The Forgotten Piece of Evolutionary Theory
subanima.org
subanima.org
"Can it really be scientifically justified though to say that a cockatoo has the 'goal' of opening the bin to get at the food inside? Or are we relying on bird consciousness or invoking some kind of weird causality here?"
By posing a question, the author nominally avoids making a blatantly false claim, but the intent is the same. In this case, the correct answer to the question is "yes" - it is not even close to being a problem.
The author then tries to suggest that the conventional explanation is in danger of inverting causality - "The cockatoo striving to eat the food inside the bin (a hypothetical future that hasn’t happened yet) causes it to open the bin in the present" -, as if all this learning was going on before the cockatoos learned that garbage cans often contained food, as if it would have been impossible to have discovered this before learning how to open the cans, and as if the development of foraging behavior is inexplicable under current concepts of evolution.
The author, of course, is well aware that there is no such problem, so, after attempting to raise doubts in the mind of the unprepared reader, he disavows all this, but in a way that tries to suggest that there is another problem: "Of course we can get around this if we appeal to consciousness and say that the bird has a mental model it has constructed around opening the bin. But that would restrict our theory of agency to things that have a brain. It wouldn’t make any sense to say that a plant wants to grow its roots to find water, or that an immune cell wants to chase after a bacterium in order to keep it from infecting the body."
Well, no, Jake, it wouldn't and it doesn't, but so what? The author apparently expects his readers to have already forgotten that this line of argument started with cockatoos' learning from observing one another, something noticeably absent from plants and immune cells.
The whole article is a chain of non-sequiturs constructed in this manner.
This is not true. Teleology is one of the most controversial concepts in biology and many are very scared of it. I was trying to target those with these deep seated fears when asking those rhetorical questions.
modified quote > "Can it really be scientifically justified though to say that a person has the 'goal' of opening the can to get at the food inside? Or are we relying on person consciousness or invoking some kind of weird causality here?"
The problem with teleology is when it's used to explain why thing evolved, for example that frogs evolved legs to walk outside water. It's not a problem when it's used to explain that the frog eat the fly because it was hungry.
Edit: I feel like I can expand even more on this. Plants grow roots to get water is a simplification, roots can serve a lot of purposes. Roots can anchor you so wind doesn't blow you away, and it helps you to extract other nutrients from the ground with their high surface area.
It's entirely possible for evolution to cause something like roots to form in an organism because it helps one of these purposes, only for it to become useful for another purpose some time later.
The ability for roots to extract water from the ground does not mean that roots were evolved for this specific purpose. Case in point: many kinds of algae have roots and they are literally soaked in water at all times.
In the context of your article, the use of "wants" here invokes, tacitly, the concept of agency. Furthermore, this is done as the coda to a section in which you discuss cockatoos learning to open garbage cans from one another. There's no problem, in the case of humans dumpster-diving, saying that they want to find food (or evidence or secrets, depending on the case.) It is a bit of a stretch, but not much, to suppose that the cockatoo behavior is driven by wanting to find food (especially, if, as you suggest, they are acting on a mental model of garbage cans as good food sources.) In the context you had set up, introducing "wants" into the quoted phrase question-beggingly prompts the unprepared reader to tacitly accept the not-explicitly-stated notion that plants want to get water just like cockatoos want to get food.
Perhaps you are thinking that there is a little bit of agency in what plants do, similarly to how some people will say (and have said to me - I'm not making this up) that a building with a thermostat is a little bit conscious. The problem with this sort of claim is not that it is provably wrong, but that it is practically useless, as the differences, between how a building regulates its temperature or a plant gets water on the one hand, and, on the other, how humans - or cockatoos - act on the basis of learning from one another, are so great that trying to discuss and analyze one in terms of the other leads to confusion rather than knowledge. If things reach this point, it has become a discussion of English-language semantics rather than anything about the natural world.
I cannot see what the problem is at all. Some species have evolved complex neurological models to navigate the world. Other species have a somewhat less complex system of chemicals, hormones and electrical impulses. In both cases, the system has evolved to adapt to the environment.
It's kind of like the author is saying "I really want there to be a Theory of Agency to explain biology. But it won't work if we just stick with natural selection. So there must be something more!"
Wonder if the author is even aware, as the rest of it looks quite thoroughly researched and without ulterior religious motives.
edit: not strictly Catholic, apparently, thanks Keiferski.
Here, what he is going for is to add 'Agency' back in to us, because the entire Religious Framework of Sin falls apart in a mechanistic universe. They must put some kind of Agency back into humans so they can have 'free will', so humans can make 'choices', and thus be liable for their Sin. You can't have a judgmental God, if the humans he created can't make a choice.
Or - More Sympathetic interpretation. Maybe this guy isn't pushing the Sin/Choice issue, and is trying to go back to the Schopenhauer "Will to Power" type interpretation. But if he is going for this, it would be nicer to call that out a little more clearly.
> Appeal to motive is a pattern of argument which consists in challenging a thesis by calling into question the motives of its proposer. It can be considered as a special case of the ad hominem circumstantial argument. As such, this type of argument may be an informal fallacy.
