Posted on 02/11/2005 9:29:29 PM PST by restornu
When The Origin of Species was published it aroused immense interest, but initially it did not provoke antagonism on religious grounds. Although many criticized Darwin's lack of evidence, none raised religious objections. Instead, the initial response from theologians was favorable. The distinguished Harvard botanist Asa Gray hailed Darwin for having solved the most difficult problem confronting the Design argument – the many imperfections and failures revealed in the fossil record.
Acknowledging that Darwin himself "rejects the idea of design," Gray congratulated him for "bringing out the neatest illustrations of it." Gray interpreted Darwin's work as showing that God has created a few original forms and then let evolution proceed within the framework of divine laws.
When religious antagonism finally came, it was in response to aggressive claims, like Huxley's, that Newton and Darwin together had evicted God from the cosmos. For the heirs of the Enlightenment, evolution seemed finally to supply the weapon needed to destroy religion. As Richard Dawkins confided, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."
Atheism was central to the agenda of the Darwinians. Darwin himself once wrote that he could not understand how anyone could even wish that Christianity were true, noting that the doctrine of damnation was itself damnable. Huxley expressed his hostility toward religion often and clearly, writing in 1859: "My screed was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsondom ... both of which are in my mind the natural & irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it, but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is to see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies."
According to Oxford historian J. R. Lucas, Huxley was "remarkably resistant to the idea that there were clergymen who accepted evolution, even when actually faced with them." Quite simply, there could be no compromises with faith.
Writing at the same time as Huxley, the leading Darwinian in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, drew this picture:
On one side spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress stand under the bright banner of science; on the other side, under the black flag of hierarchy, stand spiritual slavery and falsehood, irrationality and barbarism, superstition and retrogression.... Evolution is the heavy artillery in the struggle for truth. Whole ranks of...sophistries fall together under the chain shot of this ... artillery, and the proud and mighty structure of the Roman hierarchy, that powerful stronghold of infallible dogmatism, falls like a house of cards.
These were not the natterings of radical circles and peripheral publications. The author of the huge review of The Origin in the Times of London was none other than Thomas Huxley. He built his lectures on evolution into a popular touring stage show wherein he challenged various potential religious opponents by name. Is it surprising that religious people, scientists as well as clerics, began to respond in the face of unrelenting challenges like these issued in the name of evolution? It was not as if they merely were asked to accept that life had evolved; many theologians had long taken that for granted. What the Darwinians demanded was that religionists agree to the untrue and unscientific claim that Darwin had proved that God played no role in the process.
Among those drawn to respond was the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who is widely said to have made an ass of himself in a debate with Huxley during the 1860 meeting of the British Association at Oxford. The relevant account of this confrontation reported: "I was happy enough to be present on the memorable occasion at Oxford when Mr. Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. The bishop arose and in a light scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us that there was nothing in the idea of evolution. Then turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey? On this Mr. Huxley ... arose ... and spoke these tremendous words. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous."
This marvelous anecdote has appeared in every distinguished biography of Darwin and of Huxley, as well as in every popular history of the theory of evolution. In his celebrated Apes, Angels and Victorians, William Irvine used this tale to disparage the bishop's snobbery. In his prize-winning study, James Brix went much farther, describing Wilberforce as "naive and pompous," a man whose "faulty opinions" were those of a "fundamentalist creationist" and who provided Huxley with the opportunity to give evolution "its first major victory over dogmatism and duplicity." Every writer tells how the audience gave Huxley an ovation.
Trouble is, it never happened. The quotation above was the only such report of this story and it appeared in an article titled "A Grandmother's Tales" that was written by a non-scholar in a popular magazine 38 years after the alleged encounter. No other account of these meetings – and there were many written at the time – made any mention of remarks concerning Huxley's monkey ancestors, or claimed that he made a fool of the bishop. To the contrary, many thought the bishop had the better of it, and even many of the committed Darwinians thought it at most a draw.
Moreover, as all of the scholars present at Oxford knew, prior to the meeting, Bishop Wilberforce had penned a review of The Origin in which he fully acknowledged the principle of natural selection as the source of variations within species. He rejected Darwin's claims concerning the origin of species, however, and some of these criticisms were sufficiently compelling that Darwin immediately wrote his friend the botanist J. D. Hooker that the article "is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly." In a subsequent letter to geologist Charles Lyell, Darwin acknowledges that "the bishop makes a very telling case against me." Indeed, several of Wilberforce's comments caused Darwin to make modifications in a later revision of the book.
