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Author | Topic: How long does it take to evolve? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Percy writes:
Or maybe we just belabor the computer metaphor past its usefulness when we talk about the complex cellular machinery in living organisms. DNA has to contain the information, else the information is nowhere and we couldn't exist. Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin is no creationist crank, but he seems to think the DNA-as-program metaphor is something we respond to because it panders to the high-tech chauvinism that privileges the master-plan over the microscopic drones that do the work of building a living thing:
The problem is not one of dimension, but one of size. The nucleus of a cell of the fruit fly Drosophila, the favorite organism of geneticists, has enough DNA to specify the structure of about five thousand different proteins, and about thirty times that much DNA is available to provide spatial and temporal instructions about when the productions of proteins by those genes should be turned on and turned off. But this is simply too little, by many orders of magnitude, to tell every cell when it should divide, exactly where it should move next, and what cellular structures it should produce over the entire developmental history of the fly. One needs to imagine an instruction manual that will tell every New Yorker when to wake up, where to go, and what to do, hour by hour, day by day, for the next century. There is just not enough DNA to go around.
-from "The Science of Metamorphoses," New York Review of Books, April 27, 1989. Edited by MrHambre, : Attribution
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
dwise1 writes:
Right, you don't object to the DNA-is-code metaphor, in fact you're using the capabilities of code to refute Lamden's assertions. What I'm saying is that we've become so used to characterizing DNA as computer code that we only pay lip service to the weakness of the analogy. I do agree that the computer metaphor continually gets taken way too far. However, in the current discussion it may help Lamden understand something. He's trying to look at a particular length of DNA and figure out how much "information" it contains. That would be like looking at how many lines of code a program contains to figure out how much it does. I agree with your claim that life is complex and messy. But as a software engineer, you're in thrall to the machine fantasy of DNA as a program that somehow instructs the cells. Lewontin sees this as an ideological bias, just another way we privilege the planners over the doers. Writers like Dawkins have a tech-savvy audience that responds to oversimplifications like this, because they make evolution seem like a straightforward process that's easy enough to be understood by the amateur and blunt enough to be wielded against creationists. If it's complex, let's treat it that way.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Lamden writes:
A "blurb"? I don't know whether you mean Nagel decries that Darwinism is treated as gospel or that he decries that it's mischaracterized as gospel. Do you even know what you mean? Over the weekend, I have discovered a blurb from none other than Thomas Nagel himself decrying the portrayal of Darwinism as gospel. Had I known about it earlier, I certainly would have drawn from such a celebrated name. Although he remains an atheist for reasons that he admits amount to a convenience, his statement as a philosopher is notable. I assume you're referring to Nagel's much-maligned Mind and Cosmos, wherein Nagel critiqued materialism. I prefer Nagel's The View from Nowhere, his fascinating treatise on the illusion of objectivity. However, I felt that his ideas on materialism deserved more than the scorn that science cheerleaders heaped on them, and he certainly wasn't claiming that species don't evolve. So what is it that Nagel said that you find so compelling?
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Tanypteryx writes:
[Thomas Nagel] may be well known, but I had never heard of him. He is a respected thinker, by whom? Anyone can think about biology, why are his thoughts about biology of any importance? As a scientist and a biologist, I have run across very few people who characterize themselves as philosophers whose thoughts or opinions about science I respect, or about any subject for that matter. Most of the ones I have had experience with think they know about science but are actually failures at science and understanding science. It never fails to amuse me that people who have low opinions about philosophers usually don't recognize the name of even a prominent living philosopher. Anti-intellectualism is ironic coming from people who otherwise pride themselves on their grasp of human knowledge. Science, after all, is just as much a philosophical pursuit as an empirical one. I can only assume the disdain for philosophy among prominent scientists like Lawrence Krauss derives from an aversion to having one's beliefs questioned and one's sense of certainty undermined.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
My work is mine, whether it is science, photography, or art. I didn't ask them for their opinions so they can blow them out their ass. Your internet tough talk doesn't change the fact that you snidely dismiss an entire legacy of human thought with which you're obviously unfamiliar. Anti-intellectualism is tragic no matter whether it's fundie Christians or science-thumpers peddling it.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
I haven't dismissed anything.
