Feedback for January 2006

Michael Ruse, in his Monads to Man thinks that many evolutionists have been progressivists. I think that this doesn't mean that evolutionary theory is progressive.

Another book worth reading is Evolutionary Progress edited by Matthew Nitecki. It contains the Ayala essay and many others.

This might be a useful point to add to CD821: Saraha expansion.

Organisms live and grow by tapping into the massive energy flow that proceeds from the Sun out into empty space. That energy flow is part of the inexorable process towards equilibrium, and thermodynamics requires that eventually the Sun will be exhausted and life on Earth will cease. In the meantime, the Earth is maintained far from thermodynamic equilibrium by this energy flow.

Evolution as a physical physical process requires living reproducing organisms. These can only exist far from equilibrium in the presence of a suitable source of energy. When the Sun runs down, life here will cease.

In setting up this straw man argument (that the claims of the inherent racism in Darwinian theory were based solely on Origin of Species), Graves deflected the attention away from the more substantial evidence from Darwin's other writings.
Answers in Genesis: "Lawmakers Miss the Boat"

Present-day Darwinians, for the most part, do not want to be identified with racism; so it is no wonder that some of Darwin's statements touching on this area receive little attention. He spoke of the "gorilla" and the "negro" [sic] as occupying evolutionary positions between the "Baboon" and the "civilized races of man" ("Caucasian")
Institute for Creation Research: "The Ascent of Racism"

The size of the Sahara and the population of the Earth present no problems whatsoever with the Earth’s great age. This is a total non-sequitur.

The Colorado River delta is a large delta, containing about 10,000 cubic miles of sediment. This is far more material than would be required to fill the Grand Canyon, and more than could be deposited in a mere 6000 years.

Of course, there is a lot more involved than the Canyon alone. Thousands of square miles of plateau have been deeply eroded over the millennia, and much of this is also found in the delta. Other material has ended up in inland flood plains below the canyon, and lost to wind, and much is completely dissolved and dispersed throughout the oceans. Some links and details are found at creationist claim number CD210 "The mouth of the Colorado River does not have enough sediment for the Grand Canyon."

The problem is not that scientists are refusing to ask the hard questions. They have been doing that all along. The real problem is individuals who refuse to look at any of the answers.

Secondly, Hitler also claimed to be doing Gods work.

And so I believe to-day that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator. In standing guard against the Jew I am defending the handiwork of the Lord. – Hitler (Mein Kampf)

Racist have used Biblical justifications for their beliefs and actions ( the curse of Ham for example) since long before evolution was accepted by science, does that mean the Bible is to blame for what they did? Of course not and neither is evolutionary theory to blame for those who might misuse it. Racists will misuse anything they can to justify their ridiculous beliefs.

1) Dawkins' computer model was not intended to demonstrate evolution in its entirety. It was intended to show the power of cumulative selection, which it does. For examples of computer programs which show much more of the evolutionary process, see "Genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation".

2) True randomness can be included in computer programs with the appropriate hardware. I am guessing that Dawkins used a pseudorandom-number generator for convenience, but you are welcome to try his program with a true random-number generator to see for yourself whether it makes any appreciable difference.

3) DNA gets directly translated to only 20 amino acids, not hundreds.

4) Amino acids easily form spontaneously. They are even found in space.

[...] the scientific community has claimed credibility for many new theories comprising much of modern science that can not logically qualify as science. These theories include the theory of relativity, the theory of quantum mechanics, the Dirac Theory of the atom [...]
Charles W. Lucas, Jr., 1986. "A Call For Reformation in Modern Science" in Proceedings of the 1986 International Conference on Creationism, vol. 1, pp. 83-87.

Creationists don't spend as much energy attacking other areas of science. But that is not because there aren't other sciences on their "hit list;" it is because biology is seen as being more threatening to their religious dogma. They do mount significant attacks on other sciences such as geology and astronomy. Even physics, as shown above, isn't safe.

