Evolutionary Theories, Macroevolution, Quality of Evolutionary Science

[Caution: very long]

The experts on Evolution who show up here have made some serious errors, including claiming that whatever I write is wrong. It’s not as if I made these facts up; I did not. The problem is that the experts on Evolution who show up here are quite ignorant of the facts which are internal to Evolution, and are in denial. This should (but probably won’t due to cultish denialism) set them straight, since the following is a series of statements made by actual Evolution researchers and mathematicians. The choice of statements is made to include how and whether Evolution is a reputable science; whether macroevolution exists or merely gradualism of normal variations within a genome; whether there is or is not a single Evolutionary theory which is agreed upon by all evolutionary researchers; and the mathematics of plausibility, probability and impossibility as is related to evolution.

Darwinism and The Modern Synthesis

Sedgewick, Darwin’s teacher and mentor: Review in The Spectator, March 29, 1860:
”I must in the first place observe that Darwin’s theory is not inductive, - not based on a series of acknowledged facts pointing to a general conclusion. … I look on the theory as a vast pyramid resting on its apex, and that aapex a mathematical point. … Each series of facts is laced together by a series of assumptions which are mere repetitions of one false principle. You cannot make a good rope out of a string of air-bubbles.”

From James Shapiro; “Evolution: A View From the 21st Century”; FT Press Science; 2011; pg142.

”Conventional views of evolution were formulated before we learned about the structure of DNA and embarked on the molecular analysis of cells, morphogenesis, and the genomic record. They were formulated in the mid-19th century and reformulated in the mid-20th century, when the prevailing attitude was characterized by atomistic, mechanistic, and statistical thinking. The basic elements of the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis included an ad hoc assumption about the random nature of hereditary variation, the diversifying effects of Mendelian segregations according to the rules of quantitative population genetics, the positive action of natural selection, and a belief that geological time was sufficient for the positive action of selection-guided accumulation of small adaptive changes to produce new life-forms.”

Popper on Darwinism:

”Darwin showed that we are all completely free to use the teleological explanations in biology – even those of us who happen to believe that all explanation ought to be causal. For what he showed was, precisely, that in principle any particular theological explanation may, one day, be reduced to, or further explained by, a causal explanation.

Although this was a great achievement, we have to add that the phrase, in principle is a very important restriction. Neither Darwin nor any Darwinian has so far given an actual causal explanation of the adaptive evolution of any single organism or any single organ. All that has been shown – and this has been very much – is that such explanations might exist (that is to say, that they are logically possible).”
Karl R. Popper; “Objective Knowledge”; Oxford; 1979; pg 266.

And From Physicist Ian Hutchinson:

”For Darwin, and evolutionary theorists since, the nature of explanation is taken not to be to demonstrate that phenomena observed are a necessary consequence of the underlying laws or principles – which is the gold standard that Newton set. Instead it is taken to be to set forth a plausible history for how the observed phenomena could have been a consequence of natural selection. This is a profoundly different standard of explanation. … What I am drawing attention to, rather, is that what constitutes Darwinian explanation is at best a pale shadow of the explanatory standards of Newton, and virtually all of physical science. ”
Ian Hutchinson; ”Monopolizing Knowledge”, Natural Law and Natural History; Fias Pubs; 2011; pg 101.

And From Stephen Jay Gould;

“The Structure of Evolutionary Theory”; Belknap Harvard; 2002; pp 520-3:

”In this section I shall try to illustrate one example in extenso – the central and defining case, I believe – of the narrowing suffered by a synthesis that became augmented in power but downgraded in the art and tactic of questioning. I call this increasing confidence, bordering on smugness, the ‘hardening’ of the Synthesis. Thus I contrast the positive restriction of the first phase – the elaboration of a generous and comprehensive theory, and the invalidation and fruitless alternatives – with the negative tightening that occurred over the ontogeny of the second phase. This hardening – still our legacy today – must serve as a starting point for any current attempt to introduce more amplitude into evolutionary theory. The hard version of the Synthesis provides a standard for judging (by contrast) the interest and importance of modern revisions – from neutralism, to punctuated equilibrium, to a common feeling that the theme of developmental constraints not only gives substance to an old truth, but also confutes the hardened versions commitment to Darwin’s (I really should say Fisher’s) billiard ball against Galton’s polyhedron.

