more. Elimination of species not origination of species.
But if Natural Selection does not create complexity, what does? By complexity I do not mean diversity (as McShea does), but the existence of several well-matched interacting parts where removal of a part causes a system breakdown. And no, this notion isn’t just Michael Behe’s but Andreas Wagener’s:
Below is an apoptosis pathway. Those that have capases are only found in animals. How did the animal “clade” emerge? It would sort of need to have a lot of the apoptosis orphan genes in place and coordinated with developmental mechanisms to boot.
Even if apoptosis was in the supposed single-celled ancestral creature, it would seem a lot of stuff still had to be simultaneously in place for the system to work. Wouldn’t selection work against half-baked systems that are injurious?
stcordova,
That would depend on whether you still had your Creationism-tinted grasp of it, in that parallel universe. There is a perfectly good reason why, at any given time, one would see more purifying selection than promotion of novelty. Adaptation happens comparatively rapidly, and once it has happened, most mutations to that particular locus are selectively ‘downhill’ from the adaptive peak reached. It’s your ‘some-therefore-all, few-therefore-none’ fallacy again.
Is a complex multi-protein system in modern organisms. And … ?
stcordova,
Yes, it would. But I think you would need to show that primitive apoptosis could not be beneficial. I realise that seems like good old ‘burden shift’, but there you go. You are making a positive claim for irreducible complexity.
I don’t think Sal cares about disproving evolution. His goal seems to be to create enough collateral to become the next Duane Gish. I suspect he’ll find those rubes have already been fleeced.
Again, mere evolution isn’t being debated so no one wants to disprove it. Perhaps you should educate yourself as to what is actually being debated. Or is that too much to ask?
The theists here would gain if all the atheists left?
Yes, of course they would. They’d feel much better about themselves.
Nowhere in this quote is it implied that Dennett(or Dawkins, on anyone thinks natural selection is a “universal acid” that will rescue all populations from extinction.
All he says is that, if there’s life elsewhere in the universe, that life will also be subject to differential reproductive success as a consequence of it’s phenotype’s impact on their ability to survive and reproduce.
Holy shit mate it’s like you can barely read and you’re just slamming random ideas and concepts from the literature together into some messy incoherent whole.
I know, it’s just an observation about extinctions happening. You write:
Well fuck me, there is extinction when you remove and destroy their habitats? So you remove the place where an organism lives in merely a few human generations, and the result is that organism doesn’t have a place to live and goes extinct? Nooo, I guess that means evolution and diversification can’t happen.
Dude, fire up your google Earth, zoom in on any developed nation slowly and notice how pretty much everything you see is farmland, roads and cities. The entirety of Europe looks pretty much like an extremely fine-grained checkerboard in greens and browns. Those are fields. Humans grow crops there and care for and protect them. That usually means they spray them with pesticides and chase wild animals away that try to live there or eat them. They used to be forests and shrublands only a few thousand years ago. Millions upon millions of square kilometers of natural habitat has been lost in mere centuries and we’re supposed to conclude that because this is the cause of large amounts of extinction, evolution is wrong and diversification can’t, doesn’t and never did happen?
For fucks sake mate, think.
Nobody has ever said the only mode of evolution is diversification. Fuck, even Darwin realized millions of species must have gone extinct over the course of history (whether there is habitat loss and destruction or not). After all, even at a basic level selection for something, is selection against something else.
From https://www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Darwin's_Phylogeny.htm
Look at the diagram from The Origin of Species and notice the countless extinct bifurcations on that tree:
Why did the designer not step in and save this particular mouse population?
OMagain,
Busy triggering antibiotic resistance through ‘environmental cues’, and getting some of Lenski’s bacteria going on citrate.
Sal has made it clear that his goal is not to increase the sum total of human knowledge, or even learn anything himself. He wants to continue to abuse children with his “lessons” on the evils of evolution. Not unlike these guys.
Doesn’t mean the tree expanded by natural selection does it! It just means something made the tree grow. Given that lab and field observations show an ordinary tendency for things to go extinct, something atypical created those explosive bursts of diversification.
So why do you think a process of eliminating diversity (aka “natural” selection) creates diversity again? Seems to me, a net absence of selection is a pre-requisite for allowing diversity to emerge? Agree or disagree?
