The other day I was discussing how to teach evolution with one of my colleagues and the discussion turned to the presumed distinction between students who were really interested in science and everyone else. My colleague claimed that students who were science oriented probably managed to acquire a good understanding of evolution in spite of the fact that some undergraduate courses weren't doing a very good job of teaching the subject.Science Students Could Brush Up On Darwin, U of G Study FindsSome of us know what the problem is. What are we going to do about it? How are we going to convince professors that evolution education has to change when most of them don't even recognize there's a problem because their own views of evolution are flawed?
October 01, 2009 - News Release
Even students pursuing advanced degrees in science could brush up on their knowledge of evolution, according to a new study by University of Guelph researchers.
The finding reveals that there is room for improvement in how evolution is taught from elementary school up, said Ryan Gregory, a professor in Guelph’s Department of Integrative Biology, who conducted the research with former student Cameron Ellis.
The study was published today in BioScience. It’s particularly timely, given that this year is the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of publication of On the Origin of Species, which underpins understanding of the diversity of Earth’s organisms and their interrelations.
“Misconceptions about natural selection may still exist, even at the most advanced level,” Gregory said.
“We’re looking at a subset of people who have spent at least four years, sometimes even six or seven years, in science and still don’t necessarily have a full working understanding of basic evolutionary principles or scientific terms like ‘theories.’”
Many previous studies have assessed how evolution is understood and accepted by elementary, high school and undergraduate students, as well as by teachers and the general public, Gregory said. But this was the first to focus solely on students seeking graduate science degrees.
The study involved nearly 200 graduate students at a mid-sized Canadian university who were studying biological, physical, agricultural or animal sciences. About half of the students had never taken an evolutionary biology course, which is often not a prerequisite.
The researchers found that the vast majority of the students recognized the importance of evolution as a central part of biology. Overall, they also had a better understanding of evolutionary concepts than most people.
“That was encouraging, especially because it was across several colleges — it wasn’t just the biology students,” Gregory said.
But when the students were asked to apply basic evolutionary principles, only 20 to 30 per cent could do so correctly, and many didn’t even try to answer such questions. Of particular interest to Gregory is the finding that many students seem less than clear about the nature of scientific theories.
“This is telling us that traditional instruction methods, while leading to some basic understanding of evolution, are not producing a strong working knowledge that can be easily applied to real biological phenomena.”
Gregory has studied evolution-related topics for years and recently co-organized a workshop designed to improve how the subject is taught in public schools. He is also associate editor of Evolution: Education and Outreach, a journal written for science teachers, students and scientists. He recently created Evolver Zone, a free online resource for anyone interested in evolutionary biology.
He is also helping bring an evolution-inspired art exhibit to U of G this month. “This View of Life: Evolutionary Art in the Year of Darwin, 2009” highlights diverse artists’ views of Darwin’s ideas and evolution in general. It runs Oct. 9 to 30 in the science complex atrium.
From this comment (by Gordon Davisson, in response to this post):This is called, among other things, wanting to have your cake an eat it too. The IDiots want you to believe that they accept all of modern science and that their "theory" is consistent with the evidence.
In other words, I’m agreeing with Denyse here:He responds:
BUT claimed 98% similarity due to a common ancestor (a claim that hundreds of science writers regularly make, in support of common descent) *undermines anything else they have to say on the subject.*I do not know how to put the matter more simply than this: A person who does not see the problem is not a credible source of information.
…just disagreeing about which side is not credible. Take the 98% similarity figure as an example: one of the basic principles of science is that you must follow the evidence. If the evidence supports the 98% figure, and that conflicts with your intuition, then you either have to throw that intuition into the trash bin, or stop claiming to be doing science.No. Absolutely not.
One should never discard intuitions formed from experience, especially about vast claims. Chimpanzees are so obviously unlike humans – in any way that matters – that claimed huge similarities only cast doubt on genetic science.
The really discouraging thing here is not that some reporters are critical of evolution. It is that so many of them apparently see nothing wrong with preventing evolutionary biologists from defining their own position. This is a very strange way to do journalism, and if journalists started to apply their approach to evolution to other topics, I think it would become manifestly clear how unfair it is. Imagine, for example, a journalist deciding to use "Marxist" as a neutral label for President Obama based on the views of certain right-wing academics and political activists. Would that be regarded as fair or impartial by most journalists? Of course not. What if a reporter redefined Marxist to mean anyone who supports more active government? Would that make applying the term to Obama in a news story more defensible? Hardly. Yet when reporters label evolutionary biologists as "Darwinists," they are essentially doing the same thing.
