Most books that teach the basics of evolutionary biology are fairly genteel in their treatment of creationism—they don’t endorse it, of course, but they either ignore it, or more frequently now, they segregate off a chapter to deal with the major claims. There are also whole books dedicated to combating creationist myths, of course, but they’re not usually the kind of book you pick up to get a tutorial in basic biology. In my hands I have an example of a book that does both, using the errors of creationism heavily to help explain and contrast the principles of evolutionary biology—it’s fascinating. This is what we should do if we were to “teach the controversy” in the classroom; it’s not what the other side wants, because teaching it honestly would mean the creationists would be the comic relief and endless whipping boy of the course, as they should be.
The book is The Science of Evolution and the Myth of Creationism(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) by Ardea Skybreak. It’s very good, but right up front I’ll mention its flaw, and one reason few scientists write books from this perspective: the frequent comparisons with creationism mean we’re also hoping the book will someday be hopelessly obsolete, if ever we can get those myths treated like the jokes they are. Scientists who are not engaged in the culture war are going to regard the book rather quizzically, since it does raise up nonsensical issues frequently; it really requires a peculiarly modern American context to make it all work. It’s one of those books that, the more it is read, the less relevant its approach would become.
But it does work in that context. Skybreak covers all the key concepts, but does so in a passionate, refreshingly aggressive way. She doesn’t hesitate to call a stupid idea stupid, and back up the charge with the evidence. If your interest in evolution isn’t simply academic, this is an excellent book to simultaneously inform and instruct, and supply the reasoning to deal with creationist foolishness. It’s also refreshing to see a book that isn’t timid about pointing out that fundamentalist religion is the source of the problem, and that isn’t afraid of offending creationists. It makes for an invigorating read, and I recommend it highly.
It’s not too late to order it for Christmas! It’s perfect for that person who wants to learn some solid biology, but also wants to be an activist for good science.
I do feel obligated to mention one thing that didn’t disturb me at all, but some readers might be concerned about. The book began as a series of articles in The Revolutionary Worker. There are a few hints of sympathy for socialist ideals in a few of the sidebars and endnotes, a sympathy I share (perhaps with significant reservations not held by the author), but otherwise, this is not an ideological work. Read it for the good science and the healthy slams against creationism without reservations about the source.
PZ,
You may want to post some of this at Amazon. They don’t have any reviews yet.
MikeG
I’ve got it and have read part of it. She does indeed call a spade a spade. :)
Are you trying to seduce me, Mr. Eggcream?
Because it’s working.
Hey Rupert. You see those windmills over there? They aren’t really windmills — they’re giants. If you act now, you might be able to stop them. Godspeed, brave knight!
Besides, Ardea Skybreak is such a terrific name! She sounds like a heroine from a sci-fi novel.
…or a heron at dawn.
I don’t see her reliance on Marxism as any problem.
As Marx wrote to Lasalle, “Darwins work provides the basis in natural science for by social views” Marx, 1862, in Collected Writings, edit. McClellan, Oxford University Press.
Your alertness is admired. Very good catch Sir. Yes, Andrea Skybreak is clearly a purveyor of those Unwholesome Ideals, Communism, and Free Speech. But her true purpose is Older, and Darker. Much Darker than anyone expects, in fact. It lies Deep Beneath the Great Southern Ocean, Dreaming in a city whose architecture is a foul offence to God and Geometry. It does not live, yet it deathless lies – reaching out with its mind, moulding the Vulnerable Dreams of Tools like Andrea Skybreak, which it uses to promote Insane Ideals, like Free Speech, Unions, Worker’s Rights, and worst of all, Evilution.
Rofl ftaghn!
ROTFL fthagn!
ROTFL fthagn!
I don’t know wether it is legal copy, but take a look at
http://www.mukto-mona.com/science/skybreak/scienceofevolution.pdf
or also
http://rwor.org/evolution/index.htm
for an on-line version
Besides, Ardea Skybreak is such a terrific name! She sounds like a heroine from a sci-fi novel.
Actually, she sounds like an author whose books would be filled with means for “invoking the circle” or “calling teh Goddess within”.
Just as silly as evangelism, but not quite as annoyingly self-righteous.
Has anyone read Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith?
I’d try calling the Goddess within but, between my rotten luck and the vast cold vacuum in my soul, I’d probably just wind up conjuring Loviator or Sitala Mata or something. And that wouldn’t be good for anyone.
Has anyone read Philip Kitcher’s Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith?
I haven’t read anything by Kitcher since that horrid little volume he wrote in the mid 80’s that involved philosophical arguments in favor of group selection.
Has he improved since then?
I tried to call the Goddess within, but just my luck, she wasn’t Isis but Kali Ma instead. Lots of hearts got pulled out of chests and bodies thrown into lava before Indiana Jones straightened that mess out.
Well, good for him if he favors group selection! I am tired of knee-jerk rejectors of the idea – as closed minded as any creationist.
