There are valid criticisms of evolution

Wichita Eagle ^ | 3/9/2005 | David berlinski

[metacognative]

Opinions

There are valid criticisms of evolution

BY DAVID BERLINSKI

"If scientists do not oppose anti-evolutionism," said Eugenie Scott, the executive director of the National Council on Science Education, "it will reach more people with the mistaken idea that evolution is scientifically weak."

Scott's understanding of "opposition" had nothing to do with reasoned discussion. It had nothing to do with reason at all. Discussing the issue was out of the question. Her advice to her colleagues was considerably more to the point: "Avoid debates."

Everyone else had better shut up.

In this country, at least, no one is ever going to shut up, the more so since the case against Darwin's theory retains an almost lunatic vitality. Consider:

• The suggestion that Darwin's theory of evolution is like theories in the serious sciences -- quantum electrodynamics, say -- is grotesque. Quantum electrodynamics is accurate to 13 unyielding decimal places. Darwin's theory makes no tight quantitative predictions at all.

• Field studies attempting to measure natural selection inevitably report weak-to-nonexistent selection effects.

• Darwin's theory is open at one end, because there is no plausible account for the origins of life.

• The astonishing and irreducible complexity of various cellular structures has not yet successfully been described, let alone explained.

• A great many species enter the fossil record trailing no obvious ancestors, and depart leaving no obvious descendants.

• Where attempts to replicate Darwinian evolution on the computer have been successful, they have not used classical Darwinian principles, and where they have used such principles, they have not been successful.

• Tens of thousands of fruit flies have come and gone in laboratory experiments, and every last one of them has remained a fruit fly to the end, all efforts to see the miracle of speciation unavailing.

• The remarkable similarity in the genome of a great many organisms suggests that there is at bottom only one living system; but how then to account for the astonishing differences between human beings and their near relatives -- differences that remain obvious to anyone who has visited a zoo?

If the differences between organisms are scientifically more interesting than their genomic similarities, of what use is Darwin's theory, since its otherwise mysterious operations take place by genetic variations?

These are hardly trivial questions. Each suggests a dozen others. These are hardly circumstances that do much to support the view that there are "no valid criticisms of Darwin's theory," as so many recent editorials have suggested.

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[Conspiracy Guy]

; )

[Conspiracy Guy]

Shake. You said exactly what I think.

[Elsie]

I'm glad to see that you two CG fellows have made up.

It's SO easy to take offence when none was intended, or to hear a tone of voice that wasn't implied.

(Now back to our regular programming....)

[Conspiracy Guy]

The written word loses inflection. Especially when it is in cyberspace short speak.

[VadeRetro]

'Mushy' or not, the interia of the infintesimal small particle is STILL added to the Earth mass; it does NOT have to rebound from a hard surface.

The more you make heat, sound, and other local vibrations, the less you make large-scale mechanical motion. Photon impacts are not being transmitted down into the lithosphere to push on the Earth's center of mass. They're just too tiny, too local. They vanish into the noise.

[longshadow]

Adding a tiny radial force to an orbiting object will simply push the object out into a ever-so-slighty larger orbit, at which point a new equilibrium condition is achieve (as long as the outward radial force is still applied). The tiny amount of energy derived from the outward pressure is used up to climb the gravity well of the sun. Since the radial force is orthogonal to the object's velocity, it adds no kinetic energy to the orbit; it DOES add a tiny amount of potential energy used to climb the gravity well a tiny bit.

I can't do the quantitative analysis off the top of my head, but I'm sure RA can straighten this entire issue out.

[RadioAstronomer]

I have a old post on this very thing I am currently searching for. If I don't find it I will recreate it. :-)

[VadeRetro]

Appreciate it. This has passed the "more heat than light" point.

[Right Wing Professor]

Please don't try to blame others for your own misundertstanding of biology. Physicist was talking about species, which are categories. We were talking about fossils, which were once individual, real organisms. One is a quantization of (if not the continuum) then a much finer grainer reality. The other is a real entity.