The tale of the foolish and narrow-minded bishop seems to have thrived as a revealing "truth" about the incompatibility of religion and science simply because many of its tellers wanted to believe that a bishop is wrong by nature. J. R. Lucas, who debunked the bishop myth, has suggested that the "most important reason why the legend grew" is, first, because academics generally "know nothing outside their own special subject" and therefore easily believe that outsiders are necessarily ignorant, and, second, because Huxley encouraged that conclusion. "The quarrel between religion and science was what Huxley wanted; and as Darwin's theory gained supporters, they took over his view of the incident."
Since then the Darwinian Crusade has tried to focus all attention on the most unqualified and most vulnerable opponents, and when no easy targets present themselves it has invented them. Huxley "made straw men of the 'creationists,'" as his biographer Desmond admitted. Even today it is a rare textbook or any popular treatment of evolution and religion that does not reduce "creationism" to the simplest caricatures.
This tradition remains so potent that whenever it is asked that evolution be presented as "only a theory," the requester is ridiculed as a buffoon. Even when the great philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that the standard version of evolution even falls short of being a scientific theory, being instead an untestable tautology, he was subjected to public condemnations and much personal abuse.
Popper's tribulations illustrate an important basis for the victory of Darwinism: A successful appeal for a united front on the part of scientists to oppose religious opposition has had the consequence of silencing dissent within the scientific community. The eminent observer Everett Olson notes that there is "a generally silent group" of biological scientists "who tend to disagree with much of the current thought" about evolution, but who remain silent for fear of censure.
I believe that one day there will be a plausible theory of the origin of species. But, if and when that occurs, there will be nothing in any such theory that makes it impossible to propose that the principles involved were not part of God's great design any more than such a theory will demonstrate the existence of God. But, while we wait, why not lift the requirement that high school texts enshrine Darwin's failed attempt as an eternal truth?
If you mean "Charles Darwin : The Power of Place", the full text of the book is searchable and browsable at amazon.com. The Huxley retort to Wilberforce is mentioned on page 122.
Thanks. Although you can bring up the index, you can't (or I can't anyway) actually view the pages. There are just a few pages from the beginning available as an "excerpt".
Spetner can make that criticism all he likes, but actually the mutation rate and the time available, etc., have been reconciled countless times already. For example, here are a couple of sections of one of the talk.origins FAQ files which briefly covers that ground, but provides references to numerous studies of that sort (I'm too tired right now to patch up all the reference links, go to the original FAQ here to look them up):
Additionally, most phylogenetic reconstructions (and there have been a TON of them recently, thanks to the explosion of genome DNA sequencing in the past decade) do implicit reconciliations of this sort, since they measure genetic changes over time relative to last-common-ancestors, and square that with the time of divergence.Prediction 5.7: Morphological rates of change
Observed rates of evolutionary change in modern populations must be greater than or equal to rates observed in the fossil record.
Confirmation:
Here I can do no better than to quote George C. Williams writing on this very issue:
"The question of evolutionary rate is indeed a serious theoretical challenge, but the reason is exactly opposite of that inspired by most people's intuitions. Organisms in general have not done nearly as much evolving as we should reasonably expect. Long-term rates of change, even in lineages of unusually rapid evolution, are almost always far slower than they theoretically could be." (Williams 1992, p. 128)
In 1983, Phillip Gingerich published a famous study analyzing 512 different observed rates of evolution (Gingerich 1983). The study centered on rates observed from three classes of data: (1) lab experiments, (2) historical colonization events, and (3) the fossil record. A useful measure of evolutionary rate is the darwin, which is defined as a change in an organism's character by a factor of e per million years (where e is the base of natural log). The average rate observed in the fossil record was 0.6 darwins; the fastest rate was 32 darwins. The latter is the most important number for comparison; rates of evolution observed in modern populations should be equal to or greater than this rate.
The average rate of evolution observed in historical colonization events in the wild was 370 darwins -- over 10 times the required minimum rate. In fact, the fastest rate found in colonization events was 80,000 darwins, or 2500 times the required rate. Observed rates of evolution in lab experiments are even more impressive, averaging 60,000 darwins and as high as 200,000 darwins (or over 6000 times the required rate).
A more recent paper evaluating the evolutionary rate in guppies in the wild found rates ranging from 4000 to 45,000 darwins (Reznick 1997). Note that a sustained rate of "only" 400 darwins is sufficient to transform a mouse into an elephant in a mere 10,000 years (Gingerich 1983).
