The Blind Watchmaker -truths & philosophical jumps

I was looking at the SARS2 ACE2 binding site, which gets 30 new amino acids that BLAST doesn’t pull out of the NCBI database prior to when SARS2 appeared on the scene. Yet coronaviruses in the wild have extremely slow rates of evolution, like 1 nucleotide every thousand years, if I understand the research correctly. So, somehow SARS2 evolved extremely quickly. I saw one paper where researchers could accelerate virus evolution by constant exposure, making a coronavirus jump from cat to mouse. It isn’t clear how this can happen through simple variation and selection. It seems like the viruses can extract genetic information from hosts to make species jumps, like a microbial Lamarkianism. If this is really what is happening, then a dogmatic adherence to standard evolutionary theory is going to leave us extremely vulnerable to the next pandemic.

You are asking me to believe that you can save the world from the next pandemic by looking at BLAST the same day you finished reading a 35-year-old popular level book about evolution. You are suggesting that you can see things on BLAST that the world’s scientists cannot. I am asking you to consider the possibility that you don’t understand what you’re writing about and–this is the important part–to consider that before you write on the forum.

I said that I was done responding so I will now keep my word. I hope you start working on understanding, instead of jumping to conclusions and typing those on the forum.

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Why would I ask in such a manner if I didn’t?

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Hi Eric,
It’s a little difficult to believe you’ve invested much time into understanding evolutionary theory.

I would suggest the following reading material,

Evolution, the Extended Synthesis, eds. Pigliucci and Muller

Extended Heredity: A New Understanding of Inheritance and Evolution, Bonduriansky and Day

The Developing Genome: An Introduction to Behavioral Epigenetics, David S. Moore

Evolution and the Levels of Selection, Samir Okasha

Evolutionary Theory: A Hierarchical Perspective, eds. Eldredge, Pievani, Serrelli, Temkin

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One way I typically talk about evolution is to use a smaller scale of it to show how it works in a way that people can’t simply push off as adaptation.

Within the human species we see a multitude of mutations. We see different colors eyes, different heights, and so on. We see random uncommon ones such as people with extra digits or they develop knots on their skin that is not cancerous and so on.
The same thing happens in plants. If you go and pull up ten nonnative invasive plants of the same species and examine them closely you’ll notice slight differences. One may be twice as hairy under the leaf or buds twice as long and so on.

Well there is a genus or plants we call passiflora. Within this genus is one called P. triloba which has this morphological mimicry of butterfly eggs on its petiole. So when butterflies of the Heliconius genus gets near it they will still pollinate it but won’t let their eggs there because they think another butterfly already did.

So at first when you read a plant produces these fake butterfly eggs on its leaf stem you think surely that’s by God! How could a flower without eyes know how to copy the eggs of a butterfly. Well they can’t. So how does it happen if not intelligently designed on purpose.

Well at some point in time one of these passiflora species had a mutation on it that resulted in a bump on the stem. This bump looked kind of like butterfly eggs. It was just a random mutation. Well that flower was less likely to have caterpillars eat it foliage and kill it. It went to seed and spread thousands of seeds over its lifetime and some of those seedlings ended up having the same mutation as its parent that was passed down to it. Those seedlings stood a better chance than its “siblings” without that mutation. They also went to seed and had some that had this same mutation. The ones with this mutation, would be pollinated by the other ones in their community. The seedings that had the fake egg look stood a better chance of not being eaten by caterpillars because eggs were not laid on them. Over thousands of years, all these survivors started dominating the community. Over time even among themselves the ones that looked even closer by chance set seeds more often. So now there is a species that has butterfly egg mimicry on its leaf stem by complete random chance. The same thing is said for all the other animals.

At one time there was a bear that was born with a mutation making it have whitish fur compared to its species. This helped it blend in more with snow. Because it blended in more it was harder to be seen by predators and harder to be seen by prey. It had slightly better chances at sneaking up on prey. Because it has this slight advantage it was more likely to grow up and have offspring. The offspring that carried that random gene did better than the ones that did not. Over a long period of time that ancestral gene pool of that species made it a subspecies and eventually its own species and eventually even its own genus while its offspring would occasionally have a random mutation that somewhat gave it a better chance at surviving.

Overtime within a species that maybe just begin with one difference, had even more differences through mutations in that lineage and then again and again until it looked completely different. If you see how different dogs can be bred to look in a short amount of time, you can wonder just how different can things begin to look over a billion years.

Hi Vanessa,

I like your thinking mind - it’s always good to ask the tough questions - even if they lead us to an uncomfortable place at times.

