Fred Reed on Evolution

[Oecolampadius]

A few months ago, I came across an article by an interesting chap named Fred Reed titled "Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution" (Google the title and several links will come up). Although he understands and accepts certain tenets of evolution, he forthrightly states that he has problems with other elements of evolution. When he's brought these concerns up to professionals in the field, they've responded by denouncing him as a creationist without really addressing his questions. Memorable quote from the article: "The greatest intellectual divide is not between those who believe one thing and those who believe another, but between those who have an emotional need to believe something fervently and those who can say, 'I don’t know.'"

I'd be interested in others' take on the article.

 

[rousseau]

After a quick skim through the article it looks like the author has no idea what he's talking about, but I'm not the guy with the patience to spend my long weekend arguing the merits of a bullet-proof scientific theory.

Someone else will be here shortly.

 

[Oecolampadius]

After a quick skim through the article it looks like the author has no idea what he's talking about, but I'm not the guy with the patience to spend my long weekend arguing the merits of a bullet-proof scientific theory.

Someone else will be here shortly.

To make it easier on you or "someone else," I'm excerpting his comments on the reproductive mechanism of a variety of bot fly:

The Bot fly is a squat, ugly, hairy fly that (in one version anyway) catches a mosquito, lays its eggs on on said mosquito after positioning it correctly, and attaches them with a kind of glue. It releases the mosquito. When the little feathery syringe lands on, say, a human, the eggs drop off, hatch, and burrow into the host. These make nasty raised lumps with something wiggling inside them. Later the larvae exit, fall to the ground and pupate.

How did this evolve? Did a grab-a-mosquito gene occur as a random mutation (assuming that a single mutation could cause such complex behavior)? It would have to be a grab-a-mosquito-but-don’t-cripple-it gene. That is an awful lot of precise behavior for one mutation. At this point, the bot fly would have a mosquito but no idea what to do with it. It would need simultaneously to have a stick-eggs-on-mosquito mutation. This would seem to require another rather ambitious gene.

Catching the mosquito without laying the eggs, or squashing the mosquito in the process, or laying eggs in mid air without having caught the mosquito, would seem a losing proposition. None of these awfully-lucky mutations would be of use without the others. How do you evolve this elaborate dance by gradual steps?

Do professionals in the field actually subscribe to genetic mutations that would account for this, or is Reed misrepresenting them? If Reed is misrepresenting them, then what is their explanation for such a phenomenon? If Reed isn't misrepresenting them, well, then, yes, it would appear that these would have been "ambitious" mutations indeed.

 

[beero1000]

After a quick skim through the article it looks like the author has no idea what he's talking about, but I'm not the guy with the patience to spend my long weekend arguing the merits of a bullet-proof scientific theory.

Someone else will be here shortly.

To make it easier on you or "someone else," I'm excerpting his comments on the reproductive mechanism of a variety of bot fly:

The Bot fly is a squat, ugly, hairy fly that (in one version anyway) catches a mosquito, lays its eggs on on said mosquito after positioning it correctly, and attaches them with a kind of glue. It releases the mosquito. When the little feathery syringe lands on, say, a human, the eggs drop off, hatch, and burrow into the host. These make nasty raised lumps with something wiggling inside them. Later the larvae exit, fall to the ground and pupate.

How did this evolve? Did a grab-a-mosquito gene occur as a random mutation (assuming that a single mutation could cause such complex behavior)? It would have to be a grab-a-mosquito-but-don’t-cripple-it gene. That is an awful lot of precise behavior for one mutation. At this point, the bot fly would have a mosquito but no idea what to do with it. It would need simultaneously to have a stick-eggs-on-mosquito mutation. This would seem to require another rather ambitious gene.

Catching the mosquito without laying the eggs, or squashing the mosquito in the process, or laying eggs in mid air without having caught the mosquito, would seem a losing proposition. None of these awfully-lucky mutations would be of use without the others. How do you evolve this elaborate dance by gradual steps?

Do professionals in the field actually subscribe to genetic mutations that would account for this, or is Reed misrepresenting them? If Reed is misrepresenting them, then what is their explanation for such a phenomenon? If Reed isn't misrepresenting them, well, then, yes, it would appear that these would have been "ambitious" mutations indeed.

