This morning, I was surprised by a comment on this YouTube video, in which I pointed out the fallacies of a creationist, Rob Carter. That video starts with me summarizing my relevant background as a developmental biologist. This commenter then makes this scurrilous accusation!
Rob Carter is correct, and PZ Myers, as an old-fashioned population geneticist, is wrong. Don’t you understand that environmental conditions and factors affect the organisms’ epigenomes? DNA is just a passive information data repository and its reading is completely controlled and regulated by epigenetic mechanisms and factors.
First of all, did this guy even listen to the video before he rushed in with his knee-jerk defense of Rob Carter?
Secondly, I am not a population geneticist. I am a professor at a small liberal arts college, which means I have to be a jack-of-all-trades within my discipline — I can teach population genetics at the undergraduate level, but I would never claim to be a pop gen guy. That’s the domain of people like Dan Stern Cardinale and Zach Hancock on YouTube, and they could tie me in knots with their expertise. They definitely shred Rob Carter, who doesn’t even understand it as well as I do.
I am primarily a developmental biologist. That’s my focus and my interest, although in recent years I’ve been expanding that focus into eco-evo-devo…I’ve taught courses in that. My research is all about looking at the development of local spiders, to identify what factors in each species development shapes their adaptation to a particular niche, and how we can have so many different species of spiders co-existing in my backyard. To claim that I don’t understand the multiple factors that affect development is ludicrous. Rob Carter is just droning out buzzwords with little comprehension, and to someone who actually knows the subject he is discussing, he comes off as a fool.
Just a reminder: 15 years ago, in Dublin, Ireland, I was confronted by a group of Muslim apologists who tried to bamboozle me with claims about Mohammed’s revelations about development. They asked (at the 7 minute mark), Are you an embryologist?
, to which I said “Yes,” and set them aback a bit.
I’ve always said I am a developmental biologist. My commenter was trying to make a peculiar ad hominem, suggesting that I was wrong because I’m only an old-fashioned population geneticist
, and then rattling off a bunch of concepts that are actually the meat-and-potatoes of developmental biology.
Also, that DNA is just a passive information data repository
nonsense is a strategem used by creationists to deny the significance of changes to the genome in evolution.
Big snooze. For epigenetic control, you need a gene which can be regulated by genetic modification such as methylation. You need enzymes to do the modification. You need environmental sensors that affect the activity of the modification enzymes. How do you get all this stuff? You inherit them in a manner completely consistent with Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics.
It’s been a while since I took a cursory glance, but I thought at best epigenetic stamping made things a little fuzzy for maybe a generation or so. And maybe not in a revolutionary way that would be responsible for evolutionary novelties.
I was always more into the phenotypic fuzziness, like how plasticity might give a little wiggle room that could, if successful, later be shored up by more genetic rigidity in the generational aftermath, something akin to genetic assimilation or the Baldwin effect. I was influenced a bit by arch-Darwinist Dan Dennett on this potential tweaking.
Jean Piaget got a bit carried away with what the discovery of reverse transcription entailed, but I vaguely recall his having a take on the Baldwin effect where learned behaviors carried over between generations could change the selective regime and have longer term generation consequences as allelic frequency shifts adjust to the new behavior pattern. Not a one organism wills toward a goal and magically tweaks its own germ plasm sort of phenomenon. More a population learns to exploit a new thing and finds success due to having some capacity for morphological adjustment and members of the population who just happen to be more genetically geared that way will eventually be more successful and the tendency becomes more hardwired. But this means an eventual loss of flexibility and overcommitment.
Also my understanding of niche construction is that a population somehow modifying their environment might set a new selective regime that gradually results in evolutionarily salient adaptation toward that environmental modification.
Yeah, it’s all part of the modern perspective that the genome is a dynamic, responsive complex, not at all a . Nothing static about it.