My example shall trace the transformation of adaptation from an option to be ascertained (albeit favored and granted a dominant relative frequency) to an a priori assumption of near ubiquity (save in derivative or trivial situations without evolutionary importance) – in other words the burnishing of Galton’s polyhedron to the billiard ball of pure functionalism (allowing no significant pushing back from internal structure upon the direction of evolutionary change. This hardening buttressed (or rather in my view, overly rigidified and scleroticised) one leg on the essential Darwinian tripod of support – the second theme of functionalism against internalist and structuralist forces.”

But hardening pervaded all major themes of Darwinian central logic, and the other two legs of the tripod also experienced their own petrifaction. Pluralistic (and, admittedly, often loose) thinking about levels of selection yielded to an explicit promulgation of organismic selection as the only acceptable mode – as a virtual campaign to root out group selection accompanied by the battle of Williams (1966) against Wynne-Edwards (1962). Thirdly, a willingness to grant some independence, or at least some puzzlement , to patterns in macroevolution … ceded to the hard view that all phenomena measured in millions of years must be explained by smooth extrapolation from palpable causes on generational scales in modern populations – and that the paleontological record can therefore only present a pageant of products generated by known causes, and not provide an independent theory or even a set of additional causal principles.

[…]

I began to check early and late works of other key figures, particularly Dobzhansky and Mayr. All had moved from pluralism to strict adaptationism – and along a remarkably similar path. I began to view this transition as the major ontogenetic event of the synthesis during its second phase. I christened this change as the ‘hardening’ of the Synthesis, and wrote four papers on the subject.”

E. O. Wilson expresses his continuing faith in the Modern (hardened) Synthesis in 2006:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-01-15-faith-edit_x.htm
”Modern biology has arrived at two major principles that are supported by so much interlocking evidence as to rank as virtual laws of nature. The first is that all biological elements and processes are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. The second principle is that all life has evolved by random mutation and natural selection.
Although as many as half of Americans choose not to believe it, evolution, including the origin of species, is an undeniable fact. Furthermore, the evidence supporting the principle of natural selection has improved year by year, and it is accepted with virtual unanimity by the biologists who have put it to the test.”

Ending, of course, with the obligatory Appeal to Authority which always accompanies evolutionary claims. But when you get down to the granular level, things just aren’t that way any more.

Here’s Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins; “Blind Watchmaker”; page 141:

”So cumulative selection can manufacture complexity while single-step selection cannot. But cumulative selection cannot work unless there is some minimal machinery of replication and replicator power, and the only machinery of replication we know seems too complicated to have come into existence by means of anything less than many generations of cumulative selection!

[…]

This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed to simply postulate organized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. Indeed that is what most of this book is about. ”
[Emphasis original]

Postulating organized complexity in order to hypothesize organized complexity is, indeed self-defeating. So is postulating mutations without specifying mutations. As is postulating all phyla as derived from a common ancestor without any common ancestor identified or any mechanism identified or any falsifiable material evidence that it actually happened that way. Logical falsifiers for these, however, do exist. But they are ignored as being applicable to evolution, which is immune to logic since it predicts nothing and everything, yet another fallacy: Fallacy of Special Pleading.

Here’s Stephen Jay Gould:

”Gould; ‘The Structure of Evolutionary theory’; 2002; p33.

