Recently, I was browsing through the latest posts over at Evolution News and Views, and an anonymous article titled, Imagine: 60 Million Proteins in One Cell Working Together, caught my eye. By now, most readers at TSZ will be aware that I consider it overwhelmingly likely that the first living thing was designed. However, I’m also highly critical of attempts to over-egg the case for intelligent design. The article I read was one such attempt: it contained some unfortunate errors and omissions.
The author tried to bolster his case by quoting from two articles in the same issues of Nature (volume 537, 15 September 2016): one by Aebersold & Mann, and the other by Huang, Boyken, and Baker. As it turned out, neither paper was about the origin of life: one was about the proteome (or the set of all the proteins in a cell), while the other discussed de novo protein design.
How many proteins are there in a single cell? And how many are needed?
The ENV article was titled, Imagine: 60 Million Proteins in One Cell Working Together. When I first saw that headline, I was a little puzzled. When I hear the phrase, “60 million proteins,” I automatically assume the speaker means different kinds of proteins. But what the author actually meant was: 60 million protein molecules inside a single cell.
“What kind of cell?” you may ask. Apparently the figure of 60 million is taken from a passage in the Nature article by Aebersold & Mann, where the authors are relating some astonishing facts about the proteins in a tiny yeast cell:
A proliferating Schizosaccharomyces pombe cell contains about 60 million protein molecules, which have abundances that range from a few copies to 1.1 million copies per expressed gene.
However, yeast cells are eukaryotic: they have a nucleus. The first living thing didn’t: it was prokaryotic, and it would have been much smaller than a yeast cell. How much smaller? We don’t know. But it turns out that the number of protein molecules in a tiny cell belonging to the bacterium Mycoplasma pneumoniae is only 0.05×106, or just 50,000. That’s three orders of magnitude less than the yeast cell described by Aebersold & Mann.
But the real question we need to ask is: how many different kinds of proteins are there in a simple bacterial cell? It turns out that a typical bacterium requires 4,000 proteins for growth and reproduction, while humans require more than 100,000 different kinds of proteins. Some bacteria, however, need far fewer than 4,000 proteins, according to MicrobeWiki:
In 1995, the entire genome of M. genitalium was sequenced in less than 6 months using the random shotgun sequencing technique. It was found to have the smallest known genome of any free-living organism at about 580 kilobase pairs long, with 479 coding sequences for proteins. For comparison M. pneumoniae has 677 protein coding sequences, H. influenzae has 1703, and E. coli K-12 has 4,288.
382 of the 482 protein-coding genes in Mycoplasma genitalium have since been identified as essential. Dr. Stephen Meyer, in his work, Signature in the Cell (New York: HarperOne, 2009), generously estimates (ibid., p. 213) that a minimally complex cell needs 250 different kinds of proteins. Dr. Michael W. W. Adams, in an article titled, The Influence of Environment and Metabolic Capacity on the Size of a Microrganism, makes a similar estimate: in a nutrient-rich environment, a life-form with a minimal biosynthetic capacity would require at least 250 genes.
So the first cellular life-form probably required 250 different kinds of proteins, in order to function. That’s still a pretty impressive number.
What proportion of amino acid sequences are functional?
The Evolution News and Views article refers to the recent article by Huang, Boyken, and Baker, before going on to cite the pioneering work of Intelligent Design researcher, Dr. Douglas Axe:
This paper is interesting because it relates to the work of Douglas Axe that resulted in a paper in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 2004. Axe answered questions about this paper earlier this year, and also mentioned it in his recent book Undeniable (p. 54). In the paper, Axe estimated the prevalence of sequences that could fold into a functional shape by random combinations. It was already known that the functional space was a small fraction of sequence space, but Axe put a number on it based on his experience with random changes to an enzyme. He estimated that one in 1074 sequences of 150 amino acids could fold and thereby perform some function — any function.
