Not so intelligent design?

November 25, 2005 10:29 PM

Deep Time. “Once we realize that Deep Time can never support narratives of evolution, we are forced to accept that virtually everything we thought we knew about evolution is wrong.”
It’s not the latest salvo from the proponents of intelligent design... [more inside]
posted by nanojath (65 comments total)

Quite the opposite: the author of that sentiment is Henry Gee , Senior Editor of Biological Sciences for Nature... and no fan of ID (unfortunately the Nature article by Gee referenced in that blog is premium only), in his book In Search of Deep Time.

Grossly simplified, Gee’s contention in that book is simply that much of the popular conception of evolution is based on outmoded narratives, concocted from the perspective of the human time scale, that simply can’t be supported by the actual evidence of paleontology and the practically inconceivable scale of time in which evolution occurs. The alternative is cladistics, which seeks to classify the relations between living things without reference to an invented (and largely scientifically unprovable) narrative of how or why one example evolves into another.

It invites the question of whether the opponents of things like intelligent design are hampered by their own outdated understanding of contemporary thought in the study of evolution.
posted by nanojath at 10:29 PM on November 25, 2005

If your story is about how a group of fishes crawled onto land and evolved legs

w...t...f...

Today, we see fossils as the remains of creatures that once lived. However, ...blah blah blah... We cannot be certain, therefore, that our current understanding of fossils is not as provisional as these earlier ones.

drivel, AFAICT. Though cladistics does have its place, eg. its DNA comparisons.
posted by Heywood Mogroot at 11:08 PM on November 25, 2005

So I can't figure it out. Is this Gee guy just campaigning to borrow his friend's time machine?
posted by deadfather at 11:10 PM on November 25, 2005

See, here you got me all excited because I thought that maybe someone was finally calling out the scientific establishment for the unscientific dogmatism regarding the mechanics of natural selection which is seems to feel is ideologically necessary, and for suppressing debate on any of the many interesting questions which the standard theories fail to adequately address out of fear of giving the creationists ammunition, but then I read the article and realized that this man is just batshit insane.

Or else his department chair has decided that things need to be more 'interdisciplinary'. If somebody made me use the word 'narratives' in a scientific treatise I'd probably lose it too.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 11:22 PM on November 25, 2005

"Deep Time" supplies all the temporal elbow room that evolution detractors say lack in order to account for speciation.

The fact that time is so "roomy" and is so vast that your average yocal has not the capacity to understand it (nor leave the wisdom to leave it to those who can) actually provides the most believable framwork in which evolution can occur.

Round these parts your average hick plays the "my Grandpappy wasn't a monkey who raised a man" card frequently enough that I don't get the "now the time frame is to long for slow genetic drift to occur" argument from the same side.

Idiots.
posted by sourwookie at 11:30 PM on November 25, 2005

nor leave the wisdom

leave=have.

been imbibing.
posted by sourwookie at 11:32 PM on November 25, 2005

It invites the question of whether the opponents of things like intelligent design are hampered by their own outdated understanding

You meant "proponents" here, right? If not I'm not sure what you're saying.
posted by gubo at 11:35 PM on November 25, 2005

gubo: people who support evolution and are not familiar with modern theories of the same expose themselves to defending things that people on their own side have rejected.
posted by Firas at 11:50 PM on November 25, 2005 [1 favorite]

Goodbye, peppered moths
A classic evolutionary story comes unstuck

Peppered Moth "Evolution"

These articles don't contrbibute to resolving the broader issue here, but it is handy to know that an oft-cited example is open to serious question.
posted by nthdegx at 1:47 AM on November 26, 2005

You know, about the first thing popular culture did with evolution was invent social darwinism, much to darwins annoyance. Public missunderstanding of science is & will always be with us. I'm donno if elimination of narrative will help, but we shouldn't expect a siver bullet solution.

