Doubt and dogmatism in science -- questioning natural selection

Through no fault of his own, a friend of ours finds his written words being used (or rather, abused) by the ID community.  Again.  This has happened to us from time to time as well, so we thought we'd address it here.  Not the actual arguments, which we have no interest in, but the misconstruing of what scientists say, or clearly mean. 

Adam Wilkins, a biologist and long-time very thoughtful editor of BioEssays, a leading biology journal, recently published a well-considered review of a new book by James Shapiro, Evolution: A View from the 21st Century.  Adam reviews the book favorably in general as a thoughtful one that those seriously interested in the nature of evolution should read; but he takes widespread exception to the author's view, taking him to task for writing that natural selection may be less important than most biologists would accept.

Adam is not the first reviewer to take Shapiro to task for this. And, probably because he relegates natural selection to a minor role, Shapiro has been assumed to be an IDer by some, including some people in the ID community.  This right here means there's a problem -- if a biologist can't question accepted wisdom in evolutionary theory, this makes evolutionary theory a dogma, just like ID.  Science should always be questioning itself -- that's how knowledge is built and expanded upon.

But, giving succor to ID is not Shapiro's intention.  This is clear from the 'debate' he has with IDers, which we won't even link to because it's tiresome, and really not much more than a clash of ideologies (you'll find it anyway, if you really must).

But, after this rather fruitless 'debate', Adam, or at least his review, gets pulled into the fray.  Adam's piece was published in Genome Biology and Evolution in January.  And the authors of the post believe it's a gotcha moment, saying that Wilkins admits something that few 'Darwinists' (and yes, that's a slur) will, which is that "a growing body of scientists" are starting to question the "alleged power of Darwin's natural selection to create the world of life that we see."

Yes, Adam does say that there are biologists who feel that the role of n.s. has been overstated (and yes, you've seen that here on MT, in fact).  But, he absolutely does not include the 'therefore' that's implied -- therefore, if n.s. didn't do it, a designer did.  The gotcha quote they pull from the review is this:

…the book’s contention that natural selection’s importance for evolution has been hugely overstated represents a point of view that has a growing set of adherents. (A few months ago, I was amazed to hear it expressed, in the strongest terms, from another highly eminent microbiologist.) My impression is that evolutionary biology is increasingly separating into two camps, divided over just this question. On the one hand are the population geneticists and evolutionary biologists who continue to believe that selection has a ‘creative’ and crucial role in evolution and, on the other, there is a growing body of scientists (largely those who have come into evolution from molecular biology, developmental biology or developmental genetics, and microbiology) who reject it.

Adam's following paragraph draws their scorn. 

The arguments from paleontological evidence for the importance of natural selection largely concern the observed long-term trends of morphological change, which are visible in many lineages. It is hard to imagine what else but natural selection could be responsible for such trends, unless one invokes supernatural or mystical forces such as the long-popular but ultimately discredited force of “orthogenesis.”

Obviously this draws scorn, because invoking the supernatural is exactly what IDers do.  But, equally obviously, to a biologist such as Adam, that's not an explanation.  Adam of course was writing for biologists, and for the overwhelming number of biologists evolution is a fact of life.  He wasn't writing with creationists/IDers in mind.  If he had been, he might have restructured his argument somewhat, but he still wouldn't have hidden the fact that there are disagreements among biologists about the strength or predominance of natural selection as a force in evolution.  The disagreement doesn't make it false.  It makes it science.

For biologists, for whom not a shred of evidence collected in the last 150 years has called into question the idea that all of life descended from a common ancestor that lived nearly 4 billion years ago, this kind of disagreement is arguing around the edges. But for an ID adherent, any kind of disagreement within the fold must mean that, therefore, evolution didn't happen.

We and other biologists don't question that natural selection can occur, or that it does occur, but ask when, where, how, how strongly, and how systematically it occurs--and how we can know which is which.  We ask how it works in general or in specific instances relative to other factors that can lead to differential proliferation of variation, or of the way genetic and other transmissible variation arises and works.  That is totally different from asking whether natural selection or Divine intervention account for life, which is not what legitimate science does.  Science is only one way to know, but it rests on observable causation in the material world only.

