Today marks the birthday of our venerable godfather (er, atheist-father?) here at ScienceBlogs, PZ Myers. I am honored and grateful that I have been invited to PZ Myers's . . . birthday . . . on the day of PZ Myers's birthday. And I hope that his first post be a cephalopod post. In appreciation of the blogfather, Grrlscientist is staging a surprise party -- a blogasm of posts -- for Doc Myers. My contribution can be found below the fold. I'm hoping that a list of all of the birthday posts will be compiled at Living the Scientific Life.
Shhh! Quick, hide behind that tree, the Lamarckian is coming. Yeah, that's right, didn't you hear about PZ and his anti-Darwinian tendencies? Richard Dawkins and Ken Miller are planning to hold a special meeting of the high priests of methodological naturalism to determine whether PZ will be kicked out of the Church of Darwin.
Anyone who does science knows that it is a conservative process. If you have a new idea and you want people to take you seriously, you better have the shit. The shit can be empirical evidence from experimentation, observation studies of natural processes, or mathematical models and simulations that attempt to describe nature. But without the shit, you ain't got nothing. The intelligent designers ain't got the shit. Darwin had the shit. So did Isaac Newton. I'm not saying it's impossible to subvert the dominant paradigm, it's just really hard. If you want to make waves, you better make sure you have your shit together before you go around trying to get your shit accepted by mainstream scientists.
So, what does all of this shit (ok, I promise to stop cursing) have to do with PZ Myers? I'm trying to argue that (a) evolution by natural selection is not dogma and (b) evolution by natural selection is a very robust theory that explains a lot of the current diversity of life on earth (ecological, organismal, anatomical, and molecular). I think most biologists (including Dr. Myers and myself) will agree with these two points. This goes along the same lines as the point that it makes no sense to call someone a Darwinist because the word does not mean what it's intended to mean when it's thrown around by anti-evolution advocates. Additionally, there is so much more to evolutionary biology that darwinian natural selection. Hell, there's so much more to natural selection than darwinian selection.
Neither PZ nor I (nor any other biologist who has critically analyzed evolutionary biology) adheres to any kind of Darwinian orthodoxy. There are other evolutionary forces, like genetic drift, sexual selection, and population structure. But none of these forces work in isolation. Evolution involves a complex network of interactions between the environment, the genotype, and the phenotype (really, just a subset of the environment). Only a portion of the phenotype is determined by the genotype (the rest is determined by the environment), and even some the extra-phenotypic environment is influenced by the genotype. The environment (both the phenotype and the rest of the environment) then impose selection pressures on the genotype. Additionally, the phenotype can change over time without any genotypic changes. Eventually, the genotype must catch up because the selection pressures have changed.
Most of that stuff in the previous paragraph is accepted by nearly all biologists. We differ in our opinions regarding the relative roles of each evolutionary mechanism and how to measure evolutionary change. We are also open to new ideas, provided they are testable and explanatory. That's what distinguishes this from this.
Happy birthday, PZ! Keep up the fight against Darwinism. We're just a bunch of anti-Darwinists, just not the kind that they want us to be.
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I am a naive Evolutionist. I guess that I am a Darwinist. But I am trying hard to be involved in the fight against ID in the science classsroom. I find your explanation of the difference between "Darwinism" and current understanding of Evolution to be fascinating - but difficult to understand. And I have two degrees in Math.
My point: I think that we soldiers on the battlefield of Ev v. Id are missing a useful tactic. When the IDers propose, or claim, that there are increasing number of arguments within the scientific community about Ev, we should neither dismiss nor deny. What we should do is say that it is so, and then begin to list what many of the disagreements are - as you have presented. This would demonstrate that they are mischaracterizing the disagreements as being ABOUT Ev rather than being WITHIN Ev.
So, what I would like is such a list. Is there a site that discusses this to a greater extent, in side by side comparison - in language (somewhat) understanable to the layperson?
I didn't really intend for this to be a discussion of Darwinism (or evolutionism); I dislike those terms, anyway. Any subset of biology cannot be studied in isolation, and evolution is the unifying theme tying them all together. You can study a single aspect of evolution (molecular evolution, morphological evolution, etc) or a single evolutionary force (natural selection, non-random mating, etc), but the conclusions you can draw are limited if you only look at them in isolation. Painting someone as a Darwinist makes it sound like they think darwinian selection is the one and only evolutionary mechanism. I was trying to make a point that anyone who studies evolutionary biology does not adhere to some doctrine of darwinism.
I'm trying to spend minimal time on the anti-evolution movement. I don't find it all that intellectually stimulating and I don't know enough about law to be interested in the legal aspects. Our best tool against the anti-science movement is education. The information is out there, it's just a matter of figuring out how to dispel it . . . or maybe the real issue is figuring out how to shut down the bullshit machine.