One of the most extreme examples of rapid evolution was when the hominid cerebellum doubled in size within ~100,000 years during the Pleistocene (Rightmire 1985). This "unique and staggering" acceleration in evolutionary rate was only 7 darwins (Williams 1992, p. 132). This rate converts to a minuscule 0.02% increase per generation, at most. For comparison, the fastest rate observed in the fossil record in the Gingerich study was 37 darwins over one thousand years, and this corresponds to, at most, a 0.06% change per generation.
Potential Falsification:
If modern observed rates of evolution were unable to account for the rates found in the fossil record, the theory of common descent would be extremely difficult to justify, to put it mildly. For example, Equus evolutionary rates during the late Cenozoic could be consistently found to be greater than 80,000 darwins. Given the observed rates in modern populations, a rate that high would be impossible to explain. Since the average rate of evolution in colonization events is ~400 darwins, even an average rate of 4000 darwins in the fossil record would constitute a robust falsification.
Prediction 5.8: Genetic rates of change
Rates of genetic change, as measured by nucleotide substitutions, must also be consistent with the rate required from the time allowed in the fossil record and the sequence differences observed between species.
Confirmation:
What we must compare are the data from three independent sources: (1) fossil record estimates of the time of divergence of species, (2) nucleotide differences between species, and (3) the observed rates of mutation in modern species. The overall conclusion is that these three are entirely consistent with one another.
For example, consider the human/chimp divergence, one of the most well-studied evolutionary relationships. Chimpanzees and humans are thought to have diverged, or shared a common ancestor, about 6 Mya, based on the fossil record (Stewart and Disotell 1998). The genomes of chimpanzees and humans are very similar; their DNA sequences overall are 98% identical (King and Wilson 1975; Sverdlov 2000). The greatest differences between these genomes are found in pseudogenes, non-translated sequences, and fourfold degenerate third-base codon positions. All of these are very free from selection constraints, since changes in them have virtually no functional or phenotypic effect, and thus most mutational changes are incorporated and retained in their sequences. For these reasons, they should represent the background rate of spontaneous mutation in the genome. These regions with the highest sequence dissimilarity are what should be compared between species, since they will provide an upper limit on the rate of evolutionary change.
Given a divergence date of 6 Mya, the maximum inferred rate of nucleotide substitution in the most divergent regions of DNA in humans and chimps is ~1.3 x 10-9 base substitutions per site per year. Given a generation time of 15-20 years, this is equivalent to a substitution rate of ~2 x 10-8 per site per generation (Crowe 1993; Futuyma 1998, p. 273).
Background spontaneous mutation rates are extremely important for cancer research, and they have been studied extensively in humans. A review of the spontaneous mutation rate observed in several genes in humans has found an average background mutation rate of 1-5 x 10-8 base substitutions per site per generation. This rate is a very minimum, because its value does not include insertions, deletions, or other base substitution mutations that can destroy the function of these genes (Giannelli et al. 1999; Mohrenweiser 1994, pp. 128-129). Thus, the fit amongst these three independent sources of data is extremely impressive.
Similar results have been found for many other species (Kumar and Subramanian 2002; Li 1997, pp. 180-181, 191). In short, the observed genetic rates of mutation closely match inferred rates based on paleological divergence times and genetic genomic differences. Therefore, the observed rates of mutation can easily account for the genetic differences observed between species as different as mice, chimpanzees, and humans.
Potential Falsification:
It is entirely plausible that measured genetic mutation rates from observations of modern organisms could be orders of magnitude less than that required by rates inferred from the fossil record and sequence divergence.
Awesumely impressive job. Well done.
lip curling re: the title "Not by chance"
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I understand but both sides are (IMO) guilty of creating conversational chaos on this point. It is indeed essential to Darwinism that the mutations that provide the source for the new genetic material ARE nondirected. When creationists talk about "random" or "chance" they don't mean to discount the predictable impacts of natural selection. At least many of them don't. I think think sometimes the evolutionists take failure to use the prescribed terms for stupidity.
Actually I've stepped in this one up to my knees. To the best of my ability to comprehend the argument, it asserts that all variation is merely the shuffling of existing alleles. In other words, God put all the possible variations into the genome in the Beginning, and evolution simply brings variants to the front as needed.
I encountered this argument during a discussion of the evolution if antibiotic resistance in monoclonal bacterial cultures. Southack jumped in with a discussion of recessive genes in bacteria. To be honest, I hadn't encountered the use of the word recessive in non-sexually reproducing organisms. I said then and say now, I don't see how this is applicable to a population descended from a single individual.
But the overall concept that all variants are derived from recessive alleles seems to be one of the fallback positions for creationists.
Those two discussions between Max and Spetner
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A lot of crosstalk and some bad form cloud their value. However some of the info helped me.
No it isn't. There's been some discussion, I believe, of directed mutations, and even some empirical work on the subject. There were some experiments with bacteria wherein the data suggested that certain "needed" mutations were occurring too often to be accounted for by chance. I don't know the details or how that all came out, unfortunately, but it was not treated as any great crisis for Darwinism. There are also special cases, like the "evolution" of antibodies within the cells of the immune system, where one can speak of something like "directed" mutations, although there are mechanisms that explain the "direction".
"Southack jumped in with a discussion of recessive genes in bacteria. To be honest, I hadn't encountered the use of the word recessive in non-sexually reproducing organisms. I said then and say now, I don't see how this is applicable to a population descended from a single individual."
As a microbiologist, I do not understand as well. The "typical" bacterium has one chromosome, so no gene can be "recessive". However, there could be some cases where you might say a trait is "recessive", although not in the diploid sort of view. For instance when growing rapidly, bacteria typically are carrying more that one chromosome copy since it often takes longer to replicate the chromosome that the division time for the organism. Still, this "recessivity" would only last a short time until the progeny sorted out the new chromosomes. Genes can also be "silent" and be mistaken for recessive. It is possible by genetic techniques to introduce more than one copy of a gene into a bacterium. This could make an artificial sort of "recessiveness". Then there's cryptic genes and assorted regulatory problems that will leave a gene silent. However, most of these are minor and artificial things associated with the laboratory.
Generally a mutation in a bacterium will be expressed in very short order.
PS it was Southack that said "all mutations are recessive".
This was the usage in question. It has actually appeared in at leat one professional journal, maybe more. The duplicate in the published case was apparently natural.
Rippin is wrong that Evolutionary theory doesn't assume random mutation
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"The major tenets of the evolutionary synthesis, then, were that populations contain genetic variation that arises by random (ie. not adaptively directed) mutation and recombination; that populations evolve by changes in gene frequency brought about by random genetic drift, gene flow, and especially natural selection; that most adaptive genetic variants have individually slight phenotypic effects so that phenotypic changes are gradual (although some alleles with discrete effects may be advantageous, as in certain color polymorphisms); that diversification comes about by speciation, which normally entails the gradual evolution of reproductive isolation among populations; and that these processes, continued for sufficiently long, give rise to changes of such great magnitude as to warrant the designation of higher taxonomic levels (genera, families, and so forth)."
- Futuyma, D.J. in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates, 1986; p.12
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/modern-synthesis.html
It gets confusing for one when one reads the "best sources" and then when one quotes them one is told one is wrong.
"This was the usage in question. It has actually appeared in at leat one professional journal, maybe more. The duplicate in the published case was apparently natural."
This could happen naturally, although it would be rare. It is a proposed mechanism in the concept of enzyme recruitment, whereby a gene is duplicated, one remains "wild type" with one function while the other undergoes modification for a new function. Then both functions will be expressed simultaneously, from what was once two of the same genes. Gene duplication doesn't last very long if there is no selective pressure to keep it. Mutation rates in bacteria are just too high.
But you are right, "recessive" is for polyploids.
yea, so? I just wasted a perfectly good 20 minutes reading this and I don't find a single idea or argument I haven't seen 100 times here, expept usually with a great deal more actual evidence rolled into the discussion. If there's a point or two in here you want to argue about, please do so. If not, I fail to see the point.
The "evolutionary synthesis" refers to articles published in 1938-1940, prior to molecular biology.
The "evolutionary synthesis" refers to articles published in 1938-1940, prior to molecular biology.
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The queston on the table is whether evolutionists consider mutation to be "random" = non-directed. I said "yea" and was told "nay." So I gave a link to TalkOrigins intro which seems to be a respected place to find out the RIGHT answers about evolution which seems to agree with me.
Now you are talking about terminology timeframes but talk origins used the quote I pulled as representative of the modern synthesis meaning "current."
So are you saying talk origins is wrong and the Modern Synthesis does include directed mutation? Or are you just making a minor point about terminology?
If not, I fail to see the point.
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The question I was exploring is whether there are any anti-evolutionists that are not liars, idiots, buffoons, and or charlatans.
One could not explore that question by asking "is there something new here" one would need to explore that by showing anti-evolutionists having intelligent SCIENTIFIC discussions with evolutionists.
I present it as a case of intelligent discussion between evolutionist and anti-evolutionist. Not as a case of something "new" as your post seems to call for.
However, if you want to determine if there is something new or if there is adequate evidence supplied you'd probably do well to read the book the two are discussing.
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