Denial of Evolution VI.

[leopold]

leopold, there is an entire website dedicated to answering questions of this sort. Do us all a favor and read it. Most of your questions regarding Gould, et al. will be answered. Here's a link to take you specifically to the page on micro v macro evolution.

An excerpt from the pages introduction:

Macroevolution
Its Definition, Philosophy and History
by John Wilkins
Version 2.1.3
Copyright © 1997-2006
[Last Update: September 23, 2006]

To be read in conjunction with Douglas Theobald's 29+ Evidences for Macroevolution FAQ.

This FAQ covers the following topics:

• What macroevolution and microevolution mean
• How the terms are used and how they came to be coined
• Confusions in the scientific literature about the terms
• A philosophical discussion of whether macroevolution is reducible to microevolution, or if it stands as a separate process in evolution
• Whether or not there are barriers that prevent microevolution, which creationists accept, from becoming macroevolution, which they reject
• Whether or not the idea of macroevolution can be falsified, and whether specific accounts of macroevolution can be falsified.

how about posting their definitions in this thread?

 

[Randwolf]

how about posting their definitions in this thread?

Your mouse not working today leopold?

 

[Rav]

how about posting their definitions in this thread?

What about the perfectly reasonable requirement of knowing what you're talking about before crusading against it? In other words, what excuse do you have for being too lazy to learn the basics of evolution, on your own, before trying to falsify it?

 

[rpenner]

Leopold -- when you ask old questions, it is sufficient to point to old answers. When you either quote-mine or steal without credit from people to quote-mine it is not beneficial to your development to post isolated extracts for you. So please click on the link, read the single web page from top to bottom, and then please demonstrate that you read it by commenting on or questioning what you read in sensible fashion.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/macroevolution.html (This is Randwolf's first link)

 

[leopold]

They are over a dozen new species - hence it can't correctly be characterized as microevolution.

not according to the definition provided by a prestigious university.

Nothing I've read fits that characterization.

then you are either blind, a liar, or refuse to accept it because that is EXACTLY what was said, read the article.

Yes, but I presume you would agree that Gould and Ayala were two of the three most authoritative experts in the field

i am not going to say who was the most authoritative at the meeting, i wasn't there nor do i have list of who was.
i WILL say gould and ayala were both mentioned by name in the piece.

- with Dawkins being the third (I wonder what he was doing then).

maybe out front protesting.

I disagree with the way this is stated.

correct, i'm sorry.
i should have stated what was written, at the risk to some a clear, no as to the question (and the central theme of the meeting) of whether the process of microevolution can be applied to macro evolution.

It should be expanded to include the fact that they were talking about a particular issue in Gould's theory, and without qualifying the details, this remark would not convey the truth of the matter.

yes, they discussed various ways of trying to explain what they found, goulds hypothesis amoung them.

That omits the caveats that still are being buried in this thread.

what caveats are those?
it's a very simple matter aqueous, these scientists simply did not have the evidence.
i have no idea why you can't understand that.
do you think they had the evidence but failed to recognize it? all 50 of them?

Part of the disconnect here is that we are talking about Darwin's Theory of Evolution, as amended, which only addresses speciation and nothing more.

incorrect, the discussion here is about the conclusion of the conference and how/ why they reached it.

My reason for harping on creationism is that it's invalid.

for the puroses of this thread i don't give a rats ass about creationism.

The fact is, the Theory of Evolution accounts for the nascence of divergent groups which no longer interbreed, from a common breeding pair (or pairs). This critical fact has somehow been buried in this thread.

and you must remember the very real problem of erroneous statistical correlations.

That's why we have to be careful to distinguish the meaning of words here.

and i am trying to do that aqueous because i want answers to this.

We have been talking apples and oranges for quite a while now. if anything, we ought to at least agree on definitions. That seems to elude this thread for some reason.

apparently because most here just simply refuse to acknowledge what these scientists concluded and why.
they simply do not want to admit that WE HAVE APPARENTLY BEEN LIED TO, and any scientist with integrity should be thoroughly pissed off about it.

