It sometimes moves much faster than people generally think.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Support Dean’s World
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
It sometimes moves much faster than people generally think.
{ 25 comments }
Fascinating story. I have always been in the camp of evolutionists who believe that evolution happens quickly and sometimes produces strikingly different morphology from very small genetic differences.
Of course if it’s all directed by some intelligence, then this is exactly what you’d expect… ;)
Still, someone’s going to say “well, if it’s not a different species then it’s not evolution!“.
Other examples of fast-moving evolutionary changes are the well-known phenomena of bacteria developing resistance to drugs or chemicals in just a few years. Or humans averaging almost a foot taller in just a few thousand years.
But still, there’s that nagging “no new species” thing there…
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Danica Patrick wins Formula One event
I remember reading about some fish that spread to a new ecosystem in Africa and speciated into something like a hundred new species filling every ecological niche on a time scale of around a thousand years.
Elisha Feger’s last blog post..had a toothache
Stephen Jay Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium.”
It took me years to really get a grip on evolution, to understand its power and beauty as well as its limitations (e.g. social evolution – which is all cr@p). I just find it rather depressing that Science and Religion are seemingly at odds over it and other issues.
Elisha
Cichlids. The most beautiful freshwater fish around. I’ve got two tanks of them (africans), although nothing beats the beauty of Discus – which is South American (and terribly delicate).
Elisha:
Much as with the finches of Galapagos, the cichlids’ “speciation” is something that has been deduced from the variation that exists today, not observed while happening.
People who believe the world was created with all extant species about 10,000 years ago aren’t going to accept “speciation of cichlids” that supposedly happened over a thousand years or so. When you can deny the fossil record of billions of years, you’re not going to be intimidated by a couple hundred species of cichlids.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Danica Patrick wins Formula One event
Saying that it is a rapid and large-scale evolutionary change may be a bit premature. It may be that their DNA was programmed millions of years ago to adapt to environment by making substantial physical changes.
But either way it’s quite fascinating.
Cosmic: No, Galapagos finch evolution has been caught in progress. You can check out The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time for the details if you like.
The question of speciation, though, is a tough one, one for which there aren’t any really clear answers (or examples) yet.
I don’t really think this is an example of evolution… Like the finch example it maybe (and probably IS) an example of adaptability of a species… that, ironically, shows how certain species that CAN adapt will survive as their environment changes. Chicken and Egg.
If these scientists would change these lizards environment, I’ll bet you that they’d “de-evolve”.
John_B:
I’m sorry, but that’s not an example of “evolution caught in progress” because the change in the beak is not a species separating event. It could be explained to be the same things as a dog being bred with longer ears. You and I might see this as evidence of evolution at work, but the people who need convincing will not. Which was my point about the the finches already. Your example is no different than the lizards whose heads have grown larger, but are still the same species. There is a qualitative difference between variation within a species, and the introduction of a new species. Your example is simply a redundant example of the lizard already cited.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..In Obama’s World
Adaptation is ongoing, in all species, all the time, and frequently in ways far more significant than the eye can see.
The modern controversy over Darwin arises from personalities inflicted with reified thought; concretized thinkers who compulsively “nounify” dynamic processes.
This happens on both sides, both ends of the religious/secular spectrum as they war with endless games of my nouns are better than your nouns, ignoring that we are here, and that life occurs, and continues, and does so irrespective of their complaints, affirmations, attributions or observations.
As a vital scientific discipline, Evolutionary Biology is about dead; profoundly eclipsed by molecular biology and, to some degree, genetics. It will likely return to the pastures of Zoology, somewhere near the boneyards of Phrenology.
Until then, it needs something to do. “Inflated Darwinism” will continue to pretend being what Darwin thought, championed by academia’s conspicuous scions of Evolutionary Biology who are, frankly, academically and intellectually incapable of enjoining the remarkable explosion of research and learning in molecular biology.
Like secular priests of a fading religious movement, they will continue to incite and conflate matters of science with the traditional concerns of ontology, teleology and theology.
Until the money runs out and the department chairs clean up the mess.
Hmph — Well, according to Kevin D., Dean, you are some sort of closet Nazi since you subscribe to the scientific fact of evolution.
I wonder… am I a fascist because I know the Earth orbits the sun….?
It is obvious enough to me that over time, a sufficient number of small changes add up to a new species. The reason we haven’t observed it is that changes sufficient for speciation take a long, long time, certainly longer than a human lifetime. I’d imagine that it’s possible that there hasn’t even been a speciation event in a multicellular organism in the time we’ve been observing, which would have been since about 1859, when On The Origin of Species was published. That’s only 150 years ago. And anyway, we can’t look everywhere.
