Anti-Chomsky

Comments

1. 

   August 5, 2004

   Laban Tall

   The funny thing is that Darwinism may or may not be the central plank of modern biology, but the evidence for evolution, a central plank of Darwinism, is almost non-existent.
   Have a look at this essay. It’s not just that there’s a ‘missing link’ between ape and man. ALL the links are missing.
   The fossil record destroyed old-style creationism – but it’s also destroyed evolution.
   New species seem to arrive fully-formed.
   http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/2000/10/evolution/

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2. 

   August 5, 2004

   Mick H

   Sorry Laban, but I don’t buy this “morphogenetic fields” stuff of Rupert Sheldrake. It’s rubbish. And as for “Evidence for evolution is almost non-existent”, well, I think you’ve been reading too many Intelligent Design/Creationist articles. The whole of life is evidence for evolution.

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3. 

   August 5, 2004

   Anthony

   Slightly off topic, but have you seen the new Smartcar adverts which play on Darwinism to sell their cars! The irony of Darwin being used to flog the ultimate item in intelligent design – a car.

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4. 

   August 5, 2004

   Paul Craddick

   Mick,
   I’d argue that there’s a crucial difference, conceptually and empirically, between intra-specific evolution and inter-specific evolution.
   All of the examples Darwin gives in “On the Origin of Species” are of the former since, clearly, those are the only ones which we have any hope of “observing” (examples of breeders and the like); you must be referring to the same when speaking of “the whole of life.”
   Inter-specific evolution, as far as I can make out, ultimately results in the view that everything is either the same species – or no species at all. This nominalistic upshot creates, to say the least, a strange tension in the theory, since its starting point is a dizzying array of apparently distinct species to be explained.
   So, on grounds that have nothing to do with any theistic belief, I have many doubts about inter-specific evolution (though none about intra-specific).

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5. 

   August 6, 2004

   Dave

   Paul, I’m not sure I understand your argument. Saying that there is some internal inconsistency in what you call “inter-species evolution” is just wrong, and as far as I can tell could only come from a misunderstanding of evolution.
   Populations are always drifting – when two separate sub-populations become different enough, we call them different “species”. Often, it’s because there’s too much genetic difference for them to produce (fertile) offspring. Other times, it’s just massive variation in appearance. But these changes are happening in all populations – especially small populations under a lot of environmental/selective pressure. You need only look at the fossil record to see the gradual march of different forms, slowly changing into other forms.
   Where Darwin may have been wrong is that he assumed evolution always occurs at a very gradual pace. Evolution and speciation can be relatively rapid at times (in a geologic sense, anyway). Evolution happens most rapidly when small populations are separated or when new pressures appear (or new niches open up). This is why we see massive explosions of new species after mass extinctions. Oftentimes, while we can see the progression of species in the fossil record, we see little “jumps” at these rapid speciation points where a species changes rapidly or splits into many distinct species.
   Many uneducated creationists cite researchers like Dawkins and Gould as claiming that Darwinism is false. Uniform, gradual evolution may be false, but Dawkins, Gould, Darwin, and pretty much everyone else agrees on evolution through natural selection. Some also cite “missing links” – a missing link is just a gap in the fossil record. But since there is a continuum from one species to the next, unless you have a fossil from every single individual in a lineage from one species to the next, there will always be “missing links”.
   In fact, since evolution is most rapid in small populations, you’re actually less likely to see the most “transitional” fossils. But you can definitely see the gradual change over a family of species – either as a chain, like the one that led to the horse and to modern whales, or as a rapid branching, like the evolution of the South American finch to the myriad varieties that Darwin observed in the Galapagos.

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6. 

   August 6, 2004

   Backword Dave

   What the other Dave said.
   “Inter-specific evolution, as far as I can make out, ultimately results in the view that everything is either the same species – or no species at all. This nominalistic upshot creates, to say the least, a strange tension in the theory, since its starting point is a dizzying array of apparently distinct species to be explained.”
   It’s not uncommon in science, or even in dialectics to arrive at a postion which has moved the goalposts, as it were, from the starting point.
   But yes there are still species. Members of one species (usually) cannot mate with members of another and produce fertile offspring. However, a species is just a collection of individuals — who vary pretty widely. If you take public transport to work, you’ll see a range of human types. Assuming that we are evolving (I’d argue that we’re not; pretty much any human born today is as likely as the next to produce children — that applies in areas of the world where there’s starvation or genocide too, surviving those is luck, not good genes or smarts) whatever humanity turns into in several thousand years would have some kind of forerunner on your morning Tube.
   What about Eohippus for example? Are you suggesting God created a horse like animal, realised it wasn’t likely to inspire the sport of kings (though Stephen Pollard might have bought one and blogged about it constantly), and then threw it out and replaced it across the globe one night with Horse Mk II?
   If species boundaries are so hard, why do we share so much DNA with chimps?
   I’ll stop now.