I favor teaching approximately the selfish gene theory, *complete* with mathematical deductions, and discuss the iterated prisoner's dilemma. There is lots of mathematics supporting the gene selction model which is no harder than geometry class. And once you start throwing mathematics at people, they tend to shut up about moral implications. What creationist ever complains about the iterated prisoner's dilemma? The game theory is almost as influential as evolution in modern moral philosophy, and faily corrosive to religious views.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:59 AM on November 26, 2005

This article is common sense, and anyone who views it as revolutionary has been deluding themselves.

That said, good post, this particular sense should be more common than it is. And I agree that the selfish gene theory is concise and elegant, and should be universally taught.
posted by mek at 4:20 AM on November 26, 2005

Seems to me hat since humans began to develop minds and the ability to communicate verbally they have used "narratives," and I see nothing wrong with so doing when discussing science.
posted by Postroad at 4:35 AM on November 26, 2005

did anyone notice that the 2nd link is actually to free republic? ... that's not a comment on the worthiness of the article, i just thought it was interesting
posted by pyramid termite at 5:29 AM on November 26, 2005

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

Absurd.

So, evolution couldn't have happened the way everyone thinks, because thinking of things in terms of millions of years is HARD.

So, instead, we'll use cladistics, which substitutes the deductive arrangements made in the past with deductive arrangements done differently.

And besides, he's absolutely right. Just because something is several strata lower in the fossil record doesn't mean that it came beforehand, I mean, noone was there to SEE the fossil get deposited, so how could you ever really tell????

Some days I feel like I wake up in some sort of parallel universe.
posted by Ynoxas at 5:47 AM on November 26, 2005

Good post. Humans create stories to explain things and evolution is a story with many assumptions that are essentially arbitrary. There are other theories which fit the evidence just as well but arent congruent with the way we see ourselves so we disregard them
posted by tranceformer at 6:07 AM on November 26, 2005

Good post, but that Flash thing, or whatever it is clumsy, too small (as a % of the Web page, and not intuitive.
Please improve it to make your point better!
posted by ParisParamus at 6:43 AM on November 26, 2005

There are other theories which fit the evidence just as well but arent congruent with the way we see ourselves so we disregard them

Ok, I'll bite. Like what?
posted by Bort at 7:33 AM on November 26, 2005

Many of the assumptions we make about evolution, especially concerning the history of life as understood from the fossil record, are, however, baseless. The reason for this lies with the scale of geological time that scientists are dealing with, which is so vast that it defies narrative.

Considering that we can give a clean, concise narrative of stellar evolution, which occurs on a vastly longer timescale than biological evolution, this seems unlikely (not to say obvious, egregious BS, since that would be rude.) For that matter, don't I recall seeing narratives of the evolution of the entire universe, from big bang to present state to eventual heat death? Yes, I do.
posted by jfuller at 7:38 AM on November 26, 2005

> Ok, I'll bite. Like what?

For instance, that the entire universe and all therein, including Bort and all his memories, popped into being from nothingness 12.7 seconds ago. It's not a very interesting theory but it certainly fits all available evidence.
posted by jfuller at 7:44 AM on November 26, 2005

jfuller,

You have an unique definition of evidence.
posted by Richard Daly at 7:51 AM on November 26, 2005

Couple of things. First off, he seems to fundamentally misrepresent paleology as teleology. When we find fossil records of fishlike creatures with legs, then the hypothesis is that there was a change that made this advantageous and that hypothesis is tested by looking for evidence in the, say, soil record around the fossil.

Second, his fundamental argument, that "deep time" cannot support narratives (while all nice and pomo) can be turned around to say that no time can support narratives. Human life is too complicated to have cohesive narratives in the present anyway. And, if we want to get epistomological, we come down to the "how do we know that any of this existed ten minutes ago?"

Third, which plays off the second point, basing conclusions on the simplist answer is flawed. "Occam's Razor" is not, as it is usually trotted out, a methodology for eliminating incorrect conclusions, but rather a narrative force of its own that frequently leads to fallacy.

Fourth, while experiments cannot be conducted that match every single possible iteration of past possibility, experiments and predictions can be made in paleontology that are broadly supported by what we know and can prove. Yes, it's possible that carbon radioactivity degraded at a different rate in the past, or that it existed in different proportion, etc. But none of those "maybes" can be as well supported as the working hypotheses.