I’ll return to Dr. Axe’s estimate in a moment. The Evolution News and Views article went on to breathlessly declare that Axe’s figure of 1 in 1074 had actually been too generous, and that the true proportion of 150-aa sequences capable of performing a biological function was hundreds of orders of magnitude smaller (green bolding below is mine – VJT):
The new paper in Nature seems to point to a much smaller functional space. The authors say,
It is useful to begin by considering the fraction of protein sequence space that is occupied by naturally occurring proteins (Fig. 1a). The number of distinct sequences that are possible for a protein of typical length is 20200 sequences (because each of the protein’s 200 residues can be one of 20 amino acids), and the number of distinct proteins that are produced by extant organisms is on the order of 1012. Evidently, evolution has explored only a tiny region of the sequence space that is accessible to proteins.…
Since 20200 is about 10260, and the space actually sampled by living organisms is 1012, the numbers differ by at least 240 orders of magnitude for proteins of length 200, or about 183 orders of magnitude the 150-amino-acid chains Axe used. No wonder the authors say that “the natural evolutionary process has sampled only an infinitesimal subset” of sequence space.
This, I have to say, is a complete misreading of the paper in Nature by Huang, Boyken, and Baker. The authors are not trying to answer the question explored by Axe – namely, what proportion of 200-amino acid sequences are capable of performing a useful biological function? Rather, what they are estimating is the proportion of possible 200-amino acid sequences which are found in nature. Their answer is: 1012 divided by 20200 (which is approximately 10260), or in other words, 1 in 10248. But instead of concluding that any amino acid sequences which are not found in nature are non-functional, as the writer of the Evolution News and Views article appears to do, they draw the opposite conclusion: “The huge space that is unlikely to be sampled during evolution is the arena for de novo protein design.” In other words, there are a whole lot of new proteins out there which nature hasn’t created yet, but which scientists can create.
Back to Dr. Axe’s estimate of the proportion of 150-amino acid sequences which are capable of performing a biological function: I have previously discussed his figure of 1 in 1074 in my online review of his latest book, Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (New York: HarperOne, 2016). I quoted from various professors, including an expert in protein structure who argued that the proteins in the first living things would have all contained considerably less than 100 amino acids:
So I think the counterargument to the ID folks is not that sequence populations of 10E80 needed to be searched to find a 100-mer with robust enzyme activity, but rather that random populations of a few million relatively small proteins could contain a few molecules from which to start the evolutionary process.
Another professor whom I cited regarded Dr. Axe’s work as highly biased, because he had based his studies and calculations on very large sequences of amino acids (150-amino acid chains), even though much shorter sequences (such as polypeptides) were known to have biological functions.
Additionally, I quoted from a third professor, who kindly pointed out to me that because a very large number of different amino acid sequences were capable of performing the same biological function, the actual number of attempts that would be required to make a molecule with the same function as one of these proteins was likely to be much lower than 1060 or 1080. This professor also estimated that the number of attempts that would have been available to evolution had been estimated at 1042 – far greater than the number of attempts that could be made by doing man-made experiments (no more than 1012, which means that any protein which is too difficult for human experiments to generate might still be created by natural processes). This professor added that that while he was very sympathetic towards arguments against the natural origins of the first cell, and while he thought Dr. Axe may well be correct in arguing that abiogenesis was astronomically unlikely, in his opinion, Dr. Axe seemed to be trying to calculate the probability of an unknown process, and was therefore overstating his case.
Bottom line: we don’t really know how rare functional 150-amino-acid proteins are in sequence space, and we don’t know that they couldn’t have been derived from shorter proteins.
How did life get to be left-handed?
The Evolution News and Views article went on to say that there were
Axe’s estimate of one in 1074, one must note, referred to mutations to existing proteins in the universal proteome of all organisms. When considering random chains of amino acids in a primordial soup, however, Steve Meyer noted in Signature in the Cell (pp. 210-212) two other requirements. The amino acids must be one-handed, and they must form only peptide bonds. Applying generous probabilities of 0.5 for handedness and 0.5 for peptide bonds, Meyer reduced the probability for a lucky functional protein chain of 150 amino acids to one in 10164, far beyond the universal probability bound (p. 212). [Green bolding mine – VJT.]
