10 ms·

The Forgotten Piece of Evolutionary Theory

30 points by rzk 3y ago

bondarchuk 3y ago
It links to two articles from the Templeton Foundation, which is plainly a (Catholic) religious organisation trying to inject themselves and their dogma into "science". 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.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I don’t see anywhere that lists them as a Catholic organization. They seem to sponsor papers that are at the “intersection of science and religion” which is a fairly broad category. The founder himself was a Presbyterian, so I don’t know why his foundation would be Catholic. They also seem to have sponsored Buddhists, Hindus, and many other religious groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  Thank you for calling this out. It puts this into perspective, it is a long article with ton of video's, ton of quotes, which is a technique I've noticed with some religious organizations putting a spin on science. Take a lot of science citations and examples and simply spin them differently to fit your desire. 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.
  - yamrzou 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_motive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_motive > 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.
    - jungturk 3y ago
      That's because its inordinately expensive to prove that a motive contributed directly so we resort to heuristics. This asymmetry is well understood and exploited for disinformation purposes (though there's often some collateral damage inflicted on nuanced sources, as you mention).
- subanima 3y ago
  All biologists interested in agency are keenly aware of Templeton's religious slant. Unfortunately we live under capitalism and scientists have to get paid from somewhere. Most standard funding bodies are not willing to fund agency research as teleology is seen to be deeply unscientific. 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 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."
  - ddgflorida 3y ago
    There's nothing unfortunate about living under capitalism. Capitalism has reduced poverty more than any other economic system.
- uoaei 3y ago
  You may be conflating "giving alternative perspectives for a more holistic picture" and "attempting to supplant one perspective with another to advance one's own agenda".
HelloNurse 3y ago
> Hello. I'm Jake. I'm a biologist turned philosopher/mathematician, and now a YouTuber. Join me on my journey to explore this crazy thing we call life. 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".
- subanima 3y ago
  Genetic assimilation is a concept that has been well confirmed and is not really controversial among biologists: https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12348 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 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/Biological-Agency_1_FINAL.pdf 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?
ivanbakel 3y ago
Embedding citations through images is an odd choice, but the biggest issue this article has is a complete dearth of discussion about mechanism. How are we meant to understand that agency influences genetics? What's the flow of genetic information in "genetic assimilation", and how is it any different from Lamarckism? 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"?
- subanima 3y ago
  The intended medium is the video at the top of the page. The page itself is just a way for me to show all my sources clearly. See this link which I also posted below for details on the mechanism of genetic assimilation: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-018-0403-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-018-0403-x 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.
  - ivanbakel 3y ago
    >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?
    - subanima 3y ago
      Well, many people would simply disagree with you about what questions they want to think about and find compelling. E.g. https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/ https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/ or https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/ https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/
n4r9 3y ago
There's a weird underhand rhetorical trick going on in this argument. The author presents an example of cockatoos exhibiting complex goal-driven behaviour. He notes that it can be explained by their having a basic mental model. He then argues that there's a problem with this explanation because it doesn't apply to the behaviour of simple organisms like plants. 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!"
mannykannot 3y ago
There is a good deal of tendentious argumentation here, as can be seen in the section on the cockatoos in Sydney which have learnt how to open garbage bins. The author adopts a popular meme in this style of writing, the rhetorical question presented as if the situation presents a problem for current theory: "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.
- taylodl 3y ago
  Which is all a polite way of saying the author is disingenuous and the article is garbage. If opening garbage bins yields a survival advantage to cockatoos then whatever underlying biological factors are driving that ability will tend to prevail and increase in the cockatoo population.
jononomo 3y ago
What bothers me about evolutionary theory is that it is a theory without a mechanism (natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from?). Also, the process can't even get off the ground until the existence of life has been established, which is basically the entire game.
- gus_massa 3y ago
  > natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from? 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.
  - jononomo 3y ago
    1% of wing is actually worse than just not having a wing. And saying "well, it just randomly happened" is not a "mechanism" in any sense whatsoever.
    - gus_massa 3y ago
      Just consider: rat -> flying squirrel -> bat 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.

