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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | I'm completely with Ishmael on this. "Survival of the fittest" is a misnomer since, on the whole, everything does survive: "failure of the most off-the-pace" would be more accurate, though not catchy and not helpful. It behoves us all to keep things just as they are. And that's not what evolution by any continuous forces is supposed to achieve. |
Exactly.
Though few have yet to realize it, this is the principal problem that confronts evolutionary theory.
The very forces Darwin thought would select the extremes actually work to select the mean.
We know this now. He didn't know it then. He had an excuse to shape the theory as he did. We've no longer any excuse to believe it. Evolution by natural selection does not work.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| Ishmael wrote: | | Evolution by natural selection does not work. |
Well, I guess I've only myself to blame. I did ask. The fact that the entire scientific community disagrees with you should not get in the way of a good rant.
If you remember, Vitaly's original posting on this matter concerned the way in which THOBR conflated a critique of evolutionary biology with that of Indo-European languages. Vitaly made the point that this weakened the focus of the book. Now that you have clarified where you stand with regard to evolution per se and having read Dawkins and Dennet on these matters I can only say I agree with Vitaly.
Inevitably you will retort with the usual treatment of the scientific community and the much rehearsed arguments about a monolithic academia. This remains nothing but a rhetorical tool and confuses readers into thinking that there are no debates within the hallowed halls. This is clearly nonsense. There are always differing schools of thought at any one time. Within History and Archaeology we have the obvious example concerning the nature of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Was it an elite power shift or an ethnic cleanse? The antagonists are Francis Pryor and Heinrich Harke. Within Psychology we have the Humanistic theorists, the Psychoanalysts, the Cognitivists etc. Within Economics we have the Keynesians, the New Classicals and the Marxists. Academia is best viewed as a plurality of competing perspectives, each led by a cutting edge theorist. In true Darwinian fashion a dominant perspective will temporarily gain the ascendency and then lose it as new evidence comes to light. Even Physics, the hardest of the hard sciences, recognises this relativity.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Duncan wrote: | | Evolution by natural selection does not work. |
Well, I guess I've only myself to blame. I did ask. The fact that the entire scientific community disagrees with you should not get in the way of a good rant. |
I speak only for myself with respect to my judgement of natural selection as a plausible motive force behind evolution. Although, I think most of our core group would agree with my assessment in general terms.
But Duncan, I never do let the prevailing wisdom stand in the way of my making my own judgements.
Shall I assume then that you do?
| If you remember, Vitaly's original posting on this matter concerned the way in which THOBR conflated a critique of evolutionary biology with that of Indo-European languages. Vitaly made the point that this weakened the focus of the book |
But the argument presented there has nothing to do with what I have presented here. Mick's argument in THOBR does not in the least question any of the principles of Evolution by Natural Selection. Motive force doesn't enter into the context of his point -- he is merely pointing out a widespread misunderstanding to root and branch evolutionary models.
| I can only say I agree with Vitaly. |
I can only say: You didn't answer any one of the substantive points I raised.
| Inevitably you will retort with the usual treatment of the scientific community and the much rehearsed arguments about a monolithic academia. |
Had I done so, it would still trump your non-answer.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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It is intriguing why evolution should have such a profound effect on otherwise quite sensible people.
| The fact that the entire scientific community disagrees with you should not get in the way of a good rant. |
We only deal with questions that the entire scientific community disagrees with, Duncan, I thought you knew that. Nobody has been ranting, we have been picking up and gnawing quietly over various bones that may or may not stick in the throat of Classical Evolution Theory. I don't think anyone here questions that evolution takes place (though some of us might not use such a value-laden term as 'evolution').
| Vitaly made the point that this weakened the focus of the book. Now that you have clarified where you stand with regard to evolution per se and having read Dawkins and Dennet on these matters I can only say I agree with Vitaly. |
It is interesting that Vitaly has not been heard from since. It is not unreasonable to suspect 'careful ignoral' on his part because he could not name the two species. This is important because THOBR does not launch any kind of attack on Evolution, not even on Darwinian Evolution, it merely points out certain shortcomings that its adherents either refuse to address or have not realised exist.
I cannot for the life of me understand why our subsequent discussions would weaken a book that has already been written, surely a case of post hoc ad hominem? But since you raise the question, I would have to say that you have not played your hand well. You persist in summoning orthodoxy as some kind of invocation. You are perfectly free to be orthodox, but on this site you have to use your own arguments (which can be as orthodox as you like) if you wish to advance (or advance the rest of us). You will find that by trying to select the particular orthodox argument that meets the case, that oftentimes there is no orthodox argument that meets the case.