The problem of life’s one-handedness which Dr. Meyer raises in his book is a genuine one: without homochirality, life would not exist.
A recent article by Denise Henry in Phys.org, titled, Discovery demystifies origin of life chirality phenomenon (March 11, 2015) describes a promising breakthrough in the field:
University of Akron A. Schulman Professor of Polymer Science Tianbo Liu has discovered that Mother Nature’s clear bias toward certain amino acids and sugars and against others isn’t accidental.
Liu explains that all life molecules are paired as left-handed and right-handed structures. In scientific terms, the phenomenon is called chirality…
Liu found that any molecules, if large enough (several nanometers) and with an electrical charge, will seek their own type with which to form large assemblies. This “self-recognition” of left-handed and right-handed molecule pairs is featured in the March 10, 2015, issue of Nature Communications.
“We show that homochirality, or the manner in which molecules select other like molecules to form larger assemblies, may not be as mysterious as we imagined,” Liu says.
In their paper, Liu et al. summarized their results as follows:
In summary, chiral macroanions demonstrate chiral recognition behaviour by forming homogeneous blackberry structure via long-range electrostatic interactions between the individual enantiomers in their racemic mixture solutions. Adding chiral co-anions suppresses the self-assembly of one enantiomer while maintaining the assembly of the other one. This leads to a natural chiral selection and chiral amplification process, indicating that some environmental preferences can lead to a complete chiral selection. The fact that the relatively simple inorganic macroions exhibit chiral recognition and selection during their assembly process indicates that the related features of biomacromolecules might be due to their macroionic nature via long-range electrostatic interactions
Another, more recent paper in Chemistry World by Dr. Rachel Brazil, titled, The origin of homochirality provides an excellent overview of the work in the field done to date, and discusses new findings. Dr. Brazil puts forward her own hypothesis.
Readers may still be wondering: why are the amino acids in a protein linked by peptide bonds, instead of non-peptide bonds? I’d like to invite any biologists who may be reading this post to weigh in on this subject.
What the ENV article got right
The Evolution News and Views article redeems itself at the very end, when quoting from the paper by Huang, Boyken, and Baker. The authors state:
Despite the advances in technology of the past 100 years, human-made machines cannot compete with the precision of function of proteins at the nanoscale and they cannot be produced by self-assembly.
The authors go on to suggest that the extreme efficiency of these nanoscale proteins is the due to the fact that “selective pressure operated on randomly arising variants of primordial proteins, and there were also hundreds of millions of years in which to get it right.” But this is pure speculation. As the author of the ENV article aptly puts it:
Now ponder that. They are duly impressed by the intricate molecular machines that proteins make in the cell, yet their worldview does not allow them to consider this as evidence for design.
Indeed.
What I am arguing in this post is that while I see no reason in principle why nature cannot generate proteins capable of performing useful biological functions, and while the mathematical arguments against such proteins originating by natural processes strike me as inconclusive, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to ask why the proteins we observe in nature are capable of technical feats which even our best scientists cannot match. It is not enough to simply invoke “hundreds of millions of years”: this is lazy scientific thinking, which makes no testable predictions. In the absence of such predictions, intelligent design of these nano-machines by a super-intellect sounds like a plausible explanation which warrants consideration.
Here’s one questions I’d like to ask the biologists: do the most efficient nanoscale molecular machines tend to be relatively short (as we’d expect if they arose naturally) or relatively long?
Readers who would like to know more about the difficulties attending abiogenesis are welcome to view Dr. James Tour’s online talk, “The Origin of Life – An Inside Story,” here or here. The take-home message of Dr. Tour’s talk was that currently, scientists know nothing about how the ingredients of life originated, let alone life itself. Dr. Tour makes no attempt to “sell” intelligent design to his audience: indeed, he formulates his argument without even mentioning it. Readers will find it highly watchable.