The same old "irreducible complexity" tripe. Yawn.

 

[Oecolampadius]

The same old "irreducible complexity" tripe. Yawn.

So enlighten me with a "reducible complexity" explanation.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Do professionals in the field actually subscribe to genetic mutations that would account for this, or is Reed misrepresenting them? If Reed is misrepresenting them, then what is their explanation for such a phenomenon? If Reed isn't misrepresenting them, well, then, yes, it would appear that these would have been "ambitious" mutations indeed.

I think he's misrepresenting them.

This accidental-life theory, being somewhat plausible, is therefore accepted without the usual standards of science, such as reproducibility or rigorous demonstration of mathematical feasibility. Putting it otherwise, evolutionists are too attached to their ideas to be able to question them.

First off, the origin of life is NOT part of evolutionary theory. So the fact that it remains a matter of speculation has no bearing on whether or not 'evolution' is a different sort of science.
Second, if it's not their area, i can understand if they get testy at being pestered to prove something he thinks is taken as gospel, but they think is only a working theory.

They defend furiously the evolution of life in earth’s seas as the most certain of certainties.

I'd like to know where he's finding evolutionists who insist that we know where life started.

Starlings are said to have evolved to be the color of dirt so that hawks can’t see them to eat them. This is plausible and, I suspect, true. But guacamayos and cockatoos are gaudy enough to be seen from low-earth orbit. Is there a contradiction here? No, say evolutionists.

No, the fact is that different species have developed different solutions to the problems of staying alive. One need not expect that all birds evolve the same way for the same reasons. Same as why some species have oodles and oodles of offspring, which are spread willy-nilly, in the hopes that some few of them will survive, while other species have fewer offspring, but spend more time nurturing them, to improve their chances of survival.

All in all, he seems to depend heavily on Argument from Incredulity and not quite understanding the actual positions he's arguing against.

 

[bilby]

Evolution has produced many structures, behaviours, and interactions that are hugely complex.

Some are so complex that it can be difficult to work out how they might have evolved.

But the dividing line between things that can be explained, and things that cannot, tellingly, varies from researcher to researcher.

"I am too stupid to understand how this evolved, therefore it cannot have evolved" is not a compelling argument; but it is a great recruiting tool when you say to others "If you don't understand how this evolved, then you must either accept that you don't know everything, or join me in my campaign to discredit that which makes us feel stupid".

People don't like to realise that there are limits to their intelligence. But there are.

The stumbling block for most examples of supposedly impossible evolved traits is that almost nothing in biology has only one purpose; and that stuff needn't work perfectly, it need only work a bit - and have the possibility of getting better - and it can develop.

Having eggs that are sticky is not only useful for sticking your eggs to mosquitoes. Ancestors of the botfly might well have gained advantages from sticking eggs to something else.

Telling 'just so' stories generally isn't helpful; refusal to get sucked in to the game where each detail of the natural world needs such a tale is not evidence that evolutionary biologists don't know what they are doing.

I can imagine a number of different ways in which any particular combination of traits might have evolved. In any given case, perhaps one of those is the actual way it happened. Or maybe it happened some other way. A lack of imagination is not a good reason to reject a well tested theory.

If you want to reject a theory, you need to show that its predictions are false. Not just that you can't think of exactly how they might be true.

 

[Keith&Co.]

The same old "irreducible complexity" tripe. Yawn.

So enlighten me with a "reducible complexity" explanation.

Well, IR is a claim that there are some things in biology that are too complicated to have evolved by stages, or changed from something else.
No example of IR has ever stood up to scrutiny. So that is the RC explanation: That no one's yet come up with a good reason to question evolution because of 'complexity.'

 

[braces_for_impact]

Fred Reed is not new. He's been around for awhile, claiming that homosexuality, long giraffe necks, and other insects fly in the face of evolution, based upon his own failure of imagination. Talk Origins has some here (the first few top results).

In the past, we've had many irreducible complexity arguments by creationists. Even when these are explained, like the bacterial flagellum creationists simply pick up, and move on to a new creature - reasserting the same tired argument.

