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longdog on I don't think I have enough patience to deal with people this far gone
Student Report: Fatigue in running » « Demons, angels…and now saints
Spandrels!
John Dennehy's citation classic this week is The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme, by Gould and Lewontin. It's one of my favorite papers of all time — if you haven't read it, you should do so now. It contains a set of ideas that are essential to understanding evo-devo.
Gould always struck me as a closet developmental biologist — he should have studied it more!
Oliver says
I also enjoyed this paper, although Dennett completely smashes it in "Darwin's dangerous idea". I guess the main issue that people have with this paper is semantics.. The things that are pointed out can be interpreted in various ways.
John Pieret says
Gould always struck me as a closet developmental biologist
Didn't Sean Carroll credit Gould's Ontogony and Phylogeny with starting evo-devo?
coturnix says
Dennett's chapter on this paper is a piece of crap only surpassed in its wrongfulness and maliciousness by the Creationist literature. The rest of his book is not much better – one of the worst pro-evolution books ever written.
Djur says
It's kind of odd to bash Gould for punctuated equilibria when simultaneously praising him for spandrels, don't you think? Regardless of one's opinion of punctuated equilibria (and as far as I can tell, it's easily as well-supported as Dawkins' beloved gene selection), spandrels are pretty closely related to that theory.
You can accept the concept of spandrels and reject the theory of punctuated equilibria, but accepting the former really does limit the degree to which the latter can be considered strange or unsupported. I think it's important to understand Gould's writing in the context of the hardcore 'neo-Darwinian' tendency that he was in conflict with.
As far as I know, if Ontogeny and Phylogeny didn't start evo-devo, it was certainly a foundational work. When I read it recently, nearly every page (in the science chapters) made me think "hey, PZ mentioned this before."
Lorenzo says
To all of you Gould fans, you should enjoy this:
The Spaniels of St. Marx and the Panglossian Paradox: A Critique of a Rhetorical Programme
David C. Queller
The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 485-489
Many evo-devo pioneers are quite open that Ontogeny and Phylogeny was the book that inspired them to start this new discipline, some as early as in 1977 when the book first came out.
Duff says
For all his brilliance, Gould never overcame his religious upbringing. Never under estimate the power of a religious unbringing. (I typed unbringing, perphaps a Freudian thingamagig.
Abbie says
I loved Darwin's Dangerous Idea. I did think he devoted a bit much time solely to pick on Gould. Any specific issues with the rest of it?
There is a reason that many philosophers of biology refer to it as "Dennett's Dangerous Idea" to get your associative skills working… There is no stronger adaptationist and determinist publishing out there who can come close to Dennett. If one rewinds the tape of life a million times, Dennett expects to see himself writing his book every single time – that deterministic (especially in private, when taken off guard).
Mark Powell says
Wow, I misread your last sentence as "God always struck me as a closet developmental biologist…" After my mouth hit the floor, I reread and saw my mistake. Funny, thought you were really throwing a curveball.
Deeks says
I'ts a good read but for the comment "Since Darwin has attained sainthood (if not divinity) among evolutionary biologists"……really
Regarding Gould and Biology, as a minor point of reference, when I took Biology 101 at Antioch in 1959 he was my lab instructor. Who knew !!???
John Marley says
coturnix:
Talk is cheap.
Please provide some support for those statements.
Read 25 years of literature in philosophy of biology and talk to some of those guys who know Dennett well in person.
Like these guys for instance.
PZ Myers says
You should take this discussion of Dennett to the Sandwalk if you want some real fun.
I did, a couple of months ago when Larry was cutting Dennett into pieces.
Hey, I just read this paper in my Human Biology class…that and something Gould wrote about spotted hyena genitalia.
windy says
There is no stronger adaptationist and determinist publishing out there who can come close to Dennett. If one rewinds the tape of life a million times, Dennett expects to see himself writing his book every single time – that deterministic (especially in private, when taken off guard).
Could he be expressing an opinion about an ultimately deterministic universe rather than deterministic biology? I know you keep saying this about Dennett, but I haven't seen hints anywhere that he considers Nazis, himself, etc. necessary consequences of convergent evolution.
Dennett in DDI: If by "us" he meant something very particular–Steve Gould and Dan Dennett, let's say–then we wouldn't need the hypothesis of mass extinction to persuade us how lucky we are to be alive: if our two moms had never met our respective dads, that would suffice to consign us both to Neverland…
Dave Carlson says
Coturnix said:
I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't like this book (not that I really thought I was). His arguments were all over the map, and, in my eyes at least, were so lacking in cohesion that they ended up being completely unpersuasive.
Colugo says
"and something Gould wrote about spotted hyena genitalia."
His hypothesis happened to be wrong in that particular case.
'Exposure to naturally circulating androgens during foetal life incurs direct reproductive costs in female spotted hyenas, but is prerequisite for male mating.'
C M Drea, N J Place, M L Weldele, E M Coscia, P Licht, and S E Glickman
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1691120
"Through hormonal manipulation, our previous studies
(Drea et al. 1998; Glickman et al. 1998) indicated that
formation of the masculinized external genitalia of female
spotted hyenas involves more than early androgen
exposure and, therefore, can not be merely a secondary
developmental consequence of selection for hormonally
mediated traits."
I see that you wrote there "I bet if he reran the tape of life a million times, he would expect to see himself writing his books every single time". Now you state it as a fact. So how much did your bet bring?
Also, while much ink was spilled on implicit criticism of Dennett-style misunderstanding of evolution, perhaps the best source, due to being an explicit deconstruction, is Stephen Rose's book "Lifelines". The book was written to directly explain and demonstrate why Dennett (and his smarter buddy Dawkins) is wrong.
Many say they like to read Dawkins' biology and don't like to read Dawkins' pro-atheist writings. I am the opposite. The only bad part of God Delusion was a chapter in the middle where Dawkins explains evolution all wrong, reverting back to Selfish Gene-level of analysis, demonstrating that he did not actually learn anything from decades of criticism and decades of his own responses to such criticisms with writing explanationas that appeared more and more sophisticated over time. I guess he never really internalized it. And if Dawkins is wrong, Dennett is wrong squared, as he does not even have biological training to help him out when his silliness gets exposed.
Yeah, that's actually why we were asked to read it. As an illustration of the need for empirical evidence, otherwise you get a just-so story (even when you're trying to de-bunk other just-so stories).
Still not supporting your argument. You made a claim. The burden of proof is on you. Even one actual reference would be a start.
Perhaps I should note that Dennett's philosophical training helped him write a much better book on religion last year than Dawkins could. It's not that I hate the guy, I just think that he is out of his league when he touches evolutionary theory.
6 October 2007 at 10:01 pm
I referred you to "Lifelines" by Rose. Read it. Come back and we can talk.
Papers and books by Paul Griffiths, Bob Brandon, Bill Whimsatt, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Fred Nijhout, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Rose, Michael Odling-Smee…that's just a begining.
Sorry, I see that you did give one reference.
I am not familiar with Lifelines, nor with Stephen Rose.
A quick google does not produce any actual reviews, but I'll check it out if I can find it at the library.
I found two reviews.
This one says nothing of substance about the content of the book, and reads like a plug or cover jacket blurb.
This one is, well, less than good.
Neither mentions where Rose "directly explain[s] and demonstrate[s] why Dennett (and his smarter buddy Dawkins) is wrong."
There was actually a special issue of some Journal (I forgot which one) a few years back which collected many reviews of Lifelines. Closed Access, though.
When Darwin's Dangerous Idea first came out, I started reading it kinda fast. He develops his argument step-wise, i.e., If A then B, if B then C, if C then D, etc. Suddenly, I found him out in la-la land and I missed which link was broken. I had to start from the beginning and read really carefully in order to find the spot where he stated that 'if G then H' when that was actually not true. But it was written so nicely – Dennett is a great writer – it was very difficult (probably impossible for a layperson) to identify where Dennett slips and in which step his claim has no legs. That is why this is a dangerous book – it is deceptive.
Yes, I found the only review from that journal (Behavioral and Brain Sciences)that seems to be online. It mentios that there were about 30 in that issue.
It was highly unfavorable.
Books that set out to explain why organisms behave as they do describe observations of behavior on almost every page. The books of Richard Dawkins, whom Rose selects as his special target, illustrate this well: readers can reject all of the author's interpretations while remaining fascinated by the purely factual information that these books contain. How one can hope to convince anyone of the truth of a theory without supporting it with abundant facts? Yet hard biological information is extremely sparse in Rose's book. There is a great deal about what he thinks of other biologists' opinions, but almost no observations from behavioral biology. Nonetheless, in his preface (p. x) he aligns himself with the practising biologists who spend a significant part of every working day thinking about and designing experiments, dismissing Dawkins and Daniel Dennett as people who either no longer do science or never did it. What a pity, therefore, that he chose to include so little of the experimental basis of his ideas in his book. There are a few vague remarks about how chicks behave, and that's about it.
That sums up the entire review pretty well.
I don't recall "if G then H' as an actual argument from Dennett. You can't expect me to simply take your word that some unspecified argument was wrong and led to "la la land."
Since I am a layperson, and may have missed where Dennett slips, please enlighten me.
You picked an unfavourable review (or whoever chose which one to make freely available picked it). There was good stuff there as well, not just the crap you blockquoted.
I trashed the book long ago so I cannot go back, re-read it for your pleasure (and my displeasure – reading that shit once was enough, twice would be unconstitutional) and explain all the steps and which one is wrong and why. Even if I was disposed to do it, a comment on a blog is not enough space for such a detailed analysis. Rose needed an entire book to do it effectively.
If you couldn't remember which journal it was, how did you know it was closed access?
It is not worth it anyone's time and attention anyway. Read something better instead.
A final note, then I'm gone until tomorrow afternoon.
From the above mentioned review of Lifelines
As far as I know none of the other 30 reviews that appeared in Behavioral and Brain Sciences are yet available on the web. A few of them liked the book, but most did not, albeit for a variety of reasons. There are, however, some web sites that express more favourable opinions, written from points of view that range from the Christian to the communist. To be fair, I have also come across one reviewer who works in the biological sciences who liked the book, though as he refers to its author as a highly respected biochemist I wonder how many biochemists he has asked, or whether he just took Rose's self-assessment at face value.
