The Golden Rule

Because I am, on occasion, a rather sad individual, I’ve spent a bit of time recently reading books about God. Ok, two books. For about 30 seconds each. And one was just parroting the other. But still, the point stands. 

The first point both books raised was centred on what Kant calls the Golden Rule (note to philosophers – I know nothing of Kant. Please don’t talk to me about Kant, unless we are in a pub. Although, thinking about it, I’m not sure philosophers exist outside pubs. If a philosopher leaves a pub, do they make a sound?) Namely, 

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” 

Although apparently that is Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and not the Golden Rule. I am now confused. Whatever. Basically, to go all Judeo-Christian on your ass:

"Do to no one what you yourself dislike." —Tobit 4:15

Ah, bollocks, that’s apparently the Silver Rule, on account of being phrased negatively. Matthew 22:39 (see also Antonio, Merchant of Venice, Act I:III), that’s the ticket:

“And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.”

Both C.S. Lewis and Francis Collins (the first a reformed atheist and charming orator, the second an amazing geneticist) contend that the universality of the Golden Rule (seriously, Wikipedia it, it’s bloody everywhere) argues for a unifying morality of humankind that crosses all boundaries of separation, and as such a heavenly Father passing commandment from on high. Furthermore, both assert that an instinct to obey such a rule cannot evolve from the selfish ways of evolution (which, as we all know, drives us all to eat babies on spits).

I don’t agree (that may have been obvious). There is no reason an instinct of cooperation cannot evolve – evolution requires only that a trait is advantageous to its bearer in a given environment (and that is not disadvantageous in any environment to which the bearer is exposed). Let us hypothesise that humans evolved in small groups. That seems reasonable, given that most evidence points to such being the case. In this environment, any individual is liable to encounter any other individual again, probably next Wednesday. If I trod on Bert’s hairy foot last week and then waggled my penis at him when he got angry, it’s quite probable he won’t share his squirrel-on-a-spit with me next week when my mammoth trap (involving a matchstick, a piece of chocolate and REALLY BIG colander) goes tits-up. Therefore, a basic rule of “don’t be a dick” is probably suited to living in a small group, and breaking the rule will lead to punishment and ejection. The concern of why there is a feeling of guilt attached to breaking the rule is similar to why sexual release is nice – disgust is a powerful dissuader, just as pleasure is strongly encouraging. If we make the rule a little more complex, say, “if Bob is mean three times, no-one give him any food for a month”, then there is a strong social selective pressure against Bob being repeatedly mean, and feeling like dirt is an effective way to enforce that.

A final word, and a little bit of heresy (my feet are cold and being burned at the stake sounds kinda warming right now). I don’t think the Golden Rule need be evolutionarily beneficial to have arisen and become characteristic in humans. Even worse, I’m going to say two words, for the use of which my old lecturers would have me taken outside and shot; group selection (*dramatic chord*). I think it works in humans; unlike (as far as we know) every other animal on this planet, communication and memory allow us transgenerational transmission of cultural pressures and rules, and highly effective within-group behaviours. If the head of the group establishes a rule, “don’t be a dick”, and can effectively enforce that rule to the good of the group (no hissing at the back), I see no reason why that rule cannot maintain and become fixed within the group, even if it is to the detriment of most of the individuals therein.

There I’ve said it. Grab the faggots (behave), pour the petrol – I wanna BURN.

Seriously Italy, WTF?

Sometimes Nature News makes me sad. Recently has been one such time, and frankly there’s only one country to blame: Italy. In the past three weeks there have been two stories that make me somewhat sad, and more than a little concerned for the state of science in the azure nation.

The first was frankly bizarre. At the start of March, some cock decided it was a good idea to set fire to the Città della Scienza in Naples (read the Science Museum), utterly destroying Italy’s biggest science communication complex. That, in of itself, is bad news. What was far worse, however, was the response of Il Foglio (read Daily Mail… actually don’t, no-one should have to do that), which proclaimed the fire a “purification against the scourge of evolutionism”, in the words of one correspondent. Crackpots on the internet is one thing, but when a national newspaper is glorying in the destruction of a centre of learning, it rather demonstrates the need to NOT BURN DOWN THE CENTRES OF LEARNING!

The second, just last week, is sadly not isolated to the fair shores of Italia. Last weekend, animal rights activists broke into a Milanese lab. They chained themselves to the doors to prevent them being opened, mixed up cards and animals, stole several animals and broadcast the names of researchers on Facebook. Eventually they were evicted, with the promise of being allowed to return and remove more animals (it is unclear if this is actually going to happen). Setting aside the debate on animal rights, the actions of this group are totally negative and irresponsible on three counts. Firstly, by destroying the experiments within the lab, they have set the work of the lab (on correlates of autism and schizophrenia) back years. These are distressing conditions that new techniques, including those in animals, offer a real chance of alleviating. By removing these animals, the activists have indirectly harmed human beings. Not that they care; their disregard both for the work of the scientists (students who had lost their entire PhD’s work were seen crying in the corridors – frankly I don’t blame them) and for their privacy shows that the ‘compassion’ of these protestors is a sick hypocrisy. The final irony would be delicious if it wasn’t so sad; the mice removed by the animal rights group were genetically modified to be immuno-compromised, and therefore were kept in very favourable and tightly controlled conditions in the lab. Their removal has been their death sentence.

