Differing Models on the Origin of Higher Taxa

[Dancing David]

Nobody seems to agree that there is anything sequential about this. Speciation is happening in parallel in multiple lines.

Why not use normal terminology?

Because then you can't make an argument from a fallacy of construction.

 

[Cavemonster]

already showed peer-reviewed papers using this terminology....Gould and Dawkins do....it's a common term.....what more do you want

And that has already been addressed and ignored by you, at least twice.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6998614#post6998614

It is a common term among ID proponents. Among most practicing biologists it does not mean what you claim it means.

 

[A'isha]

No. NeoDarwinism is the Modern Synthesis. Another term you should know is selectionism.

Note this paper doesn't even bother with the Neo part but just shortens it to Darwinian. My language of Neo Darwinism or Darwinian here is just the normal language used in peer-reviewed papers.

http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/22/12/2318.short

Once again, you don't actually bother to read the sources you link to, merely glancing for the slightest thing that looks, through your filters, like it might support your claims.

Because if you bothered to actually read that entire paper, you'd see that it doesn't call the Synthetic Model "neo-Darwinism". It labels a specific selectionist idea that "reached its pinnacle in the 1950s and 1960s", in the words of the paper.

It then goes on to describe how the selectionist idea of neo-Darwinism was supplanted by the knowledge gained by studies of the molecular data, leading to Kimura's idea of neutralism (remember Kimura and his idea that was revised by Ohta, from the paper you tried to cite as evidence that scientists were taken by surprise by the idea that the molecular clock was unreliable and therefore should have listened to that crackpot Denton instead? No, you probably don't).

The paper then goes on to describe the conflicts between neutralists and selectionists (aka neo-Darwinists) over the molecular evidence, particularly regarding our old friend, the phenotypic stage.

So, unless you're saying that molecular evolution is not part of the Modern Synthesis, randman, you're using the term "neo-Darwinism" completely incorrectly, and the paper you cited as evidence for your usage of the term in fact utterly contradicts you.

 

[Cavemonster]

Perhaps. But, even then, there are still better ways to address the situation than "you are using that word wrong!"

This is a general point, and one not aimed at only those we are presently conversing with.

You can't have civil discussion without clarity of terms. Someone who deliberately eschews clarity and honesty is not the same thing as someone who is mistaken in word choice and definition.

The vast majority of this poster's arguments are deliberate linguistic fallacies.

If we don't insist on honest use of terms, there is no mechanism for discussion. I think that ignoring dishonest use of language as a debating tactic only legitimizes it.

 

[RecoveringYuppy]

Note this paper doesn't even bother with the Neo part but just shortens it to Darwinian. My language of Neo Darwinism or Darwinian here is just the normal language used in peer-reviewed papers.

No, they ddin't just shorten NeoDarwinism to Darwinism. Can you not read the text you quoted?

 

[A'isha]

No, they ddin't just shorten NeoDarwinism to Darwinism. Can you not read the text you quoted?

I'm sure he can. He just didn't, instead simply looking for the term in the paper's abstract without bothering to read the full thing to see when, how, and why that term was used, then running back here to post crowingly about how he's using the same terms real, scientific papers use!

 

[catsmate]

randman wants and needs a so-called god, end of story.

Paul

Yet he needs science to reassure him that his god belief is correct. Alas this isn't going to happen.

 

[Paulhoff]

With all due respect, that has little to do with the real issues presented in this thread.

He spouts the TERM, it is a real issue.

Paul

 

[Paulhoff]

Then why do scientists use the term even in peer-reviewed papers published by respected journals?

Because the term is now excepted, like the BIG-BANG, or is that hard for you to understand. It is not a term Darwin wanted for the thorey, but like all non-gods he can't control everything.

Paul



wait, that so-called god of the bible has the same problem, oh my.

 

[Paulhoff]

Yet he needs science to reassure him that his god belief is correct. Alas this isn't going to happen.

Funny, but when I was young, people like him didn't even want anything at all to do with evolution, now they try to work it to get their idea of a god into it. But one by one all things like a spherical earth, earth not being the center etc had to be agreed to by them, and that must hurt.

So has for not happening, it already is, and the fingers are running out.

Paul

 

[randman]

And that has already been addressed and ignored by you, at least twice.

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=6998614#post6998614

It is a common term among ID proponents. Among most practicing biologists it does not mean what you claim it means.

Yes, it does. Neo Darwinism means exactly what I said it means. The outdated historical meaning, most are unaware of, from nearly 100 years ago is not Neo Darwinism.

Just read scientific literature....it means the Modern Synthesis.

That has been explained to you over and over again....when will you learn and quit being a troll...

 

[A'isha]

Yes, it does. Neo Darwinism means exactly what I said it means. The outdated historical meaning, most are unaware of, from nearly 100 years ago is not Neo Darwinism.

Just read scientific literature....it means the Modern Synthesis.

That has been explained to you over and over again....when will you learn and quit being a troll...

Except your own links say that you're wrong.

 

[randman]

Once again, you don't actually bother to read the sources you link to, merely glancing for the slightest thing that looks, through your filters, like it might support your claims.