Because this debate/polemic is boringly showing up on blogs every couple of months or so, and once I tried accessing with no success so I gave up – it is not that important. I do not want to get into deep discussions about a bad book, just to warn people about its worth so they can read it cautiously or decide not to read it at all.
Also, Behavioral and Brain Sciences is a bastion of genetic determinism so they handpicked the reviewers they liked and they STILL got some positive reviews of the book despite their efforts to demolish it.
OK, I lied.
I don't expect you to lay it out in detail, but if you want your argument to be taken seriously, you need to be at least specific enough that I can see where to look for the error.
Anyway, I get that you don't like Dennett. That's okay.
You claim that Dennett is wrong, but without backup, everything you've said is opinion.
Now I really am off to bed.
This review of another book by Rose may be enlightening on his style, if you feel you can trust Dawkins on this. (Love that part about the cake.)
I am just tired of this topic.
You may also want to read:
Richard Lewontin – The Triple Helix
Evelyn Fox Keller – The Century of the Gene
David Moore – The Dependent Gene
Jonathan Marks – What it means to be 98% chimpanzee
Lewontin, Rose and Kamin – Not In Our Genes
Dorothy Nelkin and M.Susan Lindee – The DNA Mystique
Ruth Hubbard abd Elijah Wald – Exploding the Gene Myth
Susan Oyama – The Ontogeny of Information: Developmental Systems and Evolution
Susan Oyama – Cycles of Contingency : Developmental Systems and Evolution
Most of those books do not address Dennett by name but address the naive ideas about evolution as exemplified by Dennett's book. Most of these books are also somewhat old (~10 years), as Philosophers of Biology consider this topic solved and have moved on to more interesting projects.
For a good explanation of adaptation, read Robert Brandon's book 'Adaptation and Environment'. He is the clearest writer (and thinker) in the field and easiest to read for a non-expert. Bill Whimsatt is as good but he is the opposite – the most difficult to read (it takes me about three days to read and digest any one of his papers). Those guys will give you tools and ammunitiion to fight this fight if you are into it.
When Dennett published his book, all the philosophers of biology read it and considered it trash. But they gave Dennett a benefit of the doubt. After all, he was just moving from one field to another and that was his first attempt. He got it wrong, but that happens. So, over the following couple of years they engaged him and tried to educate him. He stubbornly resisted so they gave up on him. They now ignore him. They do not mention him in their writings because they do not consider him to be a player in the field any more.
Yet, this is not groupishness or clanishness. They really tried to teach him. And they are open to people who are willing to learn. Alex Rosenberg was, ten years ago, just as naive about evolutions as Dennett was. But Alex is an open-minded person, more interested in learning than in self-promotion. So he read and read an read, and learned a lot. His undertsanding of evolution is now quite sophisticated and he is making real contribution to the theory. I got but not yet cracked open Alex's newest book and I am looking forward to reading it. I doubt I'll ever read another Denett biology book again if he writes one.
S. Fisher says
Gould and Dawkins are both great writers and evolutionary theorists even if they do have beliefs toward opposite ends of the "evolutionary spectrum". Both must be read and appreciated in order to understand the wide range of opinions to which one may be led by the same set of facts. Gould, however, seemed to always have his eye on his legacy and to his hoped for place in the pantheon beside his heroes Aggasiz, Owens, Cuvier and the like. He was, after all, a student of the history of science and new full well a scientists' fame is gained not only by new discoveries and ideas, but by the controversy they cause and perhaps even the enemies they make. Never-the-less Gould has always been one of my favorite authors and I've read all his books with the exception of his opus, which I've purchased and perused, but never had a spare year to read.
Mike from Ottawa says
For all his brilliance, Gould never overcame his religious upbringing. Never under estimate the power of a religious unbringing."
You mean his worship of the Yankees?
The view that Gould is self-aggrandising / disingenuous / ideological is not exactly uncommon among evolutionary biologists. Dennett's view of Gould is at least fairly well represented among evolutionary biologists. Maynard Smith, Dawkins, EO Wilson, Steven Pinker, Trivers etc have all expressed similar sentiments. It is one thing to disagree with Dennett – Gould is a polarizing figure with both supporters and detractors; it is another entirely to call Dennett's opinion 'malicious crap'. I have to admit to being less than persuaded by coturnix's 'arguments' on this page.
Just for fun, some assessments of Gould by non-biologists
http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=2016
http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/evolute.html
I am a layperson when it comes to understanding evolution, but what I've read by Dawkins makes sense. My knee-jerk reaction is to use this as an easy out (you don't like Dawkins, and everyone else seems to, so I'll just go with him) but I would like to understand the debate.
I think I understand Dennet's criticism of "punctuated equilibrium" and I agree with him on that point. I'm less familiar with the adaptationist/whatever the opposite of adaptationist is debate. I'm seeing you disagree with Dawkins and Dennet in a fundamental way, so I guess I'll need to read up on this specific feud before passing judgement.
Sven DiMlo says
Mike, that was funny. Hey, F@#$ the "Yankees."
The spandrels paper was instrumental in a soul-searching,self-conscious redirection of my field, ecological animal physiology, documented in New Directions in Ecological Physiology (1986).
Please don't make the same mistake as Larry Moran and some of his commenters., though–adaptation is empirical and nearly ubiquitous.
Hi Coturnix,
why do you think Dennett would expect to find the same results if you rewound the tape of life a million times? I really think you've misunderstood him on this point.
Of course, in a deterministic universe, you would trivially get the same result every time with the same initial conditions. But I find nothing in DDI or other writing to suggest he has such a fatalistic view of rewinding the tape with slightly different initial conditions.
Anyway, you've already poured a lot into this topic here, so maybe just a link to your previous review, which I would really like to read.. all I could find on the blogotubes were several variations of your claim about rewinding the tape of life a million times.
Both Gould and Dawkins are a bit overrated. Gould's best book is Ontogeny and Phylogeny; Dawkins' is The Extended Phenotype. Gould's major contribution was reviving half-forgotten and discarded ideas; Dawkins' was clarifying and making accessible contemporary ideas.
There is a theoretical rift within evolutionary biology, sometimes called adaptationist vs pluralist. Positions on a number of specific debates (adaptation, levels of selection, genes and behavior etc) tend to cluster in these factions, but there are different combinations of positions. That's perfectly normal and healthy for a science. As popular writers, Gould and Dawkins became the representatives of these factions. (It's actually more complicated than that, with multiple schools with different emphases. Then there are those who are such unorthodox – and anti-Darwinian – evolutionists they make the pluralist/Gouldian school look like adaptationists in comparison.) Some of these debates go back deep into the nineteenth century.
Decades ago Tinbergen attempted to integrate different approaches with his four questions; Gould (2002) presented a causal factors triangle diagram with a similar theme.
Chris Clarke says
I have never been able to understand why there's any dispute over the existence of spandrels.
I mean, I've got a photo of one right here.
You know, for me, the whole Gould/Dennett thing is settled by the fact that Dennett is fun to read and Gould isn't. I always found Gould corny and schmaltzy when he's using his "common touch" and annoying on science, because no matter how good his ideas he always had to present himself as some kind of scientific Garibaldi, a voice in the wilderness the establishment didn't want to hear.
Dennett is wrong a lot (though I don't think you can come up with any quote that would reveal him to be a determinist to the degree you imply, coturnix), but he does point out a lot of logical and semantic flaws in evolutionary debates, and I have yet to see a convincing refutation of the claim that there is a tendency toward increasing complexity, and would be again after the rewind.
It was something Dennett was wrong about the cemented the centrality of development to evolution for me. His description of evolution as a substrate-neutral, algorithmic process is compelling, and correct in the abstract. The error is that he assumes that what is being replicated (with mistakes) is the same thing that is being selected. The Modern Synthesis makes this error, too. Both forget that its the genotype that is copied, but the phenotype that is selected. Conflating these two, or assuming there is some kind of 1-1 mapping between them, is a serious mistake that has dogged biology for decades.
No one mentions Kirschner and Gerhart's book in this thread… ok, they sort of pass a lot of old ideas off as novel by giving them new names, but the book is well written and avoids the polemics others can't seem to.
NelC says
Oh, silly Chris @45: that's not a spandrel, this is.
melior says
I vividly recall reading Gould's paper on spotted hyenas, mumblety years ago in my high school library. Natural History was one of my favorite periodicals to browse, especially when I was supposed to be doing something else.
What sticks it in my mind was his description of the way the males and females look so similar (he referred to the females as having evolved a 'false scrotum') that the only way they could be distinguished was through… erm, palpitation.
I decided not to major in biology.
miko: "No one mentions Kirschner and Gerhart's book in this thread."
They are on the cutting edge, like West-Eberhard and Deacon. The next evolutionary synthesis will fully incorporate Baldwinism, like the last century's synthesis brought Mendelism into Darwinism.
AntonGarou says
I read that paper as part of my biology 101, and it was extremely interesting- I find myself in the position of agreeing with both Gould and Dawkins on evolutionary matters, to a degree.Yes, spandrels and and maybe even bauplans exist, but that doesn't mean they can't be selected for/against long-term since what constitutes a spandrel in one environment may very well be a positive(or negative)-value trait in another.
truth machine says
Wow, that's a cogent argument.
If one rewinds the tape of life a million times, Dennett expects to see himself writing his book every single time – that deterministic (especially in private, when taken off guard).
That's an ideologically driven lie — Dennett has been quite explicit that he only holds that certain general characteristics would be repeated — that the arisal of humans specifically is historically contingent, as opposed to the arisal of human-like intelligence.
After his performance here, it should be hard for anyone to take coturnix seriously.
I have yet to see a convincing refutation of the claim that there is a tendency toward increasing complexity, and would be again after the rewind.
It's so obvious that one must be in the grips of an ideology to deny it. If common descent is true, any organism must have some simpler progenitor.
The error is that he assumes that what is being replicated (with mistakes) is the same thing that is being selected. The Modern Synthesis makes this error, too. Both forget that its the genotype that is copied, but the phenotype that is selected. Conflating these two, or assuming there is some kind of 1-1 mapping between them, is a serious mistake that has dogged biology for decades.
Where does Dennett make this mistake? In any case, Dawkins made a central point of correcting it.
There isn't.
He had to go out of his way to do so, throwing in some lies about Dennett's "private" claims in the process.