Obviously this isn’t Italy’s fault; there are many fine people in Italy, of all creeds, and both of these incidents have led to outrage in the country. However, there is a disturbing undercurrent in the view of science in Italy, and it is this undercurrent being shown to the world. Several of the comments on these articles expressed a similar concern – the intelligent majority in Italy needs to become more vociferous and drown these absurd retrogrades.             

How Ontology relates to Evolution

A brief note: this short piece stemmed from a series of comments I made on a YouTube video that suggested ontology and evolution are a single field, and therefore that the lack of understanding in the former means the latter is a pseudoscience and therefore that God exists and I’m going to burn in hell.   

 

Evolution, at its simplest, is change over time. It necessarily begins with a substrate for change (e.g. non-living organic matter at the very beginning). However, the origin of this matter is not part of the theory; that is a separate, but related, field of study, with its own hypotheses.

We do not have a good understanding of the origins of life. A lot has happened in 4-5 billion years, and there is very little evidence left to hint at what occurred. We have interesting hypotheses, built from what circumstantial evidence can be gathered (largely from the extreme situations we see at present, like life at thermal vents). But, because they are largely extrapolated, these hypotheses are difficult to refute and so have not become theories – it is the failure to realise the potential to refute a hypothesis that allows it to become a theory.

Compare evolution. The change in gene identity over time is demonstrable, for example in generations of laboratory animals. Given a large enough longitudinal study, it is feasible we could see changes in gene identity over time in humans. The fossil record shows the gradual accumulation of changes over time in the physiology of organisms – the evolution of modern horses is a particularly good example among many. Genetic relatedness between organisms correlates with physiological and behavioural similarities.

Evolution and ontology should be considered separately; they address different questions and the evidential basis for the former is much greater than for the latter.

As a final point, the cosmology argument is, once again, separate. Cosmology does not lie within the field of biology, but the processes that occur mirror those of biology. Evolution is not limited to the change in biological material over time; anything can evolve over time. In fact, one could say that anything (acted upon by a force of any description) must evolve over time, biological or not. Therefore, there are ontological and evolutionary aspects to a great many things, including biology and cosmology; in all instances, evolution builds off ontology for the its initial substrate, but the process of evolution can be investigated and understood without any knowledge of how the original substrate came to be.   

 

Refuting Evan Wigg V

Greetings again dear reader. We enter now a realm of non-biology, a dark and scary place where Schrodinger's Cat lurks behind each and none of the rocks, and people say things about waves without referring to the difficulties of Kate Middleton. I, as an unashamed Biologist, may struggle with some of this. I may make errors. This said, Mr Wiggs wrote an entire article without any expertise, so I'm happy that I'll be ok.
Information Theory is not Evolution's friend
Once again, we delve into the difference between ordered and planned text (such as wot you is reading) and the evolutionary process of ordering organic molecules (such as DNA chains). Mr Wiggs sees no distinction here, and as such believes evolution to be too good to be true. Once again, he evokes the word of the mysterious amateur evolutionist: ". . . However, not only is life irrelevant to the 2nd law [of thermodynamics], but order from disorder is
common in non-living systems, too. Snowflakes, sand dunes, tornadoes, stalactites, graded river beds, and lightening [sic] are just a few examples of order coming from disorder in nature; none require an intelligent program to
achieve that order. In any nontrivial system with lots of energy flowing through it, you are almost certain to find order arising somewhere in the system. If order from disorder is supposed to violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics, why is it ubiquitous in nature?” This draws on aspects of Turing's Theory of spontaneous chemical equilibrium, and as
such is a reasonable point to pose to someone, such as Mr Wiggs, building their argument based on evolution breaking the laws of thermodynamics.

As an aside at this point (and a weak rhetorical point, I'll admit), it never ceases to amaze me that anti-evolutionists base their arguments on the line of "this theory violates that theory." They rarely seem to consider
which is more likely, that a 150-year old theory has maintained despite such a glaring error in its basis, or that their grasp of the relevant theories is loose at best.

Mr Wiggs proceeds to dissect the evolutionist’s claims by attacking the analogies, leaving thermodynamics for his discussion of physical laws (tune in next time for such exciting titbits). Wiggs claims these examples are simple information: a crystal is a crystal is a crystal, and can be broken down to a like structure (I’m unsure of quite how far such reduction could go, but we’ll leave that), whereas biological information must vary to encode and as such is complex. Wiggs uses some God-bothering phrase as an example here, which is tiring in an argument that has frankly little to do with religion, but his point is valid to an extent… the pile of sand is a pile of sand, whereas a string of bases is not necessarily a specific protein. However, Horn-Monkey now has an opportunity to test his new Ultra-Horn, as Wiggs claims next that crystallisation is a natural process dictated by circumstance, whereas the structuring of DNA
could not possibly happen by physical processes. *WEEE-AHHHHH* Nice, Horn-Monkey, I like that one, you may keep it. The process of a string of nucleotides forming a relevant monomer is entirely possible, and it is this difference of
opinion that lies at the heart of Mr Wiggs' failure to accept evolution. The issue is that nucleotides can be shown to assemble, in realistic conditions recreated in the laboratory, which makes the biogenetic assembly hypothesis
considerably more than just hand waving, as Mr Wiggs condescendingly puts it.