Possibly the stupidest thing I’ve read on the internet. I will take it as sarcasm, giving the benefit of the doubt. But there’s no real indicator that it’s sarcasm. Certainly nothing in the history of ID supporting posts suggests that it’s anything other than boneheadedness.
Possibly the stupidest thing I’ve read on the internet.
You really need to top digging. Try to realize that you don’t know anything about this subject. A non-functional ovary weighs nothing.
So what? That’s what Erik said. Natural selection is not the source of innovation.
Mung:
Erik said that nature is not the source of innovation:
You weighed all non-functional ovaries?
You weighed all functional ovaries?
Give it up, John.
A second egg in the pipeline weighs something.
Where did Erik say that? Your link is to you saying that you said something else.
We’re talking about eggs without ovaries. What are you talking about?
Jesus, Mung. Follow the link and read the comment.
Mung,
Just stop digging. Please.
False. As your link shows, I was simply quoting and rephrasing what your recommended source said. It said: “Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. Nature’s many innovations—some uncannily perfect—call for natural principles that accelerate life’s ability to innovate.”
In essence, it was your statement, not mine. You linked to it and recommended Vincent to read it, so that he would apparently learn or something.
ETA: If you still quibble about “nature” vs “natural selection”, get over it. I asked earlier for a mechanism how nature could innovate (i.e. I got over the “nature” vs “natural selection”) and somebody nicely provided the answer – mutation.
Erik,
Yes, and you did so incorrectly, as our exchange shows:
keiths, to Vincent:
Erik:
keiths:
Erik:
keiths:
The exchange also shows that I never said anything in the sense of stating. I was just paraphrasing to get a question answered. I was asking, not saying.
And you weren’t the one who’d have the answer.
I pointed out and corrected your misunderstandings, Erik. What’s the problem?
You had (and still evidently have) the misunderstanding that I said something about nature. Your source said. And you will never be corrected.
People can read, Erik.
You made a mistake. Get over it.
You apparently haven’t. You are wilfully pressing your misconception.
Next time you quote something from Vincent or phoodoo, can I go about it as if you said it yourself? I mean, what’s the problem?
Erik,
You didn’t quote. You paraphrased, and your paraphrase was incorrect. Read it again.
keiths pointed to it. I quoted what was in the description. No, I have not read that book. I have read Darwin.
So there’s no distinction between microevolution and macroevolution due to the nature of change over time?
Darwin likened the nature of evolution to his understanding about linguistic change – tree-like diverging. This is not all there is to linguistic change. Linguistic change occurs because language is fundamentally distinct from speakers. Every next generation has to learn it anew. Every next generation learns it in their own way, which constitutes linguistic change. Languages can be mixed or they can supplant other languages, so there’s not only diverging, but also converging and assimilation. For all this to work, there have to be people, language users.
Does the theory of evolution work the same way? Does the next generation inherit genes or do genes have to be learned? If inherited genes are what we are, then how can there be change? If there’s evolutionary change, it follows that genes are not (only) what we are. Do mixed species occur, just like there are mixed languages? If yes, how do they overcome their genetic differences in order to reproduce? If not, then the process of evolution is not really similar to linguistic change.
Throughout change and despite of change, language retains its purpose – to express a meaning. There’s also a clearly identified engine to both language use and change – language users across generations. What is the purpose and engine of evolution?
If there are variations anyway, then why should the organisms who possess them survive and reproduce? If anybody and everybody is born with variations and therefore can accidentally be born with the same or similar variations, then what’s the value in preserving some specific variations through one’s own offspring? ETA: By the way, how do you ensure the transmission of a specific variation? “I have this awesome chest hair. I better make kids so it gets passed on.”?
