There exists in nature biological forms not explicable by Darwinian theory.
A new video has been posted on youtube.
Do non-adaptive and beyond-adaptive order pose an existential challenge to Darwinism?
Denton says yes.
152 thoughts on “The Biology of the Baroque”
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Transcript of Biology of the Baroque, narrated by Robert Blythe except as noted where Denton is speaking:
Ornate mathematical patterns. Lavish design. Exquisite detail. Nature surpasses even the most talented artists in her extravagant beauty, richness, and deep order. Her forms are marked by an overabundance that cannot be reduced to mere utility. But can such order and beauty be explained by “Darwinian” evolution? And if it can’t, what does that mean for our understanding of nature?
Opulent architecture. Intricate fugues and symphonies. Dramatic art. The Baroque era spanning the 17th century and half of the 18th century was so characterized by florid excess that the word came to be synonymous with extravagance. Pure functionality faded to the background and layers of gratuitous beauty and stunningly detailed design defined music, art, and architecture. The great architects of the period didn’t just build with their sights focused on function. The designers of Versailles or St Paul’s Cathedral were aiming to create something beautiful, something sublime.
The opposite approach is to create structures that are purely functional with no emphasis on beauty or taste. The German Bauhaus movement and its modernist architecture is one example. Industrial design is another. So is life under “Darwinian” evolution.
Darwinism is at its core a profoundly functional mechanism. Natural selection ruthlessly eliminates from the gene pool any organism whose structures aren’t useful for survival and reproduction. If a new structure is to be passed on to offspring, according to strict Darwinian theory, it must serve some new adaptive function. That is, it must be useful for survival. In the Darwinian view, beauty is at best an unintended side product, a mere whim of sexual selection. Nothing need be decorative. Everything has a specific use or it is discarded.
Under Darwinism nature is strictly utilitarian. For more than a century, biology has been understood in these terms.
But what if this way of looking at life has blinded us to the true nature of biology? What if there are other factors at play?
Geneticist Michael Denton began to wonder about the standard
Darwinian explanation of nature while studying the red blood cell for his PhD at King’s College in London. As he came across features in biology that did not seem to possess any particular survival benefit, Denton began to realize just how much order in biology was actually non-adaptive. He started seeing life more as a piece of baroque artwork than as a purely functional machine.
[Denton says} “Non-adaptive order is seen in something like a maple leaf or leaf forms where you have extraordinary complex and beautiful patterns for which you can’t imagine what function that pattern, specific function that pattern serves. So that’s what non-adaptive order is. It’s a pattern in the natural world for which you can’t imagine what function it served. And that’s a fantastically serious challenge to Darwinism.”
Imagine stepping outside on a sunny summer’s day. All around you are different kinds of trees each displaying beautiful order in their differently shaped leaves. But for Darwinian evolution to explain the shape of these leaves, or any structure in a living organism, there ought to be some reason why that specific shape caused one to live and another to die in a given environment. Yet there appears to be no functional reason why there are so many different leaf shapes. Much like Baroque architecture, these shapes seem extra, perhaps even decorative. They’re not needed to survive. They are simply beautiful.
[Denton says} “It’s okay if it’s just a maple leaf. You can perhaps pass over the maple leaf. But if non-adaptive order, like the maple leaf, permeates the biological world, and if a lot of the taxa-defining novelties seem to be non-adaptive, you now have a nightmarish scenario. When the fundamental assumption of Darwinism is that all the novelties in nature are adaptive, suddenly [it] looks very insecure.”
Example of non-adaptive order fill the world of botany and plant life.
[Denton says] “You can look at the beautiful concentric pattern underlying angiosperm flowers, that’s all flowers belong[ing] to the group called angiosperms. The basic plan of the flower is concentric circles . You have an outer circle of sepals, then you have an inner circle of petals, then you have stamens and you have the carpel in the middle. All flowers are bent [built??] on this beautiful concentric plan. But what organism was that concentric plan adaptive in? What function did that pattern of gene expression originally serve? It’s exceedingly difficult to give an adaptive framework to explain that particular pattern. And if you can’t show that it’s adaptive, then you can’t give, you can’t give a Darwinian explanation for it.”
