Sticking a fork in Natural Selection (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, December 10, 2011, 07:54 (4733 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: And so the discussion is the same as usual – chance v. design. There are no forks being stuck into natural selection or even Darwinism in general, apart from the undermining of gradualism.

DAVID: Gould did not see gradualism. The Cambrian is the biggest problem for Darwin's theory. In the 10 million year period, all of the basic parts were created for the species that exist today. This is extremely sudden complexity. To explain my "God's" role: He planned all of this in advance. We are beginning to unpeel the onion of the genome. Epigenetic discovery shows the organism can quickly re-adapt when it has to. The guiding mechanisms to reach H. sapiens are there. It took only 6 million years to develop a brilliant brain like dhw's. And the chimps are in stasis. Only one of us species are the chosen among the species.

I can’t see any evolutionary disagreement between us here, as it’s the speed of change that knocks Darwin’s gradualism on the head. If you believed that your God created every species separately, there would indeed be a fundamental conflict with Darwin, but instead you argue that God preplanned everything. That’s one design theory, though I can’t see that it has any advantage over the theory that God didn’t know what he was doing initially and experimented as he went along, or that he knew what he wanted but had to experiment in order to get there. The Cambrian would in both cases have been a period of intense creativity. So even for a believer there’s more than one option, and none of these options in any way contradicts the rest of Darwin’s theory. The chance alternative, of course, has to go back to the self-assembly of the mechanism, but Darwin doesn’t cover its origin anyway. And so the Cambrian is a problem for gradualism, but not for natural selection or Darwinism in general.

In passing, I'd like to add something to your statement, which I'm sure you will approve of! As far as I can make out, epigenetics only covers adaptation – just as you have said yourself. Adaptation on its own is not enough to account for new organs and species (though as both Tony and Darwin often point out, it's very hard to define "species"). There has to be innovation as well. Perhaps – just perhaps – epigenetics may shed light on this too, but whatever the mechanism, it has to increase the odds against chance.