Genetics in an age of fundamentalism

I heard a program the other day on the BBC Radio 4's In Our Time about the origins, rise, and persistence of Chinese Legalism. Introduced in the 4th century BC, and the hallmark of the rule of the first emperor, the philosophy of Legalism was based on laws and their strict implementation.  It was the basis of a brutal, authoritarian state, elements of which have lasted 2500 years.

Here's one description (found here):

...Legalism is a Classical Chinese philosophy that emphasizes the need for order above all other human concerns. The political doctrine developed during the brutal years of the Fourth Century BCE. The Legalists believed that government could only become a science if rulers were not deceived by pious, impossible ideals such as "tradition" and "humanity." In the view of the Legalists, attempts to improve the human situation by noble example, education, and ethical precepts were useless. Instead, the people needed a strong government and a carefully devised code of law, along with a policing force that would stringently and impartially enforce these rules and punish harshly even the most minor infractions. 

                                                                                              L. Kip Wheeler 

To overly simplify, but I'm just trying to make a point, in Legalism, allegiance must be paid to the role of the ruler, rather than to a particular leader.  And, the system of rulership is absolute.  Further, Legalism views people as much easier to control if they are uneducated, and there's no sense in which they are expected to improve themselves.

In contrast, another ancient Chinese philosophy, Confucianism, was much more benevolent, with an optimistic view of human potential; people are basically good, and if taught new things they can be cultivated into better people.  Confucians see authority and leadership as something everyone has the potential to achieve, whereas in Legalism, the ruler dictates and people are expected to follow.

This contrast between people as good and improvable vs inherently evil, the absolute vs the relative, is of course a familiar dialectic, not at all restricted to philosophy of nation states.  Theism vs agnosticism,  laissez faire or free market vs regulation, the US Constitution as fixed or as flexible, cultural relativism vs universal human rights, free will vs predetermination, and of course tabula rasa or blank slate vs inherency, or nature vs nurture.

Confucius

The consistency with which people view the world in either absolute or relative terms is curious to me, and indicates that we aren't necessarily learning from observation, evaluating and interpreting the facts as we see them as we go about choosing our favorite economic system, or whether cultural practices that are alien to our own have any merit.  It seems instead that we've got an a priori view of the world that informs those decisions, an ideology that guides us in what turns out to be a fairly predictable direction.  In a loopy sort of way, those with an absolutist ideology would say that that ideology is genetic (and, indeed, that things like how we vote are genetic), while those with a relativist ideology would disagree, saying it's learned.

But at least our mythology about science is that it's supposed to be fact-driven, not ideological.  Often it is, though how do most people decide whether or not they accept that humans are driving climate change, or that all life evolved from a common ancestor?  Unless we're climate scientists or evolutionary biologists, we generally don't have the knowledge to evaluate the data in any meaningful way.  So these decisions become ideological.  In that sense, facts do not rule, not even in relation to science.

And what about the role of genes in making us who we are?  Ken and I have been sneeringly called "blank slaters" more than once, because we don't embrace the idea that who we are is determined by our genes.  The assumption is that if one doesn't accept that genes are always destiny, one must accept that they never are.

But, there's another way, and it's more subtle, and more nuanced, and that is to recognize that there's a continuum of gene action, from predictable to unpredictable.  Some alleles pretty reliably are associated with a given trait (alleles associated with Tay Sachs or cystic fibrosis), while others are not (APOE4 and dementia, HFE and  hemochromatosis).  With a few exceptions, specific genetic variants can't be predicted from most complex traits, and vice versa.  So, sometimes Legalism might be a good analogy for the relationship between genes and traits -- dictator, strong-arm genes -- and sometimes Confucianism; genes interacting with environment.  But there's also Daoism, another ancient Chinese philosophy, which taught that people were to live in harmony with nature, that government is unnatural, and that the best government is a weak government -- no dictator genes, mostly environment.