The abstract patterns underlying organic structures may be easier to recognize in plant life but examples abound in the animal world as well. Many structures that seem primarily functional have at their base underlying plans that are not particular to certain environments. Oftentimes these take the form of numeric patterns or constraints. Many of the characteristics that divide the different taxa from each other, the characteristics that are used to define the branches on the tree of life, seem to be abstract and non-adaptive.
[First seven minutes. Transcript mine, any mistakes my own.]
The DI’s science budget at work.
Thanks for the transcript.
Does the video ever say anything?
Does it admire the beauty of ichneumons?
You weren’t supposed to let that slip.
Her forms are marked by an overabundance that cannot be reduced to mere utility.
Darwinism is at its core a profoundly functional mechanism.
Nothing need be decorative.
Under Darwinism nature is strictly utilitarian.
For more than a century, biology has been understood in these terms.
Examples of non-adaptive order fill the world of botany and plant life.
When the fundamental assumption of Darwinism is that all the novelties in nature are adaptive, suddenly [it] looks very insecure.
[part 2] Transcript of Biology of the Baroque, narrated by Robert Blythe:
One of the most familiar patterns in animals is the insect body plan. The plan divides an insect into three parts: the head, a thorax with six legs each divided into five basic parts, and an abdomen.
Every insect is based on this plan.
Many very different adaptive structures are built on top of this pattern, from the grasshoppers’ legs for leaping to a bee’s legs for gathering pollen, but these adaptations are only skin deep, built upon a more fundamental unchanging pattern that crosses species, environments, and functions. Much like Bach’s fugues, all these variations among insects are variations on a common theme. It’s apparent that these variations are adaptive. But what was the original survival value of the underlying theme, the insect body plan itself?
Denton’s answer is that perhaps the underlying theme or body plan never was adaptive or perhaps it was only adaptive in a generic sense. It might have been a good ground plan to build different insect species, but even if it was a good ground plan this would still be a paradox for Darwinism because natural selection cannot see or select for features that merely have an underlying general usefulness. Natural selection is limited to selecting structures that are adaptive, that serve some specific purpose in a specific species and environment.
The pentadactyl limb is another example of a generically adaptive structure that is hard to account for by natural selection. The pentadactyl limb is the pattern of one bone, two bones, and five digits, that underlies the limbs of all terrestrial vertebrates. This pattern applies both across species and within the same species. Limbs obviously have functional purposes, but much like the insect body plan, it isn’t clear why all tetrapod limbs are built on the same pattern when they serve wildly different functions. Even Darwin thought it strange. “What can be more curious,” he wrote, “than that the hand of a man formed for grasping, that of a mole for digging, the leg of a horse, the paddle of the porpoise, and the wing of the bat, should all be constructed on the same pattern?”
Darwin shrugged off the mystery as a consequence of common descent. In Darwin’s view, a biological feature shared by different organisms today could have come from a common ancestor. But descent from a common ancestor only explains how a feature, once developed, is passed down to other organisms. It doesn’t explain how the feature itself arose in the first place so it really doesn’t solve the mystery of non-adaptive forms shared across species.
Even less does common descent explain the existence of non-adaptive patterns in individual species. For example, the hind and fore limbs of all terrestrial vertebrates are built on the same underlying pentadactyl pattern, even though they take different forms and perform radically different functions. Consider your own limbs. The human hand is made for holding and grasping and equipped with fine motor skills. The human foot, on the other hand, is made for running and walking. Yet these two structures with completely different functions are built on the same pentadactyl plan. And this holds true for every terrestrial vertebrate species. How can the similarities between the two be accounted for in purely adaptive terms?
Other examples of apparently non-adaptive patterns abound among animals.
Why do centipedes always have an odd number of body segments? How did that help them survive?
Why do nearly all mammals from mice to giraffes have seven bones in their cervical vertebrae?
All octupi have eight tentacles. Why not six, or ten?
Jellyfish have a mesmerizing radial symmetry. Sand dollars and starfish both display a starlike pattern.
Nature seems to have plenty of room to develop order and patterns that do not serve an immediate survival purpose. Darwinism, however, is not that flexible. It’s not enough, according to Darwinian theory, that a biological feature is currently adaptive. Every stage in its past evolution also had to be adaptive. And in the case of many biological features, that seems far from likely.
