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Ch. 10: Bully for Brontosaurus

#152: Mar. - May 2017 (Non-Fiction)
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geo

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Re: Ch. 10: Bully for Brontosaurus

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I’m not sure how much I understand the nuances of the ongoing argument between the Dawkins-Dennett and Gould camps. And I’ve never really understood why it seems so important to brand the modern synthesis “Darwinian or “neo-darwinian” or whatever. You would expect evolutionary theory to encompass new ideas and new discoveries. Darwin got most of it right even before genetics was understood. So now we have concepts such as plasticity and epigenetics that could not have been anticipated by Darwin, but are certainly compatible with the theory that carries his name. Gould asserted many times in his long, illustrious career that this or that is non-Darwinian in nature. Why was this so important to him to brand some new concepts—usually his—as strictly “non-Darwinian”? Turns out that Creationists also like to make this distinction, insinuating that Darwinism (which I personally think is a dated term) is forever on the brink of failure simply by virtue that it changes. Flann wrote a post a while back where he pretty much borrowed a page from Gould, arguing that epigenetics is another “nail in the coffin” of Darwinism. (Again, there’s that term). But epigenetic is merely another detail about the real world that has been discovered and is easily compatible with Darwinism (or rather the modern synthesis of evolutionary theory).

The more I look into this issue, I see that a lot of criticism has been directed toward Gould over the years. Indeed, here’s an an article from none other than Robert Wright entitled “The Accidental Creationist.”

An excerpt:
. . . over the years, Gould himself has lent real strength to the creationist movement. Not intentionally, of course. Gould's politics are secular left, the opposite of creationist politics, and his outrage toward creationists is genuine. Yet, in spite of this stance—and, oddly, in some ways because of it—he has wound up aiding and abetting their cause.
http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm

Gould often refers to the other camp as “Darwinian fundamentalists” or “ultra Darwinists”. Two of the Darwinian "fundamentalists", Jerry Coyne and Brian Charlesworth, wrote in the April 1997 Science Magazine that
Our concern as evolutionary geneticists (2). has been with Eldredge and Gould's repeated revisions of the mechanisms proposed for stasis and rapid evolution. Punctuated equilibrium originally attracted great attention because it invoked distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms for stasis and change (3). These mechanisms were said to decouple macroevolution from microevolution, leading to Gould's pronouncement that "if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory [of evolution] is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy" (4, p. 120). Yet many evolutionists saw no obvious contradiction between punctuated pattern and Darwinian process: Stasis can result from stabilizing selection (for example, long periods of environmental stability); rapid evolution can result from selection-driven responses to sudden environmental change or invasion of new habitats; and the association of morphological change with speciation can result from the fact that both are promoted by adaptation to new environments (5).
Gould wrote:
My own field of paleontology has strongly challenged the Darwinian premise that life’s major transformations can be explained by adding up, through the immensity of geological time, the successive tiny changes produced generation after generation by natural selection. The extended stability of most species, and the branching off of new species in geological moments (however slow by the irrelevant scale of a human life)—the pattern known as punctuated equilibrium—requires that long-term evolutionary trends be explained as the distinctive success of some species versus others, and not as a gradual accumulation of adaptations generated by organisms within a continuously evolving population.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/06 ... mentalism/

I don’t believe that Gould’s many assertions—for example, that punctuated equilibrium is outside the scope of traditional Darwinism—have held up very well over the years. Many new ideas have been incorporated into the modern synthesis. They represent a progression of our understanding about evolution. As such, Dennett’s argument that punctuated equilibrium when viewed with long periods of stasis does fairly represent Darwin’s own concept of slow, gradual change. You can easily see it both ways. Gould’s contributions were important, but he made grand proclamations that Creationists love to co-opt to deny the reality of evolution. Not Gould’s fault obviously, but as Robert Wright points out, his own ideology easily aided and abetted their cause.