“For reasons beyond the mere self-indulgence or egotism, I believe that defenders of such general theories about large realms of nature owe their readers some explanation for the personal bases and ontogeny of their choices – for at this level of abstraction, no theory can claim derivation by simple logical or empirical necessity from observed results, and all commitments, however will defended among alternative possibilities, will also be influenced by authorial preferences of a more contingent nature that must then be narrated in order to be understood. Moreover, in this particular case, the structure of this book includes a set of vigorously idiosyncratic features that, if not acknowledged and justified, might obscure the far more important raison d’etre for its composition: the presentation of a tight brief for substantial reformulation in the structure of evolutionary theory, with all the threads of revision conceptually united into an argument of different thrust and form, but still sufficiently continuous with its original Darwinian base to remain within the same intellectual lineage and logic.”
[Emphasis added]

So the “Modern Synthesis” became dogmatic, and still is dogmatic, to the point of cultism. Its adherents have locked down a concept which is “hardened” yet demonstrably false under many findings of modern biology, yet which the cultists demand must be accepted as Truth by everyone from researchers to the courts to the general public, who are ridiculed and slandered as anti-science religious zealots if they demonstrate skepticism.

Charles Hodge:

Charles Hodge; “But Is It Science?”, Ch 6: “What is Darwinism”; Pennock and Ruse, Eds.; Prometheus, 2009; pg 96.
”The third cause of the alienation between religion and science is the bearing of scientific men towards the men of culture who do not belong to their own class. When we, in such connections, speak of scientific men, we do not mean en of science as such, but those only who avow or manifest their hostility to religion. There is an assumption of superiority, and often a manifestation of contempt. Those who call their logic or their conjectures into question, are stigmatized aas narrow-minded, bigots, old women, Bible worshippers, etc.”

Macro/Microevolution vs. Darwinian Gradualism.
Gradualism a la Darwin demands that there be no difference between microevolution and macroevolution, that only a single “evolution” exists and is sufficient to explain every twist of biological history. Further, the claim is that the micro- / macro- distinction is not even a topic amongst evolutionists.

False and demonstrably so. Grabbing a few books off the shelf:

“Evolution, the Extended Synthesis”; Pigliucci, et. al.; Entire Macroevolution Section VI, containing three chapters on Macroevolution.

“Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology”; Ayala and Arp, Eds.; 2010; PART V: Are Microevolution and Macroevolution Governed By the same Processes?

This section contains the following:

”Microevolution usually refers to the changes in allele frequency within a species that ultimately affect the phenotype of the organisms that make up that species.Macroevolution refers to the changes that are across species, such as when a new genus, phylum, or family emerges (forms of speciation), or when species go extinct. This is why, in the first paper in this part, Michael Deitrich notes that: “Patterns of variation within a species are classic examples of microevolutionary phenomena, while patterns of phyletic change associated with either punctuated equilibribium or mass extinction are recognized as examples of macroevolutionary phenomena.”

With respect to microevolution, common examples of patterns of variation within a species exist all around us, including the emergence of coloring that camouflages several species of animals like birds, butterflies, beetles and moths.

[…]

Conversely, with respect to macroevolution, patterns of phyletic change are most readily available from fossil evidence. Consider the so-called “Cambrian Explosion” of a multitude of new species that probably arose as a result of punctuated equilibrium (morris, 1998).”

And next:

”The Structure of Evolutionary Biology”; Stephen Jay Gould; 2002; pg 894/5:

“Yet however successful we have been in executing this greatPHILOSOPHICAL shift at the level of microevolution – where we understand that no archetype for the sea horse, a sequoia or a human being exists; where an enterprise called “population genetics” stands at the core of an explanatory system; and where we have all been explicitly taught to view change as the conversion of intrapopulational changes into interpopulational differences – we have scarcely begun to execute an equally important reconceptualization for our descriptions and explanations of macroevolution. We still encapsulate the pageant of life’s history largely as a set of STORIES about the trajectories of ABSTRACTED DESIGNSthrough time.