A common feature of appeals to motive is that only the possibility of a motive (however small) is shown, without showing the motive actually existed or, if the motive did exist, that the motive played a role in forming the argument and its conclusion. Indeed, it is often assumed that the mere possibility of motive is evidence enough.
This asymmetry is well understood and exploited for disinformation purposes (though there's often some collateral damage inflicted on nuanced sources, as you mention).
Johannes Jaeger is one such researcher in this area who has written a blog post about this concern: http://www.johannesjaeger.eu/blog/pushing-the-boundaries
Quote from the article:
"I've been trying to get my research into organismic agency funded by public funders for years now, without the slightest chance of success. The project is heavily transdisciplinary, trying to redefine how scientists see evolving spaces of the possible, expanding our view of what is a valid scientific explanation beyond strict mechanicism (yet still rigorous and naturalistic), challenging our mechanistic view of organismic behavior and biological evolution, while attempting the impossible task of simulating a whole cell or organism (see below). No panel at any funding body other than Templeton was open minded enough or could muster the transdisciplinary expertise to judge such a project properly and fairly. Also: gatekeepers will be gatekeeping, especially in committees set up by public funders. Templeton offers me a unique opportunity to escape these problematic institutional constraints. Whatever their motives to do this, this project is almost sure to drastically reduce the space for supernatural mysticism in biology rather than justify it in any way."
Most tellingly, the example of the Galapagos finches doesn't explain exactly what is unique about those birds. If it's agency, then why isn't the same effect seen in other songbirds of similar brain size, as the citation mentions? Why do these birds not show the same varied adaptations to "goals"?
As I said in the video, the hypothesis for the finches is unproven. I simply wanted to show an interesting alternative theory that throws up some interesting questions.
The trouble is that the example fails to be compelling. Why should the flexible stem of finches be in their agency, rather than their DNA (which might justify what set the finches apart from the other songbirds)? Why should we then start to ask questions about agency, when there's no strong reason to believe that agency at cause?
There are lots of interesting questions in counterfactuals, but almost none are particularly worth thinking about scientifically. What do I about a world where agency influences evolution, given that there's no evidence that that world is this one?
E.g. https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/
or
Apparently lacking any idea of the difference between science and fast-talking, but only apparently; I'd guess bad faith and good rhetoric, or some unimaginably bad institution where one can be convinced that they have studied biology and still, at the end of their education, still fall for obviously illogical and unproven theories, like the egregious one about "genetic assimilation".
https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12348
If you're concerned about a mechanism, then here are more details which were too complex to put in the video, but in retrospect with many people dubious, I should have indeed provided a more in depth explanation:
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-018-0403-x
I got my biology education at the University of Melbourne if that's an unimaginably bad institution to you. Many many biologists and philosophers are very interested in biological agency as a phenomena, discussed in this review here:
https://www.templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Biologi...
For names, google Evan Thompson, Philip Ball, Kevin Mitchell, Lynn Chiu, Stuart Kauffman. Are they all idiots too?
Random mutation. You can blame cosmic rays, transcription errors and a few more problems that cause random mutations.
Note that this random mutations usually cause very small changes. For example making the neck a 1% shorter or longer. In some cases, the longer neck helps to get to the food and not starve. You need a lot of 1% small changes to get a giraffe.
It's not like in the X-men movies that a mutation gives you fully formed wings.
Note that most mutations are bad, you get a 99% less efficiency eating sugar, or 50% less calcium in the bones or other very bad stuff. Or a dead cell or a crazy cell that is the seed of a cancer. So sunbathing under an X-ray lamp all day is a very bad idea.
How much "wings" does a flying squirrel has 30%?
(It didn't evolve that way, but it's easier to imagine that sequence. But flying squirrel "wings" look more similar to pterodactyl wings that bat wings in spite they are unrelated.)
"30%" wings are good to glide. "1%" wings are probably good to jump a little farther. "80%" wings are probably good to jump to a branch instead of climbing. This numbers are totally made up, but I hope they show that intermediate "wings" can be useful.
I don't remember a protein that appears out of the blue in vertebrates. Do you have an example? For many proteins we have reconstructed the evolution. A famous example is the hemoglobin (that keeps the oxygen in the blood) and the myoglobin (that keeps the oxygen in muscles). A long time ago they were the same protein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemoglobin#Evolution_of_verteb...
I'm a mathematician. All the calculations that have results that are harder than "picking the correct atom out of the galaxy" use very simple models where the bases of the DNA are picked randomly. Everyone agree that this method is very bad and it's very hard to get a working protein this way. Evolution is a randomized version of "branch and cut" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_and_cut You don't search the whole space, but you cut most of the branches without checking them.
Also, some calculations I saw use the modern version of the protein that is long and very efficient. It's expected that the original version was shorter and barely useful, so it's much easier to find it. Anyway, we still don't have good candidates for the short and crappy versions. So there is still a hole there, but I expect it will be fixed, perhaps in a hundred of years :) . And the origin may have been even more weird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA_world
I object to the materialist story on many levels that seem so clear and obvious to me that it is sometimes difficult for me to appreciate that people who buy the story are operating in good faith.