Wiggs follows up by stealing Paley’s watchmaker argument and not crediting it; bad Wiggs, that’s plagiarism. He goes a little further as well: “if you saw 500,000 sand particles all lined up in a row you would suspect intelligent design, because wind can carve and grade a dune but it won’t line up the particles”. Well no… you could perform a series of experiments to attempt to discover a reason for the line… if you assumed intelligent design because one hypothesis was untrue, then frankly you lack the critical thinking to be a scientist, and should stay away from studying how the world works. By this thinking, I would assume electric lighting at night is the work of a creator god because the presence of light cannot be explained by the presence of the Sun.


Wiggs then moves to the crux of the issue, namely the ordering of information in DNA (he calls it “specific complexity”, although God only knows who he’s quoting). He’s going pretty well, comparing DNA to the written word, with the importance of both in translation, rather than the nitty-gritty of the information itself… *WEE-AHHHHHHH* What’s that, HM? Have you spotted something? “The DNA molecule… [has] been made by a higher intelligence that can ‘read’ the message as well as ‘create’ the message” I quite agree HM: what the actual fuck? No it hasn’t, it is a mindless replication process without deliberate targeting. It contains instructions for its reproduction and encodes the relevant machinery, but it is not the work of a higher intelligence!
Wiggs wraps up there, presumably because he has defeated the evil ones for another section. He references a paper for further reading, but frankly it comes from a journal called Creation Science, and I’ve already got three papers to read from (Real) Science, and a book called “The Awesome Book of Comic Fantasy” that probably contains more
correct science, so I’ll give that one a miss…

Refuting Evan Wigg IV

Another week, another shot across the bows of creationism from the ivory tower.
Biochemistry is not Evolution's friend
I have to admit to a little confusion at the outset as to what Mr Wiggs is going to suggest the Biochemical aspect of evolutionary theory contains... he has not got a great record in the Biochemistry stakes thus far. Once again, we are treated to a glossary of terms, again with some flaws. Mr Wiggs asserts that the concept of spontaneous generation of life (that is, from non-life) has been discredited... I am less sure of this. The remainder of the glossary is a simplistic explanation of chemical terms, with which I have no issues.
Wiggs moves onto what I would consider biogenesis, the study of the origins of life (he uses a different definition of biogenesis). He states, quite correctly, that the primordial soup theory is now largely doubted, as the conditions suggested for the origin of life in such a way are not believed to have been present at the time. Purely and simply, neither the pools nor the right concentrations of relevant compounds needed are likely to have been present 4.6 billion years ago. Wiggs lists several arguments for the beginnings of life, and dismisses them all for scientific flaws or lack of evidence. This is fine; we don't know how life formed, it's still one of the big questions of biological science! However, Horn-Monkey is getting ready to squeeze: *HONK-HONK* Biogenesis has little to do with evolutionary theory; evolution itself says nothing about where the material came from, merely that this orginal material branched to present diversity. It is an arguable hypothesis that it could have been placed there by a god, if you wanted to go down that route (it would not be an easy route, or my route, but it is a hypothesis). The origins of life were nearly 5 billion years ago, and a lot of things have happened on the Earth since then, obliterating many clues, so unsurprisingly it is extremely difficult to assess how life originated!

Coupled with his continued rejection of evolution as a force capable of acting on non-living substances, these form Wiggs argument against evolution with Biochemisty. I suggest that Wiggs highlights an exiciting question in Biology, but one that lies outside the scope of evolution theory.