There’s some truth that Dennett is a little black-and-white in his thinking. For example, he comes up with the notion of cranes and skyhooks and then accuses Gould of looking for skyhooks—his own concept. But in this chapter he uses the well-publicized controversies surrounding many of Gould’s grandiose claims as a jumping off point to talk about evolution, which is after all the subject of his book. This is a much better approach, in my opinion, than, say, Dawkins and Carrier, both of whom tend to focus way too much on what Creationists believe. Dennett also makes it very clear that Gould’s closet theism (my term) is only his personal “hypothesis”. So I guess I’m willing to grant him a little wiggle room there. In any event, I have no horse in this race. I love to read Gould’s stuff and I’m enjoying this book quite a lot too.
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Re: Ch. 10: Bully for Brontosaurus

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The Robert Wright article is great by the way. I'm glad to have stumbled upon it.
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Re: Ch. 10: Bully for Brontosaurus

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geo wrote:I’m not sure how much I understand the nuances of the ongoing argument between the Dawkins-Dennett and Gould camps.
I also don't understand the ins and outs, but I can say this - I keep running into "anti-Gould" material that I, in my limited knowledge, know to be wrong. Actionably wrong - the sort of accusation that wouldn't even pass the "reckless disregard for truth" test for which comments on politicians are libelous, since a Q and A session or a thorough job of reading would have shown them to be false.
geo wrote:You would expect evolutionary theory to encompass new ideas and new discoveries.
I think a fair amount of the unfairness has been generated by anachronism, in which statements which make some sense in the academic environment in which they were made don't hold up so well after the environment changed. So, for example, when Gould supposedly declared "Darwinism is dead" he was clearly talking about an orthodoxy of gradualism and "mutation as raw material" which no longer has a dogmatic hold on matters. When Gould was putting forward "selection at the level of species" as a major part of the Darwinian process, this was considered anathema by many orthodox Darwinists because it doesn't fit the textbook adaptationist story. So Gould claimed too much, and popularists still hold it against him, but the pejorative reactions which were also wrong somehow seem to be conveniently forgotten.
geo wrote:Gould asserted many times in his long, illustrious career that this or that is non-Darwinian in nature.
I would like to see the quotes. I do not remember reading anything by Gould claiming that, for example, punctuated equilibrium is "non-Darwinian." I suspect if you look at the original statements, it would have been clear from the context that he was talking about a particular narrow interpretation of Darwinism.
geo wrote: Why was this so important to him to brand some new concepts—usually his—as strictly “non-Darwinian”? Turns out that Creationists also like to make this distinction, insinuating that Darwinism (which I personally think is a dated term) is forever on the brink of failure simply by virtue that it changes.
First, I repeat that I doubt it was important to him, or that he repeatedly made such claims. Second, Dawkins, Dennett and everybody else who writes about evolution argue that Darwinism changes (epigenetics being a blatant example) so why is it that Gould gets tarred with spreading this malicious gossip among the creationists? I re-iterate that a scientist cannot be held responsible for the things flat-earthers like about their work.
geo wrote: The more I look into this issue, I see that a lot of criticism has been directed toward Gould over the years. Indeed, here’s an an article from none other than Robert Wright entitled “The Accidental Creationist.”
None other than Robert Wright? Not exactly known for his scientific research. A brilliant writer and thinker, for sure, and I expect correct about Gould erring by neglecting arms races in his claims of complexity-neutral evolution (but then Wright deals pretty shallowly with the issues involved, in his New Yorker piece, so it's hard to be really sure).

Gould has also turned out to be broadly correct in his criticisms of sociobiology, where the tendency to inappropriately claim things are biological adaptations most clearly ran amok. People who deal in big ideas make mistakes - I defy anyone to find an exception. What I find irritating is the urge to pile on Gould without even understanding him. Most scientists in the field stay away from the urge to "take sides", and some who don't, like, apparently, John Maynard Smith, do not do so from a position of ignorance. But the frequency of jumping from ignorance to personal criticism rivals the frequency of specious borrowings by Creationists, and it raises some questions.
. . . over the years, Gould himself has lent real strength to the creationist movement. Not intentionally, of course. Gould's politics are secular left, the opposite of creationist politics, and his outrage toward creationists is genuine. Yet, in spite of this stance—and, oddly, in some ways because of it—he has wound up aiding and abetting their cause.

http://www.nonzero.org/newyorker.htm
I was left completely unconvinced. Let's see, he abetted creationists by arguing that evolution is random and has no bias toward meaning, complexity, or producing humans. Say what? Read Wright's statements on this carefully. He never does give a plausible account of how this claim of neutrality of evolution might abet creationism. (But Dennett says Gould believes in skyhooks, and Dennett is an honorable man.)