First, there is the fact that the story of Darwinian evolution driven by Random Mutation combined with Natural Selection has a simplicity to it that a lot of people appear to mistake for elegance and explanatory power. It makes sense of the beaks of finches on the Galapagos Islands, and we can extrapolate the process across a billion years, and so we assume that we can explain all life on Earth.
In fact, this is a case of explanatory powerlessness masquerading as simplicity and elegance. Merely conducting a naive extrapolation in one's head is not the same thing as "doing science". This whole subject requires a deep dive into philosophy of science because so many people are simply unable to define what science is or have a cartoonish definition to the extent that they try to explain what science is. It is notable that Darwinian Evolution is not easily accessible to experimentation and test tubes and randomized control trials, and whatever other catch-phrases people associate with "doing science" and yet people seem to think that it belongs in the category of "science" as opposed to "metaphysics".
To the degree that the theory has produced testable predictions, the most notable have to do with the fossil record, which basically just disconfirms the theory of Evolution at every turn. They fossil record demonstrates stasis along with the sudden appearance disappearance of various forms. It also contains periodic explosions of entire body plans seemingly out of nowhere. Not only is there "a missing link" in the fossil record, but "missing links" is characteristic of the fossil record across the board. It is the most notable thing about the fossil record.
At this point I am going to make an appeal to authority: the authority I appeal to is Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. I highly recommend his discussion with Joe Rogan that appeared on Joe Rogan's podcast on July 13, 2023 -- episode #2008. Meyer has a PhD in the History and Philosphy of Science and if you pay any attention to him at all, it will soon become apparent that he really knows his stuff. He has a slow and stammering style, however, so listen to him at 1.5x speed.
I have been following Meyer since the late 1990s and I have read his books and watched his debates online, etc. As far as I am concerned, Meyer is undefeated in any public conversation that I have seen him engage in and I have never read a convincing rebuttal to the arguments he makes in his books (Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and The Return of the God Hypothesis).
I find Meyer to be a far more credible and far more serious intellectual force than the various academics and intellectuals that are associated with the other side of the debate. I don't think Dawkins has an answer to the question of the origin of life, I don't think Neil DeGrasse Tyson is a serious thinker, I don't find the multiverse nonsense credible at all, and the various physicists who push it are just making fools of themselves, in my view.
You asked about a protein whose origin cannot be explained through the Darwinian story. I am only going to be relaying arguments that have been made by Stephen Meyer and Douglas Axe, so I would suggest you listen to them make those arguments directly.
You can hear Doug Axe summarize the problem if you go to YouTube and find video "qwFi_2YZa_c"
If you listen to JRE #2008, starting at 13:30, you will hear Joe Rogan ask a normie question "doesn't it work if you just give it enough time" and the Meyer responds with an argument I find convincing. I will summarize it here:
We now know, thanks to the genetic revolution, that if you want to build a new form of life you have to have new code, because new anatomical structures require new cell types, whih require new proteins which can only be created by a protein that is one step further back in the process, i.e., the code. So if you're going to have a cell that functions in a digestive system, it is going to have to have an associated enzyme to to perform the digestive function, which means that it going to have to have different RNA.
So you have a situation in which you need to have an enzyme evolve, but the enzye is created by a sequence of code, so to iterate on the enzyme as you are evolving it you can't directly mutate it, but you have to mutate the code that creates it. The analogy to software is good -- suppose you have a string that doesn't work for some purpose (perhaps it is an incorrect password) and you need to try a different string instead, but instead of copying and mutatatig the string to see if you can get a better one, you have to copy and mutate the function that produces the string. Unfortunately, the relationship between the function that produces the string (which is itself a different string) and the string you're interested in is not direct and by randomly mutating the function you just end up breaking the function altogether pretty much every time.
Another aspect of genetics to consider is developmental gene regulatory networks. It turns out that in addition to genes that build proteins, there are also genes the build molecues that send signals to other parts of the genome. This is why cells can differentiate themselves from each other when they undergo cell division. So as an animal grows from a single fertilized cell into two cells and then four cells and then eventually billions of celles, there is an over-arching plan that can be realized and the fully grown animal can be composed of many different types of organs and tissues. Obviously the timing and accuracy of the orchestration of cell-division is crucial to ending up with all your organs in the right place. What scientists discovered as they studied these developmental gene regulatory networks is that they look to us like integrated circuits (for conducting information) and that they are incredibly tighly integrated. What this means is that if you want to turn body plan A into body plan B, you are going to have to do it by modifying the developmental gene regulatory networks, but these networks are so dense and integrated that you basically cannot modify them without destroying their ability to serve their initial purpose. In other words, you break the first body plan long before you come up with a different body plan.
The fundamental problem that the materialist Darwinian evolution story has is the origin of information. Information is highly specific. You cannot just randomly muck around with it without degrading the signal.
Dr. Eyad Qunaibi has a good introductory series that looks at evolution in a critical manner. I came across some material with English captions[1][2][3] for those interested.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYHhWkQZz30