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Jhud -> The failure of Natural Selection (5/15/2008 12:54:04 PM)
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Was motivated to start this thread because of a recent interview of Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a visiting professor at Harvard, MIT, the University of Bologna and the College de France in Paris, who studied physics and cognitive sciences I read.
The interview concerns a book he and Jerry Fodor are writing on evolution without adaptation. In criticizing this critical aspect of Neo-Darwinism, he makes points that myself and other IDists have been making for years, for example:
“Insects had evolved at least ten elaborate forms of mouthpieces, uniquely adapted (one would say) to their feeding upon flowers, one hundred million years before there were any flowers on Earth.”
And notes that:
… when Sherman stresses that the sea urchin has, in-expressed, the genes for the eyes and for antibodies (genes that are well known and fully active in later species), how can we not agree with him that canonical neo-Darwinism cannot begin to explain such facts?
Both points emphasizing the fact that many attributes exist that precede any ability for selective processes to have acted on them.
He also mirrors the ID (and in all fairness, the creationist) claim that evolution as it stands is quite limited to explain anything except very minor changes in a population:
Of course, there is natural selection all around us (just think of the flu virus, mutating and adapting every year, to our detriment) and inside us (just think of our antibodies and our synapses and the pancreas cells and the epithelial cells). The point is, however, that organisms can be modified and refined by natural selection, but that is NOT the way new species and new classes and new phyla originated.
For that, major changes in regulatory genes and in gene regulatory networks have to occur. All this is perfectly naturalistic and now well documented. Minor changes in the order of activation of master genes can create vast discontinuous morphogenetic changes. Very similar (in the jargon orthologous) genes in insects and in vertebrates produce an inversion in the development of the nervous system.
In essence, in insects the system is ventral, in vertebrates it’s dorsal. Two opposite gradients of morphogenetic factors (one the mirror image of the other) produce this difference. Huge difference to the eye, but minor in its origin early in the development of the embryo.
And he promotes the idea of a ‘universal genome, an idea I have detailed previously:
Suzan Mazur: Have you seen any convincing new illustrations and evolutionary models?
Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini: The idea of a universal genome, a’ la Sherman, is the most interesting I have seen recently. Not a single key, but an important key.
And the kicker? He can’t stand the notion of ID, so he can’t be called a sympathizer:
I think that abandoning Darwinism (or explicitly relegating it where it belongs, in the refinement and tuning of existing forms) sounds anti-scientific. They fear that the tenants of intelligent design and the creationists (people I hate as much as they do) will rejoice and quote them as being on their side. They really fear that, so they are prudent, some in good faith, some for calculated fear of being cast out of the scientific community.
It’s interesting that here he also affirms here the current fascistic nature of the scientific community, affirming Stein’s Expelled thesis.
All in all, while he and Fodor appear to be no friends of ID, it good to see that inch by inch Neo-Darwinism is falling by the wayside as the failed theory that IDists and creationists have long been saying it is.
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