Being A New Post for Marco to Hook Comments On
Like most people with an interest in the historical
sciences, Alfred Wegener is one of my heroes. He marshalled an overwhelmingly
convincing mass of evidence of the need for continental drift, argued his case
coherently and courageously against monolithic opposition, and was eventually
vindicated long after he disappeared on a macho scientific expedition across
the Greenland ice cap.
Like most people who have thought about it seriously, the pillars
of the scientific establishment who mocked Alfred Wegener are also my heroes.
Because no matter how much evidence there is of the need for a new theory, you
can’t throw out the old theory until you have a new theory. And for a new
theory to be science, it needs to have a plausible mechanism. And in the case
of continental drift, there was no proposal for how it could possibly have
happened that was not obviously wrong until the mid-ocean ridges were
discovered, long after Wegener’s death.
To generalise: if you are an iconoclast who wants to
convince me to change my mind about something scientific, you need to do two
things. (1) Present an overwhelming mass of evidence that the existing models
are inadequate: there has to be something that needs to be explained. (2)
Present some vaguely plausible model, consistent with the other things we know,
that explains this stuff that needs to be explained.
The rest of this post
is just going to be me arguing with Marco, so I’ll see the rest of you later.
:)
***
From the most recent comment of Marco down on the ‘Yes, Natural Selection on Random Mutations is
Sufficient’ post:
I'm just going to summarise what I believe to be
the source of our differences.
It does not make sense to talk about the source of our
differences. You have not yet clarified your model sufficiently for it to be
meaningful to talk about the differences between us. As the iconoclast, you need to present
overwhelming evidence that the existing model needs to be changed, and some
plausible mechanism for an alternative model. These are both necessary. Reiterating that you see the need for a change, and advancing very vague mechanisms that are not linked to the known facts of molecular biology, are never going to convince me. Of course there is no need for you to convince me; but if you want to convince anyone in the scientific community, these are the two things that you need to do.
1) Experimental basis - your mentioning that a
synthesis cannot be experimentally derived by definition, is to me an admission
that it is not strictly science. You do believe it to be science by a reasoning
I do not accept.
The only way I can construe this statement is that the
historical sciences in toto are not science. To me, this is an unreasonable
limitation of the meaning of ‘science’. It impacts all possible mechanisms of
evolution.
2) expanding informatics principles to genetics - genes as a store of information and instructions analogous to a computer algorithm. To me it is obvious and valid - to you (and biologists in general) it is a big no-no.
This is because biologists know more than you do. The relationship
of genes to computer algorithms is only an analogy, and it is a very weak
analogy.
3) definition of randomness - Ditching a statistically valid definition of random in favour of a statutory functional one makes the synthesis *not falsifiable* in the statistical sense. One should be able to verify that a simulation based on statistical randomness would come to the same probability distribution.
4) Dismissal of trivial non-randomness. You appear to do this equally for biochemical reasons that mutations would happen in certain areas more than others that are not proportional in any way to the function, but also it appears for things like horizontal gene transfer and epigenetics effects. To me it is an admission that random is incorrect even in your functional description. For instance, I think it is as reasonable a synthesis that horizontal gene transfer explains the spread of all beneficial mutations. I do not think that it is the whole story, but the standard evolutionary synthesis crowds out other ideas as if it had been experimentally verified.
I am absolutely sure that a simulation based on statistical
randomness could show natural selection
on random variations was sufficient to account for biological change. I am absolutely sure
that a simulation based on trival non-randomness could show natural selection
on what I call trivially non-random variations was sufficient to account for biological change. Alternatively,
I am sure that a simulation based on statistical randomness could show natural selection on random
variations was not sufficient to account for biological change. None of these
simulations would necessarily tell us anything about reality. The real system
that we are trying to simulate is too complicated. Modelling is not experiment. All models are only as good as their assumptions. This quibbling about definitions of randomness is, to me, irrelevant and uninteresting. It does not get us one step closer towards identifying a deficiency in the standard model, nor clarifying a plausible mechanism for directed evolution.
18 comments:
The only way I can construe this statement is that the historical sciences in toto are not science. To me, this is an unreasonable limitation of the meaning of ‘science’. It impacts all possible mechanisms of evolution.
Well yes! You know I've had it in for the historical sciences in some way. It is one thing to say that nature has done the experiment for you, and I can't fault *lineage* and *chronology* and *timescales* associated with evolutionary theory, they *are* science in the verifiable sense. I want all possible mechanisms of evolution to be back on the table because they are *not* strictly science by my arguments. Where nature has done a clear experiment historical sciences are fine. Where they haven't, it is religion, pure and simple.
I will get back to the informatics argument.
Before I forget, I left a comment at the bottom our last thread. Stretch theory is looking a lot like your explanation of continental drift. I don't want to be dead before stretch theory is accepted. There is ample proof, and I want you on the correct team. Check the evidence for yourself.
With regards to informatics and biology, I can only surmise that the association with those ideologues that "don't believe in evolution" has relegated what I find to be just a shortcut and an analogy that works and is representative of the biological reality, just without having to explain things at the lowest individual genetic unit, to the fringes of the scientific establishment. The informatics argument in Lennoxes book was done over several chapters, if I remember correctly, but I do not remember your criticisms directly - just that it amounted to God of the gaps. I think panspermia proponents also have this concept of genes as information.
Perhaps it would help me understand if you could explain to me again what Lennox was saying that contradicts biological reality.
Andy C Cooper can be one of your heroes *before* it gets to that. https://scute1133site.wordpress.com/about/
I insist that Wegener had proved beyond reasonable doubt that continental drift had occured.
What I have been saying where you haven't been listening:
*There doesn't need to be a mechanism that people can agree that is plausible* to be acknowledged 100% right. He deserved to be recognised a hero while he was still alive. Stretch theory should be accepted as gospel before even discussions about mechanism are required. The proof is in the forensics. There is also circumstantial evidence galore. Why won't scientists listen? Because there is nothing in it for them.
See, there is an unbridgeable gap between us. :( I've tried to explain in this post where you might want to start putting the foundations for the pylons. But beyond that I don't know what I can do.
I know very well that an alternative explanation for life as we know it is that it was generated by non-chemical life (I think that's where you're going with your thought experiment), having read me some Fred Hoyle and some Star Trek novelisations in my time, but I don't think this is a line of inquiry that is going to be fruitful. To get a density and complexity of non-chemical interactions to a degree commensurable with what we see in chemical life one would have to go back to a few milliseconds after the Big Bang, which is pretty much unobservable.
And yes, I have been watching the comments on the other post, as well. I'll write a little post in the next few days in support of the stretching model for the shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which seems both obvious and unimportant to me. You would have noted that the 'about' page you linked to is pretty much all scute1133 making well-grounded mechanistic arguments for comet stretching in terms of established science.
Here is a thought experiment on the limitations of your informatics analogy. Every time you write a program, before you run it you tear it in half and swap halves with a program someone else has written, then stick the two halves together. How well will that work, do you think?
Here is a thought experiment on the limitations of your informatics analogy. Every time you write a program, before you run it you tear it in half and swap halves with a program someone else has written, then stick the two halves together. How well will that work, do you think?
Importantly, I don't think this affects the analogy at all. It's all about how the programming language and collaborative tools are set up. Programming language can definitely "be like" the information combination in sexual reproduction, which I think you are alluding to. The phenotypes involved in sexual reproduction are Mendelian, and the analogy in informatics are plug in program features or adjustments. In success between programs that mainly do the same thing such "organised chaos" is a good software engineering strategy. No need for a random number generator to organise chaos in this way.
And yes, I have been watching the comments on the other post, as well. I'll write a little post in the next few days in support of the stretching model for the shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which seems both obvious and unimportant to me. You would have noted that the 'about' page you linked to is pretty much all scute1133 making well-grounded mechanistic arguments for comet stretching in terms of established science.
Obviously it is more important to me for several reasons, and the mechanistic arguments are all well and good but the experts and *all* the mission scientists still have this in the "no plausible mechanism" box, pure and simple. It is very pertinent to the fringes of our argument, that the bar is way too high that even a proof is not enough to overturn a set of unproven mechanisms just because they are incumbent. They do not even have any investment in one or another being right. I really cannot understand the psyche of these scientists.
If you are an iconoclast who wants to convince me to change my mind about something scientific, you need to do two things.
My thesis is that a cumulative effect of Ockhams razor muddles what is experimentally verified (or verifiable) and that which is "synthesis" or generalisations that are not (or cannot). Especially with the historical sciences, evidence is interpreted through the simplified syntheses. My thesis is that scientist that filter out the poisoned fruit of Ockhams razor, but leave in what is experimentally verifiable will make discoveries well in advance of the mass of evidence you say is required. They will even know if there is likely to be overwhelming evidence or not, and where or when that might happen.