Still, there are observable examples that seem to be frozen in time. Dawkins describes one involving birds in one of his books, though I can’t remember which one. Basically, there’s a black-headed bird that lives in a particular place. As you move east, the head on the bird (same species) gets lighter and lighter until it is white. Now these neighboring populations all interbreed, but the trend is for each group to have lighter heads than the group that lives to the west of them.
The kicker is, when you get to the location where the birds have lost all the pigment in their head feathers, you’re back where you started. The white-headed birds live side-by-side with the black-headed ones. As they do not interbreed with them, however, they are essentially a separate species. My recollection of the details may be faulty, but that’s the gist.
It seems to me a straightforward and compelling example of how speciation must work. Once you have populations who aren’t breeding, even if they are extremely genetically similar to begin with, their gene pool can of course drift in different ways, somewhat at random so long as the adaptations are survival-neutral, until one of them chances upon a mutation that gives them an edge of some sort over their former cousins.
Please see this response to Kevin D’s Expelled review:
http://my.opera.com/WayOfTheDodo/blog/2008/04/21/response-to-kevin-ds-expelled-review
Does Kevin knowingly spread falsehoods or is he merely ignorant of the actual facts when he comments on Expelled?
CC: if you want to redefine evolution to mean speciation, I guess you could do so, but only by wreaking violence on definitions… Speciation is a special case of evolution, generally taken.
As I noted in my previous comment, speciation is a difficult question. Jerry Kindall’s example was in my mind as I wrote, and it certainly seems to be along the lines leading to speciation. The case of the Galapagos finches is certainly an example of evolution, but it is not an example of speciation.
I wonder if finding speciation depends on the amount of time invested in looking for it? Would it be easier to see in beings with rapid generation like bacteria?
This jumped out at me:
(My emphasis.) Doesn’t that bring evolution as we have theorized into serious question? It should at least put the “features that were always there but not expressed until the environment activated them” theory on some pretty solid ground.
This has been my problem with Evolutians from the start. The goalposts are constantly on the move. In another field, when your theory hits something that it didn’t predict, you start looking at the fundamentals in your theory. In Evolution, just just add another epicycle.
And I notice that all the Evolitians were just waiting for a chance to jump on Kevin, even though he closed comments on the actual thread. Lame.
Phelps’s last blog post..FAIL
I have zero problem believing there are natural mechanisms that lead to evolution, what the creationists would call both micro- and macro-evolution. The challenge has been finding macro-evolution of the type that involves a whole sale change to the genome, alteration of the number and size of the chromosomes. Recent research on aneuploidy may be the key to understanding that, and may explain why there does appear to be something called punctuated equilibrium. But we don’t know for sure at the moment.
Having participated in debates over Intelligent Design, I’ve been pretty well floored. While I have little patience for creationists, I have always found ID to be an interesting speculation and framework for constructing new theories, which isn’t a bad thing even if it turns out to be wrong. I’m not an advocate for the theory, except that it looks interesting to me and if some people want to explore it, they should go right ahead. Why not?
What I am, though, is an advocate for going ahead and allowing discussions of these things in the biology classroom. Why? Not because I’m sympathetic to creationist arguments–I’m not–but because I’ve witnessed over decades how the staunch refusal to even allow these discussions in the classroom has not led to greater understanding of science, it’s led to greater mistrust of both teachers and scientists.
I also have to say one of the reasons I left atheism itself behind was the vitriolic response I got from many anti-ID, anti-Creationist people. Even people I thought of as friends were foaming at the mouth and calling me names and accusing me of being a closet creationist because I refused to be sufficiently hostile to the ID folks. Nothing I said to them penetrated. While there were–I repeat, there absolutely were–rational and decent people who saw themselves as Darwin’s defenders (which I have no trouble with, he should be defended), there were a number who went way out of their way to be antagonistic and nasty almost beyond belief. I almost never write about these issues anymore because I was so stung. It became obvious at that time (and this was a couple of years ago) that what some say is true: atheism and Darwinism are zealously guarded religions disguised as civilized, rational thought. (For some. Not all.)
The whole idea that science education will be utterly destroyed if we let kids talk about these issues in the science classroom still strikes me as ridiculous. But that’s exactly what some people talk like, and in the most vitriolic terms imaginable in some cases (the oaf PZ Myers, for example, openly accused me of being a creationist, which only proves to me that today’s PHD mills turn out incompetents with PHDs on a regular basis).