What is really going on here is censorship. When reporters use as a "neutral" description of evolution a polemical smear invented by its critics, they are effectively silencing evolutionary biologists by not allowing them to speak for themselves. They are poisoning the well so no one will be willing to listen to the actual views expressed by evolutionary biologists. Journalists who write about evolution should re-read the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, especially the provisions calling for them to "Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant" and to "Give voice to the voiceless...."
Whatever a news reporter's views on evolution, he or she has a professional duty not to simply spread stereotypes and caricatures. That duty means nothing if it only applies to news coverage of groups and positions with which the reporter agrees. The real test of fairness for reporters is how they treat those with whom they disagree. When it comes to evolution, sadly, many reporters are failing the test.
Yet Darwinian evolution had nothing to do with it.We all know how creationists use the word "Darwinism." Most of the time, it's a synonym for evolution. All of the time, it's an attempt to obfuscate and confuse their audience. What Wells is saying is that evolution had nothing to do with the paper. All that happened was a bit of genetics. According to Wells, "Darwin's theory of the origin of species by natural selection" was not involved.
First, some bacteria happen to have a very complex enzyme (acetyltransferase), the origin of which Darwinism hasn’t really explained. Come to think of it, most cases of antibiotic resistance (including resistance to penicillin) involve complex enzymes, and the only “explanations” for them put forward by Darwinists are untestable just-so stories about imaginary mutations over unimaginable time scales.
Second, the acetyltransferase story is about minor changes in an existing species of bacteria. But Darwin’s theory isn’t really about how existing species change over time. People had been observing those long before 1859, and most of the new insights we’ve gained since then have come from genetics, not Darwinism. Yet Mendel’s theory of genetics contradicted Darwin’s, and Darwinists rejected Mendelian genetics for half a century. And although an understanding of genetics is important when dealing with antibiotic resistance, Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection is not.
Third, Dardel and his colleagues made their discovery using protein crystallography. They were not guided by Darwinian evolutionary theory; in fact, they had no need of that hypothesis.
Dr. Wells pointed out that research on antibiotic resistance wasn’t guided by Darwinian evolutionary theory. That evolution occurred — that is, that the population of bacteria changed over time — is obviously true, and obviously was relevant to the antibiotic resistance research. Dr. Wells made the observation that the research owed little to Darwin’s theory that all biological complexity arose by natural selection without teleology.This is an incredible admission from a creationist. Egnor admits that the bacteria evolved. He then goes on to define some bizarre version of "Darwin's theory."1 But the cat is out of the bag. What we see here folks, is the recognition that there is a distinction between Darwinism and evolution by natural selection. We're still not clear about the difference but it seems that bacteria can evolve resistance to antibiotics.
I, Jonathan Wells, agree that Maurice et al. (2006) employed evolution by natural selection in their methodology. My position is that evolution by natural selection is not what I mean when I use the word Darwinian.Note that I'm not asking him to agree that "Darwinism" was involved in the paper. All he has to do is admit that evolution by natural selection is not what he means when he uses the word "Darwinian."
1. The standard version of Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is that populations evolve due to the differential survival of individuals with a fitter genotype.
Maurice, F., Broutin, I., Podglajen, I., Benas, P., Collatz, E. and Dardel, F. (2008) Enzyme structural plasticity and the emergence of broad-spectrum antibiotic resistance. EMBO Rep. 2008 Feb 22 [Epub ahead of print] [PubMed]
The point cannot be hammered home too often: In media coverage of the evolution debate, a standard trick, the one that stands out the most for slipperiness, is the refusal to define common terms. What is "evolution," or "creationism," or "intelligent design"? Readers may think they know. The reporter may think he knows. Usually, the shades of meaning get blurred, with the suspiciously consistent effect of casting evolution skeptics into a bad light.Oh dear. Klinghoffer thinks that we are guilty of using definitions that make creationists look bad. He quotes from an article by Terry Mattingly who says ....