We've had objects escape earth's gravitational field to never come back. Does this mean gravitational theory is wrong? Sometimes, we're unsure of the exact mechanism that a bacterium or virus uses to make people ill. Does this mean the germ theory of disease is wrong?

If you wish to supplant evolutionary theory, just poking occasional holes at the limits of our knowledge isn't sufficient. You have to have a theory that explains those same phenomena better than the present one.

 

[Oecolampadius]

Keith&Co., bilby, and braces_for_impact--I appreciate the thoughtful replies.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Keith&Co., bilby, and braces_for_impact--I appreciate the thoughtful replies.

Sure.
how thoughtful, though?
What are your thoughts on Reed at this point?

 

[Bomb#20]

The same old "irreducible complexity" tripe. Yawn.

So enlighten me with a "reducible complexity" explanation.

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[Valjean]

First, the article conflates abiogenesis with evolution, then a depiction of science as plausibility, rather than evidence based, then more abiogenesis, then some questions about coloration any 8th grader could answer, then some complaints about the ToE being an ideology and giving no clear answers.

The article then goes on to state: "Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC."He has the sides completely reversed. What he's describing are the creationists. Its they who are obsessed with scientific threats to their world-view. Science pays no attention at all to creationism, unless directly challenged.

Where does Reed come up with this claptrap? It's a creationist meme, right out of Answers in Genesis.

He goes on to complain about scientists being ignorant true believers, citing their inability to explain abiogenesis.
Reed then waxes philosophical, and tries to look at the Big Picture. He tries to paint himself as a scientific sophisticate, but succeeds only in further illustrating his utter ignorance of scientific methodology.

Here I became exasperated and gave up.
Reed conflates science and faith. He sees them as competing ideologies. He doesn't understand scientific method. He doesn't understand evolution theory. This whole article is an uninformed rant.

 

[Malintent]

So enlighten me with a "reducible complexity" explanation.

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Begin anti-science:

Bomb, I am sorry, but in trying to explain the (impossible) path nature took to get from shape number 1 to shape number 7 , which was only one question, you have not only failed to convince my unmoving mind, but now you have created 5 additional problems with this so-called (just a) theory. Now explain the path from shape 1 to 2 AND 2 to 3 AND 3 to 4.... etc... Se what happens when you try to learn yourself something? You just get stupider. Once upon a time you had one simple question that was already easily answered (obviously, that god does everything so shut up), and now your mental gymnastics with the sole purpose of denying the god and his glory has only served to create all these new problems and questions. What's wrong with you people!!??!

:End anti-science

 

[rousseau]

So enlighten me with a "reducible complexity" explanation.

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Basically take this, but elongate the process over millions of years, and a... very large number of generations. So instead of 7 iterations, it's more like.. I don't even know... a hundred thousand? A million?

If we trace evolution back to the first replicators, there's probably been an obscene number of generations.

 

[Malintent]

What's truly "obscene" is the sheer number of sexual acts that took us from there to here. it's.... ungodly!
I reject this on the grounds of good discretion!

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

First, the article conflates abiogenesis with evolution, then a depiction of science as plausibility, rather than evidence based, then more abiogenesis, then some questions about coloration any 8th grader could answer, then some complaints about the ToE being an ideology and giving no clear answers.

The article then goes on to state: "Third, evolutionists are obsessed by Christianity and Creationism, with which they imagine themselves to be in mortal combat. This is peculiar to them. Note that other sciences, such as astronomy and geology, even archaeology, are equally threatened by the notion that the world was created in 4004 BC."He has the sides completely reversed. What he's describing are the creationists. Its they who are obsessed with scientific threats to their world-view. Science pays no attention at all to creationism, unless directly challenged.

Where does Reed come up with this claptrap? It's a creationist meme, right out of Answers in Genesis.

He goes on to complain about scientists being ignorant true believers, citing their inability to explain abiogenesis.
Reed then waxes philosophical, and tries to look at the Big Picture. He tries to paint himself as a scientific sophisticate, but succeeds only in further illustrating his utter ignorance of scientific methodology.