Anyway, speciation clearly occurs. The only real question is how. Three decades ago, Stephen Jay Gould was able to observe in public, without hesitation, that mutation and natural selection alone did not appear sufficient to explain the diversity of life on Earth. Such a statement was not controversial amongst biologists at the time he said it, and it shouldn’t be controversial now because very little has changed since then. But I remember just pointing that out, and having people foaming at the mouth and calling me a liar because he supposedly “never” said anything like that, which of course he did. When I calmly pointed to the proof, I just got stony silence in response.
By the way, Mesengerrr’s comment above strikes me as typical of the zealots I talked about. The white-hot fury that comes out of some of Darwin’s so-called defenders is undeniable.
And messengerrr is so zealous, Dean, that he’s starting to spam other threads where Kevin appears. He just dumped a nearly identical I-hate-Kevin comment on the Steakhouse Burger thread.
Yep. It’s pretty typical of the type of irrational fury that defines many of Darwin’s erstwhile advocates. These folks do more damage to the sciences than anything the Creationists do, in my opinion.
John:
You repeatedly miss my point. It’s not about what I think or define evolution to be. It’s what the Intelligent Design proponents use as a rebuttal against the arguments. They say that evolution is unproven because we have not observed a speciation event. Not me. And since that’s the group that is providing the alternative side of the debate, that’s the point that needs to be rebutted. Pointing out that variation within a species is viewed as an evolutionary process by evolutionists is pointless. You need to find another argument, or give up the arguing with them.
I think Dean’s position on this is pretty close to mine. Let the debate happen. Shutting off debate does not convince anyone. It is quite possible to propose and examine Intelligent Design as a process leading to differentiation of species without bringing “God” into the picture. In fact it’s a wholly plausible hypothesis, and as such it should be in the mix of hypotheses that are studied and put to experiment.
Telling someone that any mention of ID means they are a religious nut is just going to alienate people who otherwise might have some valuable contributions to the growth of scientific consensus.
The one thing I don’t agree with is Dean’s assertion that “Darwin’s erstwhile advocates” do more damage to the sciences than Creationists do. I think Creationists do far more damage to science. Once you believe the universe is 10,000 years old, you pretty much screw up virtually all observational astronomy, which means you can’t really understand stellar evolution, planetary formation, cosmic phenomena, etc. After all, if science says a bone is 65 million years old, and you know that isn’t true, then you can’t really trust much of anything science tells you, can you?
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Art and morality
And I notice that all the Evolitians were just waiting for a chance to jump on Kevin, even though he closed comments on the actual thread. Lame.
Yes, I agree, closing the comments on the thread was lame.
CC: I stand corrected an apologize for anything untoward I might have said.
That said, I actually don’t have much tolerance for ID, once it gets beyond the level of ‘maybe, at the time of the Big Bang, a process with certain pre-determined aspects was put into play’.
While I won’t look for a fight in telling an ID-er that I think he’s misguided, I certainly do dismiss any and all arguments that go beyond the baseline I stated above. Those arguments introduce complicating factors that seem unnecessary to me. I do pay obeisance to Ockham’s Razor.
Sean: I suspect we’re very close to agreement as well. However, let me just point out to you that I say the foaming Darwinist ideologues do more damage not because their ideas are more damaging, but because of what happens on the Public Relations front when it comes to public school teachers and biologists in general.
The number of people who believe the Earth is 10,000 years old (the Young Earth Creationists, as the creationists like to call them) is pretty small in my experience, and few if any among them are scientists. On the other hand, some of them are Medical Doctors and Engineers–in fact, people with those two types of degree seem to be the ones most often identified among the “scientists” who are Creationists. Now, does that make them qualified as evolutionary biologists any more than you or I are? I doubt it. Yet somehow they were able to get these degrees, and even to do things like practice medicine or design or redesign mechanical or electronic devices.
Those who say an understanding of evolution is necessary for science strike me as off-base. You don’t need to have a firm grasp of speciation in order to understand what genes are or why certain alleles cause birth defects. You just don’t. Nor do you need any of that to know how to develop an integrated circuit or perform a kidney transplant. You just don’t.
The Jesuits (a Catholic religious order) have put a number of people out there who have advanced degrees in things like astronomy or physics. Of course, the Vatican long ago declared that belief in evolution is not in conflict with Christian belief, and many mainline Protestants and Orthodox have said the same thing. But if some Jesuit, or some fundamentalist Christian, has a degree in astronomy and he also thinks God might be behind some of what we see in evolution, where does that stop him?