 

[Randwolf]

General information...

I thought some might be interested in a free link to leopold's infamous Science article as it can be difficult to find the original in its entirety. (without a membership)

Science 21 November 1980:
Vol. 210 no. 4472 pp. 883-887
DOI: 10.1126/science.6107993
Evolutionary theory under fire

It may take time to load, but it's there. Now everyone can see what all the quote mining fuss is about.

 

[leopold]

RAV has already posted a link to the article and has been verified as the original by james r.
page 8, post 127

 

[leopold]

I thought some might be interested in a free link to leopold's infamous Science article . . .

it isn't MY article and it was published in a respected peer reviewed journal.

 

[Rav]

it isn't MY article and it was published in a respected peer reviewed journal, but I don't understand it.

Fixed.

 

[Randwolf]

RAV has already posted a link to the article and has been verified as the original by james r.
page 8, post 127

Oops. Sorry. Missed it.

 

[Rav]

Actually Randwolf's link is quite nifty, being that it contains more than just the specific article we are discussing.

 

[Rav]

My previous comment was an understatement. This is a brilliant resource. Up to this point I was certain that a bunch of people would have written to Science complaining about Lewin's coverage of the Chigaco conference, but I had no way to check. Now I do, and I have, and there were. Check "Macroevolution Conference" under "Letters" in this issue: http://worldtracker.org/media/libra...tml/Science.vol.211.issue.4484.year.1981.html

Here's a prophetic start:

Thank you for Lewin's "Evolutionary theory under fire," a fine article that vividly describes the self-correcting manner by which scientific knowledge progresses. The choice of title, while obviously designed to draw attention to the proceedings of an important symposium, is unfortunate because it suggests that evolution is being challenged instead of pointing to the reevaluation of the mechanisms by which organic evolution proceeds. As a result, this article is undoubtedly destined to enter the out-of-context arsenal that has become a mainstay of recent creationist literature. We are sure the creationists will be delighted to have an opportunity to cite Science in apparent support of their cause.

JOSEPH E. ARMSTRONG
BOYCE A. DRUMMOND
Department of Biological Sciences,
Illinois State University, Normal 61761

Lewin has basically had his arse handed to him on a plate for his terrible reporting. We're going to be pulling some gold out of this one.

 

[Rav]

Continuing on:

A number of speakers at the macroevolution conference held from 16 to 19 October 1980 at the Field Museum (Research News, 21 Nov. 1980, p. 883) claimed that major portions of the modern synthetic theory of evolution have been put in doubt by recent work on macromutation and punctuated equilibrium. Roger Lewin's article gives the impression that skepticism concerning these claims was expressed by a minority of the participants. In fact, many (perhaps most) of those present remained skeptical, and the proportion of doubters within evolutionary biology as a whole is almost certainly higher than that seen at the conference. Lewin admits that he risks "doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting." True to his word, he presents a simplistic caricature of the modern synthesis, renders condescending judgments on its defenders, and repeatedly gives the last, longer, and stronger word to the advocates of saltationism.

The bias in Lewin's account is especially evident in his choice of quotations and in the interpretations he puts on those quotations. The saltationist view is represented by numerous quotes from Gould, Vrba, and others. But proponents of the synthetic view appear in quotes rarely, and then only as complainers. We never hear them explaining their views. For example, Lande's talk on the genetic basis of phenotypic change is dismissed in a single sentence as an unsuccessful attempt "to persuade his audience of the more traditional view. . . ." Lande's work is original and highly relevant to the questions addressed by the conference. It is traditional only in that it ties explicit, detailed models to hard data. As far as we can tell from reading Lewin's article, defenders of the modern synthesis base their views more on blind faith than on reason. Lewin writes, "Ledyard Stebbins (one of the architects of the Modern Synthesis) feels there is little to be explained at all by species selection or the Effect Hypothesis, adhering as he does to the gradualist position." Two sentences later a summary statement by Stebbins is dismissed as "a polarized view of what actually transpired." No saltationist is given such treatment.