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7. 

   August 6, 2004

   Backword Dave

   Sorry to be such a bore, but one more thing. “[The Theory of Evolution’s] starting point is a dizzying array of apparently distinct species to be explained”
   Actually, it isn’t. Darwin tried to account for the variety of species he found on the Galapagos, many of which resemble animals found in South America, but usually with distinct traits. He could equally well have gone to Australia, which is, if anything, an even better example.
   Darwin explains several contemporaneous problems. It had become obvious by the mid-C19 that species could become extinct. The Dodo is the best known example. As JBS Haldane is said to have quipped about God’s “inordinate fondness for beetles,” there are lots and lots of insect and arthropod varieties in the world. So many millions, in fact that two of each, even at a gram a pair would have weighed the Ark down with several tonnes of creepy-crawlies. Then there’s Malthus, who predicted population explosion. Actually population explosions do occur, as with rabbits and cane toads in Australia, and escaped/released mink on these islands. Something had to exist to explain why species levels were kept in check.

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8. 

   August 6, 2004

   Paul Craddick

   Dave and Backwards Dave,
   I think you both made good and interesting points, but I don’t believe they speak to the real issue here. Clearly, what is meant by “species” is at the heart of the dispute.
   Variation – say of people on a train – doesn’t of itself imply a “fluidity” or imprecision of “species”; those differences are surely better understood as variations on a theme.
   That gets to the heart of what’s wrong with “nominalism” – the notion that taxonomies don’t key off of real commonalities, but rather are convenient labelling devices (merely “nominal”) to be changed as is expedient. Au contraire, we classify based on traits which are understood to inhere in things; resemblance based on shared characteristics is a sine qua non for reasonably grouping together numerically distinct individuals.
   Here’s an argument for why I believe inter-specific Evolution to be an incoherent notion:
   It’s a fundamental datum of modern biology that any animal capable of reproduction is of the same kind – “species” – as its progenitor; of non-sterile offspring it’s true to say that “like comes from like.” (I don’t assert that this notion is unproblematic as a definitive notion of species-membership, but it’s a widely affirmed view.)
   Now picture an epoch-spanning chain of begetting and reproducing of the begotten. Assume that after thousands of millenia, owing to selection pressure, a “new species” has emerged. By definition, this new specimen is incapable of reproducing with specimens of distant ancestors. But such an account doesn’t cohere.
   Each descendant, by definition, is of the same kind as its parent; but its parent is of the same kind as its parent; and so on, working backwards – otherwise there would be no “chain” of descent in the first place. So either the principle is false that “species” – so far as readiness-for-reproduction goes – entails similarity in kind with a proximate parent, or that principle cannot harmonize with a notion that allows for a radical break in kind (a saltatory moment) at some distant stage in the generational cycle.
   Hence I conclude that on this account, everything is really the same species – or no thing is any species. But one of the key premises of the account – similarity in kind between parent and offspring – presupposed a certain “stability” to specificity. This goes beyond a mere “moving of goalposts.” But no contradiction occurs if an account is limited to intra-specific Evolution.
   On the principle of parsimony, the argument which notes changing, isolated sub-populations is, again, an observation of intra-specific change. The question is whether changes of degree, however cumulative, can entail a literal change in kind.
   And I was misunderstood over the expression “starting point” …
   Yes, experiences on the Beagle in the Galapagos set Darwin’s thoughts in motion … I meant that Evolution’s starting point – what it aims to explain – is “species-ness,” as evinced by the dizzying array of species one encounters prosaicallly. The book which presents his view, after all, is called “On the Origin of Species,” not “On the origin of certain species observed in the Galapagos Islands.” He abstracted his findings into a universal account, in other words.

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9. 

   August 7, 2004

   roger

   Hi, Paul! Two points
   1. Classification. The classification from traits is, I believe, being overtaken by cladistics — which classifies from, among other things, chromosonal similarity.
   2. The question of species is one that is still controversial within the boundaries of the neo-darwinian synthesis. But I don’t see how it puts into question evolution — it simply points to different weightings of the factors implicated in evolution. As I remember it, Mayr was very concerned with the constraint of habitat as a species defining one — in contrast to Sewall Wright, I believe, although I might be going senile and have forgotten my American biologists.
   Now, the cool thing about Darwin is that he outlined the conceptual areas in which the controversy goes forward – doing for biology what Newton did for physics. To reduce Darwin’s insights to some grade school picture of evolution unfortunately disguises the real reach of the theory of natural selection, with its insights into adaptation and habitat — essential limits to understanding what ‘selection pressure” is about — and gave us a picture in which we can understand a., how individual types arise, and b., how they interact with each other and with other types. Nobody had ever done that before. Horowitz, who I can’t take seriously, isn’t really making a scientific point, but simply continuing his life work — as provocateur.
   I’d have to put Darwinism (and its heir, neo-Darwinism) up there with the jewels of Western — and even human – thought.

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10. 

    August 7, 2004

    Backword Dave

    Laban, I read the article you linked to. The author has a degree in “nueroscience from Cambridge University.” I’ve heard of the seat of learning, but the discipline is a new one to me, perhaps that’s why it’s all over my simple head.

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11. 

    August 7, 2004

    Dave

    duces a lot of complexity to a single, over-general axiom that – as you show – does not hold. What is true is that the offspring of two parents will have genes that are very nearly (but not always perfectly) half of one parent’s genes and half of the other’s. Since we define species largely on genetic difference nowadays (or at least on secondary characteristics that are due to genetics), the child of two parents which are classified as being in the same species can usually be classified as a member of that species as well.
    What is important is the genetic composition of a population, not the particular “species” we decide to classify that particular population at that particular point in time as. A modern human might be able to produce viable offspring with a neanderthal or even a H. erectus, but we classify them as different species because there are significant morphological differences. Also, consider that “modern” humans did not exist alongside H. erectus – H. sapiens did, but they were a different population of H. sapiens than exist today. We call both our ancestors and ourselves H. sapiens because of similar physical features, but we can’t know for sure how much genetic drift there’s been since then, or whether, say, every fertile human today could breed with every fertile H. sapiens of the opposite sex from the original population and produce viable offspring.
    A species, therefore, is a fluid thing in time. The distinctions we make between species at various points in history are purely for our convenience – they are an artificial classification system. Now, there may be a statistical underpinning. If you could take the genetic signatures of every individual mammal, for instance, and perform a K-means clustering on the data, you might (if you picked K correctly) produce an optimal categorization, for some definition of “optimal”. But we’d still have to figure out what that meant.
    Anyway, enough ruminating. You get the idea.

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12. 

    August 7, 2004

    Mick H

    Paul, I think I see what you mean, but I don’t see the problem. Okay so you have genotype A, with offspring B. Clearly the same species. Suppose there’s an environmental change so that B gets cut off. Genotype A, we’ll assume, stays the same. B begets C begets D etc.. Each offspring is the same species as its parent, but because of selection pressures in the new environment there’s a movement in the genotype. By the time you get to Z there have been enough accumulated genetic changes for an offspring of A and Z not to be viable. Meanwhile B to Y have died out. So you’ve got a new species: two genotypes, A and Z. There’s been no “saltatory moment”, as you put it, but cumulatively a jump has been made.

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13. 

    August 8, 2004

    Dave

    To add to Mick’s example, even if A is also extinct, if A and Z genotypes produce signficantly different phenotypes, then paleontologists are likely to call them different species.

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14. 

    August 9, 2004

    roger

    David, your discussion of the difference between like produces like and genetics is mostly admirable. But you should be cautious about statements like “What is true is that the offspring of two parents will have genes that are very nearly (but not always perfectly) half of one parent’s genes and half of the other’s.” One of the most important theories in neo-Darwinism stems from studying ants, where your half and half mixture breaks down. Technically, ants are haploid, which means that only a forth of the chromosonal mixture comes from the male. In fact, as William Hamilton showed, you can use game theory to explain the various social lives of ants by understanding the chromosonal percentages, and the way in which the queen mates, or sterilizes other ants, or the way in which a colony will break apart. That is the marvellous thing about Darwinism — it has progressively mathematized its insights, and that use of mathematic models has produced ways of understanding, among other things, the behaviors of living things like ants, and viruses, and algae, and worms. Sexual selection is one of the many ways in which an idea about species deriving from Aristotle and going up to Linnaeus was simply dissolved by Darwinism. The question of species becomes, instead, the question of levels of selection — with people like Dawkins using Hamilton’s work to suggest that there is only one basic level, which is genetic, and others — including Hamilton himself — saying there are emergent levels, group levels, upon which selection works.

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15. 

    November 21, 2004

    Kropotkin Beard

    egin their occupational therapy. They were going to be cleaning the toilets for some professor at M.I.T. Two days later they went to meet the professor. As they walked into the front office they passed dozens of file cabinets. They turned into a short hallway and to their horror they saw a big poster of Bertrand Russell on the wall. The door to the left of the poster was open and as they walked through the door a man wearing glasses stood. And with a toilet brush in each hand, he outstretched his arms and said:
    Chomsky: Hello! I’m Noam Chomsky. Get to work!

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16. 

    July 10, 2006

    Beardy McBeard

    “KB” (aka Kropotkin Beard above) is a buffoonish troll who surfs the net looking for sites where he can “defend” his lord and master, Ayatollah Noam Chomsky, mainly by insulting those who dare to criticize Chomsky’s crackpot political ramblings and copious historical fabrications. One of KB’s favourite tactics was to write lame “satires” lampooning supposed “anti-Chomskyites” and leave them all over cyberspace like goat droppings. As a blog commenter, KB is as close to being a raving madman as you’re ever likely to find.

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