Hmm, I may have gotten off-point, so let me re-make it: if you’re in a scientific field that doesn’t really require believing in Darwinian evolution, so long as you concur with its biggest points regarding natural selection and whatnot, why does it matter in the least if you think something daffy like “The Earth was created at 9:46am GMT in the year 7267 B.C.”? And that’s going to stop you from diagnosing skin cancer or designing a new cantilevered arch how exactly?
On the other hand, tell millions of barely-science-literate parents that they cannot have their children so much as *discuss* provocative ideas in the science classroom, and what do you think the damage is? Especially when they’re telling their kids that science is a religion made of people who lie for a living? Who are so afraid of a simple discussion that they need to run to court just to ban it?
I really don’t see how anyone views this as *not* damaging. Is it that they’ve never met a person who is a functioning, college-educated, thoughtful and productive adult who believes something whacky like astrology or creationism? If so they live in a cave and apparently only come out once a year to check if the Earth is still here or not.
Heck, now the dam is burst and I’ve broken my two year old pledge not to write about this anymore, so I’ll put another provocative thought out there:
The best way to get kids not to take creationism seriously and to take actual interest in evolution is to put little warning stickers on the textbooks making it look like evolution is a pernicious and dangerous idea.
Discuss.
Dean:
Heh…. nothing beats a bit of reverse psychology.
As for the rest of the argument, you should know by now that I use the extreme examples to make broader points. Whether you believe the earth is 10,000 years old or believe it to be older than that, there are plenty of similar Creationist beliefs that are just as antithetical to the science we currently understand to be as “true” as we can say anything is. To believe, for example, that God made Adam literally out of dirt and used one of his ribs to make Eve is to fundamentally divorce humans from any evolutionary process. To believe that the world was created in seven days from nothing until it was roaming with animals and plants that were just waiting to be named is to deny everything we know about cosmology, geology, archeology and who knows how many other sciences. Yes, the “Young Creationists” may be the easiest to pick on, but it’s all of the same cloth.
By the way, I have tremendous respect for Catholic scientists, particularly (and perhaps unfairly) the Jesuits. I say “perhaps unfairly” because there may be dozens of other orders just as committed to rational thought as the Jesuits, but the Jesuits just have better P.R. I don’t know. All I do know is that there is a long history in the Christian religion of brilliant minds who have been able to reconcile their faith with what their objective minds have been able to observe about the universe. And sometimes that’s gotta be tough.
John_B:
I certainly understand your position on the whole ID thing, but I do want to suggest to you that it is quite possible to have a more nuanced view of Intelligent Design than yours. The easiest way to do it is to suppose that there was one initial “from scratch” intelligent species that dragged itself from the slime through natural selection, but that once they developed sufficient technology, they decided that there were better and easier ways to guide others to the same place. They could then have either overseen and guided evolution through genetic manipulation themselves, or if they are clever enough, they could have created DNA itself as a self-directed “program” that has certain key “mutations” pre-programmed into it (say, the use of chlorophyll as a means to store energy, for example) and those pre-programmed “mutations” are triggered by certain environmental factors.
Or, if you want to get really crazy, you could postulate that the universe itself is predisposed towards certain molecular arrangements, and those manifest themselves as inexorably as gravity.
I don’t remember who said it, but I think it was Einstein who said the universe is not only stranger than we do imagine, but it is stranger than we can imagine.
So sometimes I try to imagine really strange things. Just for fun.
CosmicConservative’s last blog post..Art and morality
CC: I’ve no problem whatsoever in considering that life on earth began through the intervention of some alien culture in the distant past. Possible? Sure! Likely? I need more convincing.
But the ID folks whom I know do not argue that. They argue primarily for a special creation that more-or-less exactly established the world as it is today. They would have very serious problems with the theological issues raised by the Alien Designer. (See the SF of James Blish on this point, particularly A Case of Conscience, with a Jesuit hero!)
I’m aware that there are some ID folks who accept the role of an unguided (except in the most general way) evolution. I’ve not yet met one, however. With them, I probably would not have major issues.
The point is that nobody yet knows what preceded the Big Bang; nobody knows for sure how life started. Many theories abound, some more seemingly plausible than others, some more liable to falsification than others.
Merely asserting a proposition that is immune to logical attack a priori just doesn’t not win any arguments with me, whether it comes from Dawkins or the Creation Institute.
Comments on this entry are closed.