Because if you bothered to actually read that entire paper, you'd see that it doesn't call the Synthetic Model "neo-Darwinism". It labels a specific selectionist idea that "reached its pinnacle in the 1950s and 1960s", in the words of the paper.

It then goes on to describe how the selectionist idea of neo-Darwinism was supplanted by the knowledge gained by studies of the molecular data, leading to Kimura's idea of neutralism (remember Kimura and his idea that was revised by Ohta, from the paper you tried to cite as evidence that scientists were taken by surprise by the idea that the molecular clock was unreliable and therefore should have listened to that crackpot Denton instead? No, you probably don't).

The paper then goes on to describe the conflicts between neutralists and selectionists (aka neo-Darwinists) over the molecular evidence, particularly regarding our old friend, the phenotypic stage.

So, unless you're saying that molecular evolution is not part of the Modern Synthesis, randman, you're using the term "neo-Darwinism" completely incorrectly, and the paper you cited as evidence for your usage of the term in fact utterly contradicts you.

You really are that dense, aren't you? Neutralism was not part of the Modern Synthesis. It was presented earlier in the 60s and rejected, and has more recently been brought back to again challenge Darwinism aka Neo Darwinism aka selectionism. The Modern Synthesis aka Neo Darwinism was established and generally accepted in the 40s and 50s and has been dominant ever since with PE being the first biggest modification but in the last 10 years, it's begun weakening due to a lot of critiques that have been around for a very long time, most of which non-Darwinians, IDers and creationists have pointed out.

Biology is thus changing a little.

Darwinism is short for Neo Darwinism. Selectionism is another term describing the same thing.

 

[randman]

Except your own links say that you're wrong.

Nope. They use darwinism same as I do and same as I've been saying these terms are used in peer-reviewed lit.

 

[randman]

That was the originally purpose of this thread. I think it's unlikely a new one would be any more constructive than this one.

It could be if the evo side had more intelligent people. I have always found the evo on-line community to be incredibly biased, near brainwashed in some areas, but at least some understand basic terms like NeoDarwinism.

 

[A'isha]

You really are that dense, aren't you? Neutralism was not part of the Modern Synthesis. It's been brought back but was largely rejected. The Modern Synthesis aka Neo Darwinism was established and generally accepted in the 40s and 50s.

And that's what it meant then. That's not what it means now.

The Synthetic Model isn't static, randman. It currently encompasses things that were completely unknown back in the 40's and 50's. The double helix wasn't discovered until 1953, and Crick's paper on the transfer of sequence information from DNA to proteins wasn't published until 1958.

The original NeoDarwinian-heavy Synthetic Model did not take into account molecular genetics. Now it does, and so NeoDarwinism is pushed further and further into the background as new genomic evidence is uncovered.

So, unless you think things like molecular genetics, the molecular clock theory, and heck, the entire Human Genome and ENCODE projects aren't part of the Modern Synthesis, you're using the term NeoDarwinism dead wrong.

 

[A'isha]

Nope. They use darwinism same as I do and same as I've been saying these terms are used in peer-reviewed lit.

No.

In his book On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859) proposed that all organisms on earth evolved from a single proto-organism by descent with modification. He also proposed that the primary force of evolution is natural selection. Most biologists accepted the first proposition almost immediately, but the second proposal was controversial and was criticized by such prominent biologists as Thomas Huxley, Moritz Wagner, and William Bateson.

...

However, Morgan's mutation-selection theory or mutationism gradually became unpopular as the neo-Darwinism advocated by Fisher (1930), Wright (1931), Haldane (1932), Dobzhansky (1937, 1951), and others gained support from many investigators in the 1940s. In neo-Darwinism, natural selection is assumed to play a much more important role than mutation, sometimes creating new characters in the presence of genetic recombination. Although there are several reasons for this change (see Nei 1987, chap. 14), two are particularly important. First, most geneticists at that time believed that the amount of genetic variability contained in natural populations is so large that any genetic change can occur by natural selection without waiting for new mutations. Second, mathematical geneticists showed that the gene frequency change by mutation is much smaller than the change by natural selection. Neo-Darwinism reached its pinnacle in the 1950s and 1960s, and at this time almost every morphological or physiological character was thought to have evolved by natural selection (Dobzhansky 1951; Mayr 1963).

This situation again started to change as molecular data on evolution accumulated in the 1960s. Studying the GC content of the genomes of various organisms, early molecular evolutionists such as Sueoka (1962) and Freese (1962) indicated the possibility that the basic process of evolution at the nucleotide level is determined by mutation. Comparative study of amino acid sequences of hemoglobins, cytochrome c, and fibrinopeptides from various organisms also suggested that most amino acid substitutions in a protein do not change the protein function appreciably and are therefore selectively neutral or nearly neutral, as mentioned below. However, this interpretation was immediately challenged by eminent neo-Darwinians such as Simpson (1964) and Mayr (1965), and this initiated a heated controversy over selectionism versus neutralism.