So not only is macroevolution not the same as microevolution, as Dietrich goes on to say:

”Many of the well-known controversies in biology have been ‘relative significance’ disputes” (Beatty, 1997).

[…]

Like many disputes in biology over the last 100 years, the dispute over the existence of distinct processes for microevolution and macroevolution is a matter of relative significance.

Dietrich resolves the “significance issue” thus:

”My claim is that these [macroevolutionary processes] form a small portion of the domain of evolutionary phenomena” that includes evolution, both above and below, the species level. This does not deny their existence or historical impact as evolutionary processes – it merely notes their current relative significance.

So Dietrich recognizes that microevolution uses processes other than Deep Time, as does macroevolution, but that speciation/macroevolutionary events are currently relatively rare, so microevolution without those processes weighs more important purely due to its current frequency. I.e., we can see microevolution so it has relative priority over speciation due to macroevolution.

Dietrich includes a “counterpoint” from Erwin:

”In his contribution, Erwin argues for a “hierarchical ordering of the evolutionary processes through time” that renders it immune to reduction to microevolution, because explaining the origins of these hierarchies requires “a historical theory of evolution, one that encompasses an understanding of how evolution itself changes the evolutionary process.”

In other words, the addition of complexity makes it more complex (difficult) to effect more change to even higher complexity.

Reverting to Dawkins’ claim above, even by postulating the primary existence of high complexity does not, in reality, give cause to expect more complexity by microevolution, especially if microevolution is just Deep Time.

And here is one series of places where modern Biological Science contradicts the Modern Synthesis:

”Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of biology; Laubichler, Manfred; 2002; Ch 11, p203.
Laubicher:
”In addition, the views of the Modern Synthesis on the agents of evolutionary change, especially in its “hardened’ form, were soon challenged by individuals trained in different fields such as morphology, paleontology, comparative embryology, and developmental biology. What were first individual voices of dissent would, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, be organized into a movement that would soon be known as evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo (Hall, 1998). Initially each group objected to specific shortcomings of the Modern Synthesis. Paleontologists argued that the implicit gradualism of evolutionary models does not correspond to observed patterns of the fossil record and proposed a whole range of macroevolutionary principles, some, like heterochrony, having a developmental base. Morphologists complained that the gene-centered perspective of the Modern Synthesis does not explain the structured hierarchy of forms and the nested nature of homologies. They also provided alternative theories of morphological evolution that included developmentl principles, such as burden or developmental constraints , in explaining the conservation of certain characters. Developmental biologists also objected to the gene-centered view, arguing that the mechanisms of morphogenesis need to be an important part of any explanation of form.”

And this:

”Many of these proposals were attempts to fill the void left by what Peter Bowler (1983) has called the eclipse of Darwinism, referring to the dissatisfaction with natural selection as the main explanatory mechanism of organic evolution. The argument in this context was that additional ‘internal’ forces are needed to understand the observed types of phenotypic evolution.”

From Michael Polanyi:

Michael Polanyi; “Personal knowledge”; University of Chicago Press; 1962; pg 168-170:
”The decisive reason why such obviously inadequate formulations of the principles of science were accepted by men of great intellectual distinction lies in a desperate attempt to represent scientific knowledge as impersonal. We have seen that this is achieved by two alternative recipes: (1) by describing science in terms of some secondary feature (simplicity, economy, practicality, fruitfulness, etc.), and (2) by setting up some formal model in terms of probabilities or constant conjunctions. In both cases the scientist would be left uncommitted; in the first because he would say nothing more than a telephone directory, in the second because he would have a machine to speak for him, impersonally. Since the latter solution still leaves over the personal acy of accrediting the machine, this act may be played down on the lines of recipe 1 by describing it as a mere ‘policy’. But to justify a scientific procedure by its practical advantage as a policy, is to conceal the fact that this advantage is expected to accrue only because we hold certain beliefs about the nature of things which make this expectation reasonable.

