First, until a third-party auditor of your income verifies that, I for one will refrain from believing it. You’ve been a bull-sh*tter on everything else, so why not this.

Second, we can judge the honesty of your inquiry by the inquiry itself. So far, the consensus opinion seems to be that your inquiry is not honest.

It’s amazing that this only happened in the last generation, considering that evolution has been the foundation and connecting theme of biology for what – a century? A century and a half?

Second, the inferential link between micro- and macroevolution is obvious – the accumulation of change.

Third, this number of philosophers is so considerable that Steve didn’t list any. The number ‘zero’ is ‘considerable’, but not in the way that Steve implies.

An “Umfunktionierung” of ID? Whose being naive? Perhaps you’ve been outside the States for too long to understand what’s been going on. ID is a deliberately crafted agenda put out by think tanks that are part of the network of the right-wing “movement” political machine. Just follow the money trail. It’s aim is not just to shore up the supprt of its reactionary fundie “base”, while providing it with a disguise of intellectual “respectability”, but, more broadly, to obfuscate the public understanding of science, while mobilizing anxieties and resentments in the service of its political and economic machinations. Ya see, back in the good ol’ U.S. of A., its not just religious believers who are resistant to evolutionary thinking, but your average sensual man-on-the-street, as well. The latter is offended in his naive sense of teleology, as if human purposes must be metaphysically pre-inscribed in the world to hold good, and thinks evolution means that life boils down to mere “chance”, (since he is liable to have only the dimmest understanding of probability or modal concepts such as contingency,- just look at the popularity and lucrativeness of state lotteries.) And, indeed, evolutionary thinking does cut against such naive “metaphysics”, since it implies that human purposes are incorrigibly a human responsibility in an indifferent, if not inhospitable world, which thought is irremediably anxiety-provoking. That’s why “Darwinism”, in disctinction from other equally naturalistic branches of natural science, presents such a rich target for the right-wing attack machine: anything that obfucates public understanding and provokes anxieties capable of reactionary mobilization will do. Now, the relation between politics and rationality is a vexed one, but any political position or commitment certainly aims at effectiveness, if not exactly normative truth or justice. If one is at all attached to a “progressive” and “democratic” agenda, wouldn’t attempting to rationally obviate public resistances to delimited naturalistic understandings be the thing to do, rather than free-riding on an agenda that seeks to inculcate an ideological denial of “reality” or reality? Perhaps your understanding of rationality in politics is as loose as your understanding of scientific rationality.

Konrad Lorenz was an important path-breaking biologist, and if his views on the instinctual bases of aggression, especially with reference to the human case, were unwelcome,- (Austrians from that time had some untoward complexes and experiences to deal with),- his life’s work did contributed to the rise of the burgeoning field of primate ethology, which has since considerably limited, modified and complicated his claims.

In short, the easier it becomes to convince yourselves that humans can reproduce in the lab or on computers evolutionary processes that are presumed to have occurred for billions of years in nature, the more you’re making the ID point that God is a Big Engineer and we are imitating him.

Sure. And the better I am at wiping my butt, the more I’m making the ID point that God painted the Grand Canyon.

Bye, Steve.

(1)I have not yet been paid a cent for serving as an expert witness for the defence in the Dover trial. You may recall that the school board has gone bankrupt, since by losing the case, they’ve had to pay both sides’ court costs. My inquiry here is more honest than you seem to think.

(2)It’s always worth keeping in mind that the people who come up with a finding are not necessarily the ones who most benefit from it. Mendel may have been a special creationist, but his work has mainly served the interests of Neo-Darwinists like yourselves who don’t share his metaphysical/theological assumptions. The point cuts both ways: The more you can make it seem as though the history of life on earth is something that can be simulated on a computer or reproduced in a lab, the more easily it will be for ID people to say that you’ve demonstrated God’s programme.

(3)This last point is where Darwin matters. Darwin didn’t think that evolutionary theory was reducible to a set of forces whose combined interactions on elements (that are themselves programmed) could be demonstrated on demand like a physics experiment. Darwin wasn’t aspiring to be the Newton of biology because he didn’t think that life worked like physics. In case, you haven’t noticed, there are no laws of evolution. If Darwin believed there were such laws, he would have probably remained a theist, as most physicists did – and remain today, I suspect.

(4)I take you at your word that Darwin is now irrelevant for ‘modern evolutionary theory’, not least because you’ve taken his insights in a direction he did not think was possible – namely, one that is congenial to ID. I know this conclusion will sound strange to you, but perhaps you’re thinking about ID the wrong way. When someone like Behe talks about the ‘irreducible complexity’ of, say, the bacterial flagellum, you guys focus on the assumption that the flagellum had to be created all at once, which suggests a divine designer. The more daring assumption is that such a designer would think like a human – i.e. someone who does in nature what humans do in labs when they bioengineer things. In short, the easier it becomes to convince yourselves that humans can reproduce in the lab or on computers evolutionary processes that are presumed to have occurred for billions of years in nature, the more you’re making the ID point that God is a Big Engineer and we are imitating him.