An even more intense controversy on this subject was generated when protein electrophoresis revealed that the extent of genetic variation within populations is much higher than previously thought. At that time, most evolutionists believed that the high degree of genetic variation can be maintained only by some form of balancing selection (Mayr 1963; Ford 1964). However, a number of authors argued that this variation can also be explained by neutral mutations. From the beginning of the 1980s, the study of molecular evolution was conducted mainly at the DNA level, but the controversy is still continuing. This long-standing controversy over selectionism versus neutralism indicates that understanding of the mechanism of evolution is fundamental in biology and that the resolution of the problem is extremely complicated. However, some of the controversies were caused by misconceptions of the problems, misinterpretations of empirical observations, faulty statistical analysis, and others.

...

One important progress in the study of evolution in this era was that the neutral theory generated many predictions about the allele frequency distribution within populations and the relationships between genetic variation within and between species, so that one could test the applicability of the neutral theory to actual data by using various statistical methods. In other words, we could use the neutral theory as a null hypothesis for studying molecular evolution (Kimura and Ohta 1971). This type of statistical study of evolution was almost never done before the neutral theory was proposed. The results of these studies are summarized by Lewontin (1974), Nei (1975, 1987), Wills (1981), and Kimura (1983). Although the interpretations of the results by these and other authors were not necessarily the same, it was clear by the early 1980s that the extent and pattern of protein polymorphism within species roughly agree with what would be expected from neutral theory (e.g., Yamazaki and Maruyama 1972; Nei, Fuerst, and Chakraborty 1976; Chakraborty, Fuerst, and Nei 1978; Skibinski and Ward 1981; Nei and Graur 1984).

...

In 1981 even stronger support of the neutral theory came from studies of the evolutionary rate of pseudogenes (Li, Gojobori, and Nei 1981; Miyata and Yasunaga 1981). Pseudogenes are nonfunctional genes because they contain nonsense or frameshift mutations, and therefore according to the neutral theory the rate of nucleotide substitution is expected to be high and is more or less equal to the total mutation rate. By contrast, if neo-Darwinism is right, one would expect that virtually no nucleotide substitution occurs because they are functionless and there is no way for positive selection to operate. When Li, Gojobori, and Nei (1981) studied the rate of nucleotide substitution for three globin pseudogenes from the human, mouse, and rabbit, the average rate was about 5 × 10−9 per site per year and was much higher than the rates for the first, second, and third codon position rates of the functional genes (table 1). An independent study by Miyata and Yasunaga (1981) about a mouse globin pseudogene also showed a high rate of substitution. These observations clearly supported the neutral theory rather than the neo-Darwinian evolution.

...

At present, we do not know the relative importance of chance and natural selection. However, the chance factor working here is a new feature of random evolution, which is qualitatively different from the neutral evolution of genes by random genetic drift. This view of evolution is based on a large amount of molecular data, and in this sense it is different from Morgan's mutationism, which was largely speculative. For this reason I have called it neomutationism (Nei 1983, 1984) or the neoclassical theory of evolution (Nei 1987, chap. 14). Whatever it is called, however, recent molecular data supports the theory of mutation-driven evolution rather than neo-Darwinism.

In other words, this paper says that the molecular and genomic data uncovered points to a dominant mechanism of evolution that is far closer to the neutralist explanation than to the neo-Darwinist explanation, and that if evolutionary theory is not following neo-Darwinist ideas, it's dead wrong to call it neo-Darwinist.

Again, this is the paper you cited, randman.

 

[Foster Zygote]

It could be if the evo side had more intelligent people. I have always found the evo on-line community to be incredibly biased, near brainwashed in some areas, but at least some understand basic terms like NeoDarwinism.

Resorting to ad hominem insults rather than addressing arguments will do nothing to convince anyone of your superior intelligence. It will only suggest your immaturity and inability to defend your position using logic.

 

[randman]

And that's what it meant then. That's not what it means now.

The Synthetic Model isn't static, randman. It currently encompasses things that were completely unknown back in the 40's and 50's. The double helix wasn't discovered until 1953, and Crick's paper on the transfer of sequence information from DNA to proteins wasn't published until 1958.

The original NeoDarwinian-heavy Synthetic Model did not take into account molecular genetics. Now it does, and so NeoDarwinism is pushed further and further into the background as new genomic evidence is uncovered.

So, unless you think things like molecular genetics, the molecular clock theory, and heck, the entire Human Genome and ENCODE projects aren't part of the Modern Synthesis, you're using the term NeoDarwinism dead wrong.

So you are agreeing NeoDarwinism is wrong?

Ok.

And NDs hampered understanding by emphasizing natural selection.

 

[randman]

No.



In other words, this paper says that the molecular and genomic data uncovered points to a dominant mechanism of evolution that is far closer to the neutralist explanation than to the neo-Darwinist explanation, and that if evolutionary theory is not following neo-Darwinist ideas, it's dead wrong to call it neo-Darwinist.

Again, this is the paper you cited, randman.

"Started to" but in 2010, they are still trying show evos that ND was wrong, hence the paper, despite data from the 60s showing it was wrong.