I shall presently have more to say on the curious logical dilemma in which any formal axiomatization of science (or mathematics) leads itself ad absurdum. At the moment I only wish to explain how the paramount desire for impersonal knowledge could succeed in rendering plausible such flagrantly inadequate formulations of science as given either by recipe 1 or 2. We owe this immense power for self-deception to the operation of the ubiquitous tacit coefficient by which alone we can apply any articulate terms to a subject matter described by them. These powers enable us to evoke our conception of a complex ineffable subject matter with which we are familiar, by even the roughest sketch of any of its specifiable features. A scientist can accept, therefore, the most inadequate and misleading formulation of his own scientific principles without ever realizing what is being said, because he automatically supplements it by his tacit knowledge of what science really is, and thus makes the formulation ring true.

[…]

This is how they made the answers come out right [they stopped when the expectation is reached, and do not consider falsification]; and this is exactly also how philosophers make their descriptions of science, or their formalized procedures of scientific inference, come out right.

They never use them to decide any open scientific problem, whether past or present, but apply them to scientific generalizations which they regard as indubitably established. This belief eliminates all the ambiguities which the formal procedures of constant conjunction – or of the progressive confirmation of hypotheses according to their increasing probability – leave open, and thus makes either process invariably give the right result…. For a belief which can be touched by no shadow of doubt remains unaffected by such understatements. So these formulae can safely be uttered to appease a strictly empiricist conscience. It is only when we are confronted with the anxious dilemma of a live scientific issue, that the ambiguity of the formal processes and of the various attenuated criteria of scientific truth become apparent and leaves us without effective guidance.”

Excerpts from an interview with Marcel-Paul Schützenberger: “The Miracles of Darwinism”:
http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od172/schutz172.htm

Q: What is your definition of Darwinism?
S: The most current, of course, a position generically embodied, for example, by Richard Dawkins. The essential idea is well-known. Evolution, Darwinists argue, is explained by the double action of chance mutations and natural selection. The general doctrine embodies two mutually contradictory schools -- gradualists, on the one hand, saltationists, on the other. Gradualists insist that evolution proceeds by means of small successive changes; saltationists that it proceeds by jumps. Richard Dawkins has come to champion radical gradualism; Stephen Jay Gould, a no less radical version of saltationism.

[…]

Q: Would you argue that the genome does not contain the requisite information for explaining organisms?
S:Not according to the understanding of the genome we now possess. The biological properties invoked by biologists are in this respect quite insufficient; while biologists may understand that a gene triggers the production of a particular protein, that knowledge -- that kind of knowledge -- does not allow them to comprehend how one or two thousand genes suffice to direct the course of embryonic development.

[…]

Q: You assert that, in fact, Darwinism doesn't explain much.
S: It seems to me that the union of chance mutation and selection has a certain descriptive value; in no case does the description count as an explanation. Darwinism relates ecological data to the relative abundance of species and environments. In any case, the descriptive value of Darwinian models is pretty limited. Besides, as saltationists have indicated, the gradualist thesis seems completely demented in light of the growth of paleontological knowledge. The miracles of saltationism, on the other hand, cannot discharge the mystery I have described.

[…]

Q: Let's return to natural selection. Isn't it the case that despite everything the idea has a certain explanatory value?
S: No one could possibly deny the general thesis that stability is a necessary condition for existence -- the real content of the doctrine of natural selection. The outstanding application of this general principle is Berthollet's laws in elementary chemistry. In a desert, the species that die rapidly are those that require water the most; yet that does not explain the appearance among the survivors of those structures whose particular features permits them to resist aridity. The thesis of natural selection is not very powerful. Except for certain artificial cases, we are yet unable to predict whether this or that species or this or that variety will be favored or not as the result of changes in the environment. What we can do is establish after the fact the effects of natural selection -- to show, for, example that certain birds are disposed to eat this species of snails less often than other species, perhaps because their shell is not as visible. That's ecology: very interesting. To put it another way, natural selection is a weak instrument of proof because the phenomena subsumed by natural selection are obvious and yet they establish nothing from the point of view of the theory.