While I appreciate that narratives constructed out of the fossil record are like trying to discern the plot of War and Peace by reading one sentence every 200 pages, it's still a better method than looking for similarities in the character's names to discern relationships among them.
posted by klangklangston at 7:53 AM on November 26, 2005

(That said, interesting post.)
posted by klangklangston at 7:55 AM on November 26, 2005

Final point: "creating narratives" is another way to say "answering questions." We see an interesting phenomenon and we ask "Why?" and "How?" "Why did this happen?" That is, what caused it to happen? "How did this happen?" That is, what, in the finest available detail, were the antecedent conditions and the sequence of events that led up to our phenomenon as an end state? Sequencing the evidence in the form of narratives to answer these questions is what science does -- in fact the main thing it does. That's the itch science scratches. Pomo-style narrative busting is presently being laughed out of the humanities. I trust it will not find a refuge in the sciences, where it is or should be understood that narratives are robust because they are testable and evidence-based.
posted by jfuller at 8:04 AM on November 26, 2005

"Occam's Razor" is not, as it is usually trotted out, a methodology for eliminating incorrect conclusions, but rather a narrative force of its own that frequently leads to fallacy.

But if you dispense with it don't you open the door to every conceivable Flying Spaghetti Monsterism?
posted by Artw at 8:05 AM on November 26, 2005

nthdegx, Do you have any more credible critiques of the peppered moth story? Those links are weak and a few minutes of googling leave me thinking their claims are just the usual ignorant and exaggerated misleading creationist bollocks.
Peppered moths have been extremely thoroughly studied in thousands of experiments. Any critique that only addresses the originals by Kettlewell will in no way undermine the broader conclusions.
Further, the writer of the second link clearly doesn’t even understand the meaning of the words he uses, let alone the implications of the experiments he believes himself to be critiquing:
The problem is that there is NO EVOLUTION occurring (no increase in complexity)! At the start of the story there are both light and dark colored moths present. At the end of the story there are both light and dark colored moths present. No new trait has been acquired. The only difference is a shift in the color distribution in the population.
I’m not even going to count the basic errors. That’s just pathetic.
posted by Zetetics at 8:34 AM on November 26, 2005

Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History.
--
Big History.
posted by stbalbach at 8:55 AM on November 26, 2005

klangklangston: Second, his fundamental argument, that "deep time" cannot support narratives (while all nice and pomo) can be turned around to say that no time can support narratives.

That's just what I was thinking as I read through it. Trying to argue against interpreting paleontology as history, he ends up arguing against history itself. And to do that, he finds it necessary to reduce it to a ridiculously simple caricature. Maybe he has some good insight about evolution, I don't know. But he doesn't know much about history.
posted by sfenders at 9:09 AM on November 26, 2005

A bit more on Big History:

World History in Context

The Case for Big History

Maps of Time: Introduction
posted by ahughey at 9:15 AM on November 26, 2005

strange. he sees to assume that (1) there is a timescale on which cause and effect are certain and (2) that the timescales he deals with are large.

for example, in cosmology, his timescales are small. yet we still see no evidence that the laws of physics evolve with time (and it's something people worry about).

so i don't really buy the "everything is wrong" thing.

on the other hand, i don't see any problem with cladistics. it seems to me that in the end it's going to boil down to the same thing, when you end up doing the maths.

but maybe i've missed something.
posted by andrew cooke at 10:05 AM on November 26, 2005

See, here you got me all excited because I thought that maybe someone was finally calling out the scientific establishment for the unscientific dogmatism regarding the mechanics of natural selection

wtf? where have you been the last 25 years? have you not heard of punctured equilibria, selfish genes, etc etc?
posted by andrew cooke at 10:07 AM on November 26, 2005

cool, thanks ahughey. The "World History in Context" article is excellent, viewing human significance in the universe not by physical size (ie. humans are totally insignificant) but by complexity (humans are the center of the universe).
posted by stbalbach at 10:22 AM on November 26, 2005

nthdegx, I'm not sure what your point is. I've never seen the "peppered moth" story given as evidence of evolution. I have seen it given as evidence of natural selection, and both of the article you cite are clear in agreeing with that presentation.