For more on antievolutionist claims about the incompleteness of the Ambulocetus fossils see:

• Ambulocetus Has No Pelvis and is Largely Incomplete? by Michael Hopkins

The things which you suggest to be "problems" with the isotopic age are not really relevant to isotopic dating at all. They are standard creationists' attempts to limit the Earth's age in other ways. The three that you mention are so bad that even most creationists have abandoned them by now. See:

CR001: There is not enough helium in the atmosphere for an old earth.
CB620: Human population growth indicates a young earth.
CE101: There is not enough moon dust for an old universe.

If an organism form is successful, and there is no reason for it to change, then natural selection will act to retard change, not cause it. Bacteria are very successful in a range of ecological niches. It's unlikely that there will be improvements that can be made to such a long-standing form.

However, we should not infer that bacteria have been unchanged in many important respects since they first evolved. They undergo a process known as "lateral genetic transfer", far more frequently than larger organisms share their genes across species. This means that if some useful gene evolves in one lineage, it can very easily (in evolutionary terms) end up in another when genes are taken into the receiving bacterium.

Strictly speaking, we don't know what the "original form" of bacteria was. Fossils won't show much, because the "morphology" (a term for the organism's shape) of a single celled organism is mostly internal, and this doesn't fossilise. We can speculate that some form or another is the "same" as the original bacterium, but we only know what modern bacteria "look" like internally.

This is a sort of forum for asking these questions, so your questions are quite fair, but you might like to go to The Panda's Thumb and send your queries there to "Professor Steve Steve", who has a number of actual biologists on call to help him answer such intelligent and interesting questions.

Your particular point is known as "The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism."

As to your second question, I recommend you (or better, your friend) spend some time reading "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution: The Scientific Case for Common Descent.

Enjoy.

Happens all the time.

Your rhetorical question, "... why on earth should they (scientists) fear counter-argument or opposing theories?" actually has an answer, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" Science is based on observable, repeatable facts (some philosophers not withstanding), creationism is not.

Both Galileo and Copernicus held to circular orbits because it was the doctrine of Aristotelian physics that celestial movement had to be circular. Neither revised the substance-form dualism of prior science. A scientific advance rarely changes everything, and the idea that Newton did this is simply propaganda. He certainly changed physics in a major way, but he didn't do it alone, and he relied upon (as he noted) prior work, which in turn relied upon prior work. Many of the changes in ideas, for example about inertia and so on dependend on work done by late medieval thinkers.

History does not follow predetermined rules or stages. This view of history, which is itself derived from the father of positivism, Comte, presumes that there are innate tendencies for societies to change in standard ways, but in fact each social trajectory is unique. Human history is more like phylogeny than it is like ontogeny.

Some of Kuhn's ideas about science are clearly correct (in particular the use of history by textbooks), and the social structure of science is garnering more study, in part because of him, although Robert Merton instituted this change in the thinking of science, not Kuhn. I recommend David Hull's view of science as a demic structure similar to Mendelian gene pools in evolution, and the subsequent view that science evolves like living things, through diversification, inclusive fitness, and selection.

Hull, David L. 1988. Science as a process: an evolutionary account of the social and conceptual development of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Using 25 years for a generation, there would be 160 generations in 4,000 years. In 160 generations, the equation would yield a population of 8×(1.25¹⁵⁹), which is about 20 quadrillion (20,000,000,000,000,000). The current population of the Earth is well within reach by that measure.

The creationists' beliefs on population through history have some significant problems, but being unable to account for the current population of the Earth is not one of them. Some problems are discussed in our Index to Creationist Claims:
CB620: Human population growth indicates a young earth.

The claim that we are somehow controlling evolution, which in the end means only that a small proportion of the world's population is the beneficiary of modern medicine and things are likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future, just resolves to the claim that we have replaced one set of selective pressures (environmental) with another (social). Artificial selection is still selection, and we will continue to evolve under that regime as we had under "natural" selection. We have merely swapped environments, and the range of things to which we must evolve. It is entirely possible that there may be the beginnings of a speciation event if gene flow between the haves and have-nots were to be halted in the future, in some science fiction scenario.

