Sandwalk: Scientific American: The Evolution of Evolution

Sunday, December 14, 2008

Scientific American: The Evolution of Evolution

The latest edition of Scientific American is all about "The Evolution of Evolution."

Here's how the editor-in-chief, John Rennie introduces the articles.

When Charles Darwin published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, he touched off a Cambrian explosion in evolutionary thought. Naturalists had theorized about evolution for centuries before him, but their ideas were generally unfruitful, untestable or wrong. Darwin's breakthrough insight was not that a simple mechanism—natural selection—made evolution possible. Rather it was that in organisms whose environments changed nonrandomly and whose reproductive success in that environment depended on inherited traits, evolution became inevitable.

In the decades that followed, Darwin's ideas connected up with the nascent field of genetics and then, at an ever quickening pace, with molecular biology, ecology and embryology. The explanatory power his concepts proved irresistible. Today 200 years after his birth and 150 years after "Origin of Species," Darwin's legacy is a larger, richer, more diverse set of theories than he could have imagined.

You will enjoy reading the articles to see exactly what Scientific American means when they talk of a "richer, more diverse set of theories." Here's the list.

SciAm Perspectives: A Theory for Everyman; by The Editors; 1 Page

Evolution should be taught as a practical tool for understanding drug resistance and the price of fish.

Darwin's Living Legacy; by Gary Stix; 6 Pages

A Victorian amateur undertook a lifetime pursuit of slow, meticulous observation and thought about the natural world, producing a theory 150 years ago that still drives the contemporary scientific agenda.

Testing Natural Selection; by H. Allen Orr; 8 Pages

Biologists working with the most sophisticated genetic tools are demonstrating that natural selection plays a greater role in the evolution of genes than even most evolutionists had thought.

From Atoms to Traits; by David M. Kingsley; 8 Pages

Charles Darwin saw that random variations in organisms provide fodder for evolution. Modern scientists are revealing how that diversity arises from changes to DNA and can add up to complex creatures or even cultures.

The Human Pedigree; by Kate Wong; 4 Pages

Some 180 years after unearthing the first human fossil, paleontologists have amassed a formidable record of our forebears.

This Old Body; by Neil H. Shubin; 4 Pages

Evolutionary hand-me-downs inherited from fish and tadpoles have left us with hernias, hiccups and other maladies.

What Will Become of Homo sapiens?; by Peter Ward; 6 Pages

Contrary to popular belief, humans continue to evolve. Our bodies and brains are not the same as our ancestors’ were—or as our descendants’ will be.

Four Fallacies of Pop Evolutionary Psychology; by David J. Buller; 8 Pages

Some evolutionary psychologists have made widely popularized claims about how the human mind evolved, but other scholars argue that the grand claims lack solid evidence.

Evolution in the Everyday World; by David P. Mindell; 8 Pages

Understanding of evolution is fostering powerful technologies for health care, law enforcement, ecology, and all manner of optimization and design problems.

The Science of Spore; by Ed Regis; 2 Pages

A computer game illustrates the difference between building your own simulated creature and real-life natural selection.

The Latest Face of Creationism; by Glenn Branch and Eugenie C. Scott; 8 Pages

Creationists who want religious ideas taught as scientific fact in public schools continue to adapt to courtroom defeats by hiding their true aims under ever changing guises.

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Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)

Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)

Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Peter Atkins

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake. Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory. Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance. Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change. Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat. Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is True

I once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000

It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick

There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner

An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod

The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.

Richard Lewontin

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Sunday, December 14, 2008

Scientific American: The Evolution of Evolution

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