[T]he committee that produces the Associated Press Stylebook needs to urge mainstream journalists to be more careful when using the words "evolution" and "creationism." Each of those terms has a half dozen or so finely tuned definitions, depending on who is using them at any given moment.That's simple. Both are creationists [On Describing IDiots as Creationists] [Creationism Continuum] [What Is Creationism?] (The last two posts attempt to deal with some Sandwalk readers who think that their preferred definition is the only correct definition.)
For example, a person who accepts a creation narrative with a "young earth" and a timeline with seven 24-hour days will certainly embrace the creationist label. But what about a person who believes that creation unfolded over billions of years, involved slow change over time, a common tree of descent for species and ages of micro-evolutionary change?
Similar things happen with the term evolution, which as the Blessed Pope John Paul II once observed, is best discussed in terms of different schools of evolutionary thought, some of which are compatible with Christian faith and some of which are not...This is definitely a problem. As we see, Mattingly is terribly confused about the meaning of "evolution" and the difference between it and "evolutionary theory." I agree that we need to be clear about what we mean and I've tried to do that [What Is Evolution?]. (BTW, "theistic evolutionist" is just a euphemism for a particular kind of "creationist.")
The word "evolutionist" certainly applies to someone who believes life emerged from a natural, materialistic, random process that was without design or purpose. But what about someone who accepts that theory on the biological front, but believes that there is scientific evidence that our universe was finely tuned to produce life? What about someone who says that creation contains evidence best thought of as the signature of its creator (Carl Sagan, for example). What about people who insist they are doctrinaire Darwinists, but still see cracks in the old neo-Darwinian creeds? Are "theistic evolutionists" really believers in "evolution" in the eyes of the truly secular academic powers that be? And so forth and so on.
To understand the core weakness of the Darwinian worldview, it is important to understand what Darwinian natural selection requires. The process will work its magic, building up functional structures in organisms, only when two very strict conditions are met: First, the structure must be adaptive—that is, helpful to the organism in flourishing in its environment—and second, there must be a continuum of structures, functional all along the way, leading from an ancestor species to the descendent.Strictly speaking, that's a reasonable explanation of Darwinism as most evolutionary biologists understand it. But here's the problem. There aren't very many evolutionary biologists who are strict Darwinists these days even though there are many who tilt strongly in that direction.
That is, the thing we are trying to explain must in some way help the creature survive, and between the creature and the creature's ancestor there must be a gradual change, each step of which is stable and enhances fitness, or success in reproduction.
Step 3: Learn About the Case against Evolution (1.5 hours). Now students will learn about some of the science that challenges evolution. Watch the DVD Icons of Evolution.This is far too complicated for public school students. The simple answer is that microevolution describes changes occurring within populations and macroevolution describes the history of life. Macroevolution includes things such as speciation that are not part of microevolution and it also includes things like asteroid impacts, ice ages, and drifting continents in order to explain the history of life. There's an important part of evolutionary theory called "Hierarchical Theory" where proponents argue for higher-level mechanisms of evolution such as species selection. They aren't part of microevolutionary explanations. Thus, microevolution is necessary but not sufficient to explain macroevolution [Macroevolution].
- Ask students to explain the difference between microevolution and macroevolution.
-The video mentions the Galápagos finches. Do the finches represent an example of microevolution or macroevolution?It's on the border between microevolution and macroevolution. The value of the work on the Galapogos finches is that the results suggest how new species are formed. They formed from a combination of physical isolation events (different islands) plus microevoutionary events involving natural selection, and random genetic drift. Such speciation events occurred repeatedly in the history of life and these studies show how they can be explained by purely natural causes.
-The video mentions mutations in fruit flies which gave fruit flies an extra pair of wings. Were these fruit flies able to fly better and survive with the extra wings?No.
-Are mutations helpful or harmful? Ask for examples of harmful mutations? How about helpful ones?A harmful mutation is one that decreases fitness. There are hundreds of examples of genetic diseases in humans. A beneficial mutation is one that increases fitness. Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is a classic example but so is HIV resistance in humans. Dozens of field studies have shown that beneficial mutations can arise fairly quickly in populations that are challenged by environmental change. Molecular data documents thousand of beneficial changes to genes and enzymes over time.