I wouldn’t presume to debate a biologist on something I know very little about, but I’d tend to think that social behavior would be determined by something like group selection. Chimps, for example, have a social structure that rewards altruistic behavior. How did that come to arise? I don’t think altruism is an effective strategy if it isn’t being mutually practiced by everyone and, for an individual in those kinds of circumstances, it would actually be antiselective, I’d think. At the very least, it isn’t particularly useful by itself. The members of a society should act more or less in concert in order to maximize their society’s effectiveness. A society that rewards cooperative social behavior would, as a society, have a distinct advantage over one that doesn’t.
I can’t call the goddess within until I advance two levels and slay 12 gnolls to earn the Ring of Summoning.
Chimps, for example, have a social structure that rewards altruistic behavior. How did that come to arise? I don’t think altruism is an effective strategy if it isn’t being mutually practiced by everyone and, for an individual in those kinds of circumstances, it would actually be antiselective, I’d think.
that’s an intelligent question.
the evolution of altruistic behavior was a rather large puzzle for the fisherian model of selection…
until WD Hamilton came along.
have you ever heard of “inclusive fitness”?
funny, I’ve been recommending this book A LOT lately, but one more time couldn’t hurt:
http://www.amazon.com/Narrow-Roads-Gene-Land-Collected/dp/0716745305
I’m sure wiki has a brief synopis of altruism and inclusive fitness as well.
ahh, yes, of course:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin_selection
Well, good for him if he favors group selection! I am tired of knee-jerk rejectors of the idea – as closed minded as any creationist.
you DO understand why models of group selection don’t apply in 99.999% of observed circumstances, though, yes?
hence your “knee-jerk” reaction isn’t really knee-jerk at all.
in fact, quite the opposite is true, it was the idea of groups or species being the level that selection acts on that was the “intuitive” position for a large part of history.
attitudes really only started to change after Fisher’s papers in the 30’s, and group selection as a major level for selection were mostly put to rest after Hamilton in the 60’s.
I have not. But I will check that book out of the library once I’ve finished my obligations for this semester, or they finish me. Whichever.
Thanks!
The best explanation of multi-level selection is Chapter 3 in Robert Brandon’s Adaptation and Environment.
The best explanation of group selection alone, with some easy math you need to follow, is the first half of Sober and Wilson’s Unto Other.
The second half of the book specifically addresses the problem of altruism (and is not as strong as the first theoretical half). The problem of altruism is always trotted out when discussing group selection because it is supposed to be the toughest case – the individual and group selection act 180 degrees against each other.
However, both in theory and in studies done so far, one can safely ignore the problem of altruism because there are so many other traits than can evolve by group selection much more easily because the vectors of group and individual selecton are not exactly opposed to each other, i.e., the angle between them is less than 180 degrees (and even as small as zero in some cases – the two forces working in concert).
Do you have some examples, or some publications where I could find some?
So, if individual selection takes the population to Point A on the adaptive landscape, and group selection takes the population to Point B on the adaptive landscape (and other levels to other points), then the Point Z, where the population will really end up in the end, can be calculated by summation of vectors. The exact spot where the Point Z will be depends on the length of vectors (the strength of selection) and on the angle between them.
There was a whole issue of American Naturalist devoted to this – I believe it was in 1990 but I am not sure. My favourites are studies on group selection (in the lab) for egg-productivity in chickens, published in the journal Poultry Science. A search on ISI Web of Science (if you have the access) or on Google Scholar can give you more recent papers.
Try
Try this
you can’t just flip out a google search on “group selection” and expect anyone is going to grasp which case examples you are addressing.
there have been dozens of multi-level selection models proposed (mostly by philosophers of biology, as you surely know), but to date, they have not been found to be applicable in the VAST majority of in-situ cases.
which is why i used the 99.999% figure, as that pretty much tracks the percent of cases where selection at the level of the individual explains the observations in the most parsimonius fashion, and does just as well in prediction.
It would be interesting to discuss specific case examples in detail, however, like the poultry one you mention.
…so long as you keep occam at your side.
mutli-level selection models keep cropping up from time to time (it’s not new), and keep dying just as rapidly as they end up not really adding anything in the empirical study of evolution.
but hey, just to show I’m not a “knee-jerk” behavioral ecologist, I’m certainly open to the idea that multi-level selection models could have better explanatory and predictive power overall….
you just have to prove it.
oh, and just in case someone was wondering…
Robert Brandon is a philosopher of biology, not a biologist, which when I ever bother to track down the latest developments in this area, I always seem to end up at. Even Gould considered the vast bulk of his group-type models mostly of a philosophical nature.
take, for example, this little paper I ran across a while back:
http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/okasha.html
so, discussing recent empirical studies examining the efficacy of multi-level models in-situ would be more than welcome to me personally, as it usually never seems to get much beyond the conceptual philosophies and models.
indeed, as the author of the article i linked to just above notes:
“…and conceptual issues are generally much harder to resolve definitively than empirical issues, where they admit of definitive resolution at all.”
based on discussion of late, It would be an interesting idea to start a thread entirely devoted to exploring any empirical developments in this area in the last 10 years or so.
not PZ’s cup o tea, I’d imagine, but it wouldn’t be hard to set up a thread somewhere else.
I’d normally suggest the ATBC area from PT, but their server is getting so abysmal of late, it’s barely worth posting there.
maybe just a google thread?