[continued from part 1, 7:20 to 12:10 mark. Transcript mine, any mistakes my own.]
Considering that Darwin didn’t think all features wera adaptive, and wrote at length about non-adaptive features, this whole line of argument seems rather odd.
[part 3] Transcript of Biology of the Baroque, narrated by Robert Blythe except as noted where Denton is speaking:
Denton’s own area of study, the red blood cell in mammals, is a stark example. Unlike red blood cells in all other animals, the red blood cell in mammals is enucleated, ejecting its nucleus before entering the blood stream. Enucleation takes place two million times per second in the average human adult and it involves an eleborate and highly choreographed process where the entire cytoplasmic machinery is reorganized in order to achieve the end result. It’s unclear whether the enucleated cell is actually adaptive in a Darwinian sense. Other animals with a high need for oxygen get by perfectly well by keeping the nucleus in their red blood cells.
But even if the enucleated red cell is adaptive that doesn’t mean a Darwinian process can account for its development. That’s because it’s very difficult to envisage a series of adaptive transitional forms leading from a red blood cell with a nucleus to a red blood cell without a nucleus. According to Denton, such transitional cells are completely unknown in nature. Moreover, even if a transitional red blood cell could somehow survive with a nucleus partway outside the cell, that trait would almost certainly be maladaptive and thus eliminated by natural selection. Such transitional forms would be evolutionary dead ends, not stepping stones on the way to the enucleated red blood cell.
The lack of adaptive transitional forms poses a critical problem for Darwinian explanations of not only the enucleated red cell but many other biological features as well.
An additional challenge to Darwinian explanations comes from biological features that may be adaptive but they appear to be far beyond what is needed for mere survival.
Perhaps one of the most extravagant of these biological features is one we usually take for completely for granted. The level to which it has developed is so excessive, it is beyond a utilitarian explanation. You are experiencing this amazing biological feature at this very moment. It’s our cognitive and higher mental abilities, especially language.
Language is a characteristic that defines us as a species. But as a biological development it is completely unparalleled. While Darwinian conjectures have been proposed to explain how grunts and hand signals could have developed into speech, none of them have real empirical evidence. And the sheer distance between the grunts howls barks and bleats of animals, and human language as we know it, is astronomical if they can be fairly compared at all.
Human language is so complexed [sic] and nuanced that it has become impossible to simulate perfectly in even the most advanced intelligent machines as any simple conversation with Siri will show. Human language is varied and textured, adapted to both concrete and abstract conversation, across every people, group, and culture. What makes human language so intriguing is not just the great variety of different languages but their underlying similarities. Despite superficial differences human languages share deep structural similarities. This is why an Australian aborigine can learn German, despite the many differences between German and the languages of the Australian aborigines.
The fact that humans, no matter what part of the world they’re from, share both language and equivalent higher intellectual faculties means that these abilities must have arisen in the earliest human ancestor. And that poses a problem. The capability to compose a symphony, understand advanced mathematics, or discuss abstract ideas, would not have been of any survival value for early man. His needs were shelter and food. The idea primitive man needed our current linguistic or other higher intellectual abilities to survive is untenable. Nevertheless, early man must have had this capability because it was passed down to every human in every part of the world.
Even today things like art, literature, or music, are understood to be valuable not for survival nor reproduction but for their own sake. Such capacities reach far beyond the algorithm of natural selection. They’re excessive, superfluous, even a gift. Their very existence is completely incomprehensible if humans are solely the result of Darwinian forces. The case that human language developed step by step through natural selection is further weakened by the fact that no single language gene has ever been discovered. That is, the needed complexities seem to have arisen spontaneously in a self-organizing emergent fashion.
Non-adaptive and beyond-adaptive order poses an existential challenge to Darwinism because it means there are huge parts of the history of life that not only can’t be explained by Darwinian evolution but they are completely outside the domain of natural selection. Natural selection only selects for adaptation. If non-adaptive order exists, Darwinism cannot be the whole story of life. If nature is an artist, not just an engineer, Darwinism is in a dire position.