So what, exactly, is the critique? Or is it just a fake critique -- calling out the story as something other than what it is?

Which seems to be the point a lot of people have with Gee's view. I can see that point -- I can see how klangstonklangston thinks that Gee is mis-representing paleontology as teleological. But I don't think he's doing that. I think he's saying that the popular presentation of paleontology is teleological, and that because of that it leads people to wrongly understand what's going on when evolution happens.

Narratives are explanations; they are never the thing they purport to explain. They are never more than approximations. Yes, they are tools for learning, but to a certain kind of (fiercely precise) mind, narrative is a bad way of undersanding things. The fact that it's how we're wired to undersatnd things doesn't mean that it's the best way. The bulk of our technological innovations over the past several hundred years have been made through using reasoning methods other than narrative.
posted by lodurr at 10:25 AM on November 26, 2005

Hmmm. Trying not to be a total prig but my background is biology and these bother me badly enough to whinge about:

> he seems to fundamentally misrepresent paleology as teleology.

Paleontology. Paleology is the study of human antiquities, especially prehistoric ones.

> have you not heard of punctured equilibria,

Punctuated.
posted by jfuller at 10:29 AM on November 26, 2005

My dad used to make some kind of a pun on "punctured equilibria", but I can't remember how it went....
posted by lodurr at 10:31 AM on November 26, 2005

Gee is only talking about paleontology, so to extrapolate to cosmology or history is to miss the point entirely.

The point is this: Suppose you dig up a fossil of a fish with somewhat leggy fins. Where does it fit in the scheme of things?

You might say 'Aha! A missing link between fishes and land animals. You might even call it Grandpa. But you would be wrong to do so, is Gee's point. This fish might have no surviving descendants, or its only descendants might be mudskippers, and there is no way of knowing.

In a linear representation of evolution from primordial slime to humans, the fish is either 'in' or 'out' of the narrative and we don't know which.

In a 'Tree of Life' representation, the fish is either at the end of a twig, or has descendants that may just be other fish or may be all land vertebrates.

In a cladistic analysis, there is no a priori assumption of where the fish fits in. The fish is what it is and you can deduce what you can about its relationships with living and dead species without the guesswork. You don't end up with as nice a narrative in human terms, but you have solid science without having to make up just-so stories. I don't think its post-modernist for scientists to admit what can't be known and restrict themselves to solid ground rather than made-up stories.
posted by nowonmai at 10:34 AM on November 26, 2005

Argh. Here's the missing ' to go after animals. I was also intending to lament the way that authors always overstate their case and try to make things sound more confrontational than they are, but maybe you need to do that to get pop science published.
posted by nowonmai at 10:38 AM on November 26, 2005

I don't think its post-modernist ...

I find it annoying that someone made it necessary for you to make this disclaimer. There is nothing even vaguely postmodernist about this idea. Pedantic, perhaps, but not postmodern.

"Postmodern" is one of those terms that have been rendered so charged as to be worse than useless. Any time it's used in discussion between more than two or three people, you can just about guarantee that the chance of getting anything useful out of that discussion has gone out the window.
posted by lodurr at 10:47 AM on November 26, 2005

A missing link between fishes and land animals. You might even call it Grandpa. But you would be wrong to do so, is Gee's point.

If that's his point, then he should stick to it. He's gone too far, trying to conclude from the fact that you can mis-use this kind of "narrative", that every kind of it is therefore entirely inapplicable to this subject. If he had simply said that when wandering around in "deep time," we have to be even more careful than usual not to be blinded by ordinary prejudices about how cause and effect should work, then I'd have no problem with that. I don't know much about evolution, so maybe he's right for all I know. Just the argument doesn't seem very good.
posted by sfenders at 11:25 AM on November 26, 2005

If you complain that evolution is just a set of "narratives" or "stories" don't you have to complain about all of the rest of science? One could say the same thing about relativity and quantum mechanics, or even thermodynamics and electromagnetism. No one has seen a magnetic field, it is inferred from measurements of currents and forces and so forth. There is always a chain of reasoning and inference between our observations and our models. Sometimes there is a statistical element too, when the data is incomplete, even in physics. But you can make statistical inferences in a perfectly logical way and get interesting results.