It used to be said that one's politics could be predicted from one's stand on genetic determinism, but determinism has become so pervasive that this is no longer true.  Atheist free-market constitutional modernist cultural relativist Bernie Sanders supporters are as likely to be genetic determinists these days as are, well, the opposite.  Determinism has become a pervasive ideology, and this despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.  Philosophers of science have long tried to define and describe how science is done, but I think fundamentally, while science is different from a lot of other human endeavors in that we do have ways of verifying that we're learning things, the role of ideology in what we think we've learned should not be underestimated.  And in many ways, it is heavily affected by emotions and by scientists' personal situations (careers, biases, and so on), even when they try to be 'objective'.  In recent decades, some 'science studies' work has clearly shown this (even if the practitioners have their own sociocultural axes to grind); given human nature, it should be no surprise. 

When did Lyndon Johnson propose the Great Society in the US?  It was in the mid 1960's, when we saw communism as a huge threat.  We reacted by becoming more like our 'enemy'.  Is it too simplistic to suggest that the same could be happening now, when our 'enemy' is religious fundamentalism?  

On the mythology of natural selection. Part X: Finally: Traveling evolution's geodesics

Science recognizes Charles Darwin's contributions to knowledge because he was a deep thinker who largely transformed a whole area of human knowledge in ways that seem likely to be permanent.   One often refers to such inspirational figures by coining terms to acknowledge their views.  'Darwinism' is one.  To name a concept after him is entirely deserved (even his co-recognizer of the salient facts of life as an evolving history, Alfred Wallace, in 1889 referred to the idea with the very title of a book summarizing the field: Darwinism: An Exposition of the Theory of Natural Selection, with Some of Its Applications).

By greatly honoring his name, science and history recognize his contributions.  But his work is not to be read exegetically as a source of The Word.  He's respected, but not sanctified.  No scientist we know of  checks what Darwin said as a means of testing whether something is true or not. This is science; exegesis is for historians.

Charles Darwin would not want a halo!

Darwin would want it that way ("And get that halo off me, please!").  He was a brilliant, doggedly thorough and persistent gentleman scholar.  His works are a wonder to read, because he was a keen and incredibly patient observer and a master synthesizer of reams of data from various fields.  But he was human and lived in the times in which he lived and with the knowledge and technologies then available.  Even he, the developer of the selectionist 'law' of nature, mainly offered hand-waving assertion and circumstantial evidence, but definitely did not in the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection show that the origin of species was by means of natural selection.  If you doubt this, read the Origin yourself, especially Chapter IV.  But that's a topic for another day.

Nonetheless, we think that Darwin's view of natural selection as a universal determinative law to account for the evolution of the traits of organisms has become widely and without deep thought adopted as a given rather than a matter of science to be examined in the real world.  This is in many ways taken almost directly from Darwin's personal view, though most who use the term have done little if any actual reading of Darwin's voluminous works.  Such a worldview becomes dogma, or the assumption of a belief system, an ideology, rather than science, as we have tried to show in this series. That is the sense in which we discuss its mythology--the tales told and assumptions made about it that don't reflect what we actually know, and don't know.

The public and professional literature are awash in 'gene for' or 'evolved for' assertions that go largely unquestioned (thoughtful, pointed reviews of this season's recent pulp eugenics book excepted).  Such stories about genomic causation or reconstructions of evolutionary history are often expressed as if they explain traits in question, but by equating plausibility with truth in fact verge on tautology, and serve preconceptions rather than testing how the living world actually works.  The pervasive explanatory 'ether' that is invoked, is natural selection.  Most biologists probably don't quite realize how close they come to explanations that would be the same if God's will were used instead.  That universal acid or Darwin's 'dangerous idea', as one philosopher referred to it, is indeed dangerous both to human society and to science.

In this series, we have discussed various ways in which purely historical processes of proliferation and divergence from common ancestry can potentially account for aspects of the origin of complex traits within organisms, and by extension among organisms, that are not due, or not just due, to natural selection.

