Sandwalk: Questioning the Tree of Life

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Questioning the Tree of Life

I'm going to Halifax NS (Canada) next week to attend a very exciting conference with a catchy title: Questioning the Tree of life. This is legitimate scientific debate about the tree of life metaphor and its validity in light of massive horizontal gene transfers (HGT, also known as lateral gene transfers - LGT) during the early evolution of single cell organisms. It brings together scientists and philosophers who share an interest in this problem. Should be a blast!

I'm supposed to report the meeting on my blog but I don't know where I'll find the time. Here are the main speakers.

W. Ford Doolittle
Tree of Life, Tree of Cells, LUCA and other questionable entities

Jan Sapp
Thinking laterally on the tree of life: An historical overview

Olivier Rieppel
The series, the network, and the tree: Changing metaphors of order in nature

Gordon McOuat
The origins and politics of trees and non-hierarchical taxonomic systems

Rob Beiko
The impact of different LGT scenarios on simulated genome evolution

Laura Franklin-Hall
Scientific models and the history of life: Deep disagreement or mere misunderstanding?

Peter Gogarten
The indistinguishability of patterns created through gene transfer between preferred partners and patterns created through shared ancestry

Joel Velasco
Inferring phylogenetic networks

Sina Adl
Specimen choice and the implications of modern technology in tree construction

Jeffrey Lawrence
Fragmented speciation in bacteria: The failure of a coalescent model

Greg Morgan
Defining biodiversity in a world with horizontal gene transfer

Yan Boucher
Evolutionary units: Breaking down species concepts

Dick Burian
Conceptual revisions deriving from the loss of the Tree

Maureen O’Malley
Philosophy of biology, Ernst Mayr, and the Tree of Life

Eric Bapteste
Lateral thinking about trees

Lisa Gannett
Trees, trellises, and the Garden of Eden

Andrew Hamilton
TOL issues in macrobes as they relate to taxonomic practice

James Mallet
Was Darwin wrong about the nature of species and speciation?

James McInerney
LUCA and LECA: Gene genesis in the genome of Eden

Chris. Malaterre
On the roots of the tree of life

Bill Martin
Endosymbiosis and gene transfers from endosymbionts, the most glaring insult to the tree

John Archibald
Genic and genomic threads in the tapestry of photosynthetic life: Implications for ‘tree thinking’

Fréd. Bouchard
Endosymbiosis in light of reflections on symbiosis and the superorganism

Rob Wilson
On arguments over the tree of life

Andrew Roger
Deconstructing deconstructions of the Tree of Life: Why a tree of microbes might be realizable, meaningful and useful

John Dupré
Analysing analyses of Tree of Life arguments: A commentary on Wilson and Roger

Susan Spath
Cultural politics and the Tree of Life

4 comments :

Heathen Mike said...: Have a great time in my hometown!; Tuesday, July 21, 2009 7:51:00 AM
Bayesian Bouffant, FCD said...: I can already envision the Creationist summaries of the conference, trumpeting the collapse of "Darwinism."; Tuesday, July 21, 2009 8:52:00 AM
-DG said...: I will be attending at least a few of the talks over the couple of days that the conference is going on. Of course many of the speakers are from the research group I am a PhD student in but there are a lot of really great people going to be here giving some excellent talks.; Tuesday, July 21, 2009 11:39:00 AM
Anonymous said...: Mazur, I'm sure, is already prepping a lengthy series of articles on this...; Wednesday, July 22, 2009 5:45:00 PM

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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Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Questioning the Tree of Life

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