Some variations are better than others, right? Better in what sense? Isn’t there some standard to determining the betterness? What’s the emphasis in the standard? Ability to reproduce (thus homosexuality is counterproductive) or survival (i.e. might makes right) or something else? What else and why?
Erik,
That’s…um…confused. Have you ever considered reading a book or two about evolution? Folks here would be happy to recommend titles to you.
How about pointing out the confusion and clarifying it. Unless it’s unclarifiable. Reading books is where I already come from.
To me, evolutionists look like that man. Namely, if the theory of evolution were true or taken seriously, there would be no soul. And no heart either in the sense you are using it. All that talk about how variation creates and mutation innovates, yet all that animus against theism and creation.
There’s no conflict between evolutionary theory and theism. There’s not even any conflict between evolutionary theory and regarding the contingent universe as a Creator-dependent Creation rather than as self-sufficient Nature.
Do you believe you can convince them?
What’s there to be convinced of.
Science has never been able to disprove the existence of magic.
It can, however, make the assumption of magic unnecessary. Or at least work in that direction.
But this means that science is distinct from metaphysics and science has a more limited scope. KN does not like this.
I am not KN. I respect him, but I am not him.
Yes, science has a limited scope. In matters of history, science can only express probabilities and likelihoods. I personally think that in matters like the age of the earth and whether the fossil record reflects common descent, the likelihood approaches the likelihood of being killed by stepping in front of a speeding train.
Still, people occasionally test such probabilities.
In the matter of how variations occur and whether they are guided, I think the mathematics eliminates the necessity of any guiding hand. I can’t disprove the existence of guidance, but simulations suggest that none is needed.
Is there such a difference in language evolution? Actually, there may be to a degree (languages slowly become incompatible), but then that just gets back to the point that while there may be something to the “macro” evolution, it’s certainly not fundamentally different from the “micro” changes.
No, but there is a good analogy between how modification with a good deal of conservation operates, regardless of the different causes of the changes occurring. It’s the common descent aspect that is revealed by branching languages, as well as by branching species.
That’s neither the cause of change nor necessary for change to occur.
But what if languages were genetically known by humans? Then change would likely still occur, it just would be much more slow and less radical in change than it sometimes is (no vowel shift over a few decades, as occurred in English, in all likelihood).
Analogy does not imply sameness.
In some ways, yes, it does. It’s the conservative aspect in both that most commonly has led to tree-like branching over the course of language change.
The point is the continuity. The information passes on in both cases, with some variation, and splits yield fairly similar patterns in both for the most part. Language, of course, is capable of much faster change, hence the use of it as an analogy, for considerable linguistic changes are observable over the course of human history, while evolutionary change in biology occurs much more slowly.
If inherited words and syntax are what languages are, then how can there be change? Well, by changing. With language it involves brain activity, and with sexual organisms it involves mutation and recombination.
Seems obvious.
Yes, there is hybridization, but it doesn’t occur on the scale of English incorporating huge numbers of Old French words. Not the point of the analogy in any case.
What is the point of analogy?
What is the point of acting as if linguistic and biologic evolution have to be similar in all ways in order for one to serve as an analogy for the other with respect to the branching aspect of both?
Glen Davidson
That is not correct. That claim was made, incorrectly, in an article by Richard Dawkins.
Their actual paper describes the mathematical model they used. “Poof” is not in there. That’s the creationist explanation.
Nilsson also addressed slightly more substantive criticisms of the paper at Talk Reason.
Patrick,
Thanks. I have phoodoo killfiled, as everyone should.
In that case you shouldn’t be thanking me for imposing him on you indirectly. 😉
I’t’s useful to have a few people willing to respond to people on the ignore list. There’s always the outside chance that some interesting topic will come up.
Probably not. But I don’t care if they ignore me as long as they listen to Elliot Sober.
In linguistics, the breaking point is “(mutual) intelligibility” which is a tricky phenomenon. In biology, the breaking point is (in)capacity to reproduce, which is quite observable, but I have not seen yet how it’s been explained.