I know very well that an alternative explanation for life as we know it is that it was generated by non-chemical life (I think that's where you're going with your thought experiment), having read me some Fred Hoyle and some Star Trek novelisations in my time, but I don't think this is a line of inquiry that is going to be fruitful. Abiogenesis is something that seems like it must be possible, just not where we can observe it and it cannot have left any evidence. Just like giving a puzzle to an expert puzzle solver but you know that it has been designed to be impossible but no way for the hapless puzzle expert to work out from looking at it. All the clues are there - obviously proof eludes either way, but this thought experiment rings true to me. Sure, as a line of inquiry there are issues with garnering evidence, but I am convinced the proximal M-life is imbedded in comets, and the lineage goes to the stars, galaxies and to the Big Bang, which, as you say, is problematic for evidence, which is where the m-life equivalent of abiogenesis would be imbedded.
Clearly I think this line would be fruitful given continued space exploration. This is because the precedent M-life to the biochemical sort must necessarily have "handles" in the complex chemical world, otherwise it could not design such. When I run the thought experiment I inexorably come to the conclusion that comets must be the precedent M-life. Of course by now they ought to be embedded with panspermia and perhaps multicellular life as well. The "giant amoeba" model is essentially where I was at a couple of years ago and stretch theory is just one of the things that it predicts that the experts didn't. Of course I could be just lucky, and evidence that I expect to be found will, fairly easily be muddled into a combination of existing theories, at least for the next few decades. Thus I don't have the mountain of evidence, but I do expect it to be found, bit by bit. I do see that it is pointless to try to sell the unsellable to scientists, but I got the jump on stretch theory before the experts, when *ONLY ONE* individual saw the evidence clear as day, unencumbered by models which predicted bi-lobe stretch to be inconceivable given any possible materials. ie. Without any plausible mechanism that would stretch a comet into a bilobe shape.
I've read up on Alfred Wegener and thought about it a lot and my conclusion is that the pillars of the scientific establishment that mocked him, far from being heroes are as villainous as the religious establishment that mocked Galileo. Possibly more so, as there are no society wide consequences for "science" losing face as there are for the government or established religion of the day. The problem of stretch theory is very similar to continental drift, but probably more so. You agreeing that the science is in its favour is because you are not a cometary scientist and they know more about it than you. The cometary scientists have done simulations that number in the billions. And small cometary bodies are much more amenable to realistic models and simulation than planets and their tectonic plates. The problem is that none of these models have shown stretch to lead to bilobed shapes in the way that I have suggested. Scute is in the simulation game as far as rocky bodies goes, and only Roche passes, and not a high percentage of them can show anything close to the bilobed shape. Thus, both you and I, as concerned skeptical scientists should be mocking stretch theory rather than supporting it. That is if we believe that there is no compelling evidence to disprove "cometary origins synthesis"
scute1133 has a good, well-argued, well-grounded mechanism. Wegener didn't. Simulations are bogus, especially if you don't know what things are made out of. But... if you want to convince me that stretch theory is bogus, your appeal to the authority of those with a superior grasp of the facts has me halfway there! ;D
These simulations are not bogus. The guide to composition is aggregates from a molecular cloud, and they've tried all sorts of strength materials. Hard brittle material aggregates tend to get to a certain spin rate fairly unscathed, and then shred. More ductile aggregates tend to go wider at the equator but fairly spherical until they also shred. Often, on shredding, the simulations show plausible reaggregation into two or more large subunits, which could then plausibly be a contact binary if they stay gravitationally bound.
Yes, Scute1133 has made a good go at demonstrating that a mechanism would work to stretch into a bilobed or peanut shape, given a brittle shell and ductile core, but I get the feeling that the experts think this is too convenient to have happened randomly from pristine cometary aggregates.
I think the only thing different in this case over Wegeners, is that the evidence that he lacked (I think there was plenty enough evidence that it occured, just not enough on how) is very likely to become apparent during Rosetta's extent of mission, as long as there is no catastrophic failure in Rosetta in the meantime. One thing that I have worked out is that 67P cannot "destretch" ie, have a partial failure in the neck which brings the lobes closer together but retaining overall integrity. This is because due to the conservation in angular momentum, and the lack of conservation in kinetic energy, work would have to be performed by the comet to speed it up. Passive friction just could not do it. friction can only help to slow it down when it is stretching.
So to summarise, the experts have it in the "implausible mechanism" box.
Me and Scute have it in the "scientific fact" box. Every new Rosetta image brings more evidence to bear, and Scute will keep documenting it until it reaches the "Galileo threshold" , that is when scientists begin to look stupid by continuing with models that just cannot fit new evidence in anymore.
I really do not understand which side of the Wegener debate, therefore the Scute/stretch debate or even the Global warming debate *you* purport to be on.
In my view Wegener was right, and he was always right, and "science" would be better served if it gets these things right without having to leap through flaming hoops to keep an old paradigm. The failure in science to "know" whether he was right or wrong goes far far deeper than having no evidence for a mechanism. The failure lies in the incumbent view *not being subject* to the need for evidence. We can still demand that the evidence speak for itself without having a preferred underlying philosophy or specific mechanism details.
If we are to accept the authority of the experts who are paid to study these things and dedicate their lives to it, we should be doing it equally for theoretical physics, climate scientists, evolutionary biologists, geologists and cometary scientists. We, however, have a brain, and we can refer back to our basic axioms that deal with the philosophy of science. We know that good new theories can predict new facts where dubious ones don't. We know that just because a model says something, doesn't make it true. If a model is predictive, only then should it get more confidence of its truth.
Should you continue to just believe whatever rubbish climatologists spit out, or cometary scientists for that matter, or are we qualified to look at the predictive power of the models that they use?
Now, my living comet theory predicted stretch, in fact required it. I jumped on scute's stretch bandwagon before He even had the evidence there for me to look over. Stretch explains at least 20 of the cometary oddities that have the experts scratching their heads.
We can't get inside comets yet, we haven't been able to see a comet over its long lifetime. It's going to take centuries to build up a mechanism case for living comet theory just as it took decades for continental drift, the way science is at the moment. Shortage of damning evidence doesn't make a theory wrong, and in the meantime, it is only the potential predictive power of a theory which can make its case. Standard evolutionary synthesis encourages a lazy "evolution of the gaps", the most aching gap being abiogenesis.
I am positioned somewhere off to the side in idea space. I consider the roles filled by Wegener and his opponents to both be absolutely essential to the advance of knowledge. I don't see how you can state, except as a reckless rhetorical flourish, that you can't locate my position on AGW, considering how very many words I have written explaining it.
We can still demand that the evidence speak for itself without having a preferred underlying philosophy or specific mechanism details.
We can demand this, but we will never get it. If we do not hold an underlying philosophy explicitly in our minds as we consider the evidence, an unexamined philosophy will sneak into the void. If we ever do get around to examining this philosophy, we will be shocked at how childish and crude it is.
A predictive hypothesis has to be consistent with all the other predictive hypotheses for the whole show. This consistency is demonstrated by a *mechanism*, which relates the hypothesis to the existing body of tested knowledge. If it doesn't have a mechanism, its just wild speculation off there in faerieland.
Standard evolutionary synthesis encourages a lazy "evolution of the gaps", the most aching gap being abiogenesis.
(1) Reiteration does not constitute demonstration. Again: reiteration does not constitute demonstration. I don't see a lazy 'evolution of the gaps', and in this long discussion I still haven't been able to discern why you do.
(2) The standard evolutionary synthesis has nothing whatsoever to do with abiogenesis. It is like criticising the standard evolutionary synthesis for not predicting the winners of the Academy Awards.
It's going to take centuries to build up a mechanism case for living comet theory
It's going to take a few decades, tops, to experimentally and unequivocally prove that living comet theory is total bullshit.
I'm not sure where to go with this discussion. My initial instinct was to just let it go. I'm sure we can have a reasonable discussion about the premises that don't work for me. I certainly think there was one stage where we were discussing Ockhams razor in a civil way.
I was reasonably content with your conclusion regarding modifications required to my NeoLamarckism to make it a testable proposition with conventional science.
I do not hold conventional science dear to my heart as you realise. I cannot convince you, with conventional science, of the fixable faults of conventional science. It's like using the arguments of Christianity in a polemy against religion.
Obviously, faults of science as a philosophy in the way people follow it, can only be reasonably criticised from outside, using non-science premises.
http://marcosevolution.blogspot.com.au/
Is where I put my previous incarnation of NeoLamarckism.
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