Here I became exasperated and gave up.
Reed conflates science and faith. He sees them as competing ideologies. He doesn't understand scientific method. He doesn't understand evolution theory. This whole article is an uninformed rant.

Yes. The lack of scientific understanding is obvious.

Now show me your mechanism and your mechanic if evolution and natural selection simply aren't enough to satisfy emotional needs.

 

[Oecolampadius]

Now show me your mechanism and your mechanic if evolution and natural selection simply aren't enough to satisfy emotional needs.

Are you addressing this to seyorni, Reed, or me? Also, are you suggesting that people who believe in evolution and natural selection do so because it satisfies their emotional needs? Sure sounds like it. Freudian slip, perhaps? I would think that honest people would want to believe something because it's true, regardless of whether it satisfies emotional needs. At any rate the ball--or rather in this case the bot fly--is still in your court. No one has yet walked me through the process that would have caused these creatures to begin grabbing mosquitoes and laying eggs on them in the first place. If you simply don't know how this came about, fine; I'll simply agree that I don't know either. Maybe we haven't thought it through thoroughly enough, or maybe there's another piece of the puzzle we need to find before we can figure it out.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Now show me your mechanism and your mechanic if evolution and natural selection simply aren't enough to satisfy emotional needs.

Are you addressing this to seyorni, Reed, or me? Also, are you suggesting that people who believe in evolution and natural selection do so because it satisfies their emotional needs? Sure sounds like it. Freudian slip, perhaps? I would think that honest people would want to believe something because it's true, regardless of whether it satisfies emotional needs. At any rate the ball--or rather in this case the bot fly--is still in your court. No one has yet walked me through the process that would have caused these creatures to begin grabbing mosquitoes and laying eggs on them in the first place. If you simply don't know how this came about, fine; I'll simply agree that I don't know either. Maybe we haven't thought it through thoroughly enough, or maybe there's another piece of the puzzle we need to find before we can figure it out.

I had a feeling this was where you would go with this, it's very common. So what you've failed to learn, or we have failed to elucidate is that you're not missing an answer. It's that you're asking the wrong question. This is what happens when you think you have the answer already and then you work backwards from there. Look, surely you agree that if I can't figure out how a murder took place then it means a murder never took place, right?

 

[bilby]

Now show me your mechanism and your mechanic if evolution and natural selection simply aren't enough to satisfy emotional needs.

Are you addressing this to seyorni, Reed, or me? Also, are you suggesting that people who believe in evolution and natural selection do so because it satisfies their emotional needs? Sure sounds like it. Freudian slip, perhaps? I would think that honest people would want to believe something because it's true, regardless of whether it satisfies emotional needs. At any rate the ball--or rather in this case the bot fly--is still in your court. No one has yet walked me through the process that would have caused these creatures to begin grabbing mosquitoes and laying eggs on them in the first place. If you simply don't know how this came about, fine; I'll simply agree that I don't know either. Maybe we haven't thought it through thoroughly enough, or maybe there's another piece of the puzzle we need to find before we can figure it out.

I thought it had been explained very clearly why that's the wrong question to ask.

The answer is unknown, it probably cannot be known (although we can make some well informed guesses), and it doesn't matter, because - despite Mr Reed's belief to the contrary - it's not the kind of question evolution seeks to answer.

The theory of evolution is an answer to the question 'What is the most plausible mechanism by which life came to be so diverse and complex'. It's a question about mechanism.

If we are asking 'What is the most plausible mechanism by which all that rubble came to be at the bottom of the canyon', then the theory of universal gravitation is the answer. You can't challenge the theory of universal gravitation by pointing to a particular rock, and demanding to know how the exact path it took when bouncing down the cliff; even if we spent days working it out forensically, the anti-gravitationalist would just point at a different rock, and demand the details of that one's trajectory.

If you were one told that there are no stupid questions, then here's your counterexample. The question about how the botfly evolved is a stupid question, because answering it would leave you no more knowledgeable than before; and an inability to answer it in no way undermines the theory it's intended to challenge.

Or do you doubt gravity, because we don't know the full history of every rockfall?