I was checking out this page, and I realized that almost everything I know about evolutionary biology I learned from Richard Dawkins. Especially the more technical books, The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, even though I own a few more, they are more laymen’s books, I think. I think he has a clear, straightforward writing style and makes the subject matter very interesting. I agree with one quote I found of one of the books, “He makes the reader feel like a genius.”
Anyway, the debate I’m looking for is as follows:
What am I missing getting such a one-sided view of the state of modern biology?
Does anybody here want to debate anything Dawkins says? That is, is there something he might have written that you don’t agree with and you’d like to sway me, and possibly others, away from that belief?
Can anybody point me in the direction of similarly-talented writers on evolutionary biology, so I can get a more well-rounded view of things?
First of all, Carl Zimmer’s books are fantastic: his book on parasites has something fascinating on almost every single page.
However, I don’t think the view you are getting is all that one sided, largely because Dawkins includes and attacks his mainstream critics in his books, so you do get a sense of what other people find misleading about his work, and you can check these people out directly if you are interested. However, these points generally are pretty subtle things, aside from the issue of how best to conceptualize what is being selected for (though again, I tihnk that by reading Dawkins, while you only get his view of things, you do get a sense of the basic controversies and what’s at stake in them)
Dawkins is probably most controversial in his non-sciency stuff, though msot of that you don’t find in his major “about evolution directly” books but rather in his articles and essays. Plenty of people, like Kenneth Miller (who’s “Finding Darwin’s God” is a great great read) don’t think that religion is cancerously bad for science, as Dawkins seems to.
Obviously the biggest “side” you are missing is in the debate between Dawkins and Gould. Unfortunately, I think Gould sort of comes off kind of weak in that exchange, and unfortunately died before he could really write too much responding to Dawkins’ most modern criticisms.
Yeah, I actually have read a few essays by Mr. Gould. I don’t remember too much, but I seem to remember I didn’t like his writing style… or maybe he seemed a little too mystical or something. It has been awhile. And part of the reason I started this thread was because I’ve heard people here and there allude to Dawkins being sort of controversial, although I am looking for science here. I could care less about what he thinks of religion. (I personally thought the whole ‘bright’ nonsense was just that… nonsense.)
And I’m googling Mr. Zimmer as I write this, and I’ll have to see if I can find something online about the debate between Gould and Dawkins. I knew they had some disagreements from Dawkins’ books, but I wasn’t sure of the exact nature of the debate.
As I recall, Dawkins said that most of the “debate” between him and Gould was a fabrication of the media, fuelled by misunderstandings and misrepresentations.
…and, now that I’ve found the book, misconceptions propagated by Gould himself apparently, heh.
See, I remember being taught Gradualism VS Punctuated-Equilibrium in my IB Bio class.
But Dawkins take is this:
“The theory of punctuated equilibrium is a gradualist theory, albeit it emphasizes long periods of stasis intervening between relatively short bursts of gradualistic evolution. Gould has misled himself by his own rhetorical emphasis on the purely poetic or literary resemblance between punctuationism, one the one hand, and true saltationism on the other.”
The gist of Dawkins’ complaint is that Gould knocked down a version of phyletic gradualism that, while real, bordered on a straw man. Presenting the idea that the overall PACE of speciation and larger scale changes is not steady as something new and revolutionary, as Dawkins rightly points out, jumps the shark. While certainly there had been people pushing that idea, it was never particularly central to evolutionary biology, and even Darwin was not guilty of it (several passages in his book note as a caveat that while he diagrams things in simple form, he does not imagine that the changes are steady and even pretty much says that he suspects that they would have long periods of stasis before rapid change, which is PE in a nutshell).
Dawkins is also angry at the way Gould et al phrased their ideas as being so revolutionary that they were easy for creationists to pick up upon as evidence that evolution period was quite kerflooey.
I like Dawkins a lot, his Climbing Mount Improbable goes a long way to refuting ID arguments in clear, understandable ways. When it comes to religion, he’s a bit like Der Trihs with a publishing contract, which is why I like him.
Having said that, I do think he overstates/overemphasizes memetics in that “man with a hammer thinks every problem is a nail” kind of way. It’s a nice part of the mental toolset, but it isn’t the be-all and end-all of cognition, IMO.
Do yourself a favour and try and read more Gould, though. Even if he comes across as mystical, Wonderful Life is one of THE great science popularisations. Everyone should know about the Burgess, and what it means for life on Earth. Everyone.
Oh, and back to Dawkins - “Brights” is just silly. Really, really silly.
MrDibbleWonderful Life is a terrific book but possibly a bit out of date. Simon Conway Morris has written his own book The Crucible of Creation on the Burgess Shale animals with some re-interpretations.
I am currently reading (or trying to) The Plausibility of Life (by two authors I hadn’t heard of*) it’s pretty dry but it covers things I haven’t seen in any of Dawkin’s books.
I looked on Amazon, Marc Kirschner and John Gerhart
Cool, thanks for the heads-up - is it as well-written as Wonderful Life? Gould made things come alive, even if some of the examples have been re-interpretted ( although the really cool stuff like Anomalocaris and Opabinia still stand, I believe). I love the Burgess - there’s a somewhat similar, later (Ordovician) Lagerstätte a short drive from my home too, the Soom Shale.
Nothing I have learned about evolution came from Dawkins. I don’t particularly care for his writing style, and don’t see the “meme” as a particularly useful concept.
Based on the quote mentioned by Phrontist, it appears Dawkins, like many others, has mischaracterized Punctuated Equilibirum. It is not, and was never put forth as, an alternative evolutionary theory, or as introducing new or different mechanisms. It was an explanation for the appearance of the fossil record. We see species seemingly appear and disappear, while remaining relatively unchanged during their tenure, not merely as a consequence of the nature of the fossil record, but also as a consequence of how speciation occurs. Therefore, they (remember that it is not Gould’s theory alone, but that of Niles Eldredge as well) contend, it is the process of speciation itself, not geological processes, that primarily (but not solely, of course) accounts for the spottiness of the fossil record. It’s a paleontological tool, not an evolutionary one.