Or, no! it wasn't his argument for neutrality of evolution that helped those nasty guys, it was his claim that there were gaps in our standard Darwinian story. Yeah, that's the one. So he must mean that Goddidit, and obviously has been telling falsehoods in order to help his secret buddies on the other side. Except that we just agreed that understanding of evolution has indeed had to evolve, and no scientists ever asserted that God, or any other skyhook, was in those gaps, so basically Gould stands accused of uttering blasphemy against the name of Darwin, even though his criticism of gaps has been taken on board and is now part of normal evolutionary understanding.
geo wrote:Gould often refers to the other camp as “Darwinian fundamentalists” or “ultra Darwinists”. Two of the Darwinian "fundamentalists", Jerry Coyne and Brian Charlesworth, wrote in the April 1997 Science Magazine that
Our concern as evolutionary geneticists (2). has been with Eldredge and Gould's repeated revisions of the mechanisms proposed for stasis and rapid evolution. Punctuated equilibrium originally attracted great attention because it invoked distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms for stasis and change (3). These mechanisms were said to decouple macroevolution from microevolution, leading to Gould's pronouncement that "if Mayr's characterization of the synthetic theory [of evolution] is accurate, then that theory, as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy" (4, p. 120). Yet many evolutionists saw no obvious contradiction between punctuated pattern and Darwinian process: Stasis can result from stabilizing selection (for example, long periods of environmental stability); rapid evolution can result from selection-driven responses to sudden environmental change or invasion of new habitats; and the association of morphological change with speciation can result from the fact that both are promoted by adaptation to new environments (5).
What are these "distinctly non-Darwinian mechanisms"? And since, as the authors observe, there is no obvious contradiction between punctuated pattern and Darwinian process, how is it that the textbook presentation of punctuated equilibrium is a "non-Darwinian process?" I think they are not getting into the details of population stability and the comparatively unusual event of successful speciation, so it's hard to evaluate their claim. But the only "non-Darwinian" aspect I am aware of in Gould's popularized presentations of p.e. speciation is the notion that the raw material, genetic variation, is always present so that it is not mutation that drives speciation but the comparatively contingent events that create the conditions for speciation. And of course, that's not "non-Darwinian" but just a very different take on how Darwinian mechanics operate. (It is, though, a decoupling of macroevolution from microevolution - is that supposed to be the great blasphemy?)
If anything, this simply spells out in some detail how Gould's "grandiose claims" may only appear to be overstated in light of the confusion around what is and is not meant by Darwinism. Has Gould's claim about Mayr's characterization of the theory been refuted? At least that would represent a specific dispute that isn't about semantics. I don't know the answer, but the generalities in this quote certainly didn't provide enough detail to assess it.
geo wrote:There’s some truth that Dennett is a little black-and-white in his thinking. For example, he comes up with the notion of cranes and skyhooks and then accuses Gould of looking for skyhooks—his own concept.

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
geo wrote:I love to read Gould’s stuff and I’m enjoying this book quite a lot too.
Me too. If you read "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" for the new ideas, pulled from here and there and, to a great extent, illuminating each other, it's really an interesting book. If you read it for sorting out controversies, it leaves a person shaking their head with frustration.
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Re: Ch. 10: Bully for Brontosaurus

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Harry Marks wrote:None other than Robert Wright? Not exactly known for his scientific research. A brilliant writer and thinker, for sure, and I expect correct about Gould erring by neglecting arms races in his claims of complexity-neutral evolution (but then Wright deals pretty shallowly with the issues involved, in his New Yorker piece, so it's hard to be really sure).
Fair enough. I only said "none other" because we've discussed Wright's book "Evolution of God" a few years back. And a few of us here are familiar with his Coursera course on Buddhism and modern psychology. I find him a very credible source. I should also point out that the New Yorker essay is actually a reworking of two chapters from Wright's book, "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny."

I certainly understand your distaste for Dennett's attack on Gould in this chapter. Also, as Wright says, Gould was widely regarded as the voice of evolutionary theory due to the popularity of his essays and books, and obviously this wasn't his fault either. But we have many prominent scientists and thinkers who agree that Gould tended to overstate the importance of some of his ideas and distort how they fit within evolutionary theory. Anyway, I think Wright's piece in the New Yorker does a great job with the nuts and bolts of the disagreement, whether or not you think that Gould deserves this tongue-lashing.

I think we could probably make a good argument that there's a lot of arrogance on both sides. We, the public, have been witness to a battle of egos. To some extent these scientists are splitting hairs. Gould and Dawkins and Dennett, etc. seem to agree on most of the particulars. Creationists love to pretend there are problems with evolutionary theory because some of the scientists disagree on some of the particulars.
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