Refuting Evan Wigg III

Hey up all. I have recovered from the epic that was genetics and am now ready to move onto the third section in the rollercoaster of magnificance that is Mr Wiggs' article, thankfully much shorter than its predecessor. Fun trivia fact: this is likely to be the last episode of this refutation written on my old laptop before I move to my shiny new Toshiba. I may have been incorrect in my use of "fun".
Statistics are not Evolution’s Friend
I have to agree with Mr Wigg straight-out here; no-one wants to be friends with statistics, its chat-nav lost contact with the chatellite a long time ago. But is evolution specifically not statistics' friend? I must admit to some trepidation here; we have already seen that Wiggs is happy to bullshit with voodoo stats in an attempt to justify his claims, so the degree to which this section can be understood might be low. He opens by suggesting a random mutation-based evolutionary theory can be refuted with the laws of probability... I will tentatively agree, but expect to pick this claim apart as it develops.Once again, Wigg attacks an unknown "amateur evolutionist" (he could at least give him a funny name) who argues from Dawkins' Blind Watchmaker that the 'evolution is a statistical impossibility' argument represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of the cumulative effect of mutation. The evolutionist suggests evolution is "an algorithmic process, the complete opposite of chance". Out of context, I'm not entirely sure what that means, and indeed Wigg attacks this aspect as well, suggesting evolution is in fact digital, a matter of life and death. Not unreasonable, nor is the following claim that natural selection is not the opposite of chance but a filter process for good and bad allleles. I can't refute most of Wigg's points here, in fact, as he finishes by pointing out that evolution is not an intelligent process, but the effects of differential selection of positive alleles from the allele pool and the random effects of drift. However, he does continue with the 'mutation can only be bad' rubbish from the last section.
Wiggs then expounds on the subject of probability, to address the claim of cumulative influence. Wigg generously provides a timescale of 20 billion years (the "age of the universe", apparently, although its long by about 5 billion years) for life to develop from non-life (a whole bucket of worms to be discussed in section 3), rather than the more usual 4.6 billion years. Wigg briefly explains basic probability, and mentions the idea that probabilities are true in a infinite timescale (that is, that random fluctuations are ironed out by performing many trials). Wigg then begins his attack on evolution by discussing the probability of randomly producing the phrase "the theory of evolution". As there are twenty seven possible characters (including the space) and twenty three characters in the phrase, the number of possibilities is 27^23, or 8.3x10^32. Wigg correctly says that picking characters at a rate of 1x10^12 per second would mean the phrase would appear once in 25 billion years. This therefore means evolution is wrong, as the processes underpinning evolution and creating phrases are identical and in no way differ in subtlties or complexity. I won't ask Horn-monkey to blow just yet...
However, as we lurch back to the primordial soup for an aside, Horn-monkey is now warming up his squeezing muscles (don't ask how, its better none of us knows). Wigg suggests that natural selection must be ignored at this point because early constructions of amino acids to form R/DNA are not alleles and so selection cannot act on them *HONK HONK HONK*. Aside from the continued inability to see the difference between the building blocks of protiens and nucleic acids, Wigg is wrong about selection. A nucleic acid structure is a biochemical entity, with physical intractions and interactions, and as such, some can be more stable than others, and so stability will be SELECTED FOR in accordance with the laws of thermodynamics. Wigg's next point is below, and once again, the man stumps me. Without being able to understand his initial maths, I cannot comment on the rest (although I like the use of "can" when talking about human DNA, as if it cocks about when we're not looking). "The odds of forming a chain of 124 specifically sequenced proteins of 400 amino acid bases is 1 x 1064,489! Now that is just one complex molecule and life requires much, much more. Mycoplasma genitalium has the smallest known genome of the free living organisms, containing 482 genes comprising 580,000 bases. A human DNA molecule can contain three billion amino acid bases. That is not counting all the other enzymes, proteins, hormones and other life chemistry needed. These odds are utterly impossible and shows that evolution being the source of life’s beginning is not even remotely possible." One point I can make is that "all the other enzymes, proteins, hormones and other life chemistry needed" are produced from DNA templates using available relevant monomers... so their appearance is not some magic trick.

Wigg concludes the section with a tirade of bile from Fred Hoyle, a man who is a good astronomer (even if he did propose Steady State), but does not understand evolution. Then, we move to a favourite of creationists: His Royal Lordship Sir Richard of Dawkins.

Wigg's anger is directed specifically at Blind Watchmaker, and it is some impressive anger. Dawkins is portrayed as a weasel from the start, although I've always thought of him more as a badger. Incidentally, Wigg calims to have read both Blind Watchmaker and Selfish Gene; I can only assume he did so with his eyes closed at the bits which mention that GENES AREN'T MADE OF AMINO ACIDS. Mostly, Wigg attacks the programme "Blind Watchmaker", the central basis of the book. In the book, Dawkins uses the programme to disprove Wigg's point about word generation by generating the phrase "methinks it is like a weasel" (which Wigg would suggest takes even longer than "the theory of evolution" as it has one more character, and a greater provenance as a phrase from Hamlet; Dawkins was doing the whole monkey-typewriter thang) in 164 iterations. Wigg suggests Dawkins cheated because: the ending was known and targetted; correct guesses are saved; Dawkins parameters were unrealistic, and more realistic parameters would not produce the result. Unfortunately I haven't read Blind Watchmaker, but I will do... this is not over yet Mr Wigg... I will return stronger than before...EDIT: It turns out that Blind Watchmaker is online (http://macroevolution.narod.ru/dawkins_watchmaker/watchmaker.html#01), so I have now read the relevant section (down by reference 49 if you are interested). a) It was 64, not 164 iterations. b) The section explains why Wigg's entire argument in this section is tosh. Wigg assumes that only the final product is successful, and that intermediate forms have no worth. This is wrong; think of the benefits of light-sensitive areas compared with the benefits of eyes. Both have benefits, but the former likely evolved into the latter in many cases. On this basis, the targetting of the phrase is no such thing; the most successful form can be assumed to be the one that bears the most similarity to the stable endpoint we know. Therefore, those strings which bear more similarity to the endpoint will be selected for. We could show this by developing the concept to have multiple stable endpoints, which the sequences would tend to from a random beginning. It is not targetting to a specific point, but to a general stability. This is the very essence of the cumulative mutation argument; each individual mutation brings increased survivability. We don't need to wait to build a jumbo jet in one go, we can build it through gradual improvements much more quickly. Similarly, the "guesses are saved" thing comes down to the same argument over the worth of intermediate forms. In fact, its wrong to use the phrase intermediate forms. These forms are no more intermediate than we are endpoints; evolution is dynamic and ongoing, it not progressive. As for Wigg's final point, Dawkins continues to alter the programme to derive unpredicted stable forms of images; stability is formed in short iterations, suggesting that the underlying concept of evolution is sound. For more information, read the book... as I intend to do!