How are you yourself getting along with the Two Species?
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| This is important because THOBR does not launch any kind of attack on Evolution, not even on Darwinian Evolution, it merely points out certain shortcomings that its aherents either refuse to address or have not realised eixst. |
Okay but this thread is replete with it. Perhaps you do accept evolution:
| I don't think anyone here questions that evolution takes place (though some of us might not use such a value-laden term as 'evolution'). |
I had originally thought that you did but much of what I have read really does make me wonder.
| I cannot for the life of me understand why our subsequent discussions would weaken a book that has already been written, surely a case of post hoc ad hominem? |
They have certainly weakened it in my mind and I'm sure that others attracted to these pages by the clarity of THOBR could be turned away by the perspective on evolution that has emerged. As I say, no scientist accepts it.
| You persist in summoning orthodoxy as some kind of invocation. |
Unfortunately, there it is again. I do not accept orthodoxy as a monolithic edifice. There are only competing perspectives, your's included.
| How are you yourself getting along with the Two Species? |
On its own merits this is indeed a puzzle. The problem with the question is that, as we've previously discussed with regard to language, we just don't know what came first. Is English ancestral to German or the other way around? There must have been a point in the past when the ancestor of each was the same, the Indo-European language. Unless you subscribe to the view that we were created already speaking these languages. In precisely the same way the fact that we have apes and humans implies a common ancestor at some point in the past unless we were created as such. The logic of evolution demands that there are common ancestors in the past. The alternative is Creationism. The implication of the Two Species Challenge is that evolution must not be true because we can't find these two species.
What of languages then Mick? Surely some must be ancestral to others. I don't know precisely how many different languages there are in the world today but you can bet that some have clearly evolved from others. You make this point yourself in THOBR by positing English as the older language to German and French. Now that must mean that German and French developed from English. Linguistically you have your Two Species. Though I can't name them the same must apply to biology.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| I do not accept orthodoxy as a monolithic edifice. There are only competing perspectives, yours included. |
You keep repeating this tragically flawed assumption. Let me point out some things which even you will have difficulty disagreeing with.
1. AE only deals with paradigms -- the basic assumptions, the organising principles and the central tenets of academic subjects. As universities are presently organised, you cannot have a functioning academic subject unless these are universally agreed among the professional practitioners. In other words, an academic subject is a monolithic edifice. It is true that you can have quite vicious disagreements amongst the practitioners but these are always on what Marx would call 'superstructure'.
2. This would be perfectly acceptable if the various subjects had some mechanism for encouraging (even for permitting) critical inspection of these paradigms on a regular basis. They do not.
Let me give an example out of your own mouth
| As I say, no scientist accepts it. |
Precisely so. No chemist, physicist or any other variety of non-biological scientist could accept it because the orthodox version is taught as rote to them in secondary school. No biological scientist would be permitted to accept it. Or if he did, he would not be allowed to teach it and possibly he would have difficulty passing his exams if he used it.
But what is 'it'? "It' is a mild disagreement about the efficacy of one possible mechanism of evolution, ie neo-Darwinism. That's all. Just a bunch of interested dudes treating neo-Darwinism as a Theory instead of observed fact. And this sends a shiver down your spine. And you're not even a professional practitioner, just someone who thinks their world-view will be shattered if this mid-nineteenth century technical speculation should turn out to need a bit of tweaking.
Or a complete overthrow. And yes, your whole world-view might get overthrown. That's one of the joys of AE...you never can tell what abyss is just around the most innocuous corner. You gotta have the temperament, mon brave.
| On its own merits this is indeed a puzzle. |
All right, Dunc, since you won't grapple with the puzzle itself, here's a meta-puzzle you might care to comment on. It's not just a puzzle, it's what we might call a paradigm puzzle since it is an anomaly squatting at the very heart of the Evolutional Model. So how come
a) no professional biologist has noticed it in a hundred and fifty years
b) no professional biologist can solve it but
c) having failed to solve it no professional biologist actually bothers to wonder why it is insoluble?
| There must have been a point in the past when the ancestor of each was the same, the Indo-European language. |
Agreed, as long as you recognise that this 'Indo-European' language is probably Early English or Early German or Early Urdu. Languages survive more often than they disappear, so far as we know.
| Unless you subscribe to the view that we were created already speaking these languages. In precisely the same way the fact that we have apes and humans implies a common ancestor at some point in the past unless we were created as such. The logic of evolution demands that there are common ancestors in the past. The alternative is Creationism. . |
Why do you suppose this blindingly obvious summation is not endorsed by everybody here?