Here's some interesting reading:
http://www.edge.org/discourse/dennett_orr.html
I think most of the sociobiology debate is summed up nicely by Dawkins here:
http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/1985-01-24notinourgenes.shtml
Whenever you see words like "dialectical" in biology or philosophy of biology, you should be keenly aware that someone is trying to unsubtly point out their education in Marxism. Not that there's anything wrong with Marxism per se (I've read a lot of it), but Marxism isn't biology no matter how much people wish otherwise, and when people who aren't trying to show which party line they're toeing what to talk about different factors interacting, they almost always pick a term other than "dialectical" (like "extended phenotype"). Some other parts also serve as keywords, but "dialectical" is the biggest.
The biggest exception to this is (unsurprisingly) Gould, who was supposedly Marxist-leaning but who never decided to replace science with politics. He came up with a whole lot of really good material with which to oppose the psychology that was then in vogue, like the spandrel essay linked way way above. The only real objections to spandrels are based on fundamentally misconstruing what Gould was getting at, in my opinion.
More interesting reading:
http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/daniel-vs-christians.html
http://bostonreview.net/BR21.5/dennett.html
Ah yes, Dawkins' classic and delicious trashing of Rose and Lewontin.
The only real objections to spandrels are based on fundamentally misconstruing what Gould was getting at, in my opinion.
Since spandrels exist and no one has ever objected to them, that looks like a misconstrual. Dennett writes in his response to Orr (see above):
If by "spandrel" Gould and Lewontin mean the particular structure used in San Marco (properly called a pendentive) then what they say is false; pendentives are one of many options, but they are probably the optimal engineering solution to the problem of supporting the dome-what I would call a Forced Move. In this sense, spandrels (pendentives) are adaptations par excellence. If, on the other hand, Gould and Lewontin mean by "spandrel" just "whatever you put in that place between the dome and the arches," then spandrels are trivially inevitable-you have to put something there. Gould himself has recently1 opted for this reading, but as I had already pointed out in my book, pp. 272-3, this interpretation also disqualifies spandrels for their role as lead metaphor in Gould and Lewontin's biological argument. In this sense, architectural constraints present a problem, not a solution, in biology as much as in building, and that is where natural selection comes in.
I loved Darwin's Dangerous Idea. I did think he devoted a bit much time solely to pick on Gould.
Dennett writes in his response to Orr:
I make it crystal clear why I have to go to all this trouble clarifying these minutiae: Gould has persistently misrepresented the import of the Gould/Lewontin paper outside biology, and many have been taken in. My task was to show the non- biologists that they have been seriously misled by Gould about this. In my book I list four propositions that are widely believed by non-biologists to have been demonstrated by Gould. The first two are relevant here:
If you believe: 1) that adaptationism has been refuted or relegated to a minor role in evolutionary biology, or (2) that since adaptationism is 'the central intellectual flaw of sociobiology' (Gould, 1993a, p. 319), sociobiology has been utterly discredited as a scientific discipline . . . then what you believe is a falsehood. (p. 265)
Well, are these truths or falsehoods? They are widely believed. Many non-biologists are under the weird misapprehension, thanks to Gould's rhetoric, that one is under no obligation to provide an adaptive account of the evolution of a complex competence or organ-such as human language. In some misguided quarters, indeed, adaptationist explanations of anything are automatically suspect! For more than a year before the publication of my book and on several occasions since then, I have repeatedly requested that he clarify his position on these propositions. Steve Gould is undeniably a Great Communicator. If these propositions are not what he meant, if over-eager readers have misunderstood him, he should find it both obligatory and easy to correct these widespread misapprehensions. If he meant them, he should either defend them against my charge that they are false, or concede that he has misled his readers. He has not accepted my invitation to clarify his position, so it falls to me to explain to the world, at whatever length it takes, why these are not the take-home messages from Gould and Lewontin's article.
Dennett's final paragraph of his demolishing response to Orr could have been written just for coturnix:
One does not lightly undertake the task of dislodging heroes from their pedestals so that their ideas can be critically assessed in the same arena with the ideas of ordinary mortals. So I expected to be treated fairly roughly by their fans, especially in their home town. Gould and Lewontin and Chomsky have so far all chosen to leave the counter-attack to others, my criticisms being too far beneath their notice, one gathers, to merit any detailed public response. The attacks I have seen to date-of which Orr's is the best, by the way-have been long on sneering and short on substance. It's been surprisingly easy to take, since my task has been far from thankless. Indeed, the thanks I have been receiving from biologists around the world has been most gratifying.
Thanny says
I don't think I've read a single comment here, purporting to be critical of Dawkins or Dennett, that shows any real familiarity with the ideas of either.
To suggest that Dawkins thinks genes have a 1:1 mapping with phenotypes is laughable, considering how often he goes to great lengths to dispel such a notion.
To claim that Dennett believes evolution isn't contingent is nothing short of dishonest.
Miko made the claim about Dennett, not Dawkins.
Yes, coturnix's behavior here is shameful. I suspect it's motivated by cognitive dissonance with hero worship of Gould — see the Dennett paragragh I quoted above.
Here's a quote from Dennett on replaying the tape, directly contradicting coturnix's claim:
There is a sliding scale on which Gould neglects to locate his claim about rewinding the tape. If by "us" he meant something very particular–Steve Gould and Dan Dennett, let's say–then we wouldn't need the hypothesis of mass extinction to persuade us how lucky we are to be alive….If, at the other extreme, by "us" Gould meant something very general, such as "air-breathing, land-inhabiting vertebrates," he would probably be wrong.
But perhaps coturnix didn't lie — perhaps he is so blinded by his animus that he's lost his ability to comprehend what Dennett wrote.
I'll concede to a fairly serious misconstrual regarding spandrel controversy on my part, yeah. It seems strange how different the text itself and its evident deployment as an instrument of controversy have been.
That'll show me to not expect academic bait and switch!
Back on Aug 31, coturnix wrote at sandwalk:
I bet if he rerean the tape of life a million times, he would expect to see himself writing his books every single time.
Note how, in bit over a month, he turned his own slanderous speculation into a factual claim. This firmly establishes his as a deeply dishonest, virtually criminal, lowly piece of slime.
Here's another actual quote from Dennett (emphasis added):
"Replay the tape a thousand times, and the Good Tricks will be found again and again, by one lineage or another".
I'll concede to a fairly serious misconstrual regarding spandrel controversy on my part, yeah.
This sort of thing comes largely of repeated misrepresentations by anuses like coturnix of what folks like Dennett say — it's the same sort of foul activity that leads people to think that PZ wants to ban the religious from science. This is why I provide actual quotations, not characterizations of what people say, and certainly not asinine claims about "private" conversations.
Back on March 31, at sandwalk, coturnix wrote
I have heard that Dennett is privately even more orthodox genocentric, super-deterministic neo-Darwinian than he lets out publically. Hard to imagine how an one be even more so than Dennett already is in his books and articles!
Someone once said that if you rewind the Tape of Life over and over again, Dennett believes that every time evolution will produce Daniel Dennett writing "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" (IMHO a God-awful book I call "Dennett's Dangerously Stupid Idea").
It's interesting to see how coturnix "evolved" from reporting on what someone else said to his own speculation to stating it as a fact, as he became more and more bold in his dishonesty, sort of like a serial killer who is emboldened by not being caught. Well, buddy, you've been caught.
Back on March 31,
Sorry, March 12: http://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2007/03/evolution-as-design.html#comment-778899257879850221
A. Person says
I've had casual exposure to the spandrel … thing on and off for a while now, and most of the content of the mentions of anything relating to spandrels outside of Gould's document itself seems to be based upon the consumption of crack cocaine somewhere along the line of communication.
It's kind of interesting if you want to get into issues about the structure of academic controversy itself. It's subtler than the normal, anti-PZ type preaching, though, to the extent that it's a pretty simple and mostly-logical hop-skip between what Gould (or his supporters) have said and written about the spandrel issue outside of the way-above-linked paper and the well-known paper itself. The elegance of the swap lends itself beautifully to a far more seamless transition than I'm taken to expect.
Or maybe I'm just making excuses for having bought something I normally give myself too much credit to not notice; take your pick.
It seems coturnix has been spreading his lies for a while. Back in 2005 he wrote at
http://circadiana.blogspot.com/2005/01/wwdd4-power-of-darwinian-method.html
Evolutionary genocentrism, by ignoring all forces but natural selection, expects perfection in adaptation, and cannot explain diversity. To use Gould's metaphor, if one replays the tape of Earth's history a million times, Daniel Dennett's writings predict that all million times there will be intelligent humans on this planet and that there will be a Daniel Dennett writing a book called "Darwin's Dangerous Idea".
Of course, we know that Dennett's writings don't predict any such thing. I think coturnix knows that too, which is why he switched to the claim (lie) that "Dennett is privately even more orthodox genocentric, super-deterministic neo-Darwinian than he lets out publically".
Here's the continuation of the above quote:
So, this is the best of all possible worlds by virtue of being the only possible world. Its design is perfect. If God had a really big computer and played an evolution game on it, this is exactly the kind of world that would arise every time he played.
Genes are immortal (soul) and everything else is transient (body as a receptacle and vehicle for the soul). What a fantastically easy replacement for God in the age of wavering religious feelings! Through our genes we acquire immortality. If in the beginning there was a Word, it was written in genetic code, and each one of us carries a copy of it in each one of our cells. By deciphering the code (Human Genome Project) we will finally Know who we really are and what is our purpose in the world. Perhaps Dennett's Dangerous Idea and Behe's Black Box are not incompatible!
I really have to wonder about coturnix's sanity.
Yes, coturnix's behavior here is shameful. I suspect it's motivated by cognitive dissonance with hero worship of Gould
Here's some support for my speculation, from coturnix's other persona:
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/01/why-creationists-need-to-be.html
Logic is not as easy as it seems. If you really want to arrive at a particular conclusion you can easily miss an error in your logic. For instance, when Daniel Dennett's book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" first came out, I bought it and started reading it. Dennett builds his argument in a series of logical steps and his starting points are things everyone will agree with. The scheme of most of the first half of the book was: A thus B, B thus C, C thus D, …..Y thus Z, with Z= Stephen Jay Gould is a lyer and a moron. It all sounded neat and impressive, but his final conclusion raised a red flag. I understand (thus like) Gould too well to accept Dennett's conclusion so easily. So, I went back and re-read every logical step, thought about it, and discussed it in a group of several very smart biologists and philosophers of biology, until I finally found which logical step was not as logical as it seemed at first reading. There was, after all, a step P thus Q, where "thus" was not warranted, and everything after that was just plain wrong. Please don't force me to torture myself by re-reading first 200 pages of Dennett's writing again just so I can find the exact P=>Q step all over again after all these years. Take this as a homework assignment – find out for yourself.