-What was the Cambrian explosion?The Cambrian Explosion was a period in the history of life where we see the appearance of new types of animals. The dates are approximately 500 million years ago and the time frame for the visible appearance of these groups ranges from 10-50 million years. It's important to note that the fossils of the Cambrian don't look like any species that are alive today and they don't contain any examples of land life. It's also important to note that the Cambrian explosion doesn't apply to plants, fungus, protozoa, and bacteria.
-Does the fossil evidence show that species have evolved by small gradual changes, or large sudden changes? Do fossils support Darwin’s theory? Why or why not?The are many examples of slow gradual changes over millions of year but there are also examples of patterns called Punctuated Equilibria. In these examples you see very small changes—such as the speciation events in the Galapagos finches—happening at the time of speciation. In other words, the fossil record mimics the sort of thing you see in the Galapagos islands where the small changes occurring at speciation are quickly fixed in the population within ten or twenty thousand years. There's hardly any fossil record of the intermediates showing the transition between these closely related species.
-The video also mentions the origin of life. Does the evidence support the claim that the building blocks of life were present on the early earth? Why or why not?The origin of life is an interesting scientific problem that hasn't been solved. Although it has nothing to do with evolution, it's clearly related. Some scientists think that life arose in a primordial soup containing abundant supplies of all the necessary building blocks we see today. There is plenty of scientific evidence that some of these building blocks—such as simple sugars and amino acids—can arise spontaneously. In fact, many of them have been detected in outer space. Other scientists prefer scenarios where life began much more simply with very small, highly abundant, chemicals that are still around today in the oceans. It will be interesting to watch for new discoveries as you grow up because science is poised to make significant advances in these areas.
-Compared to humans, was the first life simple or complex? How about compared to a calculator, computer, or cell phone? Are living organisms more or less complicated than human technology? What do students think?All available scientific evidence points to a common ancestor that was much more simple than humans, or most other species that are living today. Those primitive ancestors are much less complex than a modern computer because, in addition to having only a few hundred genes (at most), the internal cell biology and biochemistry was undoubtedly sloppy and inefficient. No modern machine is anything like that.
Wikipedia is a not-for-profit crowdsourced encyclopedia that's open to anybody who wants to contribute. This is both a strength and a weakness but the weaknesses are becoming important in an age of fake news and misinformation. The rules of Wikipedia mean that amateurs can insert any information into science articles as long as it is backed by a reliable source. But "reliable sources" include the popular press and books that may or may not report the scientific consensus accurately. When knowledgeable experts try to correct information, or put it into the proper context, they are often opposed by Wikipedia administrators who have a built-in bias against experts—a bias that's not entirely unjustified but much abused. Consequently, scientists often get frustrated trying to deal with the rules and traditions of Wikipedians because these rules are very different than the standards in the scientific community.
Here's an interesting article by Piotr Konieczny on From Adversaries to Allies? The Uneasy Relationship between Experts and the Wikipedia Community.
This is the second in a series of postings by a guest blogger, Arlin Stoltzfus. You can read the first part at: Introduction to "The Curious Disconnect". Arlin is challenging the status quo in modern evolutionary theory. He's not alone in this challenge but it's important to distinguish between kooks who don't know what they're talking about and serious thinkers who have something to say. Arlin is going to explain to you why everything you thought you knew about mutationism is wrong. I'm happy to give him a chance to post on Sandwalk.
The mutationism myth tells the story of how, just over a century ago, the scientific community responded to the discovery of Mendelian genetics by discarding Darwinism, and how Darwinism subsequently was restored. The villains of the story are the influential early geneticists or "Mendelians" who saw genetics as a refutation of Darwinism; the heroes are first, the founders of population genetics, theoreticians who sorted everything out in favor of Darwinism by about 1930, and second, the architects of the Modern Synthesis, activists who popularized and institutionalized what we're calling "Darwinism 2.0".
This story has been re-told in secondary sources for nearly 50 years, though I sense that the frequency is decreasing as this episode passes into ancient history. To find examples, try looking up "mutationism" (sometimes "Mendelism" or even "saltationism") in the index of a book about evolution.