Q: Isn't the significant explanatory feature of Darwinian theory the connection established between chance mutations and natural selection?
S:With the discovery of coding, we have come to understand that a gene is like a word composed in the DNA alphabet; such words form the genomic text. It is that word that tells the cell to make this or that protein. Either a given protein is structural, or a protein itself works in combination with other signals given by the genome to fabricate yet another protein. All the experimental results we know fall within this scheme. The following scenario then becomes standard. A gene undergoes a mutation, one that may facilitate the reproduction of those individuals carrying it; over time, and with respect to a specific environment, mutants come to be statistically favored, replacing individuals lacking the requisite mutation. Evolution could not be an accumulation of such typographical errors. Population geneticists can study the speed with which a favorable mutation propagates itself under these circumstances. They do this with a lot of skill, but these are academic exercises if only because none of the parameters that they use can be empirically determined. In addition, there are the obstacles I have already mentioned. We know the number of genes in an organism. There are about one hundred thousand for a higher vertebrate. This we know fairly well. But this seems grossly insufficient to explain the incredible quantity of information needed to accomplish evolution within a given line of species.

Q: A concrete example?
S: Darwinists say that horses, which were once mammals as large as rabbits, increased their size to escape more quickly from predators. Within the gradualist model, one might isolate a specific trait -- increase in body size -- and consider it to be the result of a series of typographic changes. The explanatory effect achieved is rhetorical, imposed entirely by trick of insisting that what counts for a herbivore is the speed of its flight when faced by a predator. Now this may even be partially true, but there are no biological grounds that permit us to determine that this is in fact the decisive consideration. After all, increase in body size may well have a negative effect. Darwinists seem to me to have preserved a mechanic vision of evolution, one that prompts them to observe merely a linear succession of causes and effects. The idea that causes may interact with one another is now standard in mathematical physics; it is a point that has had difficulty in penetrating the carapace of biological thought. In fact, within the quasi-totality of observable phenomena, local changes interact in a dramatic fashion; after all, there is hardly an issue of La Recherche that does not contain an allusion to the Butterfly Effect. Information theory is precisely the domain that sharpens our intuitions about these phenomena. A typographical change in a computer program does not change it just a little. It wipes the program out, purely and simply. It is the same with a telephone number. If I intend to call a correspondent by telephone, it doesn't much matter if I am fooled by one, two, three or eight figures in his number.

Q: You accept the idea that biological mutations genuinely have the character of typographical errors?
S: Yes, in the sense that one base is a template for another, one codon for another, but at the level of biochemical activity, one is no longer able properly to speak of typography. There is an entire grammar for the formation of proteins in three dimensions, one that we understand poorly. We do not have at our disposal physical or chemical rules permitting us to construct a mapping from typographical mutations or modifications to biologically effective structures. To return to the example of the eye: a few thousand genes are needed for its fabrication, but each in isolation signifies nothing. What is significant is the combination of their interactions. These cascading interactions, with their feedback loops, express an organization whose complexity we do not know how to analyze (See Figure 1). It is possible we may be able to do so in the future, but there is no doubt that we are unable to do so now. Gehring has recently discovered a segment of DNA which is both involved in the development of the vertebrate eye and which can induce the development of an eye in the wing of a butterfly. His work comprises a demonstration of something utterly astonishing, but not an explanation.