That’s a reductive view of linguistic processes. If the analogy applies, it might be a reductive view of biological processes too. Or else the analogy does not apply.
The speed of change is not at issue. The fundamental causes are. In linguistic change, there are agents who effect, apply, and go along with changes. Who is that agent in biological change? If there is no such agent, then we are back at square one – why is there change at all? Who is doing it and for what reason? If nobody is doing it, why is everybody going along with it? Or are we really going along with it? Should we? To what extent do/should we and to what extent not? Says who and why?
Not just by changing, but changing because of certain reasons and for certain purposes. The reason is that language has to be re-acquired at each generation and is used (must be used) to express meanings related to the ever-changing worlds of objects and ideas. What are the reasons and purposes with regard to evolution?
The point of analogy is to describe how a thing works based on how a similar thing works. The issue is that Darwin thought the analogy was accurate and complete, but in truth his understanding of linguistic change was reductive, if not defective. If the analogy is applicable, what if evolutionary biology is suffering from similar reductivity?
I also reject species as Aristotelian kinds, but biologists behave as if the term had fixed relevance, so there are determined characteristics according to which the term is being applied. A relevant distinction is being made from closely related terms such as variety or class.
Let “punctuated equilibrium” occur, but species are said to evolve, not merely occur.
Perhaps they have no convictions? On one hand, you might say it’s good that they have no prejudices. On the other, what if they have no ethical restraints either? For the time being, I am asking about logical restraints – intelligibility of the theory proposed.
And the theory accounts for the discontinuity how? I know it accounts for the continuity, but that alone is just half of reality, if not less, isn’t it?
Interesting. From your link, “The songs of sparrows, the calls of monkeys, and the language of human children could hardly be more different, yet they all lead to the same conclusion: Each species has a mind of its own that, like its limbs, heart, and other body parts, has evolved innate predispositions that cause it to organize incoming sensations in particular ways.”
What if instead of “has evolved innate predispositions” we say simply “has innate predispositions”? What would change in the meaning of the statement? Nothing, except background assumptions. So, why those background assumptions and not some other? I understand fully that some background assumptions are necessary, so why not have fully explanatory ones, not half-explanatory. Or else why not be extremely cautious with assumptions as a reasonable scientist would?
Erik,
I can’t tell if these are questions about the content of evolutionary theory or questions about the philosophical implications of evolutionary theory.
Here are two passages that seem confusing to me.
It’s not just “background assumptions” that would change. The change would be genuine explanation to mere description. That’s a significant epistemic distinction.
I can’t tell if you’re alleging that evolutionary theory is a bad explanation or an incomplete one. Of course it’s incomplete — all explanations are. To object to an explanation because it’s incomplete is to object to all explanations. Likewise, to object to an explanation because it is provisional is to object to all explanations as such, because all explanations are provisional.
Quite frankly, I think that scientists don’t stress the incompleteness and tentativeness of their explanations because those features are too obvious to be worth mentioning. What looks to non-scientists as “those scientists are so dogmatic!” is really that the usual pragmatic caveats — all theories are tentative, provisional, fallible, etc. — strike scientists as just too obvious to be worth stating. The reason why pragmatist philosopher say those things is because as philosophers we try to make everything as explicit as we can.
So is evolutionary theory, in your assessment, a bad scientific theory? If so, what alternatives are more plausible?
I don’t know how one could assign proportions to continuity or discontinuity such that the discontinuity is “half the reality” or more.
Regardless: the discontinuity in cognitive abilities between humans and other animals is a nice puzzle for biologists to solve, but there’s plenty of reason to believe that the solutions are consistent with evolutionary theory.
Here are three recent books that all tackle the discontinuity question and offer solutions that are consistent with evolutionary theory and also largely consistent with each other:
More Than Nature Needs: Language, Mind, and Evolution (2014) by Derek Bickerton.
The Evolved Apprentice: How Evolution Made Humans Unique (2012) by Kim Sterelny.
A Natural History of Human Thinking (2014) by Michael Tomasello.
Maybe I’ll write something about this here at TSZ.
If all explanations are incomplete and provisional, then there are no genuine explanations in the first place and you should not object to my change in the quote.
Anyway, it’s false that there are no exhaustive explanations. In linguistics it’s always observed whether an explanation is partial or exhaustive and the distinction has objective characterization. Unless we are back to debating whether linguistics is science. But it was Darwin’s choice to compare evolution to linguistic change. For all his faults, at least he assumed that linguistics was science.
If biological explanations are as bad as you insist, then for example Neoplatonistic emanation is much better. Even simplistic Yahweistic creationism is better in terms of consistency, even if it doesn’t account well for dinosaurs and such.
I was asking you if you thought evolutionary theory was a bad scientific explanation.
By my lights it’s perfectly adequate in some respects, problematic in others, inadequate in yet others. Yet it should hardly come as any surprise that an empirical explanation has its weaknesses and deficits — that’s just what one would expect, I would think!
The contrast between “biological explanations” and Neoplatonic emanation looks utterly bizarre to me. Neoplatonic emanation is a comprehensive metaphysics. Evolutionary theory is a scientific theory. I thought you of all people would insist on a distinction there!
So far anyone has shown here, the idea that Darwin used language change as a model for biological change is just your own invention. Any evidence to back it up? Maybe a citation from Origin or the notebooks?
Also, it’s worth pointing out that linguistics in Darwin’s time (1809-1882) was largely just comparative linguistics, this being long before more objective and formal approaches with Saussure (1857-1913) or Chomsky (1928- ).
We disagree quite profoundly here. I think that all explanations are incomplete (because there is always some range of phenomena not taken into account in the model) and provisional (because some new phenomena could be disclosed that would require rejecting the model).
The idea that explanations need to be comprehensive (not incomplete) and absolute (not provisional) in order to be a genuine explanation in the first place looks like allowing a certain conception of metaphysics to guide one’s thinking about how scientific theories function.
That involves imposing a certain conception of what the sciences must be on the sciences, rather than investigating what the sciences are (and aren’t).
It’s not in doubt:
Across the Curious Parallel of Language and Species Evolution
That Darwin thought the analogy was “accurate and complete” (whatever that’s supposed to mean) is nonsense that apparently came from himself. Add analogies to the list of things Erik doesn’t understand.
Glen Davidson
GlenDavidson,
That’s very interesting! I had no idea! Thank you!
“It may be worth while to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world; and if all extinct, and all intermediate and slowly changing dialects, were to be included, such an arrangement would be the only possible one. Yet it might be that some ancient languages had altered very little and had given rise to few new languages, whilst others had altered much owing to the spreading, isolation, and state of civilisation of the several co-descended races, and had thus given rise to many new dialects and languages. The various degrees of difference between the languages of the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even the only possible arrangement would still be genealogical; and this would be strictly natural, as it would connect together all languages, extinct and recent by the closest affinities, and would give the filiation and origin of each tongue.”
– p. 459 https://archive.org/details/originofspecies00darwuoft
Linguists go by evidence too. Nobody supposes that all languages have common origin and descent. But Darwin thinks such supposition is “natural” and “proper and even the only possible arrangement”.
The comparative method is *the* method of linguistics. Saussure and Chomsky did not do away with it. They just demonstrated that the method must be exercised with formal purity and thoroughness, in order for the science to be reliable. They had their precursors in Antoine Arnauld and Rasmus Rask, among others.
Linguists go by distinctions and are cautious assuming genetic connections. Biologists apparently go by assuming that there’s a common starting point to all genes regardless. Somewhat of a difference here.
Either you have an explanation or you don’t. Either you have the evidence or you don’t. What metaphysics is required for this? Just plain common sense.
I just love the implicit accusations of 1.) ignorance, and 2.) dishonesty. Why be that way?