Date: Sat, 25 May 1996 04:55:52 -0500
Subject: Re: Pigs could flya - Reply


Paul G:

>I don't see why you say my claim has no intrinsic justification.  People
>were arguing that certain structures of shells had adaptive significance,
>acting on the unspoken assumption that any characteristic is adaptive.
>But it was shown that they are consequence of mathematical, physical, and
>chemical laws combined with mostly invariant properties of all
>shelled organisms, such as growth by accretion.  It seems to me merely an
>example of faith in strong selectionism to explain all the changes
>that result from, for example, a small change in the timing of development
>as adaptations to the organism's environment when each of the changes is
>necessarily correlated with the others. ...

The key word in what I said was intrinsic. I would agree that most of the
time that one can find a simple physico-chemical reason for certain
features, it would probably be the case that they did not arise adaptively.
I see no reason, however, why that should be a hard and fast rule.

>Now, I may not be describing this well, but I think these ideas are
>important.  Some other important ideas at ideas are genetic drift,
>developmental constraints in evolution, and species selection, which show
>the problems in reducing morphological evolution to changes in gene
>frequency due to their selective advantage.

I also think these ideas are very important, and are probably given less
attention than they deserve. Please give us your definition/explanation of
species selection. Lisa has categorically stated that there is no such
thing as group selection of any kind.

>Anyway, what does this have to do with Marxism?

We never bother ourselves with that question here. I'm planning to post
soon on stylistic conventions in Victorian lace-making.


> Anyway,
>I thought of these topics while reading about the Sokal hoax.  There's
>a tendency to think of science as gradually producing objective knowledge,
>but here there are lots of disagreements, sometimes politicized, certainly
>related to university affiliations (Harvard/Yale vs. Oxford/Cambridge),
>lots of confusion too...

To me a sign that the field has not quite reached maturity. Disagreements
can never be completely depoliticized, but certainly physics and chemistry
do much better than evcolutionary biology in this respect. Of course, the
presence of rampant disagreement can also be a sign that a field is on the
verge of major breakthroughs. A too complete agreement means either the
field has answered all the questions it had and there is little more to
learn, or that people aren't thinking hard enough. The motto of the
scientist should always be "There is great disorder under heaven and the
situation is excellent."

Rahul




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