Creationists (ID is just its mask) want to examine the evidence for evolution (of which tons and tons exist). Do they want the same for creationism/ID? I doubt it. Why? because their isn’t any. In ID if you come across something you can’t explain you answer it by saying “oh well it was god”. What a stupid, cowardly and incredibly arrogant idea.
AS I SAY ON BLOG AND TO PPL ALL THE TIME. JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN’T UNDERSTAND SOMETHING DOESN’T MEAN IT WAS GOD. JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN’T UNDESTAND SOMETHING DOESN’T MEAN OTHERS CAN’T OR WON’T IN THE FUTURE.
p.s. I deny the holy spirit.
Could someone more knowledgable, than a curious lay person such as myself, comment on the work of Samuel Bowles, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, with regards to his views on the evolution of Altruism.
teaching it honestly would mean the creationists would be the comic relief and endless whipping boy of the course, as they should be.
Well hopefully it would mean they would get themselves some more sophisticated arguments instead of the dross that works for them currently.
As for the communism I can’t associate with communist groups because it’s against American law but I would strongly encourage anyone in America who isn’t prevented from doing so (ie American persons who were born American) to check them out, if only to piss off the people who try to controll the political views of the people by setting up such laws. It’s outrageous for a so-called democracy to ban voluntary political association.
Glad to see that the Skybreak gets your recommendation, PZ. I picked up a copy a few months ago, but I haven’t had the chance to sit down with it. I’ll have to move it up my reading list, now.
Some points on group selection for the evolution of altruisms:
* the fundamental challenge to invoking group selection for altruism is captured in Gary Larson’s cartoon of a bunch of lemmings suicidally running off the cliff … except that one is wearing a life-jacket. Even if the suicidal behavior evolved to regulate population (a kind of altruism), as was once seriously thought, it’s unable to resist the deviant individuals with (heritable) life-preserver traits. It’s these individuals whose lineages will (re)populate the community. A more biological example summarizes Wynne-Edward‘s ecology tome from 1962: why do young bucks scrape their antlers on shrubs in the arctic? Perhaps it’s a population-regulation SIGNAL – a communication which conveys population density, and faciliatates the altruistic regulation of population by restraining breeding in bucks who can’s find an un-scraped shrub of their own? Well no – these restrainers would be handily out-bred by those who showed no restraint, no altruism. So even if there’s a population excess which leads to a crash, it’s most probable the survivors would be unrestrained breeders.
Ichthyic’s point that the burden of proof is on the group selectionists is fundamental, and the mass of data gathered in reaction to Wynne-Edwards has overwhelmingly favored selection acting at the individual level. The rear-guard action by researchers such as D. S. Wilson is a minor thread for general biology. For humans specifically (as with any other species considered in isolation), arguments take a different logic and aren’t evolutionary in the same sense. Cultural “evolution” was a topic for Darwin’s own speculations in the DESCENT… and a modern body of work is described conveniently here. I’m not specifically familiar with Bowles’ economics work, described recently by New Scientist
* group selection isn’t kind, despite hopes of its proponents. It merely shifts the action from individual competition to group competitions. A case could be made that when groups fight, there’s even fewer ritualized behaviors which serve to limit lethality than were found (by “classical ethologists”) in individual combats. This certainly seems true in humans.
since it does seem as though there is sufficient interest, would those interested wish me to make a thread to discuss recent literature regarding empirical analysis of multi-level selection models?
I haven’t done a thorough scouring of the literature on this subject in a few years now, I’d love to go over anything recent that’s been published.
just say aye or nay and I can post a thread about it over on ATBC, or wherever there’s a preference.
In fact, I’m currently in the process of putting together a new course syllabus regarding evolutionary theory, the core focus being the predictions that have been made from Darwin to present, and analyzing how those predicitions have played out.
the group/multi-level models play a significant part in that, so looking exactly at how the predictions from those models have played out would be usefull to all, I think.
Hrafn,
You should peruse at least this thread on the topic of Darwin, Marx and Bad Scholarship
Summary: Marx borrowed only the notion of ‘change’ from Darwin’s theory and applied it to society in a way that wasn’t at all evolutionary. And Marx then accused Darwin’s evolution of being derivative from the competitive capitalism of English society … so go figure. (I’d add that Marx’s derivative “social reflex” analysis of Darwin here omits Darwin’s entirely novel theory of sexual selection, for which English society then offered very little support.)
yes, Marx understood Darwin about as well as Nietsche did.
not surprising, really, given that the vast majority of people today also misunderstand him and the theory of evolution.
…and that includes a lot of modern philosophers.
so…
no actual interest in pursuing a discussion of papers testing multi-level selection models?
going once…
Gone away…
Oops, didn’t get back to this. But ‘social reflex’ is about my limit for board discussions currently. Actually discussing papers is beyond my reliable resources, however interesting..
It is the incompetence of the science community that has allowed this nonsense to continue for so long. For discussion of how to stop ID see
randomabsurdities.wordpress.com
and chapter
Does the word God exist?
in the book
Our Almost Impossible Universe:
Why the laws of nature make the existence of humans
extraordinarily unlikely
R. Mirman