(5)Darwin short-circuited that inference by giving the impression that the origins of life are pretty much random, and life need not have developed the way it did at all. And if you want to keep a clear boundary between modern evolutionary theory and ID, then you should continue to pay attention to Darwin.

Pax Vobiscum

Agreed. The job is done. Another data point has been generated showing incontrovertibly that Steve Fuller is an insufferable willfully ignorant blowhard and anti-science (i.e., pro-creationist) propagandist who is incapable of acknowledging his profound errors.

Anytime you’re ready to fess up and apologize, Steve—be our guest. Based on my many years of experience as a Christian, I would humbly suggest that an admission and an apology is the “right thing” to do.

Of course, if you insist on continuing to smear scientists and peddle ID on the Internet, dissembling all the while, rest assured that we’re paying attention.

My respect for morphologists is anything but condescending. IF morphologists HAD been guided by the modern synthesis, and had the molecular/genetic data been available to them, then the framework they constructed would hardly be worth a footnote. That their independently constructed framework is in good agreement with the molecular phylogeny is precisely the point. Us molecular types on the otherhand, can be suspected of having had the modern synthesis in the back of our minds all along.

Scientists generally get excited when independent fields using unrelated methods converge on a common picture. Makes us think we’re on to something. It reinforces the notion that the model of reality that emerges from faithful execution of the scientific process is independent of the starting point and the details of the path taken. That doesn’t mean we will necessarily arrive at a single formulation of a single theory (e.g. look at physics). It means the best theories available at any given time will give equivalent predictions.

I don’t know whether a scientists belief in an objective reality is historically rooted in theology, but your point sounds plausible. (Afterall, astromony started out as astrology.) That history is fascinating, but it is really just a starting point of a particular path that led to our concept of science. More importantly, that belief is strongly reinforced by the evolution of successful, non-trivial theories that have undeniable predictive power. E.g. “God did it” is not a valid theory.

An elementary illustration of why I think there is something fundamentally correct about the scientific process that goes deeper than our prejudices can be found in physics: Two principles that emerged very early in the evolution of science 1) the same experiment performed in geographically separate locations should yield the same results, 2) the same experminent performed at two different times should yield the same results. Centuries later in the early 20th century physicists recognized that these requirements (invariance under translations in space and invariance under translations in time) correspond to the laws conservation of momentum and conservation of energy, respectively.

On the one hand, I imagine that an epistomologist like yourself (I’m speaking way beyond my expertise here, so feel free to correct my naivete) might say that of course you got out exactly the laws you asked for by the criteria that were set. I on the other hand would invert the relationship and suggest that scientists stumbled on two principles that are fundamentally necessary to construction of predictive theories about the universe. The reason I believe that is that ignoring the predictive power of the conservation laws can have a very severe impact on one’s chances of survival (e.g. while driving on the highway).

Steve, evolution, including speciation, has been observed in real time. It is a fact.

That just gives us a static taxonomic order.

It does much more than that.

It says nothing about the actual causal processes themselves.

It says a lot about them. You’re just not listening.

I’m not questioning the biological reality of the tree of life. Rather, I’m asking about how the tree acquired its shape.

Mutation, natural selection, drift, sexual selection, transduction, retroviral integration, etc. All these things go into MET.

BTW, a tree is a poor metaphor. It’s better to view it as looking down on a bush, with the origin in the center and the present being the circumference.

After all, that is the real bone of contention between Darwinists and ID people.

Well, Steve, since Darwin didn’t come up with drift, mutation, viral transduction, transposable elements, et al., it’s pure sophistry to call me and other modern biologists Darwinists. Since I’ve pointed out that falsehood above and you persist in using it, I have to conclude that your persistence is deliberately dishonest.

But to say that genetic information has always reproduced the same way leaves the question open as to whether natural selection etc. or some divine programme are involved in determining the success rates of this mechanical process.
It leaves that open in the theological sense, but not in the scientific sense. There is absolutely no evidence for divine programming or intervention (again, specified and irreducible complexity fail as evidence, since they do not correctly identify designed systems). There are mountains of evidence for the inheritance of variations that can be selected for or against. Science goes with the evidence, and applies it to those systems that cannot or have not yet been systematically examined.

This description, of course, doesn’t even get into the actual molecular evidence that the mediators of heritable change, the replication and segregation systems, are ancient, and our knowledge of today’s systems applies to their ancestors’.