Refuting Evan Wigg II

I have coffee, Mr Wigg's wonderful work, and the bullshit alarm is fixed after choking on the moth explanation... round two.
Genetics is not Evolution's friend
(I have decided not to bitch about the titles, we all need a little originality in our writing)
The first section of Wigg's magnum opus is devoted to genetics, possibly the area of strongest support for evolution although not according to this piece. It opens with a glossary of seven terms, one of which is totally wrong. A note to creationist writers: if you are going to attack the genetic basis of evolution, it helps to actually know what a gene is. It is not "the sequence of amino acids in the double helix of DNA". DNA is made up of linked nitrogen-containing bases. Dickhead.
Next, Wigg goes on the offensive against an unknown "amateur evolutionist": "EVOLUTION IS NOT RANDOM, FOR (probably not) THE LAST TIME. Variety is there because evolution causes random mutation, hence the variety." First things first, this unnamed pro-evolutionist has some phrasing difficulties. Evolution is indeed not random - mutation is random, but the effects of selection are not - but it does not cause random mutation, that happens randomly (the clue is in the name). Wigg makes the latter point, and then explains that evolution is a religious philosophy and therefore only as random as the person's thoughts *WEE-AH, WEE-AH* Oh good, the bullshit alarm is still working fine. Evolution through selection is a real and observable process, it is no more a religious philosophy than the theory of gravity.
Wigg's argument relies on the concept that mutation is a driving force of evolution and that if the (ridiculously provable) concept of mutation is debunked then evolution fails. Fair enough... would be nice to see some acknowledgement of the hard work of gene flow and particularly genetic drift, but we can't have everything.
We move to a history lesson, namely on the rise of genetics under Mendel (kind of, genetics really took off after the rediscovery of Mendel's work in the early part of the twentieth century) and the contemporaneous development of evolution theory by Darwin. Wigg suggests Darwins ideas on inheritence were untested and erroneous. *Wee-ah, wee-ah* Darwin hypothesised particulate factors of inheritence; untested, yes, but not erroneous; he didn't suggest his hypothesis was irrefutable, but if he'd read Mendel's work he would have had an evidential basis for inheritence. Wigg continues, suggesting Darwin was a supporter of Lamarckism and the concept of changes within the life of the parent being inherited by the offspring. He even offers a reference, nothing less than Origin, page 278. A brief glance at this passage, available for all on the internet (http://darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/1872_Origin_F391.pdf) shows nothing. The reference is poor, claiming to be from the 1902 6th edition, but the relevant page in the sixth edition is nothing to do with Lamarckism. Hmm... actually, the page Wigg means is page 178, that's an easy mistake, and Darwin does acknowledge that Lamarckist ideas could be correct. A point to Mr Wigg, and a round of applause. But let's not be too hasty; Darwin acknowledged that an alternative theory, at the time not disproved by an understanding of inheritence, could explain a piece of evidence. This does not mean he, in Wigg's words, "believed in the idea that variations caused by environment could be inherited". Wigg suggests that evolutionists have subtly changed that caustive agent of genetic variation to mutation from embarrassment. Bollocks, the bullshit alarm has started to smoke gently. Whatever, this monkey with a horn can replace it: *HONK*. That's fine. Science adjusts its views based on evidence; Lamarckism was wrong, and abandoned when it was shown that inheritence is genetic and that genetic material changes by mutation. It was not a cop-out, it was a correction.
Wigg seems somewhat stuck on mutation, and proceeds to describe the different types of mutation possible; fine, except he dismisses all but point mutations as being capable of changing genes (*Honk*) and claims evolutionists only care about point mutations as agents of change (*Honk*). He also confuses random assortment of chromosomes at cell division with recombination, and as such dismisses evolutionists claims of recombination as a force for change (*Honk, honk honk*). Thank you monkey, that will do. If Wigg knew what a gene was, he would understand that all forms of mutation can alter genes by changing codons and so proteins, and disrupting control elements. If he knew what recombination was, he would see that the swapping of chromosome arms is a major agent of genetic variation.
We move yet further, and return to attacking examples of evolution, specifically those boring brown birds, Darwin's finches. Wigg's description of the way environmental circumstance alters the frequency of beak alleles in the finch (he suggests that these changes happen in all the finches, it would be better expressed as just Geospinza fortis) is pretty damn good... but like so many creationists, he makes entirely the wrong conclusion, that this is merely reshuffling of existing genetic diversity and so not evolution. Evolution is the change in allele frequency in a population over time; the Galapagos finch is a good example of this. Wigg dismisses this as "not evolution" because it doesn't produce a new species; but he seems to have no grasp of the timescale required for the production of a new species, and, crucially, never attempts to define what he means by a species. Like many creationists, he equates the generation of new species to cladogenesis/speciation (the division of a group into two, with the two new groups diverging to form new species), and neglects the possible development of new species through anagenesis, where a group changes gradually over time until they are sufficiently different from their ancestor to be considered a new species.
Wigg returns to mutations, as ever, with a dissection of exactly what a mutation is. Or at least, what passes for a dissection of what a mutation is from someone who doesn't know what makes up DNA. He does well, describing the basic idea of mutation through copy errors and a failure of the error-correction process. And then he drops a bomb: "To date no evolutionist has pointed out such a mutation and if they exist they must be exceedingly rare" *HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK* Even horn-monkey could provide Mr Wigg with an example of a mutation like that. Moron. Wigg requires such a mutation to be positive, heritable and to add information to the genome. I could paper-dump again, but I offer instead MCR-1 locus mutations in the southern US pocket mouse as an example. A change in the MCR receptor in one group within an Arizona population of the mice lead to dark colouration, providing crypsis on volcanic rocks. Mutation? Check. Positive? Check. Heritable? Check. New information? What once was fawn is now black, so check. There you go Mr Wigg, an "evolutionist" has provided you with an example.
Onwards, ever onwards, and now the field of popualtion genetics is subject to Mr Wigg's deadly scrutiny. Watch it tremble. He begins by producing a paragraph of group selectionism, explaining how organisms must produce a set number of offspring to replace themselves in the population. *Wee-ah* Oh, horn-monkey has fixed the bullshit alarm. Good show. Organisms will optimise their repoductive effort to leave as much of their genetic material as possible in the next generation. R.A.Fisher is called up to the stand to suggest that high rates of positive mutation are needed to supply positive genetic material and overcome the effects of drift. Fine, Fisher said these things. We then move into some voodoo maths, cumulating in a conclusion of mutations can't be positive because the chances of the same mutation arising in multiple individuals is vanishingly small. *WEE-AH* The bullshit alarm has gone off, but there's nothing I can say; I have not got a frickin' clue what Wigg is talking about here. He seems to have jizzed some numbers onto a page and is waving it about and shouting. Wigg wraps the section up by complaining that mutations in the genome of catfish have not changed them into perch. *Wee-ah* This is another typical fallacy of creationism, the idea that evolution is some high-speed form of transmorphing one organism to another, like Harry Potter waving his wand over the catfish. Evolution is a gradual process of change of base material (e.g. the proto-catfish) into new species (e.g. all modern species of catfish) via small changes and envionmental pressures over massive periods (thousands of generations). It's not going to make a perch out of a catfish, unless some very specific circumstances occur over millions of years.
Beneficial vs. positive mutations is our next stop on the endless train ride that is this section... if Mr Wiggs managed to write a paragraph without an error in it, I'm yet to come across it. Wiggs argues that mutation can be beneficial but not positive, such as sterilisation in fruits, and that evolutionists get confused over these terms. Well yeah... because its a bullshit distinction with which evolution theory isn't concerned. Beneficial mutations of the type Wiggs discusses are human-centric uses of biology, rather than natural developments. Their place in evolution is limited to that caused by artificial selection. He continues, complaining about evolutionists getting confused with recombination. Quick check... nope, he still thinks recombination is random assortment and that mutation is only point mutation. *Honk* Horn-monkey, turn the bullshit alarm back on! He then proceeds to claim there are no acknowleged positive mutation, before giving a perfectly good example of a positive mutation causing herbicide resistance, and then trying to claim that we can't know if this was a mutation or a preexisting allele. HOW ABOUT IF WE LOOK AT THE PARENT PLANT THAT DOESN'T HAVE THE RESISTANCE OR THE MUTATION?
Endlessly we siddle on, onto the topics of Molecular Biology and Behe's Irreducible Complexity argument. Wigg makes so many errors here that my May Ball-frazzled brain is just leaking gently. First up, he claims molecular genetics does not support phylogeny; molecular genetics is now a key tool in our construction of phylogeny, Wigg's statement makes as much sense as saying bricks don't support houses. Next, he claims the long sequence repeats found within genomes cannot arise by mutation; well, no, not if you fail to grasp the concepts of recombination and meiotic fallure that produce the necesssary, as Wigg does. Wigg continues to claim that independent creation of the multitude of genomes is more parsimonious than the concept of evolution from a single ancestor, despite the existence of a highly-overworked creator that that implies. He finishes by talking about Behe's irreducible complexity concept, the idea that structures exist in extant forms that could not have been produced by intermediate forms, like a mousetrap. Wigg suggests that the cell is an example of this... I actually think the cell is a really bad example to choose, given the stunning variety of endocellular arrangements observable in extant forms from viruses to ourselves. The irreducible complexity argument is impressively bad, failing to suggest any solid examples whatsoever, and for a skilled debunking, I recommend Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable.
Just three more steps on this leg of our journey through Wiggs' torturous argument, and the next is Hox genes. Wigg suggests that Hox genes, which underlie patterning in all animal speices, present a potential mechanism for a punctuate model of evolution, as suggested by Gould. However, he then condemns Hox genes to one of Dante's circles by the words of "non-creationist" Christian Schwabe. The quote details the concept that while Hox gene mutations would be powerful enough to change phenotypes, the risk of deleterious mutation increases as the effects of the gene are widespread. No issue with that. Wigg continues with the quote afer an ellipsis: "Homeotic changes induced in Drosophila genes have led only to monstrosities, and most experimenters do not expect to see a bee arise from their Drosophila constructs.” Again, statements of fact; in fact no sane experimenter would expect to create a bee, because that is transmorphing, which is not evolution. Wigg then provides his own interpretation of the quote, suggesting that all homeotic mutations made since Schwabe's 1995 paper have only produced monstrosities, not transmorphings. But that is exactly what the studies look for; we're not trying to create bees, we're trying to learn about how patterning works! Wigg then finishes the section with some wittery religious bollocks that has about as much to do with evolution as I have to do with farming sentient peppers on Mars.
Our penultimate area is an attack on the abiliy of evolutionto predict genetic complexity. Wigg makes some vague references to the fact that genes do not map one-to-one with characteristics and that there is considerable redundancy in the genome. Wigg still doesn't know what a gene is. Wigg's points are still water off the evolution duck's back.
Finally we end this horrifically long section by looking at bent protiens, and particularly prions. From this point, Wigg suggests that protein structure has a role in gene expression within the cell. Fine; expression is a complex business, and structures of both proteins and nucleic acids are important. Wigg then makes another point that is, I think central, to the creationist's misunderstanding of science; he correctly suggests that there is a limited set of protein folds that will work, but makes a crucial misattribution. He says that because this is a limiterd set, it must be directed and cannot occur by random processes. The very nature of entropy is that only stable structures can maintain, so random processes MUST produce stable strucutres in the long run, as unstable structures will collapse. More to the point, it has precisely dick-all to do with evolutionary theory.
So, we have finally reached the end of Wigg's analysis of genetics. For someone who fails to grasp the basic ideas, he was able to write a lot... unfortunately, still nothing thus far to make me doubt evolution. Tune in next time, when Horn-monkey returns with the bullshit-alarm 2.0, to see if Wigg will succeed in his crusade...