Similarly in paleontology it is necessary to make inferences about relationships between fossils, which are inherently probabilistic. In science you have to invent stories, also known as hypotheses, and then you assign some probability to the correctness of each story (by some loose procedure amounting to debate between humans). If the same "story" explains a lot of different observational data, you come to assign a pretty high probability to it. There's no problem in making these inferences.
posted by snoktruix at 11:49 AM on November 26, 2005

While I appreciate that narratives constructed out of the fossil record are like trying to discern the plot of War and Peace by reading one sentence every 200 pages, it's still a better method than looking for similarities in the character's names to discern relationships among them.

Is a great metaphor. But I think we tend to use narration as a easy way of understanding cause and affect that we find in the world around us because story telling forms such a big part of how our culture has been past down through generations.

It is not necessarily wrong - but it isn't entirely accurate either.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 12:06 PM on November 26, 2005

No one has seen a magnetic field

Well, uh, since light itself is an electromagnetic wave, maybe that one is debatable... Hum. Anyway, you get my point, maybe.
posted by snoktruix at 12:08 PM on November 26, 2005

> In a linear representation of evolution from primordial slime to humans, the fish
> is either 'in' or 'out' of the narrative and we don't know which.

Evoutionary theorists of my acquaintance (including Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould) never say individual fossils or even individual paleospecies are in a given line of descent. They never say this. They say, carefully and correctly, this or something like it.

Linear arrangements dropped out of biology a good long time ago. See The Great Chain of Being. If that's the kind of narrative Gee is arguing against then he wins. But, y'know, so what?
posted by jfuller at 12:17 PM on November 26, 2005

I've never seen the "peppered moth" story given as evidence of evolution

I think I indicated that I wasn't making a point, but I have seen the peppered moth case given as evidence of evolution on many many occasions, as both the articles I linked to also indicate.
posted by nthdegx at 12:40 PM on November 26, 2005

andrew cooke : "yet we still see no evidence that the laws of physics evolve with time"

How will we find evidence, if it exists?
posted by Gyan at 2:01 PM on November 26, 2005

Evolution is generally defined by biologists as a change in the relative frequency of alleles in a population, across generations.
It is clear that changes in the populations of peppered moths are not evidence of evolution, they are a direct observation of evolution.
The creationist pages linked by nthdegx grant that the peppered moth story demonstrates all the conditions necessary for evolution while simultaneously asserting the opposite by incorrectly claiming that evolution requires an “increase in complexity”.

Apologies for extending the derail but, nthdegx, those links are utterly without merit and do not demonstrate what they claim.
posted by Zetetics at 2:08 PM on November 26, 2005

The peppered moth example is a favourite creationist talking point. It was one of the examples that Jonathon Wells (of the Discovery Institute) "debunked" in his anti-evolution tract "Icons of Evolution". However his debunking is extremely suspect. If you look at the literature (as I have done, a bit) you find that the experts generally agree that the moths are actually evolving in response to the changing tree bark color and bird predation. There is some debate about the influence of other factors, which is mentioned by the scientists because they are intellectually honest, but it doesn't seem to cast doubt on the main conclusion.
posted by snoktruix at 4:28 PM on November 26, 2005

Ok, I'll bite. Like what?


For instance, that the entire universe and all therein, including Bort and all his memories, popped into being from nothingness 12.7 seconds ago. It's not a very interesting theory but it certainly fits all available evidence.

Expect it's not even a theory. It's a conjecture at best unless you can offer some repeatabled tests that could possibly disprove it.
posted by Ayn Marx at 6:34 PM on November 26, 2005

> Expect it's not even a theory. It's a conjecture at best...

Leaving its epistemological status aside for the moment and giving it its proper name, it's our old friend Skepticism, Philosophical. It's been around in the form of Pyrrhonian skepticism since 300 BC and as Academic skepticism since the time of Plato's Academy. In all that time it has been commonly referred to as a theory. It may be lacking as a specifically scientific theory--but then maybe not, since in the form of Cartesian skepticism it has the name of Mr. Scientific Rationalism himself (deservedly) attached to it. I'm just as fond of Popper and falsification as you appear to be, but in the history of science the falsification criterion is quite recent (way post-Darwin, for instance) and Karl is decisively outranked by René.

P.S. as for possible tests, one recalls that in the recent body-in-a-pod popularizations of the brains-in-a-vat ...uh, conjecture... our pal n00b, I mean Neo, did indeed manage to awaken to the existence of the matrix. Though this is less widely known, Hillary Putnam says he escaped also, so there may be hope for Ayn Marx as well. See also (can't find this one online) Brueckner, A. (1991), “If I Am a Brain in a Vat, Then I Am Not a Brain in a Vat”, Mind 101.
posted by jfuller at 7:31 AM on November 27, 2005

klangklangston: While I appreciate that narratives constructed out of the fossil record are like trying to discern the plot of War and Peace by reading one sentence every 200 pages, it's still a better method than looking for similarities in the character's names to discern relationships among them.

*Bangs head against wall.* Really this is a classic example of how evolution advocates frequently shoot themselves in the foot due to their own ignorance in misrepresenting the evidence for a theory. Good theories don't live or die on the basis of single experiments, or even single methodologies. What is important in science is the triangulation of multiple methodologies pointing to one conclusion.

Furthermore, while the "narratives" are nice, sexy, and make for good Discovery Channel fodder, methods like cladistics offer much better support for the basic mechanisms of evolution. The real meat and bones of evolution are inheretance and modification. Cladistic studies showing that an adaptation developed once from an ancestor that passed that trait down to multiple genera of descendants over an inconcievable span of time permits us to evaluate Darwinism vs. other theories of evolution. The fact that we see feathers in dozens of fossil birds and in dozens of fossil dinosaurs with birdlike pelvic structures is stronger support for that hypothesis of Bird evolution than the existance of Eoraptor and Archeopterix in a sequence. In addition cladistics can also be done with molecular biology to show that modern birds emerged from a common ancestor later than modern reptiles or fish.

The insistance on narrrative rather than a pattern that spans over all living organisms is one of the things that make Evolution weak in the public debate. Evolution deniers can attack individual cases such as the peppered moth out of context. But the "meat and potatoes" of evolutionary biology is cladistics, quantitative genetics, and comparitive genetics.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:41 AM on November 27, 2005

More thoughts from the drive home.

In regards to whether this invalidates history. Historians (at least the honest ones) openly admit their dependence on documentary evidence and make it clear when they are speculating beyond the available facts. When the documentary evidence is fragmentary, can't be translated, or non-existant, historians shrug their shoulders and yield the field to archeology. The good news for historians is that human beings tend to create civilizations of braggarts wanting to document their achievements. On top of the monuments, poems, and coins, there is a smaller quantity of ephemera that has been preserved: orders, lists, inventories. For literate civilizations we have practically a year by year record going back thousands of years. For civilizations without a written record, historians just can't say very much.

The sheer scale of time separating records make the kinds of stories you tell in history impossible for paleontology. You have an example of mouse species A, and mouse species B in the same fossil bed, separated by a million years. For most species, that's about 1,000,000 generations. What happened in a million generations? Did A->B? Did A->A'->B? Or did C->A,B? And is it possible that A and B are the same species separated by sexual dimorphism, age or disease?

Then, a few seasons later, you find another example of B that predates both by another 5,000,000 generations. Well, that upsets any theory of sequence you had before.

jfuller: Evoutionary theorists of my acquaintance (including Ernst Mayr and Stephen Jay Gould) never say individual fossils or even individual paleospecies are in a given line of descent. They never say this. They say, carefully and correctly, this or something like it.

Well yeah. On the other hand, I see a lot of popular press, textbooks, and museum exhibits that focus on "natural history." Dinosaurs begat archaeopteryx begat modern birds. That's the story that makes the press.

So for example, