That’s true. Your not believing in them also doesn’t affect their truth value.
For once we agree. We have to look at the evidence, dispassionately and carefully.
Eddie, the responses are connected to the comment they respond to, so there is no ambiguity. My response was to your comment
By “as it seems,” you mean “as it seems to me.” It does not “seem” that way to Wagner, Newman, etc.
I would like to see how they could argue that “laws of form” didn’t have their basis in standard evolutionary processes.
Carefully yes. Dispassionately? Why? Is that a scientific necessity?
So you believe your wife to be beautiful provisionally, and question it all the time? You are still applying the rules for an objective issue, for what is a subjective issue. That means you reject subjectivity altogether.
@Eddie @loujost I am posting this publicly for the benefit of everyone. Two tips to solve the dilemma of a confusing conversation:
- If you click of the button with the little arrow pointing back (in the top right corner of the post), the previous comment in the conversation appears. You can trace the conversation that way.
- An underused feature on the Forum is the “reply as new topic” button next to every post. If you want to start a secondary conversation, feel free to use that button and start a new topic. Anybody can start any topic they want with anybody else they want. It’s a great feature of the system. If you get yourself in a conversation that only involves two or three people, sometimes it’s a good choice to segregate it away from the main comment board.
Because it is so easy to fool one’s self. Sure,
passion is important, and there is nothing wrong with being passionate
about an idea. Weighing evidence is tricky, though, and people who are
overly passionate about an idea for non-evidential reasons can hang on
to that idea or theory long after it has been conclusively refuted.
But
this is a complicated thing, I admit. In the early days of the theory
of evolution, it was “refuted” by physics, which claimed that the earth
was only millions of years old, not the billions needed for evolution to
produce the diversity we see today. Yet Darwin and other biologists
were passionate about this idea, and they were right. The reason for
their passion, though, was not personal vanity or other such things.
They had realized that evolution fit and explained such a wide body of
apparently-unrelated facts and observations, that it or something like
it had to be true, in spite of what physics said. And they were right.
Once physics advanced to the point where we understood radioactivity,
the Big Bang, and convection in the earth’s core, we had billions of
years…
What is the difference between the appearance of design and design?
Evolution shows that the appearance of design can be produced by variation and natural selection, without a designer.
So Eddie, you haven’t actually read the people whose arguments you are characterizing in this very strong way:
"By “as it seems,” you mean “as it seems to me.” It does not “seem” that way to Wagner, Newman, etc.
I haven’t read them either, but I would be surprised if they thought these laws of forms you speak of are independent— logically above the processes of evolution, rather than being consequences of the standard processes of evolution. Do you really have a basis for thinking that this is not the case? If not, why did you say so without qualification?
I’ll look at the book’s reviews and excerpts…but time is short…
It is untrue. You actually first have to make a model with natural selection + variation and then see which way the model turns out, and then compare the results of the model with the real world. Then you have evidence that natural selection + variation can produce the appearance of design.
Needless to say, the force of random mutation in the model to corrupt is weaker than the force of natural selection to sort. So there is no evidence that natural selection + random mutation can produce the appearance of design.
@loujost
There is no evidence here. Just a false dichotomy. Evolution “proves” only that life forms are not directly produced by a Designer, but not that life is produced without a Designer, which is why it has a marvelous intricate design.
Evolution is a designed process that produces forms of intelligently designed life designed by the Designer Who created the rest of Creation.
The only additional arguments Darwinists have made are that Nature is not intelligently designed, which is clearly false; that Nature is not rationally structured, which is also obviously false, and finally that life forms are determined by random, non-intelligent chance, which is not even good evolutionary thought.
Old thought habits die very hard. It is time we begin to develop new thought habits based relational truth.
It’s true that I can’t keep up with everything. If they don’t make many inroads into conversation and writing in mainstream biology I tend to pass them by, because there is so much trash out there. But yes, there could be gems mixed in with the trash. I’ll try to look these up.
Eddie, I’ve had a quick look at the description of Stuart Newman’s work at the Third Way website. It confirms my guess above (though he may not put it that way). I said:
I would be surprised if they thought these laws of forms you speak of
are independent— logically above the processes of evolution, rather
than being consequences of the standard processes of evolution.
I argued that the new processes or constraints being discussed are ultimately still gene-centric and produced by variation and natural selection. So here is what Newman (or someone at the Third Way website describing him) says:
He has proposed that genes act in the context of multicellular systems
by mobilizing a variety of physical processes of the “middle” scale to
generate forms of increasing complexity. These mesoscale physical
processes, discovered throughout the 20th century and thus unknown to
the formulators of the standard evolutionary narrative, cause early
embryos and the primordia of organs to reorganize in sudden but
predictable ways as the result of small changes in gene content or
activity.
His mechanisms are gene-centric and natural-selection-driven. His laws of form arise from within, so to speak.
Now I grant that he likes to speak of the impotence of natural selection (I’ve been looking at some of his quotations). But on close examination this is bluster. It is still the genes that are controlling development, etc, and the useful adaptations are still arising by normal variation and increasing in the population due to natural selection. I think you take these guys’ self-proclamations about being revolutionary far too seriously. A wider exposure to the evolutionary literature would give you a much healthier perspective.
If you really want to get into this, we can dissect Newman’s blog posts in the Huffington Post, and Coyne’s rebuttal (Another antiselectionist, Stuart Newman, surfaces at PuffHo – Why Evolution Is True), and Newman’s response to Coyne (Evolution Is More Than Natural Selection | HuffPost Impact). Sorry, but Coyne is right on this. Newman’s observations about the importance of physics, developmental processes, and the possibility of big leaps in morphology are well-taken. These tell us important things about the kinds of variation that can arise. But they in no way reduce or replace the role of natural selection on this variation, plus drift, as the fundamental drivers of evolution.
What’s novel or revolutionary about “genes act “in the context of multicellular systems”” ? And of course genes are context-dependent, again this is standard stuff and has no effect on the foundations of evolutionary theory.
About using words differently, I see that Newman’s use of the word “epigenetic” may be quite a bit broader than the usual use of that word today in genetics. So we need to be wary when discussing his views on that.
I’ll look at Wagner next, but again, I expect any new “laws” emerge from physical constraints and modularity of genes, etc, rather than being logically prior to them. And I will bet that it will have no bearing on the main theme of evolution in terms of natural selection on variation.