We could put this another way.  If it were somehow possible to show--to really show--that Divine intervention were the explanation, or that Jesus was divine, or that Mohammed really did get his inspiration from the Angel Gabriel, or that ants had souls, any sane scientist would love to be the one to do that.  His or her reputation would dwarf even Darwin's!  But that's simply not the message the material world gives us.  Even if natural selection were somehow shown to be totally wrong, it would provide not a scintilla of evidence for creationist explanations.  It would just say we've been accepting an incorrect theory and have more work to do.  That is not a threat to science, even if many scientists do cling too tightly to simple explanations for complex things.

There are separate worldviews operating here, and, even if IDers actually understood the science, their fundamentalist view of the world still prohibits questioning their dogmatic view, creationism.  And this is why something like Adam's review can be taken in vain -- IDers assume that if scientists disagree, that's a crack in the religion of evolution.

But evolution isn't supposed to be a religion.  Scientists are supposed to question what they know.  Jim Shapiro's questioning of the pre-eminence of natural selection in evolution is perfectly valid science, and will either stand the test of time, and questioning by other scientists, or it will fall.  But it doesn't mean he sees the hand of a watchmaker behind every complex living thing.  It means he thinks evolutionary theory hasn't yet explained everything.

Doubt

"Have you ever held a position in an argument past the point of comfort....given service to a creed you no longer utterly believed?" So asks John Patrick Shaney in the preface to his 2004 play Doubt. It's a very good play (and equally good new movie of the same name), about nuances and our tendency to fail to acknowledge how little we actually know. Did the priest...or didn't he?

Our society is currently commodified, dumbed-down, and rewards self-assurance, assertion, and extreme advocacy--belief. It's reflected in the cable 'news' shouting contests, and the fast-paced media orientation that pervades many areas of our society. There are penalties for circumspection.

Science is part of society and shares its motifs. Scientists are driven by natural human vanities, of course, but also by the fact that as middle-class workers we need salaries, pension funds, and health care coverage. We are not totally disinterested parties, standing by and abstractly watching knowledge of the world accumulate. Academic work is viewed as job-training for students, and research is largely filtered through the lens of practical 'importance'. Understanding Nature for its own sake is less valued than being able to manipulate Nature for gain. This was less prominent in times past (Darwin's time, for example; though at the height of industrialization and empire, when there was certainly great respect for practical science and engineering, he could afford the luxury of pure science).

It is difficult to have a measured discussion about scientific issues--stem cells are a prime example, but equally difficult are discussions about the nature of genomes and what they do, and the nature of life and evolution. Our societal modus vivendi imposes subtle, unstated pressure to take a stand and build a fortress around it. Speakers get invited to give talks based on what people think they're going to say (often, speaking to the already-converted). The hardest sentence to utter is "I don't know." (Another, "I was wrong," is impossible, so it isn't even on the radar).

A theme of our recent postings has to do with what we actually know in science, and what we don't know. It is always true that scientists firmly cling to their theoretical worldview--their paradigm, to use Thomas Kuhn's word for it. Maybe that's built into the system. In many ways that is quite important because, as we've recently said, it's hard to design experiments and research if you don't have a framework to build it on.

But frameworks can also be cages. Dogma and rigid postures may not be good for an actual understanding of Nature, and are costly in terms of wasted research resources. Clinging to an idea leads to clinging to existing projects (often, trying to make them larger and last longer), even when they can, from a disinterested point of view, be seen to be past their sell-by date. Great practical pressures favor that rather than simply saying enough is enough, it's not going to go very far, so let's start investing in something new that may have, or may lead us to insights that have, better prospects. Let's ask different questions, perhaps.

GM failed to respond to such a situation in their persistence to make gas-guzzling SUVs, and oil companies now try to fight off alternative energy sources. So science is not alone. But it's a concern, nonetheless.

Science would be better with less self-assurance, less reward for promotional skills, if experiments were more designed to learn about Nature than to prove pet ideas or provide findings that can be sold in future grant or patent applications. Most null hypotheses being 'tested' are surrogates for set-up studies where at least some of the answer is basically known; for example, when searching for genes causing some disease, our null hypothesis is that there is no such gene. Yet before the study we almost always know there is at least some evidence (such as resemblance among family members). So our degree of surprise should be much less than is usually stated when we reject the null. The doubt we express is less than fully sincere in that sense, but leads to favorable interpretations of our findings that we use to perpetuate the same kind of thinking we began with.

Real doubt, the challenge of beliefs, has a fundamental place in science. Let's nurture it.