Q: Even when they dissent from Darwin, the saltationists are more moderate: they don't pretend to hold the key that would permit them to explain evolution...
S: Before we discuss the saltationists, however, I must say a word about the Japanese biologist Mooto Kimura. He has shown that the majority of mutations are neutral, without any selective effect. For Darwinians upholding the central Darwinian thesis, this is embarrassing... The saltationist view, revived by Stephen Jay Gould, in the end represents an idea due to Richard Goldschmidt. In 1940 or so, he postulated the existence of very intense mutations, no doubt involving hundreds of genes, and taking place rapidly, in less than one thousand generations, thus below the threshold of resolution of paleontology. Curiously enough, Gould does not seem concerned to preserve the union of chance mutations and selection. The saltationists run afoul of two types of criticism. On the one hand, the functionality of their supposed macromutations is inexplicable within the framework of molecular biology. On the other hand, Gould ignores in silence the great trends in biology, such as the increasing complexity of the nervous system. He imagines that the success of new, more sophisticated species, such as the mammals, is a contingent phenomenon. He is not in a position to offer an account of the essential movement of evolution, or at the least, an account of its main trajectories. The saltationists are thus reduced to invoking two types of miracles: macromutations, and the great trajectories of evolution.

Q: In what sense are you employing the word 'miracle'?
S:A miracle is an event that should appear impossible to a Darwinian in view of its ultra-cosmological improbability within the framework of his own theory. Now speaking of macromutations, let me observe that to generate a proper elephant, it will not suffice suddenly to endow it with a full-grown trunk. As the trunk is being organized, a different but complementary system -- the cerebellum -- must be modified in order to establish a place for the ensemble of wiring that the elephant will require to use his trunk. These macromutations must be coordinated by a system of genes in embryogenesis. If one considers the history of evolution, we must postulate thousands of miracles; miracles, in fact, without end. No more than the gradualists, the saltationists are unable to provide an account of those miracles. The second category of miracles are directional, offering instruction to the great evolutionary progressions and trends -- the elaboration of the nervous system, of course, but the internalization of the reproductive process as well, and the appearance of bone, the emergence of ears, the enrichment of various functional relationships, and so on. Each is a series of miracles, whose accumulation has the effect of increasing the complexity and efficiency of various organisms. From this point of view, the notion of bricolage [tinkering], introduced by Francois Jacob, involves a fine turn of phrase, but one concealing an utter absence of explanation.

UPDATE:
Now, from the famed Wistar Conference of 1966:

"[A]n opposite way to look at the genotype is as a generative algorithm and not as a blue-print; a sort of carefully spelled out and foolproof recipe for producing a living organism of the right kind if the environment in which it develops is a proper one. Assuming this to be so, the algorithm must be written in some abstract language. Molecular biology may well have provided us with the alphabet of this language, but it is a long step from the alphabet to understanding a language. Nevertheless a language has to have rules, and these are the strongest constraints on the set of possible messages. No currently existing formal language can tolerate random changes in the symbol sequences which express its sentences. Meaning is almost invariably destroyed. Any changes must be syntactically lawful ones. I would conjecture that what one might call "genetic grammaticality" has a deterministic explanation and does not owe its stability to selection pressure acting on random variation."

(Murray Eden, "Inadequacies as a Scientific Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 11)


"[I]t seems to require many thousands, perhaps millions, of successive mutations to produce even the easiest complexity we see in life now. It appears, naively at least, that no matter how large the probability of a single mutation is, should it be even as great as one-half, you would get this probability raised to a millionth power, which is so very close to zero that the chances of such a chain seem to be practically non-existent."

(Stanislaw M. Ulam, "How to Formulate Mathematically Problems of Rate of Evolution," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 21)


"We do not know any general principle which would explain how to match blueprints viewed as typographic objects and the things they are supposed to control. The only example we have of such a situation (apart from the evolution of life itself) is the attempt to build self-adapting programs by workers in the field of artificial intelligence. Their experience is quite conclusive to most of the observers: without some built-in matching, nothing interesting can occur. Thus, to conclude, we believe that there is a considerable gap in the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, and we believe this gap to be of such a nature that it cannot be bridged within the current conception of biology."

(Marcel Schutzenberger, "Algorithms and Neo-Darwinian Theory," in Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution (Wistar Institute Press, 1966, No. 5), pg. 75)