Our objective has not been to denigrate the idea of natural selection, but to show that there are other entirely natural processes that can lead to the evolution of complex traits.  Evolution and genomics are not just one-trick ponies.  As we have noted, how and when (or even whether) these processes are at work is a matter that can be studied by clever designs or choice of material--they are testable ideas.  In fact one of them suggests that natural evolutionary historical processes could generate complex traits without any involvement of force-like natural selection at all.  However, if one clings to a selectionist ideology, selection as an axiom rather than a scientific assertion, then of course one will never even ask the questions as to whether such ideas might be correct, much less test them.

We can, however, ask a far more fundamental question, which is how selection works when it does occur.  For this, and as elsewhere in this series, we suspend skepticism for the moment and take universal, Newtonian force-like natural selection as a given.  To try to make our point, an analogy to astrophysics might be instructive.

The 'spacetime geodesics' of evolution by natural selection
In cosmology--the real thing--travel in the universe is governed by relativistic spacetime.  An object at any time moves in a way that is determined by its motion at the time and the gravitation field--one might say the gravitational 'ecology' due to the physical objects in the area.  The bigger or closer another object, the more spacetime is curved.  But the net curvature is the total of these effects in this location in spacetime.  We use the term because on the cosmic scale, space and time are inseparably part of the nature of existence.  We can say that the past has existed and, from our vantage point, we can get a glimpse of it from the distribution of matter and energy at the present time.  In real cosmology, we can also 'see' the future to the extent that we can know and (in principle, at least) predict the state and location of the objects towards which our object is moving.  Any object in motion essentially integrates all of the forces acting upon it, and moves through spacetime accordingly.  Unless driven by some separate impulsive force, the path it follows is determined by these local spacetime properties, and is known as a geodesic, which one can think of as the shortest path between points spacetime.

SpaceTime trajectory real and imaginary (modified from GoogleImages)

If the object of our interest is affected by several small local objects in the area, it meanders geodesically past them.  If or when there is a large nearby object, it follows a more greatly affected curvature around it (blue inset).  At the end of a period of interest (which we call now), and if we knew the location of the point at our chosen starting time (then), and we're oblivious to what happened between then and now, we can always assert that what happened was that the object of our desire was shot by a specific force directly along that path (shown as dotted arrow).  

But that assertion is a fiction, and science is supposed to be about fact.  That fact is that our object got to now through a path that essentially had nothing to do with now--it was not aiming toward now, its movement at any time was locally determined, sometimes by major (one might say clear-cut) factors, often by a host of minor even seemingly trivially small ones, collectively setting up the position at the next major influence.  Note that in our cosmic analogy all of our object's meanderings are considered to be totally determined by the shape of gravitational spacetime--we assumed that no probabilities were involved.

This should be enough about spacetime geodesics in astrophysics.  The point of the analogy should hopefully be clear.   Even if the implicit complete determinism of Darwinian assumptions were true, the complex dynamic nature of earthly ecologies means that an evolutionary geodesic need not follow a retrospectively reconstructable path from then to now.  A species or trait need not have evolved 'for' its current use, not even in stages aimed in a particular direction, not with its various components evolving synchronously or even sympatrically.  Indeed, if and where ecologies are complex and dynamic, the meanderings of our object--a trait or species--may be essentially indistinguishable from random movement relative to any long-term 'purpose'.  

An organism is a collection of traits, often correlated by shared genomic mechanisms, that are continually being pulled every which-way by selection of various intensities for various reasons (the nearby gravitational objects).  These pulls are based on the local context, and that context (the 'stars' etc. in the area) change over time and space--over evolutionary 'spacetime'.  The position in the future may not be predictable from its local conditions at any given time: evolution has no 'momentum' by which the past actively propels species through the present--or if it does, we need a much-revised theory of its causal dynamics.