By the way, you never answered my question about how far you'd gotten in college math and physics. The reason I asked is that I have quite a few esteemed colleagues in the math and physics departments, who have Ph.D.s and decades of experience in their disciplines, and don't seem to believe that evolutionary biology has been superseded by math and physics. In fact, some of them collaborate with biologists in the emerging field of bioinformatics. So, given that your opinion is so much more negative w.r.t biology than theirs, I'm wondering how much greater depth you must have in the field.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you for your reply!

Please don't try to blame others for your own misundertstanding of biology. Physicist was talking about species, which are categories. We were talking about fossils, which were once individual, real organisms. One is a quantization of (if not the continuum) then a much finer grainer reality. The other is a real entity.

Physicist was talking about fossils, too, when he said:

I've noticed this before (but not named it) when it comes to speciation. As a population evolves (and leaves traces in the fossil record), we arbitrarily label the individual fossils with different species names. We define species, however, by the ability to produce viable offspring. (We can't test that, of course, but no matter: it's certain that any creature would be unable to interbreed with a distant enough ancestor.)

The problem is that if every individual left a fossil, there would always come a point where a taxonomist would have to change species names between a parent and a child, but by any reasonable definition of species they have to be the same species.

(I could give examples from particle physics, too, but they're more abstruse.)

Our notation often forces us into your fallacy (sorry, to name a thing is to own it). The ignorant then proceed to read more significance into the names (and their attendant problems) than into the ideas.

For Lurkers: the above was offered in response to RWP's previous remark:

Quantizing the continuum is where you draw an imaginary line where reality has no lines. But a fossil is a real entity.

which was an objection to my statement:

After all the theory of a continuum of life is based on the quantizations (fossils) of a continuum (geologic record).

I would go so far as to say that quantizing is how we convert a continuum to a discrete instance - for instance, analog to digital conversion. IMHO, a taxonomist is in the business of quantizing.

Concerning my education, I find it particularly ironic that you would ask me for my credentials considering just a few years ago I defended you against a group of posters here who challenged your credentials. You owed them no justification - neither do I owe you.

[Right Wing Professor]

Our notation often forces us into your fallacy (sorry, to name a thing is to own it). The ignorant then proceed to read more significance into the names (and their attendant problems) than into the ideas.

That wasn't what you said originally. What you said was: After all the theory of a continuum of life is based on the quantizations (fossils) of a continuum (geologic record). What Physicist was saying is the categorization of fossils into species is quantizing the continuum. What you said was that the fossils themselves are quantizations of the continuum.

If you can't see, or won't acknowledge the difference, I can't help you.

Concerning my education, I find it particularly ironic that you would ask me for my credentials considering just a few years ago I defended you against a group of posters here who challenged your credentials. You owed them no justification - neither do I owe you.

My credentials are a matter of public record.

Your credentials would not be an issue if you were not making grandiose claims about math and physics superseding biology. Most qualified mathematicians and physicists don't apparently agree. In fact, many collaborate with biologists in helping to further the research you are casting aspersions on. How do we evaluate the strength of your claim versus their claims?

[betty boop]

Concerning my education, I find it particularly ironic that you would ask me for my credentials considering just a few years ago I defended you against a group of posters here who challenged your credentials. You owed them no justification - neither do I owe you.

Sigh. Alamo-Girl, I don't know what it is with some of our correspondents, but somethimes I get the distinct impression that rather than engage the issues brought to the table, some resort to challenging the qualifications and/or motives of the person making an argument they evidently choose to avoid.

The "classical evo reply" that I get all too often is: "You're wrong. You're stupid. And you have a nefarious hidden agenda. So I don't have to waste my time talking to you." And then you get usually extensive chapter-and-verse recapitulations of the blessed texts, and a zillion links to outside sites. As if that sort of thing constitutes any kind of a decent, fair-minded, civil debate, or rational exchange of views.

All questions are ignored, one never learns what a person's actual, active thinking about the issue under dispute is, what grounds his view of the matter is based on, why the avoided question was improper on evidentiary or logical grounds, and so forth. In short, one gets pure polemics and zero rational discussion.

FWIW, if this is the way to defend Darwinist evolutionary theory, then I'd guess the theory must be in really big trouble. This "circling of the wagons" mentality is not helpful to a rational defense of this theory or any other theory.