I’m not particularly qualified to speak on this topic either as like you I’m trained in the social ‘sciences’ however have for a long time taken interest in science and do have the book The Blind Watchmaker.

Dawkins makes some pretty compelling points that to my mind emphasise the ‘blindness’ of evolution rather than the ‘guidedness’ of it. Probably the biggest one that stuck in my mind was his description of a particular species of fish - one in the Amazon or somewhere like that if I recall, where it is clear from various analysis that the fish started evolving one way, such that it was looking down or some such and then mid way through the evolutionary process had to change the way it evolved, such that it slowly developed eyes that looked up. Dawkins argues that the shift in process resulted in the fish looking gnarled and quite odd looking and basically the implication was ‘Iyeah, this was not created by a mind with pre planning, this weird and sad looking fish is clearly the result of blind evolution at work’. The same logic would apply to diseases and viruses and complex killing mechanisms and the like - results of randomness rather than guidedness (which is kind of good because of God had a hand in making poison that blocks the exchange of salts in cells causing extreme pain, that’s not cool).

Dawkins gave some other similar examples to this fish, ones I forget now. Along with that, I remember him going into very interesting detail about the theory and thinking behind how progressive evolution can, without too much difficulty, explain how something like an eye could evolve. Basically he blows up the irreducible complexity argument (I have the book via audio - Audible.com - which I understand is the newest with some bits and prices of addition).

In all this, he does paint God into a very very small corner in terms of what creation would be - to the extent that the step to logically believing a supernatural God probably was not involved in creating all living things Genesis style or that, if he was he pretty much just left the earth to its own devices, is just a small step and not a leap.

I still believe Dawkins doesn’t explain and can’t explain many spiritual phenomena - phenomena which to my mind helps prove there is more to just naturalism. For me though, he made some excellent and hard hitting points - hard pills to swallow as a Christian. There’s a part of me that despises his incredulous bitter spirit toward God - he’s an arrogant poison spitter in a lot of ways … but it’s hard to fault his logic at times, still - there’s something kind of insidious about him I don’t like - maybe it’s just me but I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow it was something deeper spiritually.

Anyway, there’s my two cents for what it’s worth.

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Thank you. Very much appreciate that. I believe my perspective is a paradox, a dance. I totally see and believe in the randomness, and I still see order and mind at the same time. As I think more about my own visceral reactions (I am always suspicious of my own repulsions), more comes up. I do not know if this is true—I sense that, the more I talk/read from other categories of science, I notice there seems to be some a kind of culture that goes with each “category.” In social sciences, because it is SO vulnerable to the eye of the beholder/interpretation, one can be chastized or criticized for assumptions rather than carefully presenting data. For example, if I were to present to a committee in the social sciences, I would not be able to say “prove” without some raised eyebrows. I would have to say what I personally am interpreting from the data and very carefully. When I read about research in other fields, there appears to be culture that is more comfortable with interpretations. Because it is not my culture, I often feel suspicious. I don’t want any gut reaction or emotion to keep me from listening and “seeing” what I am being shown. I have to work a lot on the filters. So the questions abound. I am not crazy about books like TBW because the narrative style gets my professional culture all suspicious. But I want to be able to still listen. I will be doing more reading and welcome any and ever direction!!!

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Shortly after publishing “The God Delusion”, Dawkins reluctantly accepted the evidence of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, first amassed by Jared Diamond and later expanded by Ian Tattersall and Conway Morris. As you know, Darwin had insisted that human evolution must have preceded through mutations that resulted in very minor changes with no direction. (see “The Ancestor’s Tale”) I have not kept up to date on how Dawkins has 'wiped the egg off his face’ for this grossly embarrassing blooper, but he was never a paleontologist (doing actual field work) while the others are highly respected for their work in this field. So decide for yourself whose publications are most trustworthy.
Keep safe,
Al Leo

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Thank you. I will look into the Great Leap Forward.

Incremental small steps is essential to Dawkins’ argument. He goes on a long tangent arguing why Gould’s punctuated equilibrium is really incrementalism ina nother guise, complete with his own parable about Isrealites traveling to the holy land a few yards a day.

The whole point is that only by incremental steps can you ever hope to make steady progress. Big jumps are just way too likely to end up nowhere or worse.

So, if we do establish giant leaps in fact happen, Dawkins’ argument, and Darwin’s as well, are demolished.