The shape of the head (something I've worked on with collaborators for years) is measurable in its many dimensions, and we can look at fossils and comparative species, some of whose evolutionary past history we shared through common ancestry.  But the head is not a unitary trait, perhaps not a very meaningful trait to ask about its evolutionary trajectory in selectionist terms. The length of the face, say, need not have evolved 'for' language, or reduced smell, or balance in upright posture, or change in diet, or forward-looking stereo vision, or.....  

These factors and their importance for 'fitness' need only be synchronized if they share genomic pathways, and otherwise need not be synchronous in time or space, and the 'same' trait can serve multiple or even changing functions.

As one zooms one's lens closer and closer, the picture dissolves into every more graininess. No two individuals have the identical trait or genotype. We don't see 'spandrels' or other states that set the stage for the trait as we see it today. We don't see a ladder of discrete improvements towards today. No punctuated equilibrium, saltations, and the like except as we choose to impose them on our observations. To the extent the picture given here is apt, each local point in evolutionary spacetime is so local, so dependent on its context at that instant in time, that it need not suggest the kind of longterm arrow from then to now that is so commonly explicit or explicit in our texts, papers, and so much of the rhetoric even in professional biology.

Realizing in this way how things are--or at least might be--under deterministic assumptions, it is now time to re-introduce the other complications discussed in this series, including chance in its many manifestations, at the scales of change that are relevant.  The 'geodesic' path of evolution meanders in no one direction, by no one cause.  Even if it is 'driven' by selection at every instant, it is a path whose determinants are problematic to identify in practice. Whatever is the truth, selection is not obviously simple in a force-like way. 

And here's something to think about:   Scientists often say that the simplest--the most 'parsimonious' explanation is the preferred one most likely to be true.   In the case of our cosmological analogy, I think it's right to say that the straight-arrow path from then to now is not the simplest explanation of the change!   In fact, it may be among the least simple explanations.  That's because the geodesic path is actually the simplest: it only involves the explanation that the path follows spacetime curvature (e.g., gravity). In that sense, that is the 'straight' path.  Given the complexity of space, you'd need a host of ad hoc reasons to try to account for the usual notion of a 'straight' path (like our dashed arrow).  

The same can be said of evolution.  The straightest path is that which follows the dynamic local 'pulls' of selection; to avoid following that path, as if somehow 'insisting' on a direct rather than geodesic path from then to now, it would have to resist the myriad local conditions to keep on that path--and that then becomes teleological!  Is that a suitable 'simpler' explanation?

As we navigate our search for truth, if we are not careful in our thinking we, like Odysseus, face the twin threats of Scylla and Charybdis:  the mesmerizing sirens of examples of strong recent or artificial selection that can lead us onto rocks of extrapolation to events on a slow, long time-scale, and there is a danger of being sucked into a whirlpool of complacency by taking criteria like DNA sequence conservation too casually.

Between Scylla and Charybdis; Wikimedia

Darwin's magnificent legacy

Darwin's realization that life today is the legacy of processes of descent with modification and differential proliferation, was profound and correct as far as anything we know.  (Somewhat separate from, but related to the effectiveness of selection, is that branching from common ancestry into distinct entities such as species that are isolated from each other was also part of the theory in Darwin's view, as it is of ours today.)  But none of this implies there is only one manner of differential proliferation nor that we cannot find and flesh out the basic concepts--even if there are no fundamentally different phenomena yet to be discovered.  For example, with organismal selection, genetic variation and its effects can be sorted out by the organisms in their various local areas, with no competitive differential reproduction required, and in that sense no nasty competition to the death, necessary.

There has been nothing spooky in our use of the analogy of an imaginary odyssey through evolutionary 'spacetime'.  We are not invoking heresies, that Darwin himself would not recognize. Indeed, what we have said may be imperfectly stated but is perfectly consistent with the long-standing insistence that evolution is locally contingent and not teleological.   But that in fact is inconsistent with the ubiquitous simplistic 'evolved for' and 'gene for' tales in the public as well as professional literature.

Just to be clear, with all of its nuances, including chance effects, evolution can be accounted for by historical, material processes; there is nothing that we know that requires any external force (as in religious arguments) to guide evolution. 

Just because a story is plausible does not make it either probable nor true.  Think of it this way:  The dashed arrow in our geodesic figure is the direct then-to-now path.  We can note that by comparing a fossil to its descendants we can always construct the usual simple, direct here's-how adaptation story. But not only is plausibility not the same as truth, but considering what we've tried to say in this series, perhaps such stories are least likely to be the truth!  Perhaps it's very naive to think, much less to assert, that such simplicity is what we should expect in our evolutionary tales.  Indeed, Darwin himself tacitly was led by temptation to make some similar assumptions, basically if implicitly and unintentionally teleological ones, in his books describing barnacle evolution.

What is important to us is the difference between a nuanced view, and the way people act and speak in practice (despite perhaps their being clever enough to include briefly-stated caveats).  One can always defend business-as-usual, the direct then-to-now Just-So story, by asserting that, "Yes, yes, all the details you mention are true, but they don't really matter in my example." But one should ask whether that's sincere rather than a dismissive acknowledgement-in-passing, a lazy excuse for clinging to a comfortable ideology--especially, but not only, when it comes to explaining human variation.  If so, the invocation of 'natural selection' is an exercise in mythology, in ideology.

Ideology assumes, science asks.

Is science that different from other forms of ideology?

We in science are convinced that, whatever our failings, greed, and ignorance, the systematic approach to understanding the actual cosmos we're in is the only one that will do that.  Religion and other mysticism won't.  That is our motto, and it's our cant.

We lambaste religion--those who are just plain wrong--as grasping at every evidential straw it can to support its unsupportable belief-system.  Defenders of the faith will point to every statement of uncertainty, every mistake, and every missing puzzle-piece with sneering dismissal.  They use any lever they can find, even culpably misrepresenting science.  And, what is probably worse, they invoke the patently false logic that if a particular science explanation is wrong that implies that their particular explanation is therefore right. That is, if evolutionists make a mistake, that implies not just that there is much that we don't know about evolution, but that biblical literalism must therefore be right instead.

This is ideology in action.  For the religious (that is, those with the major nominal religious faiths), their belief brings comfort against the fears of life--its injustices, cruelty and its end.  A rewarding life ever after drives much of such belief.  Scientists don't get that comfort, even if we sometimes wax forcedly poetic about the grandeur of life's panoply.  But we feel edified, if not arrogant, that at least we have a finger on the way to Truth.  But are we so different?

What about science?
Science is a form of ideology.  It is tribal, with its secret jargon, its oracles of wisdom, beatified by symbols like Nobel prizes.  We become the experts who know.

But we usually do that based on our own canonical beliefs.  We call it a theory rather than an ideology or faith, but it amounts to more of the same than we like to think.  For example, if our ideology is that natural selection is the cause of all things present today and genetics their immediate cause, then counter-facts are dismissed.  We say that we may not know the explanation for those facts, but that with more work (and, of course, more funding) we will find it.

This defensive ideological behavior has political and economic implications of many sorts.  We often write about the vested interests and the inertia they defend with invocations of their mantras, such as that of genetic determination of our traits like disease and behavior.

Climate change is an excellent example.  Politicians routinely invoke climate change in their rhetoric if it serves their arguments in favor of some policy.  Deniers do the same, invoking science's lack of definitive results as if that falsifies the whole theory. We now routinely hear statements about typhoons as manifestations of climate change and then, "See, I told you!  Now we need a law to xxxxx".   Not all climate scientists themselves do this, but climate-change science has its lobbying for funds and attention, like all sciences do.

Typhoon Usagi, Sept 19, 2013; Wikimedia

 The NYTimes last week had a very cogent editorial that relates to this issue in the context of climate change. The author points out that the data suggest that we in fact may face fewer super-storms with global warming.  He criticizes politicians who blindly invoke climate-change rationales, and notes that even advocates sometimes slip into arguing the big-storm rationale.  Scientists seem reluctant to point out that non-commonsense phenomena may exist and things may not be well-known, but that that does not undermine our ideology.  And the fact that, say, big storms may not be a result of climate change after all, does not suggest that climate change is being imagined.

If both sides of arguments rely on selective citation and selective amnesia, then we as a society are not having a debate about the facts, but instead are in a tribal conflict for material as well as symbolic territory of one kind or another.  That may be how culture works, with science far from being as neutral and objective as we scientists like to fancy. But if science really is about the material rather than cultural/tribal world, we should learn to recognize that, and act accordingly in a more responsible way.

Reducible Complexity: reply to the IDeologs

The gaggle that continue to raid evolutionary biology blogs, patrolling for things that can be naively or intentionally misinterpreted as evidence for their theological views, specifically 'Intelligent Design' (ID), loves to concentrate on complex traits.  They claim such traits cannot have evolved because the independent components won't function on their own and the whole breaks down without them.  They call that Irreducible Complexity:  since you can't take any components of complex traits away and still be viable, such traits could not have arisen gradually by natural selection.  Therefore (the IDeologs say), Intelligent Design is true.  But this is false on several grounds, not all of them even recognized by biologists, who often defend evolution by needlessly agreeing to do it on the IDeologs' turf.

First, it is IDiotic to argue that if an evolutionary claim is false, therefore creationism is true.  That is simply a logical fallacy.  If evolution as biologists see it were being misperceived, that in no way provides evidence for any specific counter explanation.  Only an IDeolog would make such an argument.  It would be just as sensible--that is, as nonsensical--to say that our misperception proved that life came to earth from a parallel universe in a spaceship made of banana peels.  We get things wrong or understand them incompletely in evolutionary biology, which is why it remains an active science, but that is not evidence that evolution didn't happen.

Second, the major IDiotic argument about the need for completeness was one Darwin was aware of and even speculated on in regard to the eye, a favorite irreducible complexity example cited from that time to the present day.  Darwin suggested ways that primitive light sensitivity could have evolved bit by bit.  In what was really striking prescience, his basic speculations have been shown to be about right, because species alive today with 'partial' vision have been found, and genetic components of vision are shared among species with simple as well as complex light reception.  Even saying 'partial' vision is a subtle misnomer, because each species uses what it has: the light sensitivity of a worm or bacterium is not partial for their uses, and to use the adjective suggests the IDiological view that humans are at an intended pinnacle, that our vision is somehow more complete or real than a clam's.  That's an egocentric misperception of evolution.

Complexity is reducible!  It always has been.  It's a central aspect of life.   Right here and now
Thirdly, and perhaps even more important than the first two reasons why the anti-evolutionary IDeology is just plain wrong is that complexity is typically reducible!  The basic IDeologs' premise doesn't have to be refuted because it's not true.

What we know very well is that most traits of organisms are, in fact, the result of multiple interacting factors (gene networks, the  polymeric, cooperative nature of DNA and proteins, signaling and receptors systems, gene regulation, and multipart proteins, etc.).  And, eyes, too.  That is a central fact, and a main point of MT (the blog and the book).  We know from thousands of studies (yes, even the GWAS and other 'omics' studies whose excesses we love to point out) that complex traits really are complex at the gene level.

The same studies also show by their very nature--by the very fact that we are doing so many of them in the first place--that each person will have a different genotype, a different set of variants, involved--even if they have the 'same' trait, like stature, insulin levels, blood pressure, or behavior.  That is why personalized genetic medicine is unlikely to work nearly as well as advertised.  Personalized medicine almost assumes irreducible complexity: enumerate the parts and then any variation in the trait must be due to a broken part that can be identified.  But that isn't how Nature works.

Reducible complexity is true even of vision: Color-blind people are people and they have vision, yet they are missing functional light-sensitive genes (e.g., genes that are used in red or green detection, or overall light sensitivity). Visual acuity varies in all sorts of ways among perfectly viable people.