Sure you did. You explicitly said that no philosopher had ever told you anything worthwhile, and that philosophers in general are just failed scientists.
It isn't anti-intellectualism.
It's not? Nobody here even knows what Nagel supposedly said. However, no one's giving him the benefit of the doubt, or assuming that our creationist buddy is quoting him out of context. No, we just figure he's a failosopher, so he's wrong. Talk about a leap of faith. Hey, if you think creationism is old hat, anti-philosophy has whiskers on it too.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Thanks, food for thought......I see he doesn't have a good grasp of science or the scientific method.
We should be familiar enough with creationist quote-mining not to judge anyone's thought by the diced-up bits we find spat out into com-boxes online. You wouldn't know it by the quotes Lamden provided, but the author claims to disagree with the ID hypothesis, is "strongly averse" to design explanations, and touts the "remarkable achievements" of reductive materialist scientific inquiry. But if we're just relieved that we can conclude on such scant evidence that another failosopher has shown his ignorance of the scientific method, how open-minded can we consider ourselves about the definition and limitations of science? I wonder what conceivable critique of science we'd be receptive to at all. If the problem is that the criticism has to come from a scientist and not a philosopher, I recently posted a review of a book by Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin here that generated not one response. It seems like we don't want to be reminded that things like reductionism and scientism are biases; that Darwinian explanations are better for organs and traits than for complex human phenomena; that certain subjects like consciousness remain mysteries; and that not everyone who points these things out is a fundie or a fool. I guess it's easier and more fun to swat the low-hanging fruit on the fundie tree. If creationism didn't exist, we would have had to have invented it.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Percy writes:
Since Lewontin is a geneticist at Harvard, the odds are that's not quite what he's saying. According to the book I reviewed, Lewontin takes issue with the gene-centered concept of evolution (and the notion that what we are is encoded in our DNA) that the Wiki article claims no one actually affirms. One can only imagine whether Wiki has ever heard of The Selfish Gene.
Am I reading that right? Does this actually say that Lewontin rejects the genetic foundation of how creatures' bodies look and work?
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Okay. I still say that no one would have proposed that billions of dollars of taxpayers' money be spent on the Human Genome Project if there weren't a popular misconception of how crucial a detailed knowledge of DNA is to the good of society. The progressive in me wonders how much improvement in personal and social well-being those billions could have generated if we were as adamant about understanding the environmental and socioeconomic aspects of phenomena like disease and deviance.
And my question still stands: is there any conceivable critique of modern science that we would find acceptable? We make sport, for good reason, of creationists whose understanding of the philosophy and practice of scientific inquiry is sorely lacking. But is ours that much better, or have we just internalized a lot more of the myths that idealize the scientific process? It seems like we're just really adept at handwaving away any critique of modern science on the grounds that the person delivering it must be ignorant, otherwise he wouldn't be critiquing science. If a philosopher points out problems in the foundational assumptions of empirical inquiry (or even asserts that there are such assumptions), we don't bother engaging with his ideas; we simply express outrage that his amateur presumption didn't lead him to the same conclusion as our amateur presumption. If a career scientist discusses the economic, political, gender, and cultural issues involved in modern empirical inquiry, we accuse him of creating a straw man with which to sully the objective, unbiased, self-correcting process by which we come to the knowledge of the truth about our universe. It sounds like, for all our freethinking rhetoric, that there are some things we don't want to be skeptical about.
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 1392 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
Percy writes:
Fair enough. There just seems to be a siege mentality where people would rather not acknowledge problems with scientific inquiry. And it's certainly not as if every attempt to describe such problems has done so in good faith, so a certain amount of defensiveness is to be expected. I think Nagel and Lewontin succeeded in at least producing food for thought.
If you're criticizing those who are skeptical of philosophical criticisms of scientific inquiry and modes of thought, then I don't we are, at least not all of us.
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