Creation Moment 4/4/2018 - Pass The Popcorn - ENS Civil War in Evolution

 Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men;
 and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
1 Corinthians 1:25
"W. Ford Doolittle feels it is necessary to critique Darwin’s mechanism again, so many years after biologists began assuming that Darwin had solved evolution with his “law-like” notion of natural selection. Prepare for a jolt:

Many practicing biologists accept that nothing in their discipline makes sense except in the light of evolution, and that natural selection is evolution’s principal sense-maker. But what natural selection actually is (a force or a statistical outcome, for example) and the levels of the biological hierarchy (genes, organisms, species, or even ecosystems) at which it operates directly are still actively disputed among philosophers and theoretical biologists.

Now that everyone is awake, consider what has been going on in scientific circles behind the scenes. Simplistic presentations of evolution, like this one at Live Science, shield the public from deep controversies among Darwinians about evolution, or try to downplay their significance. This new PNAS paper, co-authored by S. Andrew Inkpen (with Doolittle at the University of Halifax, Nova Scotia), was reviewed by Douglas Futuyma, another long-time Darwian theorist. And it’s full of controversy!
Among the points of controversy is the so-called “unit of selection.” What does nature select? What kind of entity does it act on?

Doolittle is trying once again to make sense of the concept that Dobzhansky had triumphantly claimed made sense of everything in biology. But like Lineweaver six years ago, Doolittle shows continuing doubt in the Darwin Party’s assumption that common formulations of natural selection make any sense at all. Particularly troubling is the concept of units of selection:

Most formulations of evolution by natural selection emphasize the differential reproduction of entities at one or the other of these levels. Some also recognize differential persistence, but in either case the focus is on lineages of material things: even species can be thought of as spatiotemporally restricted, if dispersed, physical beings. Few consider—as “units of selection” in their own right—the processes implemented by genes, cells, species, or communities.

The PNAS paper by Doolittle and Inkpen is full of very damaging admissions about natural selection. Before we consider their song-and-dance rendition which they dub “ITSNTS thinking” (wait till you see what that means), it’s worth summarizing their complaints about standard ENS (evolution by natural selection):

• Natural selection lacks a theory of how it acts on communities.
• Standard views of natural selection do not address adaptation and function of “multispecies collectives.”
• Natural selection cannot explain stable or redundant bacterial communities.
  
• Natural selection cannot explain processes that benefit communities of dissimilar reproducers.
• Natural selection cannot explain how processes that benefit multiple communities re-establish themselves.
• Dupre agues that “much of contemporary biology embraces a generally mechanistic and reductionist ‘thing’ (or ‘substance’) ontology.”
• The commonplace textbook focus on reproductive success of individuals is a habit of thinking that overlooks the contingent history of the modern synthesis and population genetics.
• Some formulations of natural selection are vague because the proposed units of selection have “too many parents” (Godfrey-Smith’s complaint). This muddies concepts of inheritance.
• Natural selection is ambiguous about what “beneficial” means. “It is not clear that any property can be considered ‘beneficial’ to impermanent and nonreproducing communities.”
• Some formulations of natural selection violate William’s Principle that states, “adaptation at a level requires that there was selection at that level.”
• Some functions “are more stable or ecologically resilient than are the taxonomic compositions of the assemblages carrying them out.” This demands an evolutionary explanation.
• ENS does not easily account for redundancy.
• ENS is vague on the question of which is more relevant to evolution: the allele frequency in the population or the individual carrying it?
• Biologists are undecided on whether memes undergo natural selection. Sperber is one such ‘meme-skeptic’ that Doolittle mentions.
• Biologists also debate whether language or culture undergo natural selection.
• It’s difficult to determine if natural selection constitutes a mechanism or a logical necessity (an a priori assumption).
• Sober argues that ENS is “a priori true in the sense that no experiment could disprove it.”
• Niche construction theory is another ‘mechanism’ of ENS that is in dispute among evolutionists.
• Evolutionists face “awkward transitions in retelling the history of life,” such as the step from unicellularity to multicellularity.
• What’s more important: differential reproduction or differential persistence? Which makes more sense and is more ‘satisfying’?
• The difficulty of establishing lineages relevant to ENS can be illustrated thus: “I am my father’s son, but my heart is not the offspring of my father’s heart.”
• At what ranges can ENS be compared? Is the evolution of microbe community functions across guts analogous to the evolution of lizards across islands?
• Before Doolittle’s proposal, there was lacking “a sensible way of discussing adaptations and functions relevant to communities and ecosystems generally.”
• Some evolutionists have said there is an “urgent need for a general framework” to decide what constitutes the “health” of a system.
• An important problem in evolutionary theory is the role of abiotic components in ecosystems. These may play important roles but are not reproduced biologically. Bouchard remarked, “Evolution as change in allelic frequencies does not seem to apply to systems that have a motley crew of alleles and abiotic material interacting in a systematic way.”
• For a century, biologists have been debating at what levels Darwin’s ‘law-like principle’ of natural selection operates. Does it operate on processes as well as things?

These are some of the controversies facing evolutionists. Natural selection seems like such an intuitive idea the way it’s typically taught, until you start asking these types of questions." CEH