[Denton says] “For a Designer, lots of patterns might exist in nature which have, as it were, quite deeply adaptive, but not adaptive for a specific organism. On the other hand, the Designer might decide that he likes this pattern. He likes the pattern of a maple leaf, or, you know, it’s beautiful, or it’s symmetrical, or something like this. In other words, on a design hypothesis, you don’t need to show that all the order of the biology of the world is specifically adaptive in a specific organism.”
Intelligent Design leaves room for nature’s peculiarities and novelties because it acknowledges that there are some things that are irreducible to mere adaptation and survival. There are other forces at work in nature besides that of natural selection and death.
[Denton says] If you imagine there’s a Designer behind the world, the Designer would be free to choose whichever patterns he wants. But I think that non-adaptive order poses a far less of a challenge to Intelligent Design theories than it does to Darwinism because Darwinism necessitates that all the order of nature is adaptive or once was adaptive. And if you can’t show that, Darwinism can’t be shown to be the engine of evolution.”
— fin —
[continued from part 2, 12:10 to end of speeches at 19:35 mark before credits . Transcript mine, any mistakes my own.]
Yep.
“Odd” might be one word for it.
“Disingenuous” “Self-aggrandizing” “Money-grubbing” “biased propaganda” might be other good words for it.
So Mung hasn’t learned anything after all, go figure. Apparently the fact that it’s been known for decades that non-adaptive features are explained by even more randomness (drift) triggers some memento-like process in Mungy’s brain: that’s not a memory he can afford to form, so he just wakes up everyday repeating “Darwinizzzm cant explain it LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!11!!1”
Darwinian theory does well at explaining how organisms remain suited to changing environments. But it doesn’t explain the variety beyond that produced by a limiting feedback mechanism, It doesn’t tell us how some animals turn out to be agressive, some timid, some slow and lumbering while others are fast and fidgety. Or if it does it explains all and so it explains nothing.
A view which I consider to have more explanatory power than Darwinian theory is the following:
And from Oken as quote by Gould in, Ontogeny and Phylogeny”
This explains why birds and bats have retained the pentadactyl limb modified for a very specific purpose. Name any other animal that has put its limbs to anywhere near the variety of uses that we put our arms and hands to.
Humans have taken the pentadactyl limb further than any other animal while keeping its form true to type. Other animals have taken this form and modified it, often beyond recognition, to their own specific, narrow ends.
We can trace a continuous path of life on earth from its very beginnings to the human form. It is true that any extant form of life can be traced back in the same way, but I would argue that humans have taken evolution further than any other living species. What other creature has taken so much control over its own destiny, over its own evolutionary path? What other creature has the scope of awareness that humans have?
We may study the lifestyle of individual species, say blue whales or king cobras and they are very interesting, not as individuals, but as a species. The lifestyle of humans are interesting not as a species but as individuals. This is not just anthropomorphism, I say this because individual humans do lead such varied lifestyles, on a par with the varied lifestyles of separate species. Also, the very fact that we can study theses things makes us stand out from the rest of living nature.
Amphibians have progressed beyond fish, reptiles have progressed beyond amphibians, mammals and birds have progressed beyond reptiles, humans have progressed beyond mammals and birds. Animal species are a pre-mature hardening in form or one-sided branching from the evolution of the human.
The whole is reflected in the parts. The maturation of a human individual is a reflection of the progression of life from its beginning to the present. The maturation of an animal is a reflection of the progession of life from its beginning only up to a point.
Look at physical substance. Compounds are a natural consequence of the nature of elements. Life is only possible because of the way compounds can form. The way cells are able to join together makes multi-cellularity a foregone conclusion. Higher senses such as sight, hearing, pain and pleasure are a cosequence of multi-cellularity. And only by the attainment of these senses can a being feel the separation between its inner life and the world around it. And only then can it attain self-consciousness. It is in the nature of physical substance to allow for this to happen.
Human conscious goes way beyond anything that is required of a successful Darwinian evolved creature. We have evolved thus far, not because of, but in spite of Darwinian evolution.
