A Response

The quote from Richard Lewontin I began with yesterday is, I think, obviously true if you think honestly about the issues involved in a scientific endeavor in which so much of the information you would need to draw the conclusions you would like to is just simply not available to you and you are unable to observe, measure and analyze that information so as to come up with anything like science.  Only, if you are a scientist, you can, clearly, successfully sell your results as science and few will object to it.

If you can't observe something, and in the question of evolution, other than fossilized remains and other fragmentary information available, the minutest of fractions of the actual process included in our definition of evolution is available, other than the factual information you can glean from what you can observe is rankest speculation.  When it is speculations about "selective forces operating on most genes" which cannot be measured  "because those forces are so weak" what the currently most popular understanding of evolution, evolutionary psychology in the Dawkins style is based in, we are talking about speculations about speculations about speculations.  Lewontin's statement pointed out how thin that branch  on which rests the current understanding of evolutionary science is by comparing it with the status of knowledge about less attenuated speculations.

Worse, there is no way to confirm or reject stories about the selective forces that operated in the past to bring traits to their present state, no matter how strong those forces were. 

Even when the forces are strong, your inability to actually observe the organisms on which they were operating in the lost past means you can't choose between any alternative explanations of what happened.  That is true for many reasons that first came to the attention of many of us with the speculations about "traits" in Sociobiology, what morphed into evolutionary psychology.  In the stories and scenarios of that school of evolutionary speculation, those "traits" are alleged to have survived in a meaningfully similar form across hundreds of millions if not more than a billion years* of evolution through numerous species, not to mention organisms, which have left absolutely no available fossilized trace.  I would guess in a lot of the speculations of that sort, hundreds perhaps thousands of unknown intervening species and an incredible number of unknown individual organisms are passed over as unimportant in the epic generalization and speculation in such "stories" all unobserved, all entirely the product of the imaginations of E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and others making up such stories and scenarios, all of which rely, undeniably on their imaginations informed by the scantiest of information about other, barely related organisms which either live today or which by chance and random events left fossilized remains.  Or, presumably, though unreadable traces of DNA which only proves that it is a reasonable conclusion that there is some physical connection through lines of physical inheritance.  Hardly enough to prove any kind of connection between what an E. O. Wilson will interpret as the motivation in ant behaviors, also the product of his imagination (ants don't tell us what's on their minds) and his desire to make a connection to behavior in modern animals, most resonant for us, human behaviors.  And Wilson was rather modest in his claims compared to some of the evolutionary psychologists who will get on Fresh Air and are quoted by news readers and conservative columnists in the New York Times.

That Lewontin's admissions seem amazing and so unusual should, itself, be a flashing warning sign about the enormous amount of stuff we just take as a given when it should be part of the consideration before we believe something.  It should always be considered by anyone putting their faith in any of the assertions of scientists talking about things they never observed in the lost past and can't adequately observe and measure now, that they are certainly not doing so on the basis of reliable science.   What should have been the clearest of facts about science, that it can't go where accurate observations adequate to base any generalized assertion on and sufficient in quality and detail to quantify them are unavailable should have been included in everyone's science education.  It clearly isn't.  You can, obviously, become a renowned scientist without taking that ground-floor level necessity seriously, you can advance to the top of a career in science at a major university while blatantly ignoring it.

I will note, in passing, that the habit of story-telling was always part of the study of evolution, even before Charles Darwin, even before his grandfather Erasmus, it is something that the atheist conception of the story of life had in common with religious and folkloric explanations.  When you don't have the information you need, if you're going to think up stories about what animals and people might have been like (and it's striking low seldom plants are the feature players in those stories), what they might have done and what might have happened to them you can't do it except through creative imagination.   Darwinists didn't give up story telling, they just told different stories based on their preferences.  They may have been informed by different and, sometimes, superior information than those told outside of science - though often the science relies on other myths pretended to be information -  but they are still made up stories.  The really impressive results of evolutionary science are the ones least based on story telling and most based on physical evidence.  Pretending that the creation myths told by atheists are not myths is a common enough and accepted enough lie but it is a lie.

If a science can't do those things that Lewontin admits that much of the science around the topic of evolution can't do, then, clearly the choices between stories and the creation of those stories have to be based on things other than what gave physical sciences their reliability before some of their scientists, as well, veered off into speculations they allowed themselves to make.   Obviously the prime candidate for many of these people is their materialism, gone from a methodological choice to an ideological faith.  That was, actually and quite explicitly inserted into biology in the generation of Haeckel, Galton and Thomas Huxley, all of whom made speculations of the kind I've been talking about, based on what are clearly ideological and self-serving assertions.  Since many of their fellow scientists shared the same ideological, social and even financial interests of these scientists, they allowed it to happen, I would guess that was as strong a force in quelling critiques which would have greatly reduced the size of the field of evolutionary biology but may have left it with far less speculative underpinnings and a core of much more solid evidence based substance.  That such a substance would have been less useful for making up science fiction and anthropological romances would have been a price, but not a significant one in any serious sense.   It may have failed to capture the popular imagination, as so much of chemistry doesn't, but things don't have to make good stories to be important.

But, I think, a more modest, more careful, more factual evolutionary biology would not have served the purposes of supporting the materialist ideology of the first generation of Darwinists, those who, like Ernst Haeckel attributed to natural selection the confirmation, nay, the "Triumph of materialist monism,"Haeckel's phrase in a book which Charles Darwin endorsed without reservation.  But that goal is certainly not a scientific one, science is entirely unequipped to determine the truth of any ideology, materialistic or religious.  That is another thing which is routinely ignored by scientists who constantly assert the validation of their ideological desires through science.  And perhaps that is a habit ingrained enough in us that if science wants to approach objectivity, it will have to routinely be on guard against materialist ideology as it is against religious ideology. And not only that but also the self-interest of scientists in other areas, professional, financial and political interests, something which is a far larger and more clearly present danger to the integrity of science than any alleged religious infiltration of it.   Religion is the ONE pollutant in science that is successfully guarded against, all of those others mentioned above are routinely inserted into it.  As the history of eugenics proves, the results of failing to keep science on the straight and narrow can have the most disastrous effects in real life, the body count in the tens of millions, perhaps eventually our entire species and perhaps all of life on Earth.

*  Since, if a "trait" were to survive in two very dissimilar species, in different families, perhaps in higher taxonomic categories,  it was through two different lines of inheritance from a common ancestor so I think it's legitimate to multiply the years between us and our common ancestor by two to make this analysis.

Update:   The "speculations about speculations about speculations" are the unspecified percentages speculated about the behaviors speculated to have happened in imagined, unevidenced animals speculated to have been there.  I could have added several more "speculations" to that chain of speculation because once you get out of the range of time known on hard physical evidence and the virtual fraction of a second in evolutionary time for which we have any sound knowledge of behaviors, the entire thing is storytelling and guess work.  But such is the science of evolutionary psychology and most of the story telling around evolution made of.  While, since we know evolution happened and since we know that we know almost nothing about it, the lack of information is frustrating but making stuff up is still making stuff up and the conclusions you draw from that are only as grounded as the legitimate conclusions you can draw from physical evidence allow.  In a complex story of even a very simple behavior, it is entirely ungrounded.