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 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.