CharlieM,
What happened in lineages that were not directly on the human line? Was that evolution, or was that crystallisation of some vague compositional process too? Are magic mushrooms more advanced than chanterelles? More to the point, have you got any?
hotshoe_,
This is just plain dumb.
First you say…
Then you turn around and claim….
So awareness (consciousness) has given us unprecedented control over our destiny but it’s a challenge to Darwinian evolution? Try at least being consistent with yourself
Everything evolves.
I am being consistent. I don’t equate our evolutionary path with Darwinian evolution.
Maybe an analogy of an airliner will help. An aircraft can fly to its destination using an automated flight control system (AFCS). Within that system it can have an automatic stabilization system (ASS). Evolution of life is the AFCS, Darwinian evolution is the ASS and humans have begun to take over by switching some of the automatic control back to manual.
CharlieM,
You’re a great one for swapping between waffling at length and the fundamentally meaningless soundbite.
Do you mean that everything is subject to genetic change – that ‘Darwinism’ is, in fact, correct? I’m sure that’s not what you are saying. In fact, you may well think that NOTHING evolves in that way. Or some things, but you reserve the right to be a bit hedgy-y on what.
Are magic mushrooms and chanterelles commonly descended, and if so, is the mechanism of their divergence composed of mutation, recombination, selection and drift?
CharlieM,
No. No more analogies, for God’s sake!
That analogy is a bad one of evolution, and flies in the face of evidence. Fact is consciousness is no evolutionary mystery, and it makes no sense to claim it’s some sort of challenge as if it wasn’t an advantageous trait to have. Google “mirror test” and you’ll realize consciousness and (self) awareness is not at human-only trait. You can imagine all the extra “systems” you want, but that bears no relevance to reality
It seems rather odd that with all the brain power Denton brings to the table, he doesn’t mention that traits are often tied together in such a way that adaptive and irrelevant traits evolve together as cojoined twins or triplets.
The easiest demonstration of this is the linked traits of fur color and tameness in canids. When the Russian silver fox breeder set out to select for tameness in foxes, he got cuddly, tame foxes, but they lost their valuable coats at the same time. They began to look like mongrel dogs with mottled fur.
It’s hard to believe Denton doesn’t even mention linked traits.
Or that IDists in general would fail to mention linkage when discussing the fixation of detrimental alleles.
I’m sure this is thoroughly discussed in the book, and he just forgot to mention it in the video.
Variety is the spice of life.
I don’t see genetics as being in control. The organism controls its genes, which in turn produce the substances by which it grows and maintains itself.
I believe so.
Mutations disrupt, that’s why error correction mechanisms are put in place. Recombination is a controlled event which produces change and thus divergence. Selection ensures that organisms remain in tune with their environment. Drift is just a consequence of the ever changing nature of life and the earthly environment.
Non-Adaptive Order: An Existential Challenge to Darwinian Evolution
From Non-Adaptive Order: An Existential Challenge to Darwinian Evolution:
I’m quite willing to accept that there are types, or something that looks a lot like types, or Bauplane. Owen’s ideas have been nicely revived in contemporary discussions by theoretical biologists like Goodwin, who defends a version of biological structuralism. I think that structuralism is a really intriguing idea that calls out for further development.
But — this is the important thing — whether or not structuralism is a viable contender for explaining evolutionary processes depends entirely on whether it is an empirically well-confirmed model of those processes. There’s some evidence to support it, and some evidence against it. Unlike ID, structuralism is measurable and testable. Whether or not it survives iterated testing remains to be seen.
CharlieM,
Genes are inherited, organisms aren’t. Whatever is changing as a succession of gametes is produced, it isn’t in any sense organisms producing substances as they grow and maintain. You are confusing development and evolution.
CharlieM,
Some mutations disrupt. Most even. This does not mean adaptive evolution cannot happen. You like an analogy: indiscriminately broadcast seeds mostly fall on stony ground. Therefore unplanted seed can never set? No.
Fact remains, what is fundamentally different about chanterelles and magic mushrooms is contained within their differences in gene sets. If you accept common ancestry, there was a process of divergence. How did these genes change, if they did not mutate?