There seems to be a problem with the way you guys use terms like ‘evolution’ and ‘common descent’ to describe, on the one hand, something depicted on cladogram or demonstrable on demand in a lab and, on the other, something that’s actually happened in nature. This is why I return to the fossils.
That’s a failing with your understanding of a scientific theory then, rather than a problem with our writing. Theories unify experimental evidence and observation, applying defined mechanisms to explain the observations. Evolutionary theory unifies the fossil record with the demonstrated instances of speciation and the heritable variation/selection. These sorts of extrapolations go on in all fields of science – for example, plate tectonics unifies geochemistry, modern seismology, and evidence of the geological past within a single theory, even if it cannot directly address much of the past (or even address much of the present via controlled experiment). It’s considered as fantastically successful as evolution.

All of these – the molecular evidence, observations of the present, genetics, genomics, fossils – are part of evolutionary theory; removing any one may make it easier for a non-scientist to grasp, but it would in turn weaken the theory both in terms of its evidentiary support and explanatory power.

Perhaps he fears an “imperialistic” over-extention of evolutionary thinking to socio-cultural processes that would undermine social understandings. But that’s a philosophical matter, without any established evolutionary warrant, and can readily be argued against philosophically, rather than through claiming to establish another ersatz “scientific” research program. Perhaps he’s worried about “transhuman” science fictions, but that’s just a genre of gruesome comedy and has little bearing on the contributions of evolutionary thinking to the challenges we are likely to face. What’s truly weird about Fuller’s tactic or position is that he claims to want to do a politicized sociology of science without doing any elementary political sociology first, such that he ends up perversely supporting a tendency clearly allied to corporatist and reactionary/phalangist political programs that seek to repress natural science in the interests of imposing a functionally authoritarian social and politico-economic order. Go figure.

Actually, guys like you bother me a lot more than our biological brethren. You must be young and/or naïve. Evolutionary psychology has come a long way since it was demonised as ‘sociobiology’ thirty years ago, not just as a field of research (which admittedly remains controversial) but as an off-the-shelf explanatory framework for social phenomena. Books like Pinker’s The Blank Slate would have been given the Konrad Lorenz treatment in the 1970s. Now he’s seen as the most reasonable guy on the planet. To be sure, transhumanism is still in its infancy but it has a considerable cross-ideological cult following, including the Discovery Institute, which has ties with Ray Kurzweil. I doubt that a few deft philosophical moves will prove sufficient to deflect either tendency in the long term. Finally, with regard to your political sociology remarks, no socio-economic movements owns a set of ideas unless we decline to use them to our own advantage.

Response to 109

But how can gene sequences demonstrate the interrelatedness of different species unless common descent with modification is true?

Response to 110

[Fuller] … which argues that, even without fossils, we would have come to interpret the gene sequences as evidence for evolution.
[John] “Evidence for evolution”? No, they are evidence for the mechanisms of evolution. How can you be so sloppy, Steve?

Response to 111

The only thing you need to “presuppose,” Steve, is that organisms on earth were reproducing and passing genetic information to their offspring via DNA 1 million years ago in more or less the same way that did five days ago.

Response to 113

One question Fuller raises is whether we’d view molecular data as anything more than a sophisticated classification system. Classification systems based on morphology predate Darwin and, for Darwin, Wallace, Lamarck, and almost certainly others, raised the question of whether these classifications reflected some sort of biological reality. The molecular data would just have made the urgency for proposing an explanation more intense. It’s not clear what other than common descent can explain these similarities (which is probably why all three mentioned above made proposals based on that assumption). Once you have common descent, what you need is mechanism; in the absence of Darwin, the relative emphasis on drift, geography, natural selection, and sexual selection might have been different, but the results would probably be the same.

First, let me concede sloppiness, per response 110. But this is because I remain unclear about what actually constitutes evidence for evolution itself – i.e. not merely as ‘the tree of life’, interrelated through common descent, as evidenced by gene sequences. That just gives us a static taxonomic order. It says nothing about the actual causal processes themselves. The issue here isn’t quite the one identified in 113. I’m not questioning the biological reality of the tree of life. Rather, I’m asking about how the tree acquired its shape. After all, that is the real bone of contention between Darwinists and ID people.

Now, as 113 also says, Darwinism proposes natural selection and a host of other forces, evidence for which can be demonstrated in the lab and simulated on computers. But how exactly does this tell us anything about long history of life on earth? Perhaps response 111 is supposed to be the answer. But to say that genetic information has always reproduced the same way leaves the question open as to whether natural selection etc. or some divine programme are involved in determining the success rates of this mechanical process. There seems to be a problem with the way you guys use terms like ‘evolution’ and ‘common descent’ to describe, on the one hand, something depicted on cladogram or demonstrable on demand in a lab and, on the other, something that’s actually happened in nature. This is why I return to the fossils.