Creationists are one thing, but the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis folks who actually are looking at interesting stuff, like niche construction, are quite another problem. They get a little overcome by their own rhetoric. They are smarter than the creationist crowd, but tend to itch for a fight with the neo-Darwinist bogeys. That can be fun actually and maybe serve an important purpose, but their rhetoric gets co-opted and adapted by creationists into poorly comprehended weaponry. Similar things happened to Gould I guess where his views got mangled and retooled as creationist propaganda.
Needz moar “Australian Trapdoor Spiders for Creationists”.
PZ, can you provide?
I mean, when someone asks you if you’re an embryologist, you say yes.
So this idiot creationist is more than stupid enough* to endorse Lamarckism and Lysenkoism. What a shock. It has never read a biology textbook, to ensure its complete cluelessness. Note that it is also possible that the creationist comment was from an LLM AI, since it is also that level of wrongness about technical content.
*They are all that stupid.
Didn’t Murray Gell-Mann sign a letter from Nobel prize winners defending Natural Selection from creationist attacks, only to get a letter from one them telling him that he didn’t understand Physics?
Regarding that Muslim apologist guy, he did debated with Lawrence Krauss years later.
So at least, there’s some common ground.
Well, I used to be an embryo. Close enough.
Of the thoughtless errors already noted, I would add:
[1] Epigenetics is not an alternative theory to population genetics. Both are alive and well in biology.
[2] DNA reading is not “completely controlled” by epigenetics.
[3] The “DNA is just a passive information repository” error has already been pointed out, but I find it particularly risible as creationists argue that DNA is a rich, complex system with 100% functionality and zero “junk”, and thus too complicated to have evolved naturally. So which is it? Incredibly simple or irreducibly complex? Apparently, both at once.
I knew who wrote that comment before I looked at the name: Tomi Aalto.
He trolls comment sections everywhere with his idea that evolution is invalid because genetic sequences do not matter and that literally everything is epigenetics. He’s been doing it for at least 15 years and he’s an absolute joke.
He even had an internet law named after him.
Aalto’s Law: The law stating that any time a Young Earth Creationist (YEC) cites a legitimate, peer reviewed scientific publication in support of a claim, it is most probable that the publication actually contradicts that claim.
As the late Richard Feynman (Nobel laureate in physics for QED) pointed out decades ago, religionists have had centuries of time to perfect their particular brands of obscurantism. Words routinely get redefined to mean what they want them to mean, and pious fables become Revealed Truth for a “chosen few”, and that should never be questioned because it came from an Ultimate Authority that the “chosen few” OBVIOUSLY INVENTED. According to the irrationalists, the more absurd the claims the more that they have to be true because no one could invent such ridiculous fables. Despite the obvious fact that there are millions of ridiculous fables that contradict each other, and oftentimes even contradict themselves. Armed with an unshakable conviction that reason and evidence are all irrelevant, and that only religious conviction can describe reality, no matter how obviously wrong their conclusions. As the late Isaac Asimov said, religionists have been “immunized against the feeble lance of mere reason”.
There are millions of Lutheran fanatics who still endorse the below nonsense, and many other religious denominations are equally irrational:
“Reason is a whore, the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but more frequently than not struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.” — Martin Luther
“Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom … Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism… She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.” — Martin Luther
A common thread among religionists appears to be that the more psychotic the alleged “prophet”*, the greater the number of followers they will eventually collect. There were numerous psychotics involved in creating the bible fables, which are all self illustrating.
*That should be spelled “profit”, just look at the wealth of the largest churches, and the wealth of the moronic televangelists. Their followers subscribe to the eventual brain death of performing self lobotomies. I had a friend in high school that I once considered to be quite intelligent. He was raised a Morman, and in later life he became a “nearly drooling” idiot, peddling Mormonism all the time. He was also quite oblivious to the fact that those nonsensical fables about invisible golden plates, magic rocks, magic, etc. were all invented by a career huckster and outright criminal. As an astronomer one said: “if you show people how to destroy their own power of reason, some will eagerly finish the job on their own.” Religion is just an attempt to escape reality, which the “true believers” so greatly fear.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_charges_against_Joseph_Smith
“As an astronomer one said” ==> “As an astronomer once said”