[Tribune7]

and a zillion links to outside sites.

Outside site. It's usually just Talk.Origins or an offshot such as Panda's Thumb.

[b_sharp]

"FWIW, if this is the way to defend Darwinist evolutionary theory, then I'd guess the theory must be in really big trouble. This "circling of the wagons" mentality is not helpful to a rational defense of this theory or any other theory."

It's not about 'circling the wagons', it's about making sure that accurate information is disseminated. Unless you are able to produce the research yourself, your only outlet is to rely on those that can and have done the research. It is difficult for a layman to understand fully, let alone critique, another's work unless that layman has equivalent study and/or experience in the relevant field.

The reason most in academia dislike uninformed debate in venues such as this one is the lack of verification of information. Anything can be said and taken for fact, even if it contradicts what has taken years of verified and replicated research by multiple researchers.

It may be more fun and interesting to be a rationalist than an empiricist, but inductive ponderings will only go so far before deductive arguments need to be considered.

[betty boop]

It may be more fun and interesting to be a rationalist than an empiricist, but inductive ponderings will only go so far before deductive arguments need to be considered.

Do you take me for a "rationalist," b_sharp? Oy!!!

Actually, my method is empiricist. My critique of neo-Darwinism rests mainly on observational and epistemological grounds.

But I do agree that, as science, popular discussions such as we have here aren't exactly "state of the art." On the other hand, neither are we confined entirely to the strictures of the scientific method. Some would regard the latter as a severe disadvantage. I don't.

Even science has to fit into "the big picture" some time.

Thanks for writing!

[longshadow]

I've got it: the solar radiation pressure (an outward force) merely cancels out a very tiny portion of the sun's gravitational (inward) force acting on the Earth. In that sense, the effect of the radiation pressure on the earth's orbit is indistiguishable from the effect of removing a tiny amount of the sun's mass, such that the decrease in gravitational force on the earth is equal to the outward force produced by the solar radiation pressure.

I think we can all agree that if we take an appropriate mass chunk of the sun and make it "disappear," the effect on the Earth would be that it's orbit would increase in radius by some tiny amount, until a new equilibrium condition is established at the new orbital radius. The Earth doesn't move further away, unless the radiation pressure is increased, or more solar mass is removed to reduce the gravitational pull.

The only way for the Earth to continue to zoom away from the sun would be if the radiation pressure/solar mass loss were so large as to decrease the sun's gravitational attraction to the point where the Earth's velocity was larger than the solar escape velocity. Solar radiation pressure alone isn't going to get that job done, at least not at the current flux.

;-)

[VadeRetro]

I think that's the final hurdle. Building to escape doesn't happen with tiny pressures. Also--a key point I had missed and you realized--if you really want to stabilize an orbit at a higher level, you have to add transverse (orbital) velocity, not directly outward pressure.

Because the radiation pressure is at right angles to the orbital velocity, you can basically ignore the orbital velocity. Radiation pressure becomes the act of holding a plate aloft by shooting BBs at it. The inverse square law for light means that the higher the plate goes, the fewer BBs even strike it.

The plate goes up until it hits an equilibrium point. The pressure has slackened--some of the BBs miss--to where it can't rise further. If the rate of BBs increases for a bit (a brightening phase), then the plate is pushed higher, but only to a new equilibrium point. If it slackens (dimming), the plate drops lower until the number of BB impacts required to keep it aloft is met.

A tiny pressure, no matter how unrelenting over the years, won't do any more than keep the plate at an equilibrium somewhere.

[RadioAstronomer]

Sigh. I am sorry to be taking so long. :-(

LOOK FOR A POST IN THE MORNING.

My sincere apologies.

[PatrickHenry]

Why can't you astronomers keep the same hours as everyone else?

[RadioAstronomer]

Because my personal clock has been off ever since I came from "out there" :-)

(Actually from Athens Greece) However, since there are no birth records, a federal judge had to "issue" me a birth date. This is no BS. I was blind international adopted out of an orphanage with no paperwork (except the adoption). Not even a birth cert. He ended up using his daughter's birthdate to create me a birth cert so I could be naturalized. :-)