Of course useful Big Jumps in Biospheric evolution are extremely unlikely. I ascribe to the Teilhardian view that the important evolution we should consider is that of the Noosphere, the sphere of exchanged ideas. The best evidence points to the fact that this occurred relatively suddenly when one or more Homo sapiens brains (with many billions of potential connections) served as ‘hardware’ for a super computer we call Mind. Rather than in one Giant Leap, this may have occurred as a primitive Artificial Intelligence that is still perfecting itself. Current work in the AI field may shed light on how it could have occurred some 50K yrs. ago producing the Pro Magnon peoples.
Al Leo

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The Ancestor’s Tale discusses the so-called GLF in some detail and with approving interest. It was published in 2004, two years before the publication of The God Delusion.

@Vanessa, please be cautious when reading any Christian on this forum when they write about Dawkins. Falsehoods like that one :point_up_2: are abundant and persistent.

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Do we somehow know there are no giant leaps in the fossil record, or is that an a priori assumption?

Even if Darwin is ‘demolished’ it wouldn’t really mean all that much today. Evolutionary theory has not been in stasis since Darwin.

For a historical overview of evolutionary theory and various developments see,

Eternal Ephemera: Adaptation and the Origin of Species from the Nineteenth Century through Punctuated Equilibria and Beyond, Niles Eldredge.

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Dawkins claims in one of the last chapters of TBW that Darwinism is the foundation of evolutionary theory, and none of the new theories can dislodge it. That’s the foundational premise of his book. If you are right, then TBW is also demolished.

Dawkins whole argument is how to explain the appearance of design without a designer. He thinks Darwinism is the only plausible way. So, if Darwinism is dead, and Dawkins is right, then intelligent design inference is correct. Of course, Dawkins may be dead wrong, but it seems a number of knowledgeable people here think his argument is pretty good. That is why I asked my first question about whether TBW hangs together as a whole, or if people just swap out premises once disproven while maintaining Dawkins overall conclusion.

@sfmatheson has already commented on this.

If you want to understand evolutionary theory then you should look elsewhere than TBW.

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Perhaps I did not make it clear that Dawkins published “The Ancestor’s Tale” prior to “The God Delusion” (I purchased both as soon as they appeared on Amazon.). The point I was making was that (to my knowledge) Dawkins has never explained how he reconciles his dogma that human evolution takes place via small mutational changes with NO direction–just the opposite of a Great Leap Forward. You might profit by re-reading Ancestor’s Tale. His treatment of the GLF takes less than 2 pages of a 600+ page book, which in my opinion, does not show "approving interest".

Dawkins does an admirable job in the last 600 pages in showing how Neo-Dawinism explains biological evolution; i.e. of animals and plants. IMHO Dawkins problem (likewise for many intelligent I.D. proponents who contribute to this Forum) is that they refuse to consider Teihard’s proposal that the Noosphere is real and dominates the path which human progress will take. Evolution in the Noosphere follows many of the same ‘rules’ as that in the Biosphere, but may make reasonable the postulate that a GLF could be responsible for the sudden appearance of Mind (e.g. in Cro-Magnon culture) of cave art and burials with valuable goods.

Stephan, before pasting a Falsehood label on someone’s post, be sure that the reason for doing so is not that you simply disagree with this viewpoint.
keep safe,
Al Leo

That point is wrong. The GLF is fundamentally different from the gradualism of genetic evolution. Dawkins knows this, and so do you if you’re read those books. That’s very, very basic.

Uh, sorry, but you wrote falsehood about Dawkins, a popular pursuit on this deteriorating forum, and now you are doubling down instead of admitting you were wrong.

You are not the only one around here who seems to think that using Dawkins as a voodoo doll is helping your cause. I’m amused and amazed by this behavior.

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There does indeed seem to be a lot of deterioration around here lately. It isn’t that personalities have changed much - abrupt and blunt and wrong-about-something people continue to be all those things as always. But it does seem that people are losing patience with each other’s (in other times more tolerated) faults. So this isn’t just to @sfmatheson or @aleo, (or @mitchellmckain - in other threads) that sometimes display or provoke more ire than perhaps necessary - but more generally a reminder for all of us: as hard as it is to accept correction from others, if you feel you can’t emotionally ‘get there’ or feel unable to stop taking it personally (or turning your interactions into personal jabs at the other) then please impose a break on yourself before coming back. A bit of time helps take the edge off responses and helps us behave better. Thank you to all your better selves for all the great stuff you already bring here. Don’t let all this latest stuff become a blight on that.

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Thank you, everyone, for your response. It really helped me understand the purpose of the book and find a way to appreciate it for what it is. I came to realize that I had a completely different expectation/request when it was recommended to me. This influenced my confusion and reaction. The stance makes sense now in light of it’s purpose. Thanks!

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