I encourage you to consult whatever sources you have and to share the stories that you find. Note that you won't always be successful. A quick survey of several dozen contemporary books on my shelf reveals that most don't address this episode specifically (a notable absence, in some cases 2); some tell the mutationism myth with varying degrees of panache; and a few provide a historical account rather than a myth. The few historical accounts that I found were in Gould's 2002 The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, Strickberger's 1990 textbook Evolution, and the Wikipedia entry on "Mutationism".
Lets look at a few examples of the mutationism story. Readers who want to check out a freely available online source from the scholarly literature may refer to Ayala and Fitch, 1997 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9223250?dopt=Citation). One example that really caught my eye is not from scientific literature, but from the 2005 obituary for Ernst Mayr in The Economist:
It was not that biologists had given up on evolution by the 1940s-quite the contrary. But they had got very confused about its mechanism. . . . The geneticists of the early 20th century did not help. They rediscovered the laws of inheritance first developed 40 years earlier by Gregor Mendel, an unsung Moravian monk. They also discovered the idea of genetic mutation. But instead of linking these things to natural selection, they came up with the idea of "saltation"-in other words, sudden mutational shifts from one well-adapted species to another. Nor, the geneticists complained, had there been enough time for natural selection to do its work, given what they had discovered about the rate at which mutations occur, and the fact that most mutations are deleterious. It was all a bit of a mess. . .Mr Mayr's advantage over the laboratory-bound biologists who had hijacked and diluted Darwin's legacy was that, like Darwin, he was a naturalist-and a good one. (anonymous, 2005)
"It is hard for us to comprehend but, in the early years of this century when the phenomenon of mutation was first named, it was regarded not as a necessary part of Darwinian theory but as an alternative theory of evolution! There was a school of geneticists called the mutationists, which included such famous names as Hugo de Vries and William Bateson among the early rediscoverers of Mendel's principles of heredity, Wilhelm Johannsen the inventor of the word gene, and Thomas Hunt Morgan the father of the chromosome theory of heredity. . . Mendelian genetics was thought of, not as the central plank of Darwinism that it is today, but as antithetical to Darwinism. . . It is extremely hard for the modern mind to respond to this idea with anything but mirth" (Dawkins, 1987, p. 305)
"According to mutationism, random changes in the hereditary material are sufficient for adaptation without much, or any, selection at all. Mutations just somehow happen to be adaptive, the right changes simply manage to occur. The inadequacies of this view are obvious" (Cronin, 1991, p. 47).
"Darwin knew nothing of this [i.e., genetics] but as it turned out, his ignorance was sublimely irrelevant to the problem he was really interested in tackling: evolution. This point was not fully grasped by biologists. Many early geneticists at the dawn of the 20th century, thought their discoveries of the fundamental principles of genetics somehow cast doubt [on], or rendered obsolete, the concept of natural selection. It took several decades of experimentation and theoretical (including mathematical) analysis to show not only that there was no conflict inherent between the emerging results of genetics and the older Darwinian notion of natural selection, but that the two operate in different domains." (Eldredge, 2001, p. 67)
"Mendelian particulate inheritance (today, we call the "particles" genes) was originally identified with De Vries's "mutation theory", according to which new variations or species originated in large jumps, or macromutations, and evolution was exclusively explained by mutation pressure. Darwinian naturalists, believing that Mendelism was synonymous with mutation theory, held on to theories of soft inheritance, while they considered selection a weak force at best. They did not know of the new findings in genetics that would have supported Darwinism. (SegerstrŒle, 2002)
Notice how, in every version of the story above, the position taken by early geneticists just doesn't make sense. This isn't a story of theory versus theory, its a story of confusion ultimately yielding to reason.
If de Vries and the other geneticists are playing the role of the pied piper in this story, the "naturalists" are like the children lured away from their Darwinian home. Ultimately the innocents are returned, and order restored, by (oddly enough) mathematicians:
"Between 1918 and 1932 Fisher, Haldane, and Wright showed that Mendelian genetics is consistent with natural selection. Only then, more than 60 years after the publication of The Origin of Species, was the genetic objection to natural selection finally removed. Modern molecular and developmental genetics have confirmed in exquisite chemical detail the key aspects of genetics necessary for Darwin's ideas to work: that the genetic material is DNA, that DNA has a sequence, . . . mutates . . . contains information . . " (p. 16 of Stearns and Hoekstra, 2005)
First, the mutationism story is clearly a story or myth, and not an ordinary scientific truth claim. We can see this because the story-tellers are not using ordinary scientific conventions to convince us that the story is true. If you or I were making an ordinary scientific argument (for instance) for an effect of "translational selection" on codon usage, we would mention a correlation between codon frequencies and the abundance of corresponding tRNAs, citing the classic work of Ikemura (1981), and we might even repeat a figure showing this correlation, to impress this point upon the minds of readers (e.g., just as in Ch. 7 of Freeman & Herron, 1998).