We believe that the current debate on macroevolution is useful and healthy. We also believe that there is plenty of room in Science for advocacy of particular positions: there are letters, book reviews, and above all, scientific reports. The partisans can slug it out in those places, where they have the responsibility (and the opportunity) to justify their views with logic and evidence, and where it is understood that biases are being expressed. Within the scientific community and within the public at large, people look to Science for information on developments outside their own areas of special competence. Neither constituency is served well when advocacy is disguised as "news," thus evading the usual conventions of scientific discourse. In taking it on himself to arbitrate a scientific debate, Lewin has encouraged widespread misunderstanding of a particular set of issues and, more generally, of the way science actually works.

D. J. FUTUYMA
Department of Ecology and Evolution,
State University of New York,
Stony Brook 11794

R. C. LEWONTIN, G . C. MAYER
J. SEGER, J. W. STUBBLEFIELD III
Museum of Comparative Zoology,
Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138

 

[Rav]

And more:

Reporters at the Chicago macroevolution conference, including Lewin, apparently missed what was really happening there. The fossil record says that profuse evolution has indeed occurred over millions of years, but data just aren't sensitive enough to analyze evolutionary kinetics. This is the province of the evolutionary geneticist who works with descent and change in populations of present-day organisms. Very simply, we have abundantly demonstrated that evolution can be either jerky or gradual depending on the circumstances and the genes concerned. So what is all the fuss about? Forty years ago, the modem followers of Darwin (Fisher, Haldane, Wright, Dobzhansky, and Mayr) stole the evolutionary spotlight from the paleontologists. This conference saw an attempt by a few fossil zealots who are able to charm reporters to regain attention. Most unfortunately, the ideas they used have neither data base nor innovation.

HAMPTON L. CARSON
Department of Genetics, John A . Burns
School of Medicine, University of
Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu 96822

 

[rpenner]

1. leopold claims to understand the definitions of macroevolution and microevolution
2. leopold claims to understand the 1980 conference reported on by Roger Lewin in Science
3. leopold claims that all 50 scientists are logically and legally bound to forever have the dogmatic views about macroevolution and microevolution that leopold ascribes to them based on second-hand reports as leopold not only refuses to read their actual writings from 1980 but denies that they have a right to point out that Roger Lewin seems to have misquoted them and that the quote makes no logical sense.

leopold has been doing this for [POST=2716879]over 2 years[/POST], in the face of all evidence, so it is clear he is being driven by dogmatic adhesion to a creed and not evidence and logic.

leopold reads this

According to the traditional position, therefore, if sedimentation and fossilization did indeed encapsulate a complete record of prehistory, then it would reveal the postulated transitional organisms. But it isn't and it doesn't.

and thinks "it" means "evolution" when a sensible reading is that "it" means "sedimentation and fossilization."
leopold reads this

In a generous admission Francisco Ayala, a major figure in propounding the Modern Synthesis in the United States, said: "We would not have predicted stasis from population genetics, but I am now convinced from 884 what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate."

and he thinks Roger Lewin is (via his purported quote of Francisco Ayala) communicating a statement of fact. Actually, what is being conveyed is a distorted description of punctuated equilibrium -- a mechanism which imposes a non-trivial rhythm on the rate of phylogenetic change in the fossil record. This idea was only 8 years old in 1980 and it was already strongly convincing. When you have a large and successful population during a long period which lacks disasters, there is no adaptational pressure and thus small changes don't tend to accumulation in any particular direction and the size of the population buffers it against genetic drift, so the distinctive phenotype can persist in some cases over millions of generations, and this is what is meant by "stasis" in punctuated equilibrium. None of the mechanisms of evolution (variation, competition, natural selection, mutation) have been turned off but since the population is large and successful it tends to stick with that success than to wander off. (leopold used to think the "884" had more significance than a page-number preserved by lazy cut-and-paste even though his other quotes were weirdly hyphenated due to the same cut-and-paste procedure.)

