Creationism’s effect on the progress of our understanding of evolution
Lynn Margulis argues that natural selection cannot provide a powerful enough evolutionary force to account for the punctuated equilibrium demonstrated in the fossil record. She proposes as an alternative that evolution is driven by changes in symbiotic relationships. I’m not a biologist, and I don’t understand what exactly her theory means, so I’m not going to try to argue for or against it, but it got me thinking:
Evolutionary biologists cannot afford to let Margulis’s theory become well-known and accepted as a mainstream theory, because that would create a rift in the pro-evolution camp, and creationists would be able to exploit this by combining Margulis’s argument that natural selection cannot account for punctuated equilibrium with arguments by Neo-Darwinists against Margulis’s theory to support their claim that evolution is false. This would be effective because many people would not understand that “we do not understand everything about how evolution works” does not imply “creationism is correct”. Thus, many evolutionary biologists might feel that they have to be very careful to look like they do know everything about how evolution works. This could make it more difficult for them to spot aspects in which their assumptions about evolution are mistaken. Maybe the biggest damage caused by creationism is that it suppresses legitimate criticism of the current accepted models of evolution, besides spreading false information to the general public.
Again, I’m not arguing in favor of Margulis’s theory in particular, but the statement “There exists at least one false fact about evolutionary biology that is accepted as true by a consensus of researchers in that field” seems fairly likely to be true.
Creationists have a historical tendency to distort, lie and just plain make shit up.
Nothing done in actual science will affect this behaviour. So giving it even a moment’s consideration is an error. Arguments as soldiers is an anti-pattern; treating actual science as soldiers is the precise error of the creationists. Just get on with the science.
Margulis is a highly respected biologist. She’s most well known for originally proposing the idea that mitochondria arose as part of symbiosis; this turned out to be completely correct. Since then she has spent most of her time trying to find subtle but powerful symbiosis where she can. Sometimes she has been correct and sometimes she hasn’t been.
There’s a lot wrong with this. First of all, biologists have spent a lot of time over the last 40 years arguing over whether natural selection accounts for most diversity we see. Even Darwin’s original ideas had a notion of sexual selection. But modern ideas include neutral drift and the founder effect, as well as horizontal gene transfer via infection, and a few other ideas. So the claim that biologists can’t discuss such ideas seems wrong given that empirically they are doing so.
The vast majority of biologists don’t pay much attention to creationism and aren’t spending their time thinking about how creationists will use their results. Moreover, creationism is a generally a US phenomenon (although certainly not completely). If one is a biologist in almost any Western European country these issues will not cross one’s mind.
Of course that’s the case. But that has nothing to do with reacting to creationism. That follows for almost any broad area of science simply due to the large number of facts involved.
“Cannot afford” is probably too strong a statement by far. Apparently Margulis is famous for substantiating the endosymbiosis theory of (many) organelles, which was highly unpopular when she did so. And yet I don’t recall any creationist materials saying that the success of this different theory means that creationism is right. Gould’s proposals about punctuated equilibria are occasionally claimed to be evidence for creationism, but it’s fairly rare. The cost here is probably quite bearable (though nonzero).
I don’t want to search for it at the moment, but I remember Margulis (or a female author with the same thesis) was brought up by evolutionary biologists[1] as an example of the system working. (i.e. someone has controversial thesis that is ignored, but gathers up evidence for it and it gets accepted).
It was in a response to Ben Stein’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed movie that tried to argue that biology is dogmatically attached to Darwinian evolution, tolerating no deviation from the “party line”. The author used the Margulis thesis to show that, no, if you have evidence for a controversial view in biology, it will get the attention it’s due, so you should work on finding that evidence rather than whining that you’re being shut out, as the Intelligent Design proponents do.
[1] I’d prefer to just say “evolutionist” to distinguish the sides here, but that always sparks a side-debate.
That hasn’t worked too well for cultural evolution so far—and that isn’t that difficult to understand.
I’m not sure I follow this. Can you expand on what you mean?
If Margulis is an example of the system working (she had a good idea and it was accepted) cultural evolution is an example of it not working (a simple and basic idea remains down-trodden for many decades).
What do you mean by cultural evolution and what do you mean by the idea being simple and basic?
Cultural evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_inheritance_theory
Downtrodden: “for some reason I haven’t fully fathomed, this most promising frontier of scientific research has attracted very few people and very little effort.”—Ed Wilson.
Simple: see the dictionary.
Basic: cultural evolution is fundamental to understanding cultural change—just as evolution is fundamental to understanding organic change.
Dual inheritance theory is not at all simple or basic when one tries to actually think about it beyond a “yeah, this occurs” level. It involves a lot of math, much of which is generally more abstract and subtle than the math used in standard population genetics. It also isn’t clear that DIT is able to make testable predictions in its current form that aren’t either standard results in population genetics or ideas that would be simple consequences of informal thinking anyways. It might be fair to say that this is a set of ideas which should have more attention than they have gotten. But calling dual inheritance theory either simple or basic just doesn’t reflect the actual state of the theory.
The basic idea is simple:
Monroe Strickberger, Evolution (1996)
Evolutionary theory is not simple, of course—but “evolutionary theory applies to human culture too” is only seven words.
That seems pretty muddled. The rapid changes frequently seen in rock strata are mostly the result of invasions—and do not really have much to do with the rate of change associated with natural selection.
It sounds like you’ve generalized from Richard Dawkins to all evolutionary biologists.
Science is not a fight, it’s a search for truth. If Margulis’s theory is proven true, then accepting it as a mainstream theory is obligatory. That it might open the door for already-confused people to get confused in yet another way is not a strike against it.
Science isn’t a fight. Getting science taught properly in schools IS a fight (which we are losing, at least in America. Close to 50% of us don’t believe in evolution).
If one looks at the Gallup data one sees a slight trend against creationism in the US.
Since the early 1980s Gallup has asked:
The data for that suggests that since 1982 American attitudes have been almost unchanged except that the percentage answering 2 has steadily increased with most of that being apparently accounted for in a drop of those with no opinion. I don’t know what exactly that shows, but it is difficult to argue from that data that “we are losing” for most definitions of “we” and “losing”.
Of course, it would be naive to assume that most people who give technically correct answers to such questions in polls have any real clue about the issues involved. They just answer the way they intuitively perceive to be high-status and ideologically correct; I’m sure most of them would easily change their opinion if these factors changed.
The primary reason people in the general public get worked up about evolution one way or another is ideological baiting and status concerns. The idea that it’s somehow important for the common folk to have a correct view of scientific theories that have nothing to do with their regular business strikes me as rather absurd.