As I understand it, it has been quite a while (before my life began) since evolutionary biologists generally regarded every detail of every organism as some kind of adaptation to something or other. Gould said from the start of his career that what we have are contingent accidents. Evolution rewards (through reproductive success) whatever works AT ALL, not necessarily what might work best. Evolution has always been in the business of exploring a vast morphospace of shapes and forms that are all different, but none are distinctly better or worse.
Indeed, there is a school of thought that drift is perhaps substantially more influential than selection in determining which of these experiments ends up reaching fixation. For example, if we look at ring species, there is no particular reason why each species in the ring is best adapted to where it happens to life. Variations simply haven’t drifted all the way around the ring.
There is some debate as to whether Darwin, were he alive today, would argue that every detail has resulted from some specific selection. Today, the old notion that the giraffe’s neck was selected for length to reach acacia leaves has been abandoned, in favor of the idea that necks getting longer simply didn’t handicap those with long necks. They weren’t selected FOR, the simply weren’t selected AGAINST.
Bottom line: evolution is not a matter of strict detail-by-detail adaptation.
Oh god yes. That’s so dumb I literally gasped when I heard it the first time. I was sure no one could have said anything so stupid out loud, much less let it be filmed for posterity.
Kinda makes me wonder how much input Denton had into the content of the narration when he’s not speaking directly. I obviously think Denton is wrong about bodyplans and lifeforms in general, but I wouldn’t have guessed he’s so backwoods stupid, that “what good is half a wing” way.
Maybe that part isn’t Denton’s idea. We don’t know exactly what he said about “transitional” red blood cells. Maybe the IDiots who produced this film took whatever Denton said and turned it into this travesty all by themselves.
But gods, whoever wrote that stupidity is a total waste of oxygen.
Kantian Naturalist,
Unlike evolutionism ID is both measureable and testable. CSI is a measureable metric as is IC. Natural selection, drift and neutral construction, OTOH, offers nothing
Allan Miller,
If you accept common ancestry you do so on faith as there isn’t any science that supports it.
So Allan and hotshoe_ are going to take on Denton over the enucleated red blood cell. That should be interesting.
That’s functionalism. If it’s not adaptive it isn’t rewarded through reproductive success. This is the view you hold while claiming no evolutionary biologist holds this view.
In what way does it fly in the face of evidence. You say that consciousness is no mystery. Really!
You think its an advantage to have it. Well just because it may be good to have does not mean that it just magically poofs into existence. What advantage is it for us to know about external galaxies or that there are only five regular solids. Rats and bacteria are very good at survival without having the ability to know these things.
Just because some more advanced animals show a basic form of self-awareness does not mean that they have consciousness anywhere near the level of human consciousness. Do you think that an elephant knows that it has a central nervous system, that its optic nerves carry signals to its brain? When a bull gets the urge to mate and mounts a female do you think it knows that this will no doubt lead to the production of a baby elephant in several months time?
Do you think that crows look back and think, “I wish I had done more with my life”?
Rudimentary self-awareness is what I would expect from animals that are close relatives to humans, or come closest to humans in their stage of evolution.
Mung,
So Mung thinks the enucleated cell is a good example of a transition that cannot happen by genetic amendment? Tee hee. Do you swallow everything ‘your boy’ is reported to say whole?
What about occasionally enucleated blood cells in penguins? Are they ‘transitional’? Do they go round with the nucleus hanging out?
Andreas Wagner:
It’s no wonder then that this seems to be the prevailing view here at TSZ. It’s the mainstream. It’s the position against which ID and Denton argue. And we all know ID and Denton are just wrong. Or perhaps they are right but for all the wrong reasons.
Mung,
OK, let’s do a straw poll.
I’ll start – is it my view? No.
No. And I doubt that Denton does either.
What were the adaptive steps leading from a nucleated red blood cell to an enucleated red blood cell?
It’s not my view either, but I don’t count.
Presumably the designer likes pretty things then.
Comparable in quality and depth to their other ideas, I suppose.
No, I’m not going to “take on Denton”.
I’m just going to take on the stupidity of the idiots who hear that nonsense “… if a transitional red blood cell could somehow survive with a nucleus partway outside the cell …” and nod their heads smugly because it fits right in with their anti-Darwin bias.
That’s your movie choice. You’re the one who embedded it in your OP without any criticism of its stupidity.
People are so gullible, they will buy anything.
No matter how clearly I try to write, you find some way to make me say what I didn’t intend. Yes, neutral mutations are “rewarded” by reproductive success. This his how drift works.
You have this misrepresentation thing down, I guess. I agree with Wagner that ” every one of those brilliant adaptations is the sum of innumerable tiny steps”. But how about features that are simply neutral and accidental, and not the result of adaptations? You seem to be saying that because Wagner is not talking about them in this passage, he must believe they don’t exist.
FIRST, you must explain why enucleated red blood cells are an adaptation at all. Do they work that much better than if they had a nucleus? Do they confer some fitness advantage? Is it possible that a mutation producing red blood cells without nuclei could have spread through a population simply because it conferred no disadvantage?
If you can show that enucleated red blood cells are in fact superior, you might make a testable case that those possessing them enjoyed reproductive advantage.
Mung,
So why do you think he brings it up?
I dunno. I could make some guesses. Viruses can’t replicate in enucleated cells f’rinstance. More room for haemoglobin too.
But why do they have to be adaptive? In one post you chide TSZers for their supposed panadaptationism, now here you are demanding an adaptive story as if panadaptationism were the only game in town.
Yet … the transcript as reported claims to know what the steps looked like (with nuclei comically hanging half-in and half-out of cells), and to know that they were maladaptive. How was this certainty arrived at?
I didn’t say it’s no mystery, I said it’s no evolutionary mystery, as in “we have no idea where it comes from”. Again, consciousness is not exclusive to humans. We’re not as extraordinary as you make it out to be, but you can’t insist that intelligence is not an advantageous trait when you said a few lines above that that intelligence allowed us to take control of our environment. Do you seriously think our evolutionary success doesn’t have anything to do with our intelligence?
Cut the crap with the “poofs into existence” nonsense please. That’s your thing. It’s sort of stupid to say something like that when my point is that there’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for how intelligence evolved gradually.
Cool, so we see different “grades” of intelligence all around in plenty species. And the closer the relative the more similar to ours. How does that happen “spite of Darwinism” as you claimed? It’s 100% consistent with evolution.
And yes, Rats and bacteria are good at surviving… in their niches. Try locking the smartest man on earth in the sewers and see if he outcompetes rats
Here’s the Prologue and first chapter of Wagner’s book Arrival of the Fittest.
Prologue is source of the Wagner quote Mung posted. It doesn’t look like a quotemine (even with the potentially suspicious ellipses) because it seems long enough to capture valid context for Wagner’s point.
Except.
Except that quote is like Darwin’s infamous paragraph discussing the perceived problems with eye evolution (usually summed up by creationists as “what use is half an eye”) — Wagner’s “consider the falcon” is just the opening of a long closely-worded discussion of both the successes and problems of a strictly-adaptationist (and gene-centric) view of evolution.
It does no justice to Wagner, or to us, to hold up that relatively-short quote of his and demand that we show our skeptic credentials by disagreeing with what Wagner appears to be saying in that opening remark. You need to look more broadly, as Wagner does, to give a legitimate answer.
Now I wonder if Mung truncated that quote himself or if he copied it from some creationist website.
NO, I don’t. Denton is talking about non-adaptive order. Coming up with an adaptationist story would be counter-productive.
If you haven’t done so already you should watch this video by Denis Noble.
Naked genes are not inherited, the entity that is inherited is the fertilized cell which contains the genes. You and me as oirganisms began as a single cell. The cell is passed over from mother to offspring and the genes could do nothing without this cell. Even when single celled organisms divide you cannot say that the genes alone were inherited because the cytoplasm and cell wall is also shared between the daughter cells.
Neither side needs to come up with adaptationist stories for every feature, because neither side believes every feature is under selection.
Did anyone answer my question about linked features? Does Denton mention and deal with linkage?
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2013/08/25/famous-physiologist-embarrasses-himself-by-claiming-that-the-modern-theory-of-evolution-is-in-tatters/
The paper
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1113/expphysiol.2012.071134/full
Larry Moran on Noble and Shapiro
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-physiologist-thinks-about-evolution.html