30 points by rzk 3y ago

It links to two articles from the Templeton Foundation, which is plainly a (Catholic) religious organisation trying to inject themselves and their dogma into "science". 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.

keiferski 3y ago
I don’t see anywhere that lists them as a Catholic organization. They seem to sponsor papers that are at the “intersection of science and religion” which is a fairly broad category. The founder himself was a Presbyterian, so I don’t know why his foundation would be Catholic. They also seem to have sponsored Buddhists, Hindus, and many other religious groups. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation
FrustratedMonky 3y ago
Thank you for calling this out. It puts this into perspective, it is a long article with ton of video's, ton of quotes, which is a technique I've noticed with some religious organizations putting a spin on science. Take a lot of science citations and examples and simply spin them differently to fit your desire. 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.
- yamrzou 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_motive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_motive > 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.
  - jungturk 3y ago
    That's because its inordinately expensive to prove that a motive contributed directly so we resort to heuristics. This asymmetry is well understood and exploited for disinformation purposes (though there's often some collateral damage inflicted on nuanced sources, as you mention).
subanima 3y ago
All biologists interested in agency are keenly aware of Templeton's religious slant. Unfortunately we live under capitalism and scientists have to get paid from somewhere. Most standard funding bodies are not willing to fund agency research as teleology is seen to be deeply unscientific. 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 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."
- ddgflorida 3y ago
  There's nothing unfortunate about living under capitalism. Capitalism has reduced poverty more than any other economic system.
uoaei 3y ago
You may be conflating "giving alternative perspectives for a more holistic picture" and "attempting to supplant one perspective with another to advance one's own agenda".

HelloNurse 3y ago

> Hello. I'm Jake. I'm a biologist turned philosopher/mathematician, and now a YouTuber. Join me on my journey to explore this crazy thing we call life. 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".

subanima 3y ago
Genetic assimilation is a concept that has been well confirmed and is not really controversial among biologists: https://doi.org/10.1111/evo.12348 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 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/Biological-Agency_1_FINAL.pdf 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?

ivanbakel 3y ago

Embedding citations through images is an odd choice, but the biggest issue this article has is a complete dearth of discussion about mechanism. How are we meant to understand that agency influences genetics? What's the flow of genetic information in "genetic assimilation", and how is it any different from Lamarckism? 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"?

subanima 3y ago
The intended medium is the video at the top of the page. The page itself is just a way for me to show all my sources clearly. See this link which I also posted below for details on the mechanism of genetic assimilation: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-018-0403-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s12551-018-0403-x 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.
- ivanbakel 3y ago
  >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?
  - subanima 3y ago
    Well, many people would simply disagree with you about what questions they want to think about and find compelling. E.g. https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/ https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/ or https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/ https://www.expandingpossibilities.org/

n4r9 3y ago

There's a weird underhand rhetorical trick going on in this argument. The author presents an example of cockatoos exhibiting complex goal-driven behaviour. He notes that it can be explained by their having a basic mental model. He then argues that there's a problem with this explanation because it doesn't apply to the behaviour of simple organisms like plants. 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!"

mannykannot 3y ago

There is a good deal of tendentious argumentation here, as can be seen in the section on the cockatoos in Sydney which have learnt how to open garbage bins. The author adopts a popular meme in this style of writing, the rhetorical question presented as if the situation presents a problem for current theory: "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.

taylodl 3y ago
Which is all a polite way of saying the author is disingenuous and the article is garbage. If opening garbage bins yields a survival advantage to cockatoos then whatever underlying biological factors are driving that ability will tend to prevail and increase in the cockatoo population.

jononomo 3y ago

What bothers me about evolutionary theory is that it is a theory without a mechanism (natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from?). Also, the process can't even get off the ground until the existence of life has been established, which is basically the entire game.

gus_massa 3y ago
> natural selection needs something to select, after all -- and where did that thing come from? 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.
- jononomo 3y ago
  1% of wing is actually worse than just not having a wing. And saying "well, it just randomly happened" is not a "mechanism" in any sense whatsoever.
  - gus_massa 3y ago
    Just consider: rat -> flying squirrel -> bat 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.