In reality, Roger Lewin was not at the conference as a scientist but rather as a reporter. News reports, even in peer-reviewed journals of good reputation, are not peer-reviewed articles. And even peer-reviewed articles are by no means guaranteed to be infallible -- some amount to no more than describing a line of enquiry, some have typos in data, some have important calibration errors. Science isn't a collection of journal articles -- science is the process of improving human understanding of the universe by throwing out the ideas that don't work. And leopold is not doing science since he should have thrown out the idea that he understood this topic two years ago.

But it is irrelevant that you claim your post was edited, since [POST=2716892]the very next post[/POST] double-discredits your news coverage with a quote from the purported author of the source and the paper that was presented at the 1980 conference. You therefore made no true observation and your post and any editing of it was irrelevant in 1980, 2001, 2011 or today. A news article is not peer-reviewed scientific research and a purported quote lacks the authority of stating an authors opinion that his own writings have. Here is the relevant rebuttal:
http://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/another_creationist_out_of_context_quote.htm

I don't know how Roger Lewin could have gotten in his notes the quotation he attributes to me. I presented a paper/lecture and spoke at various times from the floor, but I could not possibly have said (at least as a complete sentence) what Lewin attributes to me. In fact, I don't know what it means. How could small changes NOT accumulate! In any case, virtually all my evolutionary research papers evidence that small (genetic) changes do accumulate.

The paper that I presented at the conference reported by Lewin is virtually the same that I presented in 1982 in Cambridge, at a conference commemorating the 200 [sic] anniversary of Darwin's death. It deals with the claims of "punctuated equilibrium" and how microevolutionary change relates to macroevolution. (I provide experimental results showing how one can obtain in the laboratory, as a result of the accumulation of small genetic changes, morphological changes of the magnitude observed by paleontologists and presented as evidence of punctuated equilibrium.) The paper was published as part of the conference proceedings:

Ayala, F.J. 1983. Microevolution and macroevolution. In: D.S. Bendall, ed., Evolution from Molecules to Men (Cambridge University Press), pp. 387-402.

More accessible are two papers dealing with the same topic, written with my colleague G.L. Stebbins: Stebbins, G.L. and F.J. Ayala. 1981. Is a new evolutionary synthesis necessary? Science 213:967-971. (I quote from the abstract of the paper:

"Macroevolutionary processes are underlain by microevolutionary phenomena and are compatible with the synthetic theory of evolution." But, please, read the whole paper to get the wealth of results and ideas that we are discussing; and read also the following paper:

"Stebbins, G.L. and F.J. Ayala. 1985. The Evolution of Darwinism. Sci. American 253:72-82."​

You may quote from this letter so long as you don't quote out of context or incomplete sentences.

Reading Ayala's 1983 article, we see on page 392 his breakdown of leopold's question:

The issue 'whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated' to macroevolution involves, at least, three separate questions. (1) Whether microevolutionary processes operate (and have operated in the past) throughout the organisms which make up the taxa in which macroevolutionary phenomena are observed. (2) Whether the microevolutionary processes identified by population geneticists (mutation, random drift, natural selection) are sufficient to account for the morphological changes and other macroevolutionary phenomena observed in higher taxa, or wherther additional microevolutionary processes need to be postulated. (3) Whether theories concerning evolutionary trends and other macroevolutionary patterns can be derived from knowledge of microevolutionary processes.

Ayala answers #1 and #2 in the affirmative but I think confused history with theories in his answer of #3. #3 logically requires an understanding of climate, astronomy, plate tectonics, ocean flow, geochemistry, etc to account for the history of life on earth and I think Ayala correctly gets caught up in complexity and answers the wrong question. Humans make choices. Economics is the study of humans making choices. But even complete knowledge of economics will not describe history, because history is about people making choices with the ideas and information that they had at the time which is far more complex than describing how people make choices under fixed laboratory conditions. So then Ayala's endorsement of a study of macroevolutionary history and mechanisms as a field of study in its own right does nothing to weaken his overwhelming endorsement of #1 and #2. leopold, importantly, seems to deny #1 and #2 so #3 becomes irrelevant to the present conversation.