Refuting Evan Wigg I

I recently asked anti-evolutionists on a well-known internet forum to provide me with their arguments agains evolution, and their first response was to paste this link: http://www.evanwiggs.com/articles/reasons.html#Introduction.
A brief glance through made me sad; the English is just horrible. Then I read the arguments. Bleurgh. So, even though most of my friends will undoubtly reject these arguments, I thought I'd destroy them anyway. I may be a little bored... However, the article is preposterously long, so I may attack each section in turn, make a little series out of it. Fun times.
The Introduction:
We begin with the classic poor attempt to define evolution, and the compromise of "microevolution occurs, macroevolution does not". a) Microevolution is not a term used by evolutionary biologists, we tend to call that "variation". b) Macroevolution is biological evolution. The other three types mentioned are cosmology, I'm not arguing about those.
We then get a reasonable stab at defining the scientfic method... little issue with that, I've seen better but it's fine. However, we then get the usual fall back of "evolution is unscientific because it is unobservable". Difficult... I could paper-dump about 10000 examples of the observed process of natural selection, but if we're fighting on the terms of Mr Wiggs (the Wanderer for Jesus), I think he may not accept that these processes extend to produce macroevolution. Ho hum... we shall see as his argument develops.
Our final stop today is microevolution, the creationist's favourite term, and in Wigg's words "Variation that can be expressed by the genome of a “species’" I don't know quite what Mr Wiggs has against the concept of a species, perhaps he thinks we are all a brotherhood of life, but its a reasonable definition of the (bullshit) term. He witters about mutation for a bit in a non-threatening fashion and then we get to the meat of his argument, namely that microevolution = selective breeding and that this involves no mutation.

At this juncture, allow me to introduce the bullshit alarm. This alarm will sound whenever Mr Wiggs' argument disappears up his arse, and will go *Wee-ah, wee-ah*. Get used to the sound... it's going to happen a lot.
*Wee-ah, wee-ah* Selective breeding allows for alleles considered to be beneficial to become a bigger proportion of the population. These alleles can be naturally present, but they can also arise from mutation. Mutation can play a role in selective breeding, by providing the material upon which selection acts.
Wiggs proceeds to talk about increasing the sugar concentraion in sugar beet, and explains this hits a plateau. Fine; the rate of mutation is not especially high, so maximising sugar concentration by selection can only get you so far. In addition, there will be trade-offs involved, so there may well be a limit to sugar conctration. This does precisely dick-all damage to evolution. He points out the sugar beet didn't chaneg into a potato. Well, no... why would it? If potato-like characteristics were being selected for, it would have become more like a potato, but there are constraints on the sugar beet, such as its role within the plant, that mean its ability to change is limited. If we selected for potato-like traits for hundreds of generations, we could produce something more like a potato as mutation increased the potato-like characteristics we were selecting... in the 70 years Wiggs references, the amount of mutations is probably too small to allow the beet to change hugely... and they WEREN'T TRYING TO MAKE IT A GODDAMN POTATO!
And who is next to flutter over the horizon? Ah yes, the peppered moth, friend to creationist and evolutionist alike. I'm just going to set off the alarm now, because Wiggs is going to make many errors here. *Wee-ah, wee-ah*. Actually I'm a little harsh, his explanation of the basic story is one of the better ones I've read, he doesn't pretend the dark morph randomly emerged but acknowledges that it is a low frequency polymorphism (although not in those words). He does criticise Kettlewell for staging the photographs, but that's fair because he did... although to suggest this impacts on the objectivity of evolutionists (I assume he means scientists) in general elicits a brief peep from the bullshit alarm. Actually, I fail to understand his moth point... he just seems to suggest that the allele frequency in the popualtion did not change, despite historical evidence, i.e. every account of the study, suggesting it does. I am now going to replace the bullshit alarm, as it has just exploded.