When I see instances of the mutationism story, typically I don't find quotations illustrating what the mutationists believed, nor facts & figures to refute their views, but only vague attributions and generalized claims. Apropos, the following quotation from Ernst Mayr never fails to make me laugh:
The genetic work of the last four decades has refuted mutationism (saltationism) so thoroughly that it is not necessary to repeat once more all the genetic evidence against it. (Mayr, 1960)
And the puissant Dr. Mayr proceeds on, not boring the reader with any tiresome "genetic evidence", nor citing sources that might allow the reader to evaluate the truth of his statement. Its a story, after all.
By contrast, the 3 sources that I mentioned above as providing scientific history, rather than myth, all make reference to specific experimental and theoretical results, and reveal knowledge of specific historically important scientific works. For instance, Strickberger's reference list includes Johannsen, 1903, as well as the 1902 paper by Yule that reconciled Mendelian genetics with quantitative variation (in neo-Darwinian mythology, credit for Yule's work is given to little Ronny Fisher, who was 11 at the time).
Second, every story has a plot or "action", and the main action of the mutationism story is a turn of fate in which power is temporarily in the hands of the wrong people or ideas. In archetypal terms, its a story of usurpation and restoration: the throne is usurped, and the kingdom falls into darkness and confusion until the throne is restored to the king's rightful heirs. The mutationism episode didn't have to be told that way: it might have been presented as a period of reform (in which old ideas were abandoned) or discovery (when new territory was mapped out). Instead, its presented as a mistake, an interlude of confusion, a collective delusion.
Indeed, another way to look at the mythic action is that the Mendelians are wizards or false prophets who place the kingdom under a spell, leading folks astray and causing them to believe things that they just shouldn't have believed.
What delusional spell did the Mendelians cast? In the story by Eldredge, or by Stearns & Hoekstra above, the spell is that Mendelian genetics is inconsistent with "the concept of natural selection" (Eldredge). In the story told by SegerstrŒle, Cronin, Mayr and The Economist, the delusional spell is a bit different: the principle of selection is irrelevant because mutational jumps alone explain evolution.
Third, the key to restoring Darwin's kingdom was to add the missing piece of genetics. Ultimately, after the period of darkness ended, the discovery of genetics "provided the missing link in Darwin's theory" (SegerstrŒle, 2002), or "The missing link in Darwin's argument was provided by Mendelian genetics" (Ayala & Fitch, 1997). Darwinism was restored, not by taking away the power of genetics, but by redirecting it to support Darwinism. Clearly, genetics is the key to ruling the kingdom, like the One Ring that Rules them All in Tolkien's world. The ones who have the ring have the power.
The story is made more fascinating by the fact that the key to power is literally a code of rules developed by a monk that remained lost for nearly half a century. The usurpers who discover The Monk's Code misinterpret it, and use it to overthrow the true king, establishing a reign of error. But when The Founders decipher the true meaning of the Monk's Code, The Architects campaign throughout the kingdom, spreading the news: the Monk's Code proves that Darwin is the true king. Darwin's rule is re-established, all opposition ceases, and the kingdom is unified.
To summarize, the mutationism story is a myth that is retold in secondary sources. The basic story is simple: the discoverers of genetics misinterpreted their discovery, thinking it incompatible with Darwinism; Darwinism went into disfavor; population geneticists came along and showed that genetics was the missing key to Darwinism; Darwinism was restored and once again reigned supreme.
Next time on the The Curious Disconnect, we'll start pulling on some of the loose threads of this story.