The main idea is that stasis in the fossil record of phenotypes is real and is a trivial prediction of a static fitness landscape with a persistent, isolated broad peak. But this does not mean that small changes unrelated to the fitness would not accumulate even to the point of speciation -- just that later population resembled former populations in the characteristics that made the former population successful at the local fitness peak. A change in the fitness landscape (climate change, introduction of a competitor, etc) would "puncture" the period of phenotype stasis at the broad peak of the fitness function (aka. equilibrium).

http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/VIIA1bPunctuated.shtml

dr. ayala and his quote is entirely irrelevant to this discussion and my request.
the discussion is about the conclusion reached by the conference of 50 scientists and my request has NOTHING to do with dr. ayala.

This is a remarkable claim considering that you invented a conspiracy about the page number mistakenly included in your purported quote of Ayala.

this is micro evolution.
it was the conclusion of these scientists that this process can't be extrapolated to macro evolution.

there were 50 there, not just 3 or 4 or 10.
don't you understand?
these scientists FOUND NO EVIDENCE for accumulating changes that lead to macro evolution.
these scientists had almost 200 years to find this stuff and it simply wasn't forthcoming.
to imply that we have all these wonderful transitional fossils that explains evolution is simply untrue.

see immediately above.

you can call this creationist until your tongue rots but it changes nothing.

You have completely misinterpreted what the "clear no" was in regards to. So has pretty much everyone who has ever put that quote on a creationist website. The standard evolutionist response is to reestablish the context simply by quoting other portions of the article. That's all that needs to be done. Most recently, it's been done by James R and Aqueous Id on page 26. Previous to that it's been done by an array of contributors across several threads in the last 2+ years.

Your problem, of course, is two-fold. First, you've either never read the article in its entirety, or you've failed to understand its content (hence your failure to correctly contextualize certain portions of it). Second, you refuse to listen to anyone who does understand it.

The bottom line is that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that there was a single evolutionary biologist at the Chicago conference who was disputing that gradualism is a key feature of evolutionary development. In fact both Francis Ayala and Stephen Gould, who clearly form the cornerstone of your efforts to extinguish the idea that gradualism was a concept championed by evolutionists of the day, are both on record (through statements as well as work they were actually doing at the time) as saying the opposite, and have been ever since.

okay, no problem.
these scientists concluded that the process of microevolution can't be extrapolated to macroevolution.
how did they conclude that?

definition of macroevolution:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/evoscales_04

Words have more than one meaning (especially in sources with decades inbetween them) and so it is best to quote Roger Lewin if you want to know what Roger Lewin meant in 1980 about macroevolution. Fortunately in the same paragraph where he defines his terms so it is clear he is aware that he is doing some damage to the story in his attempts to convey it.

The changes within a population have been termed microevolution, and they can indeed be accepted as a consequence of shifting gene frequencies. Changes above the species level - involving the origin of new species and the establishment of higher taxonomic patterns - are known as macroevolution. The central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution. At the risk of doing violence to the positions of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No. What is not so clear, however, is whether microevolution is totally decoupled from macroevolution. The two can more probably be seen as a continuum with a notable overlap.

Roger Lewin's article does not say all 50 had the same position. Indeed, Ayala, who was actually one of the 50, is the better source points out that no sensible person would say macroevolution is not a consequence of microevolution. The nuanced position of the conference was that macroevolution by itself is interesting in ways unique to it is largely the same way History and Economics are unique fields of study. In the future one can imagine these fields merging more completely as man's ignorance of the universe is gradually eroded.

When you try and insert another source's definition you do violence to Roger Lewin's communication. But even the NSF-funded site Understanding Evolution that you quote tells you microevolution drives macroevolution, so you are not correctly summarizing science to say the opposite.

Accumulating change
Microevolutionary change might seem too unimportant to account for such amazing evolutionary transitions as the origin of dinosaurs or the radiation of land plants — however, it is not. Microevolution happens on a small time scale — from one generation to the next. When such small changes build up over the course of millions of years, they translate into evolution on a grand scale — in other words, macroevolution!
The four basic evolutionary mechanisms — mutation, migration, genetic drift, and natural selection — can produce major evolutionary change if given enough time. And life on Earth has been accumulating small changes for 3.8 billion years — more than enough time for these simple evolutionary processes to produce its grand history.

