There are traits that are biologically maladaptive. The human hernia is an example, where the benefits of being able to walk on two legs outweigh the maladaptive negative that our guts squish out from time to time. More broadly, maladaption occurs when a niche changes, so for example the Australian wombat was well adapted to a pre-human continent, but is somewhat maladapted to dealing with cars, cows and fences invading its habitat. American megafauna were maladapted to deal with the small creatures who crossed the Bering Strait in 13000 BC and ate them. In this sense, all extinction and endangerment of species can be classed as a maladaption, except that the power to change the niche generally rests with people, so there is little the maladapted entity can do. With the burka, the question whether it is adaptive or maladaptive is a function of whether its use is expanding, stable or declining, and of whether its negative effects outweigh the positive.

We may judge that one part or another of an organism is "maladaptive", but it doesn't matter what we think about it. The organism is reproducing and surviving as a species despite any variations from the "ideal." Look at the structure of our backs, how much less than ideal this arrangement is from a design standpoint. Doesn't matter; our total package is what counts towards whether we reproduce and survive as a species.
DWill

Excuse my pedantry, but I think it does matter what we think about adaptation. 'What we think about it' can be false or true, and it matters that we think things that are true, otherwise we are on a nihilist path. The point about maladaptation is that it is an objective indicator of a species failure to reproduce and survive - by definition. Knowledge about maladaption is important to see the similarities between human culture and the evolution of life. It would be true to say what we think doesn't make a difference to whether an organism is adaptive, but this is slightly different from your comment. There is a wiki at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptation

[quote="Robert Tulip"] The stoic is fatalist, in the belief that everything that happens is caused by nature. Hence even human life is a part of nature. I agree with DWill that fate must be tempered by freedom, but the message I get from scientists such as Shubin is that we can learn much by exploring life through the lens of fate. The oxygen the plants put in the air created the opportunity for handy fish to move to land

I finally got my copy of Your Inner Fish yesterday, together with my copy of Our Inner Ape, both mailed from the USA. I read YIF straight through. It is a wonderful book, full of intriguing factual implications about how we can better understand ourselves by understanding our natural origins. The excitement of scientific discovery shines through, as well as the sense that the science of evolutionary genetics is in its childhood, so we are invited along for the ride.

DWill, what you say about stoicism reflects common usage, but I was talking about the philosophy: as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism puts it, "The core doctrine of Stoicism concerns cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that virtue is to maintain a will that is in accord with nature." This stoic theme of coordination of will and nature is deeply evolutionary in character.

I agree with you about the essential non-determinism in life, but the point is, going back to the stoics and Hegel, that freedom is the recognition of necessity. We are free to deny necessity, but the evolutionary standpoint holds that a freedom which understands nature and builds on it is a higher calling than a freedom which promotes basic errors (eg creationism). My view is that denial of necessity is in some respects a definition of evil, but of course who are we to divine the nature of necessity?

I don't agree with your description of emergence as unlawful. To me this hints at our earlier discussion on adaptation and evolution - in the sense that individuals adapt while species evolve. So an individual is free to break the law, adapting to circumstance, but a society needs to enforce laws, presenting a soft determinism - if you break the law you are likely to get caught. It is this collective law-like character of emergent nature where we can see a determinism, not hard in the sense that our decisions are pre-ordained, but soft in the sense that collective decisions are to some extent predictable and follow trends. A further point is that the further our free emergence departs from physical reality, the bigger the jolt in store when a natural correction inevitably occurs. We just don't know if our artificial human civilisation is attuned to nature or intrinsically alienated from it. If the latter then a big jolt is as inevitable as night following day.

DWill, what you say about stoicism reflects common usage, but I was talking about the philosophy: as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism puts it, "The core doctrine of Stoicism concerns cosmic determinism and human freedom, and the belief that virtue is to maintain a will that is in accord with nature." This stoic theme of coordination of will and nature is deeply evolutionary in character.

I would just say that the "natures" in the quoted part and your comment are different. I distinguish, as I think is common, between "the nature of things" and nature in the natural science sense, which is what evolution concerns. I also think the important feature of Stoicism is exactly the attitude toward circumstance that it teaches us to have. I see nothing less important about philosophy in the popular sense.

I should have made it clear that "unlawful" means not following natural law. Although evolution does proceed mechanically by lawful processes, some believe that it is led by a force or impetus that is not lawful in that sense, but creative.
DWill

President Camacho wrote:I was also wondering about the pressure to publish. The saying is "publish or perish." Does this have to do with ground-breaking work or with 'anything' that is published, so long as it is published?

The quote is about how professors have to publish something in order to survive. As you can guess, the quality of the publications suffers due to this.

Biomachine wrote:I read a review of the book online and one of the things the review emphasized on was the fact Neil Shubin refused to get into it with creationists in his book.

It was refreshing to see a book published in 2008 dealing with a subject of this nature which doesn't even concern itself with the whole creationism vs. evolution debate. For me personally, it was a breath a fresh air to just read through the book without having to deal with this debate.

It entertains me to no end to see how this debate has garnered so much attention in the West. Out here in the East, evolution is what is taught in the books and creationism doesn't even enter the scientific picture. One reason for this might be that a lot of the Eastern religions and philosophies (Hinduism/Buddhism) donot believe in a Creator God or even in a God. So, even a fanatic Buddhist (is that an oxymoron? ) can believe in both Buddhism and evolution with no conflict between the two.

DWill wrote:When I was much younger, I wanted to be an archeologist because I'd read about Heinrich Schliemann's excavation of Troy and I liked to dig up old bottles and artifacts everywhere I went. Shubin communicates to us some of this boyish joy in his vocation. It's good to see portrayed not just the science but the feeling for doing science.

My thoughts precisely! Even though palaeontologists appear a lot on TV and movies, I had always wondered how they would first hone in on a spot of land to start from. Shubin has cleared those doubts with the delightful explanation of his Arctic expedition.

President Camacho wrote:The depth of science that Shubin immerses his readers in gets deeper and deeper throughout the book. It begins by, as you mention, bypassing creationism and then bursts right through evolution to in your face "slice and dice" type experiments on animal embryos of different species.

From what I can see the book uses the following techniques to explain and substantiate its findings:
1. Palaeontology
2. Comparative anatomy
3. Embryology
4. DNA analysis

It was scientifically comforting to see the findings from all these branches of science match with each other.