This is typical of biological traits.  And recent studies have clearly shown that each of us is walking around with numerous completely inactivated genes, whose 'damaged' sequence variants we have inherited--from parents who somehow had managed without them.  One recent paper found that around 165 different genes were completely inactivated (both copies not working) in a typical person.  And there are many others in which one of our two copies is not working normally.  The combination of inactive genes would be different for each person, but the truth is that we do not normally need all the genes in our genome.  That tolerance of variation is exactly the working material that biologists have known is at the basis for evolution from Darwin's own time.

Confirming this in another way, and also very clearly, is that it is routine that a gene experimentally inactivated in a laboratory animal, like a mouse, has serious effects in some strains but little or even no effect in others. A mutation causing a serious disease in humans may do nothing when the same mutation is tested in a mouse, or it may have similarly bad effects only in some strains.  That's one of the notorious problems with mouse models for human traits: mice and people share many traits but we make them differently to various extents. There is more than one way to make the same trait.  Complexity is reducible.

The reducibility of a trait, to put it in terms even an IDeolog could understand, depends on the combination of genes being viable, not on every gene having the most functionally efficient variants.  The importance of component cooperation, a favorite MT word, is in part that various types of cooperation are viable.  That aspect of redundancy and variation is one of the central reasons that complexity could evolve in the first place, exactly in the general fashion argued by Darwin and since.  No biologist suggests that an eye just emerged wholesale from the primeval slime.

But there's more.  Studies of the nature and evolution of genomes shows very clearly that genetic mechanisms arise largely by means that generate redundancy as well as alternative pathways to given outcomes, as cells respond to their local environment.  Gene duplication occasionally leads to individuals with two copies of a gene where in their ancestors there was only one (this happens in species generally, not particular to humans in any way).  That can provide redundancy, so that one of the copies can acquire mutations that alter what the gene does, while the other copy keeps plugging along with the original function.  The new function can be due to mutations in the  protein code of one of the copies, or the DNA sequences that regulate when and where the gene is used.

For these reasons, traits are the result of many different genetic contributions, all varying among individuals, each reaching similarly viable traits with different combinations of that variation.  Those combinations that aren't functional don't survive or reproduce; those that have an advantage may do better.  Over time, the mix of variation, including even the number and set of contributing genes, allow traits to evolve new or altered function.

This is how evolution works, gradually producing new or varied traits.  We understand this because we are aware that complexity is often, or even typically, reducible.  Although it hasn't been put this way before to our knowledge, this is nothing more than a modern understanding of classical evolutionary ideas.

The IDeologs claim that reduced complexity could not have existed in a stepwise, bit by bit, assembly of a new trait from parts that would not work on their own--that evolution couldn't get from there to here. But the deeper truth is that evolution is both there ('incomplete') and here ('complete') today and has been that way at any or even every time in the past.   It isn't just that things have to be assembled over time by different steps, but that they exist at any given time in various steps or stages of 'completeness.'  To a great extent, biological complexity is  inherently reducible at any time as well as over time.

And one more reason:  Of course, we needn't have gone through all of this to convince you that complexity was reducible, after all.  That is because the IDeologs disprove their own irreducibility argument by their very existence:  one can function as a human being even with a brain that allows you intentionally not to use it to recognize the realities of the world--by not using the thinking complexity they were born with!  We would apply this to those who lead the movement, and do or should know better, but not those who they naively lure into adopting its know-nothing IDeology.


Finally, we may make sport of intentionally or willfully self-deluded critics of evolution.  For any of those who are sincere but naive, one can only say that it's too bad, and poignant, too, that science shows the evolutionary nature of life, rather than the comforting existence of a benign divinity who graced the earth with our presence.  How nice if that could be true!  How hard it makes it to understand the injustices and suffering in the world.  But science is about the real world, not the one we might wish for.