Why this world scares me sometimes…

I haven’t written for a while (can’t think why), but a glace through the Nature RSS feed on my homepage (yeah… I have that) today made me shiver sufficiently that I felt the urge to pound my keyboard mercilessly into submission. Evolution is kind of important to me, being the basis of my subject and all, but once again it has come under attack. As such, consider this a rush to the battlements, in order to ready the boiling water and makes sure the really pointy stones are ready to be thrown.

Park, in this week’s Nature, heralds the worrying news that the South Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology has given de facto permission to publishers to remove evolutionary examples, such as Archaeopteryx as an ancestor of modern birds, from some of the country’s high-school textbooks. This paves the way for further examples to be removed, including the evolution of the human. This comes just months after the state of Tennessee introduced the latest in a string of ‘science educational’ laws, the so-called ‘monkey bill’, allowing teachers to “help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories” (Thompson, 2012).  Fine, in itself, and indeed many of the commenters on the Nature article fail to see the problem with such a law; after all, science is all about a critical approach to the evidence. However, I can’t help but side with Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), who suggests that the subjects highlighted as controversial in the body of the bill, including biological evolution, the origins of life and global warming, show the true colours of the bill. One again, the creationist lobby and their coat-tail riders, the climate change deniers, attempt to sneak their non-science into the classroom. Not everything in this bill is necessarily bad; the origin of life is an incredibly difficult subject to study, and our best hypotheses are largely based on educated guesswork from what little we understand of our world 3-4 billion years ago. There is, therefore, no scientific consensus on the subject and different ideas are free for debate. This is entirely untrue for evolution and climate change, however, both of which are universally accepted by most reputable scientific bodies (the American Association of Petroleum Geologists acknowledges man’s role in increasing CO₂ production; DPA. They’re not going to do that without some pretty solid evidence!)

So what is to be done? In the States, it seems likely that the monkey bill may eventually fall by the wayside. Its manipulative potential may not be used in full, in which case it is the reasonable law it naively appears to be. Alternatively, it may be uses to portray young-earth creationism as science, in which case it will fall foul of the Establishment Clause (which prohibits the making of laws favouring a particular religion), and be cast down by the US Supreme Court, as most such attempts have been so far. The South Korean situation is more worrying; surveys performed in the country yield worryingly high percentages of evolutionary scepticism, and with only a few major evolutionary scientists in South Korea, there remains a real chance that this growing scientific centre will officially abandon the key theory of biology.

The underlying cause of the evolution conflict is religion, which seems to underlie almost every incidence of this conflict. Both the American Bible Belt and South Korea are strongly Christian (with a healthy Buddhist presence in South Korea as well), and they see evolution as a threat, given that it contradicts Genesis directly. This is only really a problem to those who cling to the literal meaning of the Bible, however; people who are, to be blunt, poorly-educated. There is no reason to expect the creation story of the Bible to be literally true, given that the events described have no evidential basis and were written at least thousands of years after their supposed occurrence.

However, there is a crucial point to be extracted here; evolution has become tied to atheism, in part because some of its most vocal defenders are atheists themselves (Richard Dawkins looms into view again). I believe that this is a terrible thing for biology, and something that should be correctly explicitly in discussions. The major figures of Christianity, including the Catholic Church, accept both the existence of God and the reality of evolution, so to suggest they are irreconcilable is wrong. I can’t see how believing that evolution was set in motion by a creator god should be belittled in comparison to a belief in some celestial micro-manager. If God were an artist, would we consider a still-life painting of banana to be somehow less worthwhile than a painting made by casting a piece of paper onto paints swirling in water?  

 

References

DPA Climate Change. Available at: http://dpa.aapg.org/gac/statements/climatechange.cfm [Accessed June 10, 2012].

Park, S.B., 2012. South Korea surrenders to creationist demands. Nature, 486(7401), pp.14–14.

Thompson, H., Tennessee ‘monkey bill’ becomes law : Nature News & Comment. Available at: http://www.nature.com/news/tennessee-monkey-bill-becomes-law-1.10423 [Accessed June 10, 2012].