| The implication of the Two Species Challenge is that evolution must not be true because we can't find these two species |
I doubt it. I can't find the two species and I believe in evolution.
| What of languages then Mick? Surely some must be ancestral to others. I don't know precisely how many different languages there are in the world today but you can bet that some have clearly evolved from others. You make this point yourself in THOBR by positing English as the older language to German and French. Now that must mean that German and French developed from English. Linguistically you have your Two Species. Though I can't name them the same must apply to biology. |
You betcha. And now you know this I am sure you will be going to your local library and taking out all those biology and linguistic textbooks which have diagram after diagram showing in chilling detail what came from what came from what came from what, and you will scribble on each one "Don't believe any of this, we just don't know what came before what. This is simply a model that has been taught as fact for so long that everybody thinks it is demonstrably true."
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Martin
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| In every case, test subjects tended to prefer the composite average face than any of the real-world faces from which the data was compiled. In essence, the test subjects rewarded the genes that kept closest to the mean and punished the genes that deviated farthest from the average. |
I am suspicious of any work of this kind. How was this "average" face calculated? Average Caucasian, African, Australian Aborigine? A flick through the pages of any book on art history or anthropology would tell us that the ideal is not universal and is not static.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I am amazed that we having this discussion. Just as I am amazed at people who say "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Have a look at your wife, Martin. She is in the thirty-to-forty percentile of attractiveness for her age-group. Just as you are. Now wander round town and observe every couple...and I mean every couple. The man and the woman are almost equally attractive (or unattractive). That is attractive or unattractive to you! And how do all three of you come to this common conclusion? Because a) you are working from exactly the same attractiveness-template and b) everybody maximises the attractiveness of the mate they can attract. A few rich fat slobs like me can pull practically anybody we like but I try not to encourage the gold-digging minxes by contributing to the gene pool.
What are you going to believe, Martin? Carefully designed and controlled scientific tests which produce the same result with devastasting replication or "a flick through the pages of any book on art history or anthropology". Just 'cause Rubens has a thing about fat chicks doesn't mean his contemporaries did, though of course it is true that cultural factors play at the margins of the template. But curiously, if you have a little longer flick through the pages of any book on art history, you will find that even these cultural factors have a remarkable tendency to return to the median in the long term.
Anthropological books, I agree, are a little different since while each body type conforms to the median for their race, each median is rather different from other races. This aspect is perhaps worth more investigation.
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Martin
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I am glad you are amazed, I am amazed by your argument...
| What are you going to believe, Martin? Carefully designed and controlled scientific tests which produce the same result with devastasting replication or "a flick through the pages of any book on art history or anthropology". |
I am also amazed that you have such faith in these people.
My point is that this stuff is too easily accepted.
For argument's sake let's take this another step ... What would happen to the inbuilt attractiveness-template of someone of mixed race? Would they have the attractiveness-template of one of the races or a combination of the two? They would be very confused.
Is the composite, average human face and body type attractive to everyone from a Japanese to an Aborigine, from a German to a Pygmy? Or does it echo the people who created it?
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Martin wrote: | I am also amazed that you have such faith in these people.
My point is that this stuff is too easily accepted. |
Martin. I tend to agree with you. One ought to be very skeptical of popular science. As well as the unpopular kind. Nevertheless, from what I have read -- and observed (having conducted the experiment on myself) -- I remain largely convinced the essential case is established.
| What would happen to the inbuilt attractiveness-template of someone of mixed race? |
I seriously doubt that there is an inbuilt genes-based racial preference! What is much more likely is that there's a cultural element -- just as there is an element of fashion which I already discussed. It's often said that men are attracted most to women who look like their mothers (I will confirm this for myself).
The experiments purport to show that there are common proportional preferences for faces and body dimensions that are consistent across all cultures -- racial types are just flavours of an essential template.
And these experiments have been conducted now thousands upon thousands of times. The results keep coming back the same.
And remember...it's about relative proportion -- not absolute size. So the same rules will indeed work for pygmies.
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Duncan
In: Yorkshire
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| You keep repeating this tragically flawed assumption. |
You will need to work much harder to convince me here.
| AE only deals with paradigms -- the basic assumptions, the organising principles and the central tenets of academic subjects. As universities are presently organised, you cannot have a functioning academic subject unless these are universally agreed among the professional practitioners. In other words, an academic subject is a monolithic edifice. |
This, at a basic level is undeniable; but how 'basic' do you have to go? Clearly, even Economics which has been around as an academic discipline since the 18th Century, and is clearly divided into at least three central camps, does agree on very basic assumptions, but these soon collapse. Marxist Economists hold a view of the economy which is clearly antithetical to that held by the New Classical 'free marketeers' and the interventionist Keynesians hold a view midway between the two. Economists of all these different persuasions hold tenured positions within universities and although they have to pass examinations in the theories and models used by the other Schools, there is clearly room to carve one's own niche. As a former Economist who followed this route I can talk from personal experience. It is not a conspiracy. We used the various theories as approximations to the truth which then generated research programmes.
So, whilst you may be correct that we all believed that to some extent man is a rational animal, that scarcity forces choice etc., which are the basic paradigms, these were working models only. Man is rational most of the time etc. When the big questions, the ones that really make the subject tick, such as how best to create a dynamic economy, how to efficiently and equitably allocate resources etc. then the agreement would soon disintegrate.
This is the way mature academic subjects are and typify the scientific quest to go further. Fundamentally, Mick, unless you are in it you cannot win it. Witness this on the Time Team Forum. Whenever I mention your thesis on the English language it is described as 'amateurish'. Mention it in the guise of Oppenheimer and they listen. Perhaps there is a need to convince academia first rather than working from the sidelines.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I don't like to lay down Laws of Applied Epistemology (since they don't exist) but I really thought we were in favour of the scientific method. This does not mean we are in favour of scientists or even science in general but properly controlled experiments surely ought to be common firm ground.
| My point is that this stuff is too easily accepted. |
No, the trouble is people have such difficulty accepting it. We are so determined not to be deterministic that even though it is shown that we are helpless tools of our genetic dispositions we wriggle and squirm in the (I suppose reasonably noble) attempt to reach Free Will. Save your energy for battles you can win, I say.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Before I get stuck in to the paper Duncan linked to... I thought Wikipedia might have an article presenting the argument for evolution. The best I could find is "a clearinghouse of articles which refer to terms often used in the context of the creation-evolution controversy". It's rather long but 2 things stood out on a brief scan:
"Specific criticisms of creationist tactics include..." just goes to show that this is a fight, not a rational, dispassionate, scientific discourse.
"Evidence of evolution" links to the article Evidence of common descent, which is not necessarily the same thing.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| the entire scientific community disagrees with you |
Is Deference_to_Authority taught as a valid form of argument these days? I kinda figured their arguments ought to stand up on their own: then people can argue on the basis of those.
I suppose it's a shorthand that works a lot of the time: "I'm not getting into this right now, but trust me: the boffins know what they're talking about". Effective psychology. Crap logic.
I'm with Wittgenstein: a doubt has to be a doubt based on something; and there is no answer to the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says. But do outsiders really needle academia just to be irritating? I have been fobbed off within the academic establishment and I was completely earnest: it seems to be an accepted internal procedure. (And this was in physics, not even an area of public controversy like evolution.)
Our doubts are based on something; and they're not allayed by repeating the Establishment Line.
| Within History and Archaeology we have the obvious example concerning the nature of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. Was it an elite power shift or an ethnic cleanse? The antagonists are Francis Pryor and Heinrich Harke. |
The contention of THOBR is that both are wrong. No one doubts that Anglo-Saxons ruled over England: let whatever evidence we have speak for itself. But both are trying to account for an Anglo-Saxon regime that introduced an English-speaking population: an utterly unique feat requiring all sorts of academic gymnastics to explain.
Please select a metaphor:
-- THOBR pulls the rug out from under both of them.
-- The boys need their heads banging together to stop them squabbling
-- They are two bald men fighting over a comb.
-- Other. Please specify: _________________________________
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| I do not accept orthodoxy as a monolithic edifice. There are only competing perspectives, your's included. |
From where I'm standing, this rather contradicts your previous "the entire scientific community disagrees with you".
| The implication of the Two Species Challenge is that evolution must not be true because we can't find these two species. |
It's not about evolution being true or false: it's about evolutionary science done badly.
| Linguistically you have your Two Species. Though I can't name them the same must apply to biology. |
It must be very foggy where you live.
First, we do not have our linguistic Two Species: neither is it agreed here which is descended from another; nor is the question even entertained within the linguistics industry. Secondly, you draw a parallel between this "false positive" and biology, leap-frogging an Argument_from_Authority into an Argument_from_Conviction.
When my mum used to say "I don't know the answer but there must be one", she was not applying the scientific method and looking forward to future research; she was closing the door on an argument. In certain respects, everyone in academia closes their door -- and assumes someone else has left theirs open.
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