Other than that, though, I don’t profess to have read enough Dawkins to have much of an opinion one way or the other. I much prefer Gould’s writings, though these began to suffer, I think, later in his life (far too verbose and overly fond of the word “hagiography”). Ernst Mayr’s works are also a nice read, I’ve found.
I think that’s overplaying things. Gould and Eldredge put forth their ideas with the same sort of loud bombast “all is nothing compared to this” that you often hear from ID proponents: and of course this meant that ID proponents found plenty of juicy bits of language to play upon. Indeed, a large part of the power of the ID movement is precisely because of the way PE was presented, and frankly, I think Dawkins is plenty right to criticize and you are very much glossing over some key disagreements.
You really should read some of his books. The ancestor’s tale is quite a fun read, even if to a biologist it might seem overtly simple.
I read The Ancestor’s Tale a few months ago, and was very much impressed. I’d recommed it to anyone. He covers a lot of ground, so I’d be surprised if even a biologist didn’t fight some interesting tibdits in there.
It’s the sort of book that begs for constant new additions and corrections unfortunately… or fortunately. But yeah, a great overview read of things. I definately found a lot of cool tidbts and well expressed concepts, but I’m not a biologist so I couldn’t say whether they’d be news to anyone else.
Zimmer isn’t a biologist, but At the Water’s Edge and Parasite Rex are both chock full of awesome stuff. Parasites particularly, given how absurdly important parasites are compared to how they’ve mostly been neglected as a subject until now.
They may well have overplayed the whole “phyletic gradualism” angle, and it’s certainly correct to call them on that, and I can’t speak to the state of evolutionary biology at the time they published their theory, but I suspect a large part of any bombast came more from popular literature than the scientific.
And anything ID may have latched onto from PE is more a consequence of IDists misinterpreting PE just as they misinterpret much of evolutionary biology (and information theory, and probability, physics and just about every other scientific field they try to latch onto in support of their nonsense). I hardly think that’s a fault of Eldredge and Gould, any more than Darwin should be faulted for pointing out some “fatal flaws” in his own theory regarding the fossil record and such (which have been equally latched onto by creationists and IDists).
And it’s not as though Dawkins himself hasn’t also been the target of ID quote-mining and misrepresentation, so you can’t exactly fault E&G for that unless you also fault Dawkins for not being oh-so-careful with his words.
My doubt about the value Climbing Mount Improbable is that is real easy for creationists, or ID proponents to say, “Of course the computer simulations work out. There was a designer behind them.”
The problem is that they presented their theory as being far more revolutionary than it actually was, and used plenty of language and “the mainstream is wrong” insults in a fierce battle over adaptionism that had as much to do with PC politics as it did with biology. The result is plenty of language that makes it sound like evolution is a total wreck, needs PE to come along and save it, and so on.
While anyone can be quote mined, it’s more than that with PE. PE was a whole new paradigm of criticism for creationists: basically turning back the clock on the the idea that the fossil record has anything to say about evolution. The snipes at Dawkin’s words are petty cash in comparison. You and I might know about them, but the vast majority of people don’t: it’s obscure trivia.
However, the vast majority of causally-aware-of-the-evolution-debate people “know” that PE had to be invented to deal with the fact that the fossil record doesn’t show evolutionary change. I could count the number of times anyone has brought up the “Dawkins didn’t answer when asked if/how evolution can add information” on one hand. The PE thing, in contrast, is almost as common as “evolution is just a theory” or “there is evidence of micro-evolution but not macro-evolution>”
I certainly did. There’s way, way too much information out there for any one biologist to know or remember, so with a work a broad as that one, there’s easily bound to be many novelties for even a professor.
Well, it’s not as though Dawkins isn’t just as guilty with respect to his “selfish gene”. He made much ado about genes being the central focus of selection, but really, it’s the “vessels”, or “vehicles”, or whatever the heck he’s calling them that really get selected…which is no different than saying “the organism is the primary agent of selection”, as most evolutionary biologists had been doing all along. Besides which, even if PE weren’t quite as revolutionary as it may have been made out to be, it still contained some valuable insight, otherwise it would have been tossed in the refuse pile of failed ideas, and we wouldn’t even be talking about it now.
And adaptationism is a separate issue, really. Granted, Gould addressed this issue as well, and probably fired one of the initial volleys in the current debate with his “spandrels” essay, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with PE.
The bottom line is any theory that has vocal supporters (and let’s face it: both Gould and Dawkins are pretty darned vocal – or was, in the case of Gould…) is going to get blown out of proportion to its actual contribution to the field. Especially when those vocal types start arguing amongst themselves regarding the relative worth of their respective theories.
And prior to PE, the victim was Darwin himself, who freely admitted that the fossil record was pretty spotty, and if we couldn’t fill in those gaps his whole theory was in trouble. The problem here is not really how E&G presented their PE paper, it’s the fact that few people have actually i]read* it. And that includes all creationists who try to argue that it’s ad hoc, or an invented idea, or based on “lack of evidence”, or whatever. That and they just don’t get the “micro-” vs.“macro-” distinction anyway, and make up their own definitions as to what it means.
Again, I honestly don’t think you can pin any creationist misunderstandings or misconceptions on E&G (or Dawkins, for that matter) - they (the creationists) are entirely responsible for that on their own. Gould, Dawkins, even Darwin, were all pretty clear about what their respective theories entail, but that never seemed to stop creationists from getting the facts wrong.