Biology textbooks of the past and I would guess still have very few claimed examples of natural selection based on the actual observation of generations of organisms. And all of those I know of are totally bogus as demonstrations of natural selection.
The most popular one I'm aware of is the legendary peppered moth, the specimens of which in entomological collections went from lighter grey to dark grey, linked in time and, who knows, perhaps in reality, to the change in the atmosphere as the industrial revolution and the plague of coal burning altering the environment. There is a report that with the adoption of clean air laws it is changing back to a lighter coloration. Though the moth phase of the organisms' life was only a short part of it as compared to the time it is a caterpillar, quite likely when most of the predation that happened to them, happened, and a myriad of other issues in the back and forth over what the reported change in color means, it never represented an example of natural selection because the moths didn't evolve into a new species.
I haven't read anything in which they even explained the change of color as a result of observed predation on the lighter colored moths as compared to the darker, or, as relevantly, their larvae. I doubt anything like that has ever actually been observed with sufficient care in a sufficient percentage of any species to come close to anything like a scientific observation. Certainly in no case where there has been a change of species. And you'd have to discount any other explanations due to other, non-predatory variations in the lighter and darker subgroups as well as things like the mating patterns of the two variations and what the resulting offspring would be like, etc. I have no doubt that species evolved into other species but whatever mechanism it happened through - and I suspect there are probably thousands if not many times more of those ways it happens - I doubt natural selection is anything like "a thing".
Though, in fact checking what I just said, I'm reading that there has been a decline in all peppered moths, whatever color in the past fifty years. My guess is that it's probably a combination of man-made global warming (ironically, including coal), artificial pesticides of the kind that the Trump regime just green lighted to keep destroying honey bees and the destructive industrial, development and agricultural policies that have come with the pervasive power of the relevant STEM topics which enable, most of all, such things. I think there's a good chance that instead of saving us, as Henry Adams predicted, science will come to rule us all and we will commit suicide through the increase in our destructive power while our moral sense is eroded by scientism and greed.
Naw, I think natural selection is an ideological construct invented by aristocrats out of their point of view informed by their belief in their superiority. I have noticed that even the groups they believed were inferior, when people in those groups take up the idea, they figure it demonstrates their superiority to others.*
It's all too convenient and that's before its utility to atheist fundamentalists comes into it. I doubt it really exists as anything but an ideological framing. It has been almost uniformly negative in its effect in the world since it was first published and it still is.
* Note, I don't buy Sam Seder's theory of how the tradition of scholarship among Ashkenazi Jews came about, I think it's probably a lot more individual and a lot more varied and a lot more complex than anyone can ever know. I do have to wonder why the Sephardi are left out, I've known lots and lots of people with that heritage who were really smart and I've known loads of people from every ethnicity who are as stupid as anyone else. I'd love to hear Sam Seder on that disgusting paper by Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul I went over a couple of weeks back.
Anyone who believes in IQ as a real "thing" is pretty stupid. Lots of people with PhDs, even the legendary physicists buy that horse shit. Look at William Schockley who was a friggin' Nobel Laureate physicist.
While we have our differences, I totally agree with what Micheal Brooks said.
Update: "so something more is going on"
The 10th grade Biology Textbook example of the peppered moths is a good example of bad scientific explanation. Here's a real geneticist describing just part of the problem, the kind of problem that has been a part of the ideology of natural selection since Darwin first published it.
In contrast, most evolutionary biologists work on natural populations of plants or animals that they have chosen because they believe they can tell a natural historical story of how selection actually operates in a particular case. The most famous example is the increase in the black form of the wings in the peppered moth that has occurred in England since the mid-nineteenth century. The explanation offered and repeatedly appearing in textbooks (although since called into question because of faulty methodology) was that the moths rested on tree trunks where they were at risk of being eaten by birds. Before the spread of heavy industry the tree trunks were covered with lichens whose speckled appearance was matched closely by the “peppered” appearance of the moth’s wings, so the camouflaged moths were only occasionally attacked. With the air pollution caused by heavy industry, the lichens were killed, so the moths were easily visible on the naked dark bark and were heavily preyed upon. A mutation to black wings appeared and was strongly favored by natural selection since the black-winged forms were now once again camouflaged.
There is little doubt that this example, widely taught in lectures and textbooks, had a powerful influence in convincing evolutionary biologists who came into the field from their prior interest in natural history that one could tell the causal story of natural selection. One unfortunate feature of this case is that the caterpillars of the dark-winged forms also have a slightly higher survival rate than those of the speckled-wing form, even though they are not black, so something more is going on, but this fact is not part of the curriculum.
Read that last sentence, again, One unfortunate feature of this case is that the caterpillars of the dark-winged forms also have a slightly higher survival rate than those of the speckled-wing form, even though they are not black, so something more is going on, but this fact is not part of the curriculum.
Who knows what that "something more" that is going on is? Who knows that it has anything to do with the coloration of the moths or that you would be able to actually find anything that would account for that difference in survival rate? Or that that difference is persistent over time? It could be that there is no discernible reason for it. If you can't discern a real reason, maybe there isn't one.
Lewontin goes on about these complications:
The causes of a reduction in survival in larvae that results from mutations with obvious visible effects in adults must be as varied as the morphological character in question, and it would require a detailed examination of the process of fruitfly development to elucidate. It is precisely this phenomenon that compromises the elegant natural historical story about the industrial dark color of the peppered moth or the story about predation in the dark-colored mice. Is it the dark coat and not some other metabolic product that is changed in dark-coated mice and that is responsible for their greater success in reproduction? Perhaps the mice with dark coats are also more fertile or better able to digest their food.
Yeah, maybe one of those things. Or maybe it just happened. I would question the interpretation of any of those variable other reasons, including the possibility that it just is that way, sometime, all fit under the massive umbrella called natural selection. I would like to know what other force of nature, any law of science is held to be like that, that it can be whatever you want to say it is, providing yourself with an otherwise non-existent answer. I think to say "natural selection" more often than not is just a way of saying "it's turtles all the way down" only it's said by sci-guys and it's been found to be useful for ideological materialism and, most of all, atheism, so no one points out what they're doing.
And the fact is that even today grey peppered moths and dark colored ones are the same species. There was no new species that resulted from it, it is in no way an example of natural selection, though from the start of its use in science, that was the claim. It was a convenient lie and it still is being pushed on science websites if not in textbooks.
I suppose if the speckled moths had been rendered extinct, and only black moths survived, it might prove natural selection, at least in a simple and mechanistic sense.
ReplyDeleteBut as I understand it, that's not what happened. And, as Lewontin points out, so many other factors have to be taken into account that the simple, visible causative factor (black v. speckled, lichen covered v. bare black bark) doesn't work. It does, however, indicate the favoring we give to sight, and to what we can see. "Pics or it didn't happen," sight as a metaphor for understanding ("I see"), insight as a word meaning understanding but actually referring to seeing into, or beneath the surface of; the fact that most of our scientific instruments are designed to make visible what is invisible (from electron tracks in colliders to various devices that translate earth tremors or heart beats or even electrical activity in the brain into a graph we can read).
So if we see it, it must be true. Except nature is not so neatly arranged as that, to make all things visible to him who looks.