Of course Dan Dennett never claimed that Gould was a "lyer (sic) and a moron" or anything of the sort — it seems that Bora was projecting.
My comments got stuck in the spam box, but I see truth machine has read my mind and provided all the links I meant to, and then some :)
A charitable interpretation of coturnix's writings might be that Dennett has said something careless about determinism some time after too many beers. Once c. said something about Dennett expecting Nazis every time the tape is replayed, but I can't find that comment. (Star Trek determinism?)
Evolutionary genocentrism, by ignoring all forces but natural selection, expects perfection in adaptation…
This is flawed, too. The existence of intragenomic conflict is a verified prediction of "genocentrism" and is hardly an example of "perfection".
Huh. Readers might wonder why I repeated some of your posts, not knowing that they weren't visible when I posted. It's bizarre and misleading that posts appear in order of submission rather than order of actual appearance in the blog.
A charitable interpretation of coturnix's writings might be that Dennett has said something careless about determinism some time after too many beers.
I think that goes far beyond any charity warranted by the evidence. And it wouldn't explain his pathological lack of charity toward Dennett.
This is flawed, too.
Now that is charitable. As I noted above, his take on genocentrism verges on insanity.
Don't forget that he wrote, nearly 3 years ago, long before his nonsense about "private" conversations: "Daniel Dennett's writings predict that all million times there will be intelligent humans on this planet and that there will be a Daniel Dennett writing a book called "Darwin's Dangerous Idea"."
David Marjanović, OM says
Regardless of one's opinion of punctuated equilibria
"Opinion"? Punk eek is an observed fact all over those parts of the fossil record that are detailed enough to tell. It just doesn't hold in all cases (for example it doesn't in diatoms that speciate sympatrically in the whole tropical Pacific at once, to take the best documented and perhaps most extreme example).
coturnix, I notice you keep talking about "philosophers of biology". Why? What are philosophers doing in biology? That field belongs to science, not to philosophy. Those philosophers that aren't also scientists should IMNSHO keep out and mind their own business.
Don't forget that he wrote, nearly 3 years ago, long before his nonsense about "private" conversations: "Daniel Dennett's writings predict…
Good catch. Found the comment on Dennett and Nazis. It would be interesting to hear coturnix's take on all this, but first i'm off to a conference.
Caledonian says
People like John S. Wilkins insist that philosophy precedes science and is necessary to the functioning of science.
No one seems to have told the scientists this, because they've been functioning just fine (even solving 'philosophical' problems) without recourse to philosophers.
Perhaps you could get Wilkins to explain to you what function he and his peers perform.
It would be interesting to hear coturnix's take on all this
As interesting as hearing Larry Craig's response to the cop who arrested him.
Ken Cope says
I'll take Wilkins's remarks toward the close of this talk.origins faq of his as a (mostly) complete description of the role of philosophers:
Philosophers do conceptual tidying up, among other things, but scientists are the ones making all the sawdust in the workshop, and they need not be so tidy. And no cleaner should tell any professional (other than cleaners) how it ought to be done.
Found the comment on Dennett and Nazis.
In which he repeats the lie of an "ad hominem attack on Gould". I would love to see Dennett sue Mr. Zivkovic for libel.
An underrated book with a theme similar to 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' and published the same year is Gary Cziko's 'Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution'.
http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/g-cziko/wm/
Like Dennett, Cziko discusses how selection generates adaptive complexity beyond evolutionary biology.
Terrence Deacon favorably reviewed Cziko's book 'The Things We Do', relating purposive behavior (which for Cziko is a form of homeostasis) to universal Darwinism.
http://tinyurl.com/2kmw4h
"Cziko implies (although he never fully elaborates this possibility) that the circular causality that controls purposive behavior is not merely the logic of servomechanisms but is rather a Darwinian (Campbellian) process itself. Cybernetics meets universal Darwinism!"
jane hay says
I always enjoyed reading Gould's essays in Natural History, and found them a valuable resource in teaching college biology courses (though his historical and literary references usually fly over the heads of your average student). However, I find that evolutionarily I consider the most important concept Gould proposed to be not punctuated equilibrium (see below), but exaptation.
Gould & Eldredge originally proposed their punctuated equilibrium hypothesis as an explanation for the punctuated character of much of the fossil record. As initially outlined, it seemed to account for some instances of the sudden appearance of new forms : allopatric or peripatric speciation, occurring in a separate location from the "parent" population (a la Mayr), followed by the new species migrating back into the ancestral range, where it coexisted with or replaced the parent population. As time went on, however, G & E began postulating it as the ONLY explanation for speciation events, proposing an increasingly wide variety of reasons (see exchange of letters with Coyne and Charlesworth in Science vol.276, pp.337-341). He never did really follow up the evodevo angle as he should have, in my opinion. It seemed to get diluted, or he lost track of it after a while. Also, in several instances where G & E and others claimed that the fossil record supported their theory, the data did not really match their criteria (i.e. bacterial evolution; Turkana snail fossils; etc.). That said, however, the controversy has stimulated detailed investigation into the fossil record and the roles played by various genetic mechanisms in micro and macroevolutionary trends. It is unfortunate that when there is disagreement over mechanisms, the creation crowd (AND the MSM)always interprets this as a controversy over evolution itself. Maybe science needs to do a better job of PR.
Yeah, I have to agree with that comment from Wilkins — I think philosophy does have a valuable place in science, and it is that "clean up". It's a bit more than simple custodial work, though, because sometimes they can spot errors in our assumptions and expose interesting problems.
A good scientist not only has to be great at charging ahead and churning out data, but has to appreciate the importance of theory…and I think philosophy plays a role in balancing raw data generation with thoughtful assessment of what it all means.
BTW, that thread contains a couple of good comments on Dennett, by Ricardo Azevedo and by miko, pointing out that "Dennett's thinking is often much more nuanced than PZ gives him credit for".
Jim Lippard says
Re: #64: If you read that, also read Orr's response:
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR21.5/orr.html
Re: #64: If you read that, also read Orr's response
It's much like his attack on Dawkins: rude and dishonest.
It's also fundamentally stupid: Dennett also claims that I botched my "substrate neutrality" objection to memetics No, Dennett pointed out that Orr doesn't understand the concept at all, and that fact persists into Orr's response, where he continues to talk about "particulate" and "blending" as "substrates" — how can anyone be that dense? Blending and Mendelian composition are algorithms, not substrates. Orr is utterly clueless about fundamental computational concepts even after Dennett has carefully explained them to him with basic illustrations. Orr no more understands Dennett's arguments than he understood Dawkins' arguments about God, and he appeals to irrelevancies in re Dennett just as he does when he complains that Dawkins didn't give angels-on-pins theological arguments.
truth machine, I'm not entirely sure what your point is.
Perhaps if you posted ANOTHER 26 comments saying more or less the same thing, with even MORE venom, thus raising your percentage of total comments in this 96-comment thread from approximately one third to somewhere around half, your intent might become more clear.
As an example of the sort of intellectual dishonesty Orr engages in:
If you want to understand, say, the rise and fall of fascism, I'd suggest you learn about the International Brigade or Winston Churchill.
Has Dennett ever suggested otherwise?
I'm not sure much is gained by talking loudly of the "war meme" or the "Churchill meme."
Strawman and false dichotomy, anyone? If Orr isn't intentionally trying to pull the wool over people's eyes, then he is simply dim.
So? I'm sorry you're so dim, but it's really not my concern.
Hey folks, I just dig the holes. I'm not responsible for those who choose to dive into them headfirst.
26 comments saying more or less the same thing
I've reviewed my comments and don't see where I repeated myself, although I did repeat some of windy's contributions because hers were stuck in the spam queue, as previously explained.
I'm glad to see that other reader's think coturix was being less than rational, and it wasn't just me.
Ahh! Rogue apostrope! Kill it! Kill it!
Uh, thanks, er, "truth machine", for completely bollixing up this thread with all those posts. If I were coturnix I sure wouldn't respond here now – where would I begin? Maybe later we'll get some insight as to why he thinks what he thinks. If you just want to hurl accusations, then go ahead – but the mature way to do this is to civilly point out that someone is wrong and use research, facts, and wit to show they're wrong. It's more fun, too.
My estimation of coturnix has risen due to this thread, to be honest. Not that it needed to.
Brian Macker says
Miko,
"Both forget that its the genotype that is copied, but the phenotype that is selected. Conflating these two, or assuming there is some kind of 1-1 mapping between them, is a serious mistake that has dogged biology for decades."
Both who? I've read Dawkins, Gould, and Dennett. I've seen none of the three making this mistake.
Colugo: Another Deacon fan! Why does this guy not get his due? Everyone still thinks Pinker and Chomsky are interesting to read on language.
Well with the qualifier "some", but that obvious point doesn't cover stagnation or atrophy. A tendency to increased complexity will only continue so long as that increased complexity has selective advantage over the less complex. It is not clear that more complexity will always win out.
Truth machine, thanks to your bout of insomnia people can now follow all those links and see what else I have written around the quotes you mined. Sure, that stuff was written back in 1999 and I cringe at some of the passages when I read them today and, as I state at the top of one of those posts, I would have written the stuff differently today. People learn over time.
There has been a lot of writing and research done in the meantime, both in philosophy of biology and in relevant areas of biology, so I would have changed many parts of that essay today, though the main point stands, and the list of references is still good (though not as current).
As for 'personal communication' as a source, I did not get permissions from people who have interacted with Dennett to name them here and quote them verbatim. You can decide to believe or not believe that some very serious (and generally charitable to Dennett) people have reported on those statements, along with their personal frustrations with dealing with him and trying to teach him basic biology.
As I stated above, I have nothing against the man – I clearly liked his latest book on religion (except for a short part where he misunderstands that David Sloan Wilson is asking a different question than Dennett). But I stand by my evaluation of his inadequacy in the field of evolutionary theory. I am not qualified to judge his work on consciousness, so I will leave that to others.
But, I do not understand anyone's need for such a ferocious defense of Dennett. Is he your uncle or something? That would make such an emotional response more understandable.
Thanny: "To suggest that Dawkins thinks genes have a 1:1 mapping with phenotypes is laughable, considering how often he goes to great lengths to dispel such a notion."