More evidence that Darwin was an incoherent thinker who is inappropriately viewed for putting forward a “genius” idea.
Yeppers, but the guy still believed it.
And he supports his belief by an argument from ignorance.
stcordova,
Disagree. It is related far more to genetic isolation and the numbers of niches available than to the absence of selection.
From the “…any complex organ..” quote, it sounds to me like Darwin understood that “irreducible complexity” was itself an argument from ignorance.
IC is proof by contradiction, not argument from ignorance. There is a distinction.
“I don’t know how this assembly of parts could have arisen from simpler assemblies, so it must have occurred all at once, therefore it is highly improbable for it to happen by natural processes.”
That’s an argument from ignorance, or possibly incredulity.
Yes, but that was 20 years ago. We know better now. The one how penned the words you quoted published a review paper showing on net average selection selects AGAINST functional complexity, not for it when there is a mutational change.
So now, on what grounds aside from imagination can one argue selection selects toward non-existent traits when they are functionally complex traits. The only grounds is imagination, not physical evidence.
stcordova,
‘On net average’; this would lead to a tree of life populated with mostly simple organisms but does not exclude a few outliers of complexity substantially greater than the mean. What do we have?
But that is not proof that selection was what causes diversity! That is a non-sequitur (one of Darwin’s many “genius” non-sequiturs).
Now, there was an interesting development in the question of molecular diversity and previously supposed wide-spread heterozygous advantage.
Round about the 50’s, a question was floated around as to why there were so many diverse protein polymorphisms. The Darwinian illogical was so polluting the understanding of biology that of “natural” selection was sersiouly presumed by many to cause diversity.
“natural” selection was presumed to create protein polymorphisms (diversity in proteins, alleles of genes, etc.) since “natural” selection supposedly created the tree of life as represented in the diagram in Darwin’s book.
So the population geneticists worked on the mathematical issue as to how selection could maintain so much polymorphism, and found it leading to absurdities and hence neutral theory was born.
Heterozygous advantage was one suggested solution to the polymorphism problem, but heterozygous advantage is costly to maintain in terms of the reproductive excess required to sustain it, not to mention, it is hard to justify as an explanation for the existence of every polymorphism.
The LACK of selection is a better explanation for protein polymorphism, (diversity), and hence was born neutral theory, and the seeds of demise of Darwinian theory were then firmly planted. Kimura argued the case quite well for neutral evolution at the molecular level. Masotoshi Nei argues that what happens at the molecular level is expected to happen at the organismal level as well since we are made of molecules….
The dominance of neutral evolution in the generation of diversity is suggested theoretically and attested to by actual lab and field observations.
stcordova,
More protein alleles are selectively neutral than are beneficial. This is no argument against selection.
Darwin had no opportunity to look at protein or DNA sequence, so was unaware of the polymorphism at this level. He mainly had phenotype, which is much more likely to be under selection. Awareness of a substantial molecular polymorphism is not in conflict with a significant role for selection at the phenotypic level.
Thank you for your comment, but I must disagree. The trend observed by Wilson if in place in the past would wipe the outliers out as there becomes “reversion to the mean” (figuratively speaking).
The species Wilson refers to are complex ones, 3 every hour are being wiped out, not really many prokaryotic species being wiped out by comparison.
So the question is, why are there complex species now if the inherent direction (as demonstrated emprically) is toward simplicity. This is also confirmed not only by EO Wilson’s estimates at the organismal level, by the many papers done researchers at the molecular level which Behe catalogued in that painful-to-read paper:
http://www.lehigh.edu/bio/Faculty/Behe/PDF/QRB_paper.pdf
Imho, this was the best publication against Darwinian evolution Mike ever wrote, and it is the one least discussed.
So on empirical and theoretical grounds Darwinian evolution is not expected to create net average diversity nor novel functional complexity, hence his theory of “natural” selection is anything but natural, it’s incoherent imagination with lots of empirical and theoretical evidence against it.
stcordova,
1) Not true.
2) Wilson is referring to a very specific period in history: the anthropogenic extinction. There is no evidence that anthropogenic extinction is having any effect on the complexity of survivors, and still less that it is reasonable to extrapolate patterns from anthropogenic extinction to the entirety of earth history.
“I’m currently going downhill, so downhill is the only direction there is”.
Well, OMagain, I’m sooo glad you asked.
In the case of NIMH experiment, Calhoun, the intelligent designer of Universe 25 found something amusing about seeing the mice die. Of course the mice might not like it so much, but Calhoun and his supporters found something interesting in the whole affair.
Maybe the Ultimate Intelligent Designer of all things gets some amusement from watching systems break down and die so as to provide contrast to designs that work really really well, like say living systems that never die. Eternal life seems more meaningful if there is the possibility of death (dare we say reality of death), wouldn’t you say?
The Christian God, the Intelligent Designer of life gave the explanation of why there is death and suffering:
So the answer to your question is that it would make sense for suffering and death to exist if there is another realm that exists where that is not true, like a heaven were creatures live in perpetual bliss eternally. The bad world that is passing away was created to provide contrast to the good world that lasts forever and ever. This is like a playwright writing a story that has some tragedy and challenges in the beginning so that the happily ever after ending has more meaning.
stcordova,
It has been extensively critiqued. Perhaps you could put a Behe glove puppet on your right hand, and I put a critic’s on mine, and we can have a punch-and-judy battle and save the effort of typing anything ourselves.
But almost everything that’s ever lived has gone extinct. What sort of living system that never dies did you have in mind?
Can’t you think of another explanation for what you describe in the OP that does not involve such a Ultimate Intelligent Designer? Have you tried? What had you eliminated as possible alternatives before settling on that?
Yeah, reviewed by the likes of Jerry Coyne:
Coyne goes on to argue that what happens in the lab isn’t what is observed in nature. The problem is that Coyne equates his imagination with what happens in nature, just like Darwin did. Coyne needs scare quotes around “nature” when he says “what happened in ‘nature’ “, because what he is really referring to is his imaginary (likely false) conception of nature.
What happenED (past tense) in nature in the past to create diversity is not known, it is only assumed to be “natural” selection or something not-so-out-of-the ordinary. We don’t know that it was ordinary as a fact, and the evidence of laboratory experiments suggest complexity emerged by mechanisms that were not ordinary.
If we look at field observations in the present we see loss of diversity, not expansion of it. Ergo, it is premature, likely wrong to say ordinary mechanisms were responsible for creation of functionally complex systems.
When creationists demand direct evidence of net average complexity gains by ordinary means, evolutionists only cite their imagination of how things happened in the past, not actual observations. For all we know, miracles may have caused the emergence of diversity. The fact there is diversity in the fossil record, just like there is the fact of living things, is not evidence their emergence is by ordinary mechanisms.
At the very least, one could say “we don’t know”. If one asserts “it evolved” then that doesn’t exclude it miraculously evolving — that is descent with modification via extraordinary events. That’s at least more plausible since all observed ordinary events on average are loss of function and loss of species.
Observation at least agrees with the theory complexity is harder to come by than simplicity.
You mean isolation where lineages can’t compete for resources and wipe each other out like humans are doing to other species?
Isolation prevents selection from wiping out the new founders of lineages since isolation prevents competition for resources. We also know fixation of traits can happen without selection and that most evolution is neutral as a matter of principle.
stcordova,
Behe extrapolates microbial lab studies to nature as a whole. These tend to exclude two very important mechanisms of generation of ‘FCT’ novelty: HGT, and crossover in meiosis. So, selective at best. The extrapolation is not justified.
Messy nature is simply a different world from the models Behe chooses – chooses very deliberately – to concentrate on. Evolution is as much about ecology as genetics, and that virtually does not exist in lab models.
stcordova,
It’s not just competition; we are destroying habitat. You need a mechanism like human expansion to be in operation almost continuously in history, everywhere, for Wilson to be relevant.
That’s not the whole of it; isolation prevents gene flow, which is an important part of the overall process of selection in recombinant populations. Once gene flow is stemmed, divergence proceeds by a combination of mutation, independent selective sweeps and drift. But of course, non-overlapping populations certainly don’t compete. Ask Jerry Coyne about mechanisms of speciation. It is neither all-about-selection nor never-about-selection.
Like I say, molecular evolution is not the whole of evolution. I hate to sloganise, but I’ll do it anyway: “some-therefore-all; few-therefore-none” is the thrust of the vast majority of your evolutionary critiques.