For now, note how the writers quoted above are genuinely baffled by our scientific history. It just doesn't make sense to them. A century ago, most of an entire generation of scientists thought of genetics as a contradiction of Darwinism. This is a historical fact, and presumably it has an explanation that rational folks can understand by examining what scientists of the time wrote. But this historical fact mystifies Dawkins, Eldredge, Cronin, and others.
References
Anonymous. 2005. Ernst Mayr, evolutionary biologist, died on February 3rd, aged 100. The Economist, February.
Ayala, F. J., and W. M. Fitch. 1997. Genetics and the origin of species: an introduction. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 94:7691-7697.
Cronin, H. 1991. The Ant and the Peacock. Cambridge University Presss, Cambridge.
Dawkins, R. 1987. The Blind Watchmaker. W.W. Norton and Company, New York.
Eldredge, N. 2001. The Triumph of Evolution and the Failure of Creationism. W H Freeman & Co.
Freeman, S., and J. C. Herron. 1998. Evolutionary Analysis. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Gould, S. J. 2002. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ikemura, T. 1981. Correlation between the abundance of Escherichia coli transfer RNAs and the occurrence of the respective codons in its protein genes: a proposal for a synonymous codon choice that is optimal for the E. coli translational system. J Mol Biol 151:389-409.
Mayr, E. 1960. The Emergence of Evolutionary Novelties. Pp. 349-380 in S. Tax, and C. Callender, eds. Evolution After Darwin: The University of Chicago Centennial. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
SegerstrŒle, U. 2002. Neo-Darwinism. Pp. 807-810 inM. Pagel, ed. Encyclopedia of Evolution. Oxford University Press, New York.
Stearns, S. C., and R. F. Hoekstra. 2005. Evolution: an introduction. Oxford University Press, New York.
Strickberger, M.W. 1990. Evolution (1st edition).
Notes
1 The defining characteristic of a myth is not that it isn't literally true, but that it isn't told for reason of being literally true, but for reason of being meaningful or poignant: a myth is a story with a cultural value, not necessarily a literal-truth value. The connection between myths and untruths, then, has to do with discoverability: when we find a pattern P = { X people are repeating story Y }, where X is a large number, this pattern by itself does not prove that Y is a myth because X people might have all discovered or verified Y independently; but if Y has diverse elements that are untrue (or unverifiable), then we can conclude that its repetition does not signify independent verification, suggesting that its a myth.
2The Oxford Encyclopedia of Evolution does not have an article on mutationism; the article on Morgan says nothing of his views on evolution; there is no article on Bateson; mutationism is only addressed peripherally in Hull's article on the history of evolutionary theory; it is mainly addressed in SegerstrŒle's article on neo-Darwinism.
The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site. Unfortunately, much of the news coverage has been sloppy, inaccurate, and in some cases, overtly biased. Evolution News & Views presents analysis of that coverage, as well as original reporting that accurately delivers information about the current state of the debate over Darwinian evolution.Here's a posting from Robert Crowther dated yesterday afternoon.
So, Darwinists are admitting that up until Friday, Jan. 16 2009 @ 4:10PM, evolution was “mostly theory.” Interesting. I am now certain that dogs adapt to their environment, too. Last night my dog kept barking and I shook my finger and spoke very firmly to her and made her sit on her bed. She stopped barking. So, at 7:10 pm I had a perfect example of evolution. Or was it adaptation? Or was it bad parenting? Whatever, we now see that dogs evolve, which previously had been believed to be “mostly theory.” My peers, who were there reviewing the moment, are skeptical because they think my dog is asexual. Regardless, this is all speculation — except for poor Kali. She still lacks an opposable thumb.We may need a better word than IDiot to describe these people.
Darn. I guess I’ll have to take a rain check on that apology – because I don’t agree with this – and not just because Maurice et al. (2008) are cited incorrectly. Here’s why.Biological evolution never means just change over time, but that's not the real problem with Wells' post. You're going to have to scoot on over to Evolution News & Views and read the whole thing.
"Evolution" has many meanings. It can mean simply "change over time." The present is different from the past. The cosmos evolves. Technology evolves. No sane person denies evolution in this sense.
A professor of biochemistry and leading biochemistry textbook author at the University of Toronto stated that a major public research university “should never have admitted” students who support ID, and should “just flunk the lot of them and make room for smart students.”
