From: "Richard" (rcarlson@olympus.net)
Date: July 17, 2005 11:21:15 PM PDT
To: rjon@vzavenue.net
Subject: Re: Questioning Neo-Darwinism

Don,

I dont know if this helps, but although the author is far from one who would recognize teleological impetus behind evolution and was a firm agnostic himself and there maybe other matters which according to an Aurobindian perspective one may take issue with, regarding the authors own theory, but I know of no other single encapsulated argument that demolishes so many of the neo- (ultra) Darwinians assuptions then the classic criticism of Dan Dennett's book "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Stephan J Gould in which he locates 3 fallacies in the classic neo-Darwinist explanation of everything - including evolutionary psychology - which are based on the idea of the supposed Darwinian algorithm.

I will provide the link to the article along with a synopsis from the article of the three main arguments Gould develops.

rc
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http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Gould.html#back1

>5) Daniel Dennett devotes the longest chapter in Darwin's Dangerous Idea to an excoriating caricature of my ideas, all in order to bolster his defense of Darwinian fundamentalism. If an argued case can be discerned at all amid the slurs and sneers, it would have to be described as an effort to claim that I have, thanks to some literary skill, tried to raise a few piddling, insignificant, and basically conventional ideas to "revolutionary" status, challenging what he takes to be the true Darwinian scripture. Dennett claims that I have promulgated three "false alarms" as supposed revolutions against the version of Darwinism that he and his fellow defenders of evolutionary orthodoxy continue to espouse.

6) Dennett first attacks my view that punctuated equilibrium is the dominant pattern of evolutionary change in the history of living organisms. This theory, formulated by Niles Eldredge and me in 1972, proposes that the two most general observations made by palentologists form a genuine and primary pattern of evolution, and do not arise as artifacts of an imperfect fossil record. The first observation notes that most new species originate in a geological "moment." The second holds that species generally do not change in any substantial or directional way during their geological lifetimes—usually a long period averaging five to ten million years for fossil invertebrate species. Punctuated equilibrium does not challenge accepted genetic ideas about the rates at which species emerge (for the geological "moment" of a single rock layer may represent many thousand years of accumulation). But the theory does contravene conventional Darwinian expectations for gradual change over geological periods, and does suggest a substantial revision of standard views about the causes of long-term evolutionary trends. For such trends must now be explained by the higher rates at which some species branch off from others, and the greater durations of some stable species as distinguished from others, and not as the slow and continuous transformation of single populations.

7) In his second attack, Dennett denigrates the importance of nonadaptive side consequences ("spandrels" in my terminology) as sources for later and fruitful reuse. In principle, spandrels define the major category of important evolutionary features that do not arise as adaptations. Since organisms are complex and highly integrated entities, any adaptive change must automatically "throw off" a series of structural byproducts—like the mold marks on an old bottle or, in the case of an architectural spandrel itself, the triangular space "left over" between a rounded arch and the rectangular frame of wall and ceiling. Such byproducts may later be co-opted for useful purposes, but they didn't arise as adaptations. Reading and writing are now highly adaptive for humans, but the mental machinery for these crucial capacities must have originated as spandrels that were co- opted later, for the brain reached its current size and conformation tens of thousands of years before any human invented reading or writing.

8) Third, and finally, Dennett denies theoretical importance to the roles of contingency and chance in the history of life, a history that has few predictable particulars and no inherent directionality, especially given the persistence of bacteria as the most common and dominant form of life on Earth ever since their origin as the first fossilized creatures some 3.5 billion years ago.2 Bacteria are biochemically more diverse, and live in a wider range of environments (including near-boiling waters, and pore spaces in rocks up to two miles beneath the earth's surface), than all other living things combined. The number of E. coli cells in the gut of each human being exceeds the total number of human beings that have ever lived. Moreover, if recent reports of Martian fossil bacteria are true, then bacterial domination may be interplanetary or universal, and not merely earthly."