I have not gone to a research library to read all of the related 1980's materials, but it seems like Ayala and others are making an argument from ignorance when they say the rhythm of macroevolution can't be derived from microevolution that they are actually only communicated "I didn't think of that" which is no proof of the impossibility of it. Does anyone have a good example of them making a stronger claim than this?

 

[rpenner]

it isn't MY article and it was published in a respected peer reviewed journal.

In the section marked "Research News" -- so it is not a peer-reviewed article.

 

[Rav]

One more:

Lewin summarizes a complex series of formal papers and discussions. As he notes, my particular views on the fossil record as a source for data on certain aspects of macroevolution were not to the liking of some of my paleontological colleagues. In the brief comments on this point, however, my position seems to come through as an intonater of the "ancient lament" on the incompleteness of the fossil record. The level of incompleteness of which I spoke can be improperly inferred from the following quoted sentence: "I take a dim view of the fossil record as a source of data" and the reply by John Sepkoski: "I'm tired of hearing about the imperfections of the fossil record." Although tiredness may hardly be a basis for rejection, I believe that both of these remarks, appearing out of context, fail to carry the sense of what was meant and I should like to clarify this.

My presentation was an affirmation of my conviction that evolution must proceed with continuity, involving the derivation of new species from antecedent species. Three hypotheses of the models of the derivation of new species were presented:

1) Phyletic gradualism, by gradual accumulation of small changes (Darwinian);
2) Punctuated or stepped speciation, with moderate morphological disjunction between antecedent species (as punctuated equilibria); and
3) Speciation with major disjunctions between antecedent and descendant species (mechanism unspecified).

I maintained that by and large the fossil record does not provide data necessary to establish an equivalency between "fossil" species and "living" species. If this is the case, it is difficult and misleading to infer microevolutionary changes from the temporal or geographic sequences in the record at both the infra or interspecies level. Although both the first and second hypotheses may, and in fact likely do, express modes that exist, the fossil record itself is insufficient to falsify either one. This is the level of incompleteness with which I was concerned, far from denying the value of the fossil record in other aspects of evolutionary investigation. The third hypothesis is supportable in general if data are less than critically analyzed, but can be falsified by many particular instances as long as morphospecies are accepted as a sufficient basis for interpretation, which I consider to be the case at this level. The hypothesis cannot, however, be totally falsified by the contradictory cases alone, both because the record is insufficient for such a generalization and because it is by no means clear that only a single mode of change exists. Biological investigation of existing species can, I believe, provide a more adequate basis for support or falsification of this hypothesis.

Finally, the matter of "species" stasis, a subject of the conference, is supported by a great many well documented cases in the fossil record, if what is meant is the stability of morphospecies over long periods of time. Rarely, however, are the data of the record sufficient for interpretation of microevolutionary changes within these lineages or determination of such consequences as physiological, reproductive, or mechanical changes and similar modifications which may affect functional, populational, and ecological aspects of the morphospecies of concern. It was an exhortation to reasonable caution in these directions that was the thrust of my remarks. I do not, in fact, think that a great gulf exists between me and my colleagues on this matter, nor have I been, as might be inferred from Lewin's article, a diehard proponent of evolutionary gradualism or sufficiency of explanation by synthetic theory.

EVERETT C. OLSON
Department of Biology,
University of California,
Los Angeles 90024

 

[Trippy]

I think one good example of what is being discussed is the "Triceratopean affair". It speaks to, for example, some of what Olson appears to be alluding to as well as directly addressing some of the points being raised to address Leopold.

 

[leopold]

rpenner
can you please post some corrections, amendments, or errata from science regarding this matter?
please, no third sources, i refuse to respond to such.

 

[Trippy]

rpenner
can you please post some corrections, amendments, or errata from science regarding this matter?
please, no third sources, i refuse to respond to such.

So... The letters published by Science in response to Lewins editorial in Science aren't good enough?