However, today is evolutionary enough. The most obvious selection pressures on most of the world's populations are disease-based. Bilharzia, leishmaniasis, cholera, and a host of other parasites and pathogens impose survival filters on humans. And humans impose similar filters on the diseases themselves. We drain swamps, overuse antibiotics and prepare vaccines. Epidemiology from a human perspective is evolution from a pathogen's perspective. Human gene frequencies reach equilibria to deal with diseases, and pathogen gene frequencies reach equilibria to deal with human behaviors. We are their environments, and they are ours.

In a belt of tropical countries from Africa to South-East Asia, malaria is endemic. A form of anemia known as sickle-cell anemia, which is a genetic condition, is in equilibrium throughout Africa, where humans have lived for evolutionary durations. If both parents have the gene, the children have a one-in-four (Mendelian) possibility of having both copies, maternal and paternal, of the gene, and their red blood cells will fully become sickle-shaped, and lack the ability to carry oxygen, so the fetus or young neonate will die. But two out of four children will have, on average, only one copy of the gene, and their red blood cells will sickle just enough to prevent infection by the malaria parasite, so they will be immune to its effects. The remaining sickle-cell-anemia-free child will be normally susceptible to malaria, and may die or fail to prosper when infected.

Even more radical is the evolution of diseases themselves. Most viruses that affect humans have been with us for hundreds of thousands of years, but a substantial number of new viruses "jump" the species barrier from our domestic animals or from wild species to us, usually through "vectors", or disease pathways such as mosquitoes. Most new forms of influenza epidemics, which kill millions, come to use this way. A family of viruses known as rotaviruses jump to us occasionally, for example from fruit bats. The Black Death that occasioned the Decameron of Boccacio was spread from rats to humans through fleas. Human Immunodeficiency Virus jumped to us, possibly through the eating of monkeys and apes in Central Africa, from a family of viruses endemic to monkeys and apes known now as Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses, unsurprisingly as we are simians ourselves. There is a continual war between hosts and diseases for control of the cellular resources of our bodies. Our defenses are our immune systems, and there is thus selection for advantageous systems in humans all the time. Medicine merely changes the selective values in this war, but it does not remove the war itself. Even the eradication of smallpox and the near eradication of other killers such as tuberculosis (which is making a comeback) is still, from the pathogen's perspective, evolution in the form of an environmental catastrophe.

Diseases evolve in response to our behaviors. Paul Ewald has shown that contrary to received wisdom, long-standing diseases do not necessarily evolve towards lower virulence, or to beneficial symbiosis. It depends very much on how the disease is spread. One that infects its host, spreads easily, and is able to mutate rapidly will actually evolve towards virulence, because it is competing with itself rather than the host's defenses. Influenza can do this, because it causes its hosts to cough and sneeze. We help it along by recirculating air through building airconditioning, in crowded cities. But diseases that need their host to stay alive longer so it can mature or multiply enough to improve its chances of spreading will become more benign. One of the best things we can do to force diseases to become benign is to wash our hands and cover our mouths when we sneeze, and to generally improve hygiene. Immunization, when it is available, reduces the size of the population of pathogens and thereby lowers the probability of malign mutants arising. It also pits the much faster evolutionary rate of the immune system, which according to Burnet's Clonal Selection Theory randomly generates antibody cells and "breeds" from those that are successful in tagging infected cells and pathogens, against the evolutionary rate of the pathogens. Some viruses - for example HIV - mutate faster than the immune system, but to do this they must not kill the host before it has infected another (otherwise they would quickly become extinct). Again, the best population-wide defense against HIV is to force the virus to keep its hosts alive longer selecting in favor of benign strains. It is for this reason hygiene, in this case the use of condoms, sterile needles and screened blood donations, is so important from an evolutionary perspective as well as a medical perspective. Without taking an evolutionary approach to disease, we risk encouraging epidemics, to the detriment of our children.

People often justify things like eugenics because it is claimed that we otherwise have stopped evolving, but in terms of adaptation, we must always adapt or go extinct. There is never not an environment in which we live, and this will continue to affect our genetic constitution.