Darwinist ignorance, confusion & epigenetics (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, November 05, 2010, 12:42 (5132 days ago) @ David Turell

David has kindly reproduced an article about "epi-epigenetics" from the Procrustes blog:-"[...] epigenetic effects are purposeful. When food is in short supply, animals grow smaller, and pass that on to their progeny. The population rapidly shifts as a whole, lurching in ways completely counter to selective death, and in fact, this saltation moves them in jumps toward life. It doesn't take the death of 95% of the population by freezing to get a longer coat of hair, but within a single generation, every critter is re-adapted to the climate. -So given these non-diffusive, saltational leaps of the genome toward inherited adaptation, what can we say about evolution? Can the progress of evolution from one-celled to Man be an epigenetic purpose? Can we detect some plan in the adaptive responses of animals and people over time? Or narrowing down the discussion to just Man, is there an observable plan to the progress from australopithecus robustus to homo sapiens? [...]-Notice what I'm doing here. I'm claiming that the demise of natural selection regains teleology as a valuable tool in biology."-I have noticed what he's doing, and am struggling to follow the thinking. Firstly, unless I'm much mistaken, epigenetics enables animals to adapt to a changing environment and to pass on those changes. But why should adaptation produce new species? A smaller critter with longer hair is still a critter. Secondly, the only known purpose of all the adaptations is survival, and so if the changes in the environment are random, survival becomes the only "teleology". A deliberate plan to evolve one-celled critters into Man would mean that every environmental change leading to every new organ/variation/ species would have had to be organized to produce the ultimate species, which is you and me. And all the extinct species were a waste of time, because only the surviving ones could lead to us. This seems like anthropocentrism gone mad. -As for "the demise of natural selection", I'm inclined to echo Mark Twain and say reports of its death are greatly exaggerated. We still see examples of natural selection in all forms and ways of life, but it just isn't the all-embracing explanation of life that some neo-Darwinists would like to think it is. -I have to agree with David, though, that the theory of evolution is "extremely incomplete". Adaptation doesn't seem to me to solve the problem of innovation (new organs and new species), and mutation entails an endless series of unlikely accidents. I still believe that evolution happened, and our complexities evolved from less complex forms, but are we really any nearer to finding out how?