You seem to be responding to me… I din't say Dawkins does, I said Dennett presents his algorithmic, substrate-neutral model of a Darwinian process in this way. And he ignores development completely in DDI.
"Not that there's anything wrong with Marxism per se"
Well there is if you think that mud pies should be valued the same as apple pies if the labor involved is the same.
There also is if you think that capitalists (that would be anyone with savings invested in production) are never the authors of the capital they own, that is if one believes they didn't work to get it. Marxism has a kind of crude "There are two kinds of people" in the world mentality. It's quite obvious you can be both a laborer and a capitalist.
I'm a programmer and a "substrate-neutral model" can entail a genotype and a phenotype with selection upon the phenotype.
Brian: "Both who? I've read Dawkins, Gould, and Dennett. I've seen none of the three making this mistake."
The "both" is confusing, sorry. I meant "the modern synthesis" as some kind of anthropomorphic entity, and Dennet as mentioned above.
"A tendency to increased complexity will only continue so long as that increased complexity has selective advantage over the less complex. It is not clear that more complexity will always win out."
It doesn't have to always win out (and clearly doesn't) to exist for some period of time or to be a tendency of living, evolving systems… I certainly wouldn't be suprised if this planet belonged to bacteria some day.
Yeah, of course it can. Dennett's doesn't. Is my point. I fully by that Darwinism is a substrate-neutral concept that requires only a few conditions.
"If you just want to hurl accusations, then go ahead – but the mature way to do this is to civilly point out that someone is wrong and use research, facts, and wit to show they're wrong."
Yeah, just like Cortunix did. LOL.
Well I read DDI and several other of Dennett's books and I didn't notice any such error. If you buy that evolution by natural selection is substrate neutral then I don't see what your point was in your original comment. Dennett is not so stupid as to believe in a 1 to 1 mapping of the genome to the phenotype, and he certainly doesn't believe that natural selection works directly on the information encoded in that genotype (although it could act on the substrate, some substrates being superior to others).
"Dennett is not so stupid as to believe in a 1 to 1 mapping of the genome to the phenotype"
I wouldn't say he "believes" it so much as "operationally assumes" it. It's suprising how many biologists often operate under the same assumption, though would probably admit it's a simplification under questioning.
Check out the whole sordid history of the stupid predictions about human genome and how many where that the human genome didn't seem "complex" enough…"not enough genes." It's because they were thinking that complex traits come from genes, not from processes that are partially specified by genes.
Again, it is a major flaw and omission in the modern synthesis, which development was completely excluded from. It's not just me. See Kirschner & Gerhart, Waddington, Baldwin, West-Eberhard, Jablonka, etc, etc.
sorry for the garbled grammar, running back and forth between experiments, hope my drift can be caught.
"But, I do not understand anyone's need for such a ferocious defense of Dennett."
I'll tell you why I don't like your tactics. I like to follow certain standards which I think are compatible with reducing error in our beliefs. You are violating those standards. I don't see how we can ever reduce error by interjecting unsubstantiated claims, and actual misrepresentations of other peoples positions.
Being a programmer I came to the conclusion a long time ago that things like "junk DNA", extra nucleic DNA, and such are important. Hell if you don't have an intact cell membrane it's pretty clear genes alone aren't going to be able to build one.
Wasn't it Dawkins who used the analogy of the recipe and that the genomic plans don't specify where every raisin is to be placed in the muffin like a blueprint. Seems to me this is the exact opposite of your claim.
I'm not a biologist so I've certainly not read as many paper s as a biologist would have, but I do like to see evidence. I don't see how these what appear to be trivialities are going to break the back of the new synthesis.
I just don't see how the new synthesis as I understood it would in any way predict the exact number of genes needed.
I think it is clear that the semantics of genes intimately dependent on the environment in which they operate. That's true even in language. There are certain concepts that are much easier to express in one language than another. I don't see why that wouldn't be an analogous factor in evolution. I tell you this without having any of the background on the controversy you mentioned. Listing a bunch of names isn't going to get me there either.
Natural selection, as an algorithm, is substrate neutral. It can be done on a computer.
Biological evolution is not substrate neutral. It cannot be done on a computer.
Evolution does not equal natural selection. Many who like to play with selection algorithms on computers buy into that fallacy, Dennett included.
And, I agree with what miko says:
Perhaps my comments here were harsh, as I believe that there is a need for a stern warning to lay audiences not to fall for eloquence of prose of Dennett and Dawkins. But I do not see how 'truth machine' in any way observes Brian's high standards any better than I do. I did not want to blogwhore here, but tm did it for me. Go and read the whole thing keeping the caveats from my previous comment in mind. Also see my comments on John Dennehy's blog (the post PZ initially linked to in his post). And I'd still like to see a positive, educated defense of any of Dennett's biology that goes beyond hero-worship.
The reasons why that is true is truly unimportant. No one is suggesting we could build a computer program, run a simulation on it and generate the evolutionary history of the earth.
There's no reason you couldn't build an rich environment on a computer that is completely analogous to what goes on in the biological world.
I'm pretty sure Dennett is aware of the difference between building a simulation of a rabbit on a computer and an actual rabbit.
I certainly don't remember him using substrate neutrality to make the points you seem to be forcing on him.
Ichthyic says
Punk eek is an observed fact
Point of order:
no, it's not. It's a theory to explain the patterns we do see in some cases.
it's like confusing evolution (the fact of) with evolution (the theory of).
When I say, unimportant, I mean unimportant to Dennett's arguments. Certainly it's important in the real world.
You know one of the things I like to do is to take a charitable reading of other peoples writings. If I think that something can be interpreted in multiple ways I try to take the meaning to be the one that makes the most sense. I also try not to envision the person making points they may not intend.
I certainly don't think Dennett meant that we could generate the evolution of the rabbit on a Windows based PC.
Again, I think my problem is more with Dennett on this than Dawkins (and don't find Dennett awful, and enjoy a lot of what he writes).
The modern synthesis is in good shape, no chance of its back being broken. It just left something really, really, important out… where does phenotypic variation come from? And relatedly, what kind of phenotypic variation is possible? As I said before, they went with the simplification that phenotypic variation comes from genotypic variation, which is true in only in a facile sense.
The fact the selection does not act on genes (the "replicator" in Dawkins/Dennett terminology), but on distant downstream outcomes of the effects of nested and intertwined networks of the variable products of large sets of replicators–phew–has implications for a lot of adaptationist claims and any comprehensive theory of evolution. Anyway, lots of people are working on this now, it was just a slip-up that lasted a few decades.
A tendency to increased complexity will only continue so long as that increased complexity has selective advantage over the less complex.
not necessarily; the level of "complexity" might be only tangentially related to selection on some other definable trait.
If you can grab an objective measure of complexity, I think you will often find that it is measured on a combination of traits, any one of which may have greater or lesser selective pressure on it, or indeed, that drift itself might have had the greater influence in any specific case.
Moreover, developmental constraints (for example) might favor a more or less complex pathway in the evolution of any specific trait under consideration.
here is a need for a stern warning to lay audiences not to fall for eloquence of prose of Dennett and Dawkins.
or Gould, for that matter.
hmm, i didn't see it as so much a defense of Dennett, as an attack on a perceived repeated, undeserved bias in your presentation of Dennett.
Also, TM's presentations are typically presented in such a style, so I wouldn't take it to mean much.
for whatever that's worth.
personally, I find I'm with Cale on this. After spending decades reading the musings of Gould and Dennett and Dawkins, I find that I usually end up forming my opinions from the primary literature.
I always found their thinking stimulating, but no substitute for raw data.
To be fair I must say I am not a big fan of many of Gould's ideas. Then again I'm not a fan of some of Dawkins' ideas either (like that loosely worked out theory on memes) although I am surely in the Dawkins/Dennett camp.
The problem I have with Gould is I don't see the mechanism in some of his theory. There seems to be no means by which the things he claims operate could possibly be operating. It's like he believes in magic or something.
I don't mind some of his stuff as speculation but people hear "Gould" and seem to think it's established fact or something.
It's been a long time since I've read Gould but as I recall he assumed that something was operating in punctuated equilbrium that was outside what would be expected given what I already knew about the mechanisms and I just couldn't see it. I don't see why the standard model of evolution as even stated by Darwin couldn't generate the kind of fossil record we see.
When a particular species newly "invents" something that is useful like say the shell wouldn't one naturally expect a bout of speciation as all the implications of this new feature are worked out.
Wouldn't one also expect long periods where a species doesn't change much? What about the theory of natural selection requires that mutations must arise that generate adaptive changes in the organism, or that the felt environment must change? Nothing that I can see.
It seemed to me that he saw some extra force operating here that didn't naturally fall out of the standard model.
Ichthyic,
I didn't mean that adaptation need be the sole source of complexity, but I don't see how drift can be an force driving animals to every increasing levels of complexity. Do you have a mechanism in mind, because it's not obvious to me how it would occur.
I do see how say predatory/prey interactions can drive complexity up but it's not clear that this also doesn't eventually achieve a plateau. In the case of drift I can't even get this far.
I don't see why the standard model of evolution as even stated by Darwin couldn't generate the kind of fossil record we see.
The vast majority of evolutionary biologists ended up coming to the same conclusion.
I didn't mean that adaptation need be the sole source of complexity,
Ok, because my point was that complexity itself need not be subject to adaptive forces. whether you are speaking of an objective measure of the complexity of a given trait, or some combination of traits that relates to the perceived "complexity" of an organism as a whole.
if you are looking at a specific trait, you must take into account how that trait might be linked to others. selection might favor simplicity in one trait, but another linked trait might maintain complexity regardless, especially if the pressures on that trait are relatively slight, or non-existent.
this also relates to how drift would work, as it isn't necessarily the case for all traits that a more complex version might have any selective pressure against it (not necessarily more energy consumptive, for example).
and again, a trait that is allowed to drift could be linked to one that is heavily selected for.
I'm trying to think of specific case examples, and recent research into the evolution of blind cave fishes rings a mild bell, but the specifics escape me at the moment. If I recall the paper I am thinking of, I'll post a link.
I think I'm going to start calling myself "memory limited" – it's just so hard to remember specific papers any more.
I do see how say predatory/prey interactions can drive complexity up but it's not clear that this also doesn't eventually achieve a plateau.
look at the equilibrium models of evolution proposed for the snowshoe hare and the arctic fox as an example of why pred/prey interactions don't go to fixation.
I understand what you are saying but I don't see how the objection applies to Dennett.
I can speculate on all sorts of things. How about this, let's speculate that there are proteins that attach to the chromosomes to turn the genes on or off and that when the chromosomes are replicated the state of these switches are also copied. Now certainly if true this puts something important outside the realm of the genes but doesn't seem to me to matter to the model in general.
The importance of the switches to evolution in this hypothetical case depends on their ability to replicate. So it's easy to say well it's just another replicator we were not aware of. I don't see how such a thing damages Dennett's arguments.
Do you have a specific thing in mind that is a counterexample to an argument that Dennett is making. The argument I'm reading from you (and I'm not sure I'm getting this right) seems analogous to the arguments I hear from the religious. It's almost like a god of the gaps argument. Does Dennett have to know every detail, even the ones not worked out to be "right".
To me evolution is an informational process. So side issues not having to do with information transmission, storage, and modification are really not that important to working out how evolution proceeds. In that sense the substrate doesn't matter.
So what specifically about development shows the new synthesis to be wrong on these types of issues, or at least Dennett? At this point I'm not even sure what argument of Dennett's you are attacking so it would be nice to read that too.
Oh, and to prove I'm not a Dennett Worshiper I think it a fair criticism to say that one of his books I read should have been titled "Consciousness Explained Away". I say that even though I actually believe that consciousness is wholly a product of the brain. I think it a much easier task to show that consciousness is a product of the brain than it is to explain how the brain produces it. His title seemed to be claiming the latter in addition to the former.
Fixation and increased complexity are two different beasts.
Not so much that I think Dennett or the modern synthesis are wrong, it's just that they are painfully incomplete. It's like if you explained how a bike works but left off the part about the wheels. I hope you weren't serious about the religious crack…just because there's a gap doesn't mean I want to cram a god in it. I want to cram a good explanation in it.
I think there is a cartoon in DDI that actually shows an amorphous blob that copies into a clutch of slight varying amorphous blobs that then are subject to a selection filter. Why those shapes? What other shapes were possible? His cartoon underlines this assumption of traits as continuously variable features and provides no explanation for how variation is generated. This is misleading, and I presume it come from Dennett's total ignorance of development.
For 100s of millions of years cartiliganous fish (sharks/rays) have not "improved" on their fins (not that they need to, apparently). Then there is an explosion of fin/limb variety in teleosts and tetrapods. New genes, new alleles? No…just redeployment of an old trick, involving many genes, in a new place. Muscle precursors adopt a new (for them) mode of migration during morphogenesis that allows them to adapt to a wider variety of skeletal structures. This IS evolution, it's a crime to leave it out and settle for an explanation solely in terms of allele frequencies and amino acid substitutions.
oh yeah, on the whole philosophy discussion (is it bad or good?)
I think philosophy of science can be fun to read. Philosopher's are great arguers and usually make genuine attempts to intellectually engage with a subject. Even though i'm not in PZ's class, I recently read Zimmer's "Soul Made Flesh." It struck me: considering how long it took to get terrible philosophy OUT of science, we ought to be careful about what we let back in.
i don't even know who i'm agreeing or disagreeing with here, but complexity does not have to be adaptive for it to increase.
i think Dennett argues this… if there is some theoretical simplicity-complexity axis, and you start at the simplest, there is only one way to go.
not exactly the argument of a ferocious arch-adaptationist, is it?
The air seems clearer now.
Thanks coturnix for weighing in again. I think you are wrong about Dennett's fatalism about the 'tape' etc., but it's not so important… the larger argument is, however, very interesting.
It's not so easy to altogether banish molecular explanations in terms of gene frequencies. Miko said:
For 100s of millions of years cartiliganous fish (sharks/rays) have not "improved" on their fins (not that they need to, apparently). Then there is an explosion of fin/limb variety in teleosts and tetrapods. New genes, new alleles? No…just redeployment of an old trick, involving many genes, in a new place.
I would like to point out that the "No…" is an oversimplification. There are indeed new alleles – just compare shark vs. tetrapod sequences. (Human and shark HoxD8 are around 85% identical / 15% diverged, for example..) So yes, there are new genes and new alleles, but also yes, they are basically used to redeploy old tricks (as opposed to the caricature, advanced by no one, that a "gene for arms" suddenly appeared).
John Scanlon, FCD says
In another time zone, always behind the flood of comments; now in the #20's, had to say:
Steven Rose's Lifelines is complete rubbish. Both editions.
I'll get back to reading now (Coturnix got anything else?)
define what you mean by "plateau" then.
…(Apparently not, then).
"There are indeed new alleles – just compa're shark vs. tetrapod sequences. (Human and shark HoxD8 are around 85% identical / 15% diverged, for example..)"
Which says nothing about functional differences or adaptive relevance of the divergence. Most genes (most tested, anyway) can be shuttled between distantly related animals and do their jobs just fine.
We're often stuck with this in the zebrafish field… someone's made a nice construct with a mammalian gene, at the amino acid level they are usually 70-85% identical. They work every time.
this list is full of clever people, but open the science section of any newspaper for some version of the "gene for arms" bullshit. or anything by almost anyone calling themselves an evolutionary psychologist.
In relation to most of the comments, I'd just like to reiterate that Dawkins still said it best back in his Lewontin review. Allen Orr's linked rebuttal to Dennet is a grossly inaccurate straw man, incidentally. This is coming from someone who thinks Dennet's conception of memes, and that of memeticists in general, is ridiculously crude. I love the meme and memetic algorithms as ideas and ways of looking at ideas and cultures, but much of the work that's been done on memetics past there is like watching someone trying to force a square peg into a round hole. They've got the right idea- they understand the idea of a peg and doing better than someone chewing on the peg- but they're still wrong. Orr's response is to insist that they haven't even got the right idea by presenting a straw man of it, which is … ridiculous.
Back on the mention of actual Marxism, which (I think it was Mark?) didn't like, I'd like to note that a lot of Marxist writers are really very interesting. Marxism as a political phenomenon is sort-of interesting- as an offshoot of Hegelian philosophy, it can be utterly brilliant. Whether the conclusions are correct is basically a moot point, in my opinion, but it's noteworthy that I read randomly generated text for fun.
In a nutshell that is pretty much my position on memetics. I think you expressed it pretty well. I also found intellectually offensive the implicit idea that it was almost purely the memes attributes that got it copied into my brain. I can tell you from personal experience that I have a lot of filters on my brain that control it's contents. I'm not like a computer that has no anti-viral software running. Memetics seems like an inkling of a good idea with a lot of hard work still needed. It still needs it's Darwin.
Well no I wasn't claiming you were trying to sneak god in. I was trying to provide an analogy for how I thought you were being unfair to Dennett. I could, of course, be wrong because perhaps I didn't understand your point. I just don't think you are being fair to the book. I pulled it off my shelf and I've signed it as read it August of 1995 so I don't remember every detail but I will search for your drawing.
I turned every page and the only drawings I see that match your description are on pages 374-375 and 378. The purpose of these diagrams is not to explicate upon developmental biology so I don't see what your point is. I believe they are the correct ones because a) There are no others and b) Each diagram does show an organism presenting a phenotype to the environment for selection. c) They are amorphous blobs, one for the organism and one for the environment.
The title of the chapter in which the diagrams exist is "The Role of Language in Intelligence" and not "Developmental Biology" so I think you are being unfair to criticize him on the grounds of missing important issues of the latter. These drawings are titled "Darwinian creatures, different hard-wired phenotypes", "Skinnerian creature 'blindly' uses different responses", "Popperian creature has inner selective environment that previews candidate acts", etc. So these are clearing intended to make points about neurology and not development.
You see I think you are criticizing him for not covering something that while it may be important to how we have actually evolved isn't important to his book. I don't think it is fair to say "Well you didn't cover everything therefore you are wrong". This I believe is what the religious try to do with their god of the gaps. I have a religious relative that makes the claim that since science doesn't explain everything it's clearly "wrong".
Since developmental biology wasn't an important theme in the book I don't think Dennett can be criticized for not covering it in detail. He could be criticized if he covered it and got it wrong however.
"His cartoon underlines this assumption of traits as continuously variable features and provides no explanation for how variation is generated. This is misleading, and I presume it come from Dennett's total ignorance of development."
I read the chapter with the diagram and nothing could be further from the truth. In context the source of the variation is completely unimportant. He is comparing hardwired variation of all kinds against variation mediated by environmental feed back. He is specifically addressing brains. It can't be misleading about development since it doesn't address it.
"No…just redeployment of an old trick, involving many genes, in a new place. Muscle precursors adopt a new (for them) mode of migration during morphogenesis that allows them to adapt to a wider variety of skeletal structures. This IS evolution, it's a crime to leave it out and settle for an explanation solely in terms of allele frequencies and amino acid substitutions."
I don't think the purpose of the book was to talk about such things. From my perspective as a computer scientist it's obvious that it's a big mistake to only talk about genes that encode for proteins and to fail to recognize the absolute need for a regulatory structure on top of those kinds of genes. It is clear that there must be additional genes that control the expression of those genes and most likely as a kind of organic computer of sorts. Then it becomes obvious too that the arrangement of the genes may matter.
If you wrote a book and included this story about muscles to illustrate this wouldn't you find it unfair if someone turned around and complained that you didn't discuss the very important issue of the evolution of plasticity (which was Dennett's subject matter)?
I think it laudable when you say "I want to cram a good explanation in it." but I don't think Dennett has in any way precluded this possibility. I'm sure you'd have plenty to teach me about development but I think that even with my crude understanding I can still get other evolutionary issues correct. So I'm not sure exactly what your issue with Dennett is.
I think I understand your point about muscles but I don't see how that changes anything other than filling a good explanation into a specific subject area. I'm pretty sure that Dennett would agree that we don't understand development completely and certainly not the development of something as complex as the brain. We certainly have a long way to go.
Again where has Dennett specifically gone wrong on development? Where has he gone wrong on where selection operates? I just don't see it.
BTW, I apologize for my apostrophe use. It should have been meme's not memes and its not it's. I intellectually know the difference but for some reason when I'm typing fast I get it wrong. In the first case I just missed it but in the second it's due to the aberrant use of apostrophe to mean contraction instead of possession with the word it.
"Define what you mean by 'plateau' then."
Well there a visual analogy that Miko hints at this with his quote "i think Dennett argues this… if there is some theoretical simplicity-complexity axis, and you start at the simplest, there is only one way to go." In the analogy we can think of the most simpilist organisms as sitting next to a wall and doing a sort of random walk. Even with a random walk the organism is going to wander away from the wall.
This is almost like the kinds of physical pressures one gets in physics like when you have two plates that are so close together that the number of virtual particles that can exist is less between the plates than outside so they plates are pushed together by the density differences.
So when you are close to the wall you will feel this kind of pressure merely due to genetic drift. This "force" should diminish however when you get further away and then be swamped by other considerations.
The way I visualize a "plateau" is when a species gets to a point where there is no longer a selective pressure pushin it to higher complexity, that the random walk therefore is an important factor but that walk tends to be restricted by the ceiling of more complexity leading to higher resource costs. It can also be restricted by adaptive trade offs. Thus the organism drifts in a limited range.
It's not obvious to me that even in the predator prey situation that it will not settle down in some range of complexity and therefore present a plateau.
The fact that some organisms tend to lose complexity when selective pressures are removed tends to argue that there are resource costs involved in maintaining the complexity.
Note that there are different types of complexity. There is the overall complexity of the phenotype and also the complexity of the genotype (and cell structure) that undergirds the organism. I understand that it is possible for a complex organism to say adapt to a parasitical lifestyle and loose some somatic complexity without losing the genetic complexity undergirding it. A parasite that is descended from a arthropod or annelid is certainly going to be more internally complex than one that came from a cnidaria despite the fact that from the outside they both appear to be mere worms.
If you consider increased complexity as a kind of positive progress then all I'm saying is that there are dead ends independent of external competition, and even a predator/prey relationship can be a dead end. I don't see why a species just can't reach a position where it's not going to make any major progress along the complexity scale anymore. It can be constrained by both it's environment and the costs involved in complexity itself.
There are at least two kinds of complexity I can think of serial and parallel. Serial complexity is itself costly because it can fail at each level and therefore requires repair either in the individual or with selective costs. Parallel complexity solves this problem but with the tradeoff of having to maintain redundant systems. I don't mean to be exhaustive here as I haven't thought about it much.
Both types of complexity can be present in the cell structure, the nucleic genes, extra nucleic replicators, and in the final phenotype. I think in every case the costs increase with more complexity. Obviously the benefits of the complexity outweigh the costs near the floor but it's not obviously the case with arbitrary distance from that floor.
Since this article was on spandrels I reread the chapter titled "The Spandrel's Thumb" in Dennett's book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea". I find it a devastating critique of Gould's position. It is precisely Dennett's background in philosophy that allows him to do this. Gould's concept of spandrels and Panglossian Adaptationism suffers from several fallacies. One being that it's a straw man argument.
Read this quote from the chapter and tell me if this in any way indicates that Dennett doesn't appreciate development.
'When Dawkins, an arch-adaptationist if there ever was on, says, "There are some shapes that certain kinds of embryology seem incapable of growing" (Dawkins 1989b, p.216), he is expressing a verso of this point about the constraint of the Bauplan, and it was something of a revelation to him, he says. It was forcefully brought home to him by his own computer simulation of evolution, not by the Gould and Lewontin paper, but we might let them chime in: "We told you so!"
I think this quote also goes to show that both Dawkins and Dennett are aware of the constraints on the "substrate". It also shows that both are aware of the constraints that development imposes. At least as of the writing of DDI which is being criticized.
I did this before with Sam Harris on this blog and I would do it for Gould if I saw someone mischaracterizing his position. It's a real pet peeve of mine when people dispute a book and make claims about the contents of the book but just don't seem to have read the book or give an uncharitable interpretation of it. I did see things that are wrong in Dawkins', Dennett's, and Sam Harris's books but can't stand it when some straw man position is attacked.
Unlike Coturnix I tend to remember the reasons why I disagree with a book or at least am willing to refresh my memory before charging into an attack. I many (but probably a fraction) of Gould's books and articles over twenty five years ago and I certainly have an inkling of where I disagree with him. I dislike Punctuated Equilibrium, Non-Overlapping Magisteria, his anti-adaptationism, and his tendency to find an original theory in something everyone else took for granted. I could expand at length on any of them.
I also think he was a great scientist despite all those disagreements, but probably would have gotten pissed at his fallacious reasoning had I had to argue with him. Straw man fallacies really piss me off because I find them to be intellectually dishonest. I really liked his ideas on exadaptation and poor engineering being evidence of a process of evolution. I did buy and read all his popularizations of science type books, plus several papers by him. I don't do that if I don't respect a person's position.
All in all I think Dennett and Dawkins aren't getting a fair shake in these comments and there is a lack of appreciation for how much Gould got wrong.
This may be late, but;
I'm hopping between sites and essays, and for anyone following the Gould et al vs Dennet/Dawkins as it's been in these comments, I think Gould's section of this is particularly interesting:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1070
Having read in the past few days at least a dozen contradictory definitions of "spandrel", two of them by Gould, I continue to be convinced that many of those involved had lost their minds. It's as if "spandrel" means precisely what someone wants it to mean for the length of a given argument – usually something different from what your opponent meant, soas to facilitate accusations of straw man arguments – after which it returns to being a half-defined term, wound and waiting for some unwary fool to invoke its name and lose face to his obvious misunderstanding of something so very simple.
I am inclined to throw out "spandrel" altogether, even if the concept (in several of its chimeric incarnations) is useful, and simply carefully define a similar phenomenon by a different name when necessary. I am also developing a very bad headache going over all of this.
If these observations happen to be uninteresting, carry on.
It wasn't Mark. It was me. I find this statement curious. In what sense is it very interesting and utterly brilliant?
I find Marxism a stupefying rationalization from incorrect assumptions and a failure to grasp prior theory. Marxism is interesting in the sense that Lysenkoism is interesting. A theory that is utterly incorrect and that leads to the deaths of millions but yet, for some reason, that is appealing enough to get implemented.
As a matter of comparative brilliance Marx was a candle compared to the halide lamp of other economists. His labor theory of value is a joke when compared to marginal utility. It's a joke as is much of the rest of his economic theory. Sure there are other intellectual jokes like Keynes but Marx is hard to top for shear brilliance of idiocy. Read Sowell's book Marxism for a good critique. Sowell is a former Marxist so he knows his theory and doesn't indulge in straw men. You can read Hazlitt's "The Failure of the New Economics" on Keynes idiocy. Devastating both.
These men were not brilliant except to the untrained eye, or to the eye of those with a wish for a suitable "scientific" theory for the usurpation of power and the violation of the rights of others.
Marx's political theory is pretty much the reification as dogma of basic philosophical fallacies such as ad-hominem, motive questioning, false dichotomies, demonization of the other, and so forth. I already mentioned the proletariat/bourgeoisie fallacy. His ideology also includes the explicit association of the truth of a statement with it's source. Thus one can discount what certain people say merely on the basis of their class, and in fact classify them into the group based on disagreement with the theory being propounded.
This whole post-modernism movement was a direct descendant of this kind of thinking. It was literally invented by Marxist theorists. Are you enamored in some way of post-modernism also? What specifically is so damn brilliant?
Sorry for the bad links.
http://www.amazon.com/Marxism-Philosophy-Economics-Thomas-Sowell/dp/0043201717/ref=sr_1_4/102-7662120-4152956?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191863373&sr=8-4
"The Failure of the New Economics"
http://www.amazon.com/Failure-New-Economics-Henry-Hazlitt/dp/1933550112/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-7662120-4152956?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1191863457&sr=1-1
Postmodernism wasn't just invented by Marxists, it's largely a bizarre relabeling of a branch of Marxist theory. Which is, in fact, why a lot of it is interesting. You're making a mistake (by my gauge, anyway) in assuming being correct or good economics is a factor in whether I find the phenomenon and array of questions (and attempts at solutions) raised by the philosophy interesting and often intellectually vigorous, which they are. This is also why I mentioned randomly-generated text; if it's interesting and thought-provoking, it's important. If you want good economics, you look somewhere else, but if you want a long speculative analysis of things Marxism can be great.
The only real problem with either Marxism or postmodernism (or philosophy or psychoanalysis …) to a great degree is when people take some part of it altogether and ridiculously too seriously, especially when aspects have failed a number of very major practical tests. Marxism lends itself extremely well, especially in its political dimension, to a kind of bizarre eschatology. The Revolution is coming, and it sneers in the face of practical objections. Similarly, people in academia can try to impose interpretations that make no sense, such as in rambling about "dialectical" biology that actually says nothing or making graduate students read Lacan if they want to study almost anything.
These are interesting phenomenon, but insofar as they suffer from a severe case of stupidity they aren't really worth undue consideration in and of themselves. The fact that readings of Shakespeare have been used in poor attempts at neuroscience doesn't really degrade Shakespeare or neuroscience unless you take them altogether too seriously. Similarly, I don't see the bizarre and often irritating academic culture surrounding postmodernism detracting from the potential interest of a large number of people thinking about things from dozens of often-bizarre and helpful angles.
But, I remind, I'll read randomly generated text if it seems interesting.
It's not obvious to me that even in the predator prey situation that it will not settle down in some range of complexity and therefore present a plateau
the problem with looking at it this way is that a plateau by definition represents a maxima.
my point was that the balance between drift and selective pressures more likely results in a locally stable equilibrium.
change the relative strengths of any given selective pressure, and you end up at new equilibrium.
relative to any given state, one equilibrium might be described in context as more or less "complex" as a characteristic for any given trait.
It's likely an issue of semantics, but the complexity is just another (even artificial) characteristic of any given trait, and thus can just as easily move backwards as forwards (any specific constraints notwithstanding).
Can disagree with that fishy.
My shortest post and I screwed it up. That should have been. Can't disagree with that.
Sven DiMilo says
Chris Clarke sez:
My estimation of coturnix has risen due to this thread
Seriously, Chris? The guy busts in here breathing fire ("Dennett's chapter on this paper is a piece of crap [later, "shit" -SD] only surpassed in its wrongfulness and maliciousness by the Creationist literature. The rest of his book is not much better – one of the worst pro-evolution books ever written."), and then, when asked to back up such strong opinions, a) appeals to anonymous authority (unnamed "Philosophers of Biology;" Quentin Robert DeNameland, perhaps?), b) appeals to secret private conversations, c) condescends ("Read 25 years of literature in philosophy of biology;" "it was very difficult (probably impossible for a layperson) to identify where Dennett slips and in which step his claim has no legs"), d) egregiously misrepresents the only specific criticism offered, e) gets in a gratuitous swipe or two at Dawkins, again unsubstantiated, f) just can't remember anymore exactly what the silly, embarrassing logical flaw was, but swears there is one, g) drops names (as is his habit), h) just can't remember which closed-access journal contains the devastating arguments he can't remember, i) when reminded of the journal he couldn't remember, dismisses it as a hotbed of wrong-thinking genocentric determinists (one suspects projection of ideological bias), j) lists books (some of them far crappier than Dennett's, IMO), k) pleads space constraints, l) heaves a weary sigh and pleads that he is "just tired of" this "boring," "unimportant" topic (but see comment #3), m) disavows and backs off from, but not really, his earlier writing on the subject, n) sets himself up as an expert on both evolutionary theory and philosophy of biology (how's that degree coming along?), o) questions the motivations of those who are mounting an "emotional," "ferocious defense" of Dennett (but see comment #3), and p) claims he's said it all before, if the reader would just consult the archives of his blog and also read all the comments he's left on other people's blogs. Never once offerring a single valid specific criticism of Dennett's supposedly embarrassingly bad biology.
I'm sincerely curious, Chris: which parts of Quail's behavior on this thread did you find so admirable?
coturnix would "like to see a positive, educated defense of any of Dennett's biology that goes beyond hero-worship."
…oh for pete's sake. Could we first see some detailed criticisms of Dennett's biology that go beyond 'not enough space to type', 'can't be bothered to retrace my arguments', 'the big boys said so', and 'he's much worse in private'? Then we might have something to either agree or disagree with.
As for hero worship, I find Dennett unconvincing on many counts, but interesting to read. To pick something to criticize off the top of my head, I think he accepts the cheater detection module argument too uncritically in DDI (see criticism of Tooby and others by Buller). To pick something good from the book: the discussion on biology and meaning. And no, he's not my uncle, sugar daddy or similar.
You'll excuse me if I do a bit of ad hominem myself, but I don't think I'll find Rose on Dennett convincing after the botched job he did on Dawkins and sociobiology. And if Dawkins and Dennett's ideas are really so naive and easy to criticize, why the need to resort to strawmen like recurrent Nazis? (both you and their published critics seem to need them)
…oh, and I guess my short comment on intragenomic conflict (#81) qualifies as "hero worship" since coturnix didn't stoop to addressing it.
I simply pointed out that you have lied, repeatedly, about what Dennett has written and what his position on rewinding the tape is.
Nice fisking, Sven.
Of course I did point out that coturnix is wrong and used research, facts, and perhaps a bit of with to show he's wrong. As for civility, I provided all that coturnix's willful slander and lies merits.
My estimation of coturnix has risen due to this thread, to be honest.
Has Chris Clarke ever made an intelligent comment? Posting a picture of a spandex-clad mandrill seems to be the height of his powers.
Indeed, the depth of Pete's intellectual dishonesty is impressive. I provided quotes from coturnix that not only laid out his dishonest progression from hearsay to direct claim, but which were directly contradicted by the quotes from Dennett that I provided. coturnix, OTOH, provided no facts, no evidence, just a stream of unsubstantiated accusations. What we see here from coturnix's defenders like Pete and Chris Clarke is tribal cohesion, not rational evaluation.
His ferocious, emotional, grossly dishonest, and fact free attack on Dennett.
Oh, I agree with him that science theory is necessary for science, and belongs to philosophy.
I agree with you on all the rest, however. For example, the discovery of the Planck length and the Planck time has solved the paradox of Achilles and the turtle: for 2500 years, the philosophers had been wrong in considering it a philosophical problem.
It doesn't occur. :-)
That's one of the things Gould was right about: there is no evidence for "ever-increasing levels of complexity", and there is evidence to the contrary.
I also found intellectually offensive the implicit idea that it was almost purely the memes attributes that got it copied into my brain. I can tell you from personal experience that I have a lot of filters on my brain that control it's contents. I'm not like a computer that has no anti-viral software running. Memetics seems like an inkling of a good idea with a lot of hard work still needed. It still needs it's Darwin.
I think Dawkins would say your filters are themselves memes…
For example, the discovery of the Planck length and the Planck time has solved the paradox of Achilles and the turtle: for 2500 years, the philosophers had been wrong in considering it a philosophical problem.
The paradox was resolved by the invention of calculus and the mathematics of limits; discrete length and time measures aren't needed.
It was never considered a "philosophical" problem except in the broadest sense; it was a mathematical paradox.
The notion that space and time aren't infinitely divisible was proposed by the Greeks as one response to Zeno. The discovery of Planck length only applies to Zeno because of that prior observation; it doesn't change the nature of the problem. And it has no bearing on conceivable universes in which time and space are infinitely divisible. The more general solution is that the sum of Zeno's infinite series converges. Even Aristotle noted the significance of the fact that it takes less and less time to cover the shorter and shorter distances.
Ya gotta love the strawman. Wilkins didn't say anything to "recourse". That's like saying that roads don't precede and aren't necessary to driving because people manage to drive without recourse to road builders. Wilkins might be wrong, but this "argument" doesn't touch him.
Here's a relevant section from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy
While proposals for a much more 'inquisitive' and practical approach to the study of nature originated with Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle wrote what is considered to be a seminal work on the distinction between nature and metaphysics called A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. This book, written in 1686, marked the point where the scene was set for natural philosophy to turn into science. It represented a radical departure from the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, and while features of natural philosophy retained some of the trappings of the elitism associated with its precursor, natural philosophy was arguably empirical while previous attempts to describe nature were not. An important distinguishing characteristic of science and natural philosophy is the fact that natural philosophers generally did not feel compelled to test their ideas in a practical way. Instead, they observed phenomena and came up with 'philosophical' conclusions.
Boyle, while he is the first to fully embrace such an approach in both his experimental endeavours and his writings, shares with Bacon (and Galileo who was the inspiration in these matters for both Bacon and Boyle) a conviction that practical experimental observation was the key to a more satisfactory understanding of nature than would have otherwise been sought through either exclusive reference to received authority or a purely speculative approach.
Although Galileo's 'natural philosophy' is hardly distinguishable from science in many ways, the connection between his experiments and his writings about them is characteristically philosophical, rather than being cluttered with the results of meticulously recorded observational detail of practical scientific research, in the way that Boyle subsequently advocated.
Even though Boyle described what he practiced as 'natural philosophy', the very innovations that Boyle introduced can be seen as a basis for delineating a transition from proto-science to science. Among these innovations are an insistence upon the publication of detailed experimental results, including the results of unsuccessful experiments; and also a requirement for the replication of experiments as a means of validating observational claims.
Thus Boyle's application of the term 'natural philosophy' to his own work may be regarded an anachronistic conflation with earlier proto-science, since the distinction between the terms 'natural philosophy' and 'science' only arose after Boyle's passing.
Boyle would therefore describe his work as 'natural philosophy', whereas we would describe it as 'science'; and yet Boyle's use was correct for his own time. Nonetheless, he is in many ways the architect of the modern distinction between the two terms.
The ancient emphasis on deduction has its representative in Aristotle's Organum, and the new emphasis on induction and research has its representative in Francis Bacon's treatise Novum Organum.
Truth machine:
I basically agree with you, but please find some way to compact your posts more in the future. The current stream of argument reads like parts of several scientific articles cut into pieces and reordered by the blind. A little less stream of consciousness in organization would be an order of magnitude more readable.
It's a blog comment section, Dan, not a book. You objection is silly and pointless.
Dan, I appreciate your intelligent response to Brian Macker on Marxism. Brian's appeal to conservative libertarians Sowell and Hazlitt says a lot about his biases on the subject. Ya gotta love the appeal to the authority of Hoover Institute fellow Sowell as "a former Marxist" — is Paul Wolfowitz up next? I wonder if Brian knows that Sowell claims that Marx never held to the labor theory of value that Brian thinks both was a joke and led to the deaths of millions, a claim as absurd as the creo claim that it was Darwin who was responsible for the carnage of the 20th century. Of course, it's the rare American who is familiar with the history of Russia, or of the role of Nixon's illegal bombing of Cambodia in the creation of the Khmer Rouge, whose rule was ended by communist VietNam.
"Dan, I appreciate your intelligent response to Brian Macker on Marxism."
What? This one:
Well ever hear of the Sokal affair? Randomly generated text is a good description of postmodernism which he also finds interesting.
Negi says
In response to post #155:
Hey, Brian, you should definitely stay in your field of biology. Just as Biology has a Neo-Darwinian Synthesis consisting of darwinism with "genetic underpinnings," economics has a Neo-Classical Synthesis (mostly worked out by Samuelson and his team at MIT) that builds Keynesianism on "classical microeconomic underpinnings." (Note: I know there's some more to the neo-darwinian synthesis, but give me a break. I don't know that much about evolution.) It's even more analogous than that. Development's importance in evolution was understated for a very long time. Similarly, in economics, the role of monetary policy and floating exchange rates was vastly underplayed. Throwing out Keynes because he wasn't exactly right on every issue (note: His General Theory actually outlines the special case of an economy in a liquidity trap.) is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Do you want to throw away natural selection because it doesn't account for everything?
If you want to criticize John Maynard Keynes, read the primary material like you said. His General Theory is far more nuanced and complicated than you could possibly understand without reading any of the source material. Additionally, the theories that Keynes fought against were simply pernicious and damaging (If you don't want to read the whole book, check out Paul Krugman's foreword http://www.pkarchive.org/economy/GeneralTheoryKeynesIntro.html ).
Can you say "Austrian School?" Oh wait, you can't, because they essentially caused the great depression. To quote Andrew Mellon, Herbert Hoover's GREAT treasury secretary, ""Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. . . . It will purge the rottenness out of the system. . . . Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks. . . .."
So yeah, the whole point of this post was to let you know that you don't even know enough to comment. Also, if you're going to link a book, try to make sure it's not from a fake-ass conservative think tank called "The Foundation for Economic Education." Hazlitt has no credentials and was part of the Ayn Rand "let the babies starve in the street while we laugh at how successful we are based on who our parents are" cult.
PS: You're just as bad as everyone you criticize for not reading original sources.