During my discussion with you all on a previous topic, I’ve been meaning to create another one that touches upon the scientific side, so I wanted to open a more focused thread.
In the 19th century, Richard Owen emphasized structural “archetypes” in biology—suggesting that organismal form might reflect underlying constraints or organizational principles, not just historical processes. Darwin, of course, emphasized descent with modification and natural selection.
Modern biology has largely developed along Darwin’s line, but I’m wondering whether recent work by RTB might suggest some limited return to Owen’s structuralist-style explanations, at least in a complementary sense.
For example:
Are there cases where physical or developmental constraints strongly bias what forms are even possible?
Do recurring patterns in convergence point to deeper structural limits?
How should we think about explanations that are not purely historical but also constraint-based?
More broadly:
To what extent can structural or constraint-based explanations coexist with standard evolutionary theory without replacing it?
There is a recent preprint exploring this idea in more detail (link below), but I’m mainly interested in how people here think about the broader question, preferably from Owen’s particular structural perspective.
Thanks for letting me know. I added this sentence to make sure the discussion goes on a slightly different direction that was not fully explored before……
”preferably from Owen’s particular structural perspective.”
Has this preprint been out for a while? I remember seeing something on this topic from RTB a couple of years ago. Based on my knowledge of the fossil record, there are cases where certain body plans do evolve repeatedly over geologic time, like the shark body plan or the crab body plan. I don’t know that this would be incompatible with descent with modification though. It seems that it would simply restrict the paths available in the possibility space of evolutionary forms.
At least partially yes, in the sense that individuals inherit their genes from their parents. Mutations are common but they tend to cause relatively small changes to the inherited form, or be fatal.
The effects of the mutations may accumulate through time. If there is enough of time and the environment changes, leading to directional natural selection, forms may eventually change much. Usually, the time periods would be millions of years, not thousands of years. In this sense, the age of the life on Earth matters much. Accumulation of small changes for a billion years may lead to changes that would not happen within thousands of years.
Natural selection is the filter that separates the viable forms from the unfavourable ones. Some forms are likely to be less viable than others. For example, have you thought why we do not have real dragons in the world?
There are at least two characters in the dragons that are not seen in the other animals.
One is the combination of four legs and two wings. The wings of vertebrates are typically formed from the upper legs, so the usual form is two legs + two wings. The ancestral form of a dragon should have been a vertebrate with six legs. The development of two of the legs to wings should have given an advantage, compared to the six-legged forms. A six-legged vertebrate (which we do not have) would probably be heavier than a four-legged one and the center of mass would be different. Those make the development of the wings less likely.
The other character is the ability to breathe fire. We do not have vertebrates that can breathe fire. A gradual development of such an ability would be difficult because none of the vertebrates are fireproof. The fire would harm the mouth of the animal itself. It might be possible that some animal develops an ability to spit harmful chemicals but there is a long step from that to breathing fire.
Edited in response to moderation (possibly brought on by flagging my own post):
Yes.
For example, there are upper limits on the size of insects due to (i) thickness of exoskeletons and (ii) transporting oxygen via trachea.
No. They usually point to the most effective shape for competing in specific environments, such as (i) streamlined shapes of tuna, sharks, dolphins and ichthyosaurs, or (ii) sabre-toothed predators on very large herbivores.
The same way we think about any other explanation: does it make testable predictions that match later observations.
More broadly:
Completely, since standard evolutionary theory includes constraint-based explanations.
So presenting it as something you “recently came across” is not remotely credible, and undermines anything else you say about it.
This thread is a sham that should probably be closed.
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SkovandOfMitaze
(Intellectually Atheist Emotionally Christian )
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I guess I don’t see what’s supposed to be the new idea or how this idea is different from the theory of evolution that we already have.
I mean the constraints are all just natural selection. Tree forms have independently evolved numerous times. Vines have independently evolved numrerous times.
Our genes are only going to go so far. I won’t have a kid suddenly that has a beak and venom glands. The chances that humans would ever develop beaks and venom glands is super slim. For a fact I can’t imagine it happening unless our species crash on some alien planet and gets isolated from others for hundreds of millions of years.
Basal forms tend to be the dominant form because it’s the form that we evolved from and have genes all working with. So we can look at us, gorillas, chimps, and even monkeys and so on and see a basal type. If all humans vanished and chimps were left for for millions and millions of years whatever species they evolved into would most likely still be chimp looking. But we know endless forms are possible based off of environment. A lunged bony fish became a tetrapod who became mammals that run around that became an anima again that thrived in the sea like dolphins and seals. Some took on shapes like bats with wings. The process would have been long and gradual. Everything is constrained by genes to a degree. Such as humans evolving to being 10 inches tall with six foot wings and spongy bones like birds is highly unlikely. Could it still happen over hundreds of millions of years if the right pressures were there? Yeah. But most likely the conditions wont ever favor that. If that was what the favorable conditions were, we would probably just go extinct before reach it if there was not another way to adapt.
Convergent forms is normal.
Coevolution is normal.
We use to have insects that were far larger than today.
Some forms are just byproducts of nasal forms taking on may different divergent traits within the same family. Like spiders, mites and ticks. Wasps and bees share a close common ancestor. They also share a close one with ants. All basal forms but have taken on very divergent traits.
So I guess I just don’t understand what the “ground breaking” addition is supposed to be.
But this is still under Darwin’s framework, at least from my understanding. I am referring to Owen’s style of structuralism that interprets all that data from an entirely different framework:
You’re referring to the original version, which wasn’t peer-reviewed and involved only a small number of contributors. The updated version I just linked is substantially different—it includes input from a much broader group of individuals and organizations and was released just over a month ago. Here’s the press release for it:
I’d say it was more like AI-assisted or edited—mainly to help refine the tone of my responses and make sure I was clearly addressing your points, especially since you mentioned concerns about that during our discussion.
It’s a preprint on open source software, not a peer-reviewed article in a scientific or academic journal. It’s also not something you recently ran across, as others have pointed out.
The current version you linked was authored by F. Rana and Hugh Ross. Seems a small number of contributors. The article wasn’t anonymously peer-reviewed for publication in a journal. It wasn’t peer-reviewed at all, as far as I can tell.
Look up Alan Tai who is part of that community. He was a major author that essentially provided proof for Owen’s theory through RTB’s model of ENCODE’s 2012 results and a model that could potentially be tested further. Here is his work that was mentioned in section 2.8.1:
A. Tai, Quantum well model for charge transfer in aperiodic DNA and superlattice sequences.
No, it says, " on behalf of the Reasons to Believe Scholars Community Journal: OSF Preprints" (my bolding)
A major uncredited author. Okay. Seems unethical, but if you say so. He provided “proof” for Owen’s theory. Really? Then why hasn’t this definitive “proof” been published in a respectable scientific journal instead of an in-house organ or pay-to-play funhouse?
That was actually enjoyable. The peer review was unanimously negative. Lol
To do something on behalf of someone else means acting as their representative, agent, or in their place to support their interests. It involves performing an action (like signing a document or speaking) that benefits them or fulfills an obligation in their stead. It is common in formal, professional, and legal situations.
He is a credited as part of a Group authorship group under the umbrella term “Reasons to Believe (RTB) Scholars Community”.
I would not exactly call it "definitive proof but they tried to resubmit it to PNAS Nexus after they addressed the reviewer’s objections and ,for whatever reason, they refused to send it back to reviewers or at least reevaluate it as an entirely new submission.
Not all of the peer-review comments were negative. There was one that was very positive. He or she seems to be the only evolutionary biologist.
I was talking about the actual report itself containing the whole comment not just the objections they were showcasing to help provide context. Also, anybody can have access to this report as was stipulated:
The full editorial decision letter and reviewer reports from PNAS Nexus are on file and may be
made available upon reasonable request for purposes of scholarly transparency
It does not RTBemployee but “supporter” and I am someone who just prefers privacy more than anything else.
So RTB is the very positive review of RTB’s scholarly article that was rejected by every reviewer of every scientific journal where it was submitted. Got it.
I should also add that there are three levels of peer review: Nope, Maybe with revisions and further review, and Yep. The RTB article by Rana and Ross fell unanimously into the Nope category. They weren’t even offered a maybe. I’m amazed they published the rejections.
If you feel they were not able to successfully address the reviewer objections, then by all means point out where they failed and we can discuss it here.
Did you read any part of the article I linked? If not, I would at least read the abstract and the introduction to get a sense of what is groundbreaking or new because I specifically mentioned in the Op-ed that this is not just structuralism in general. This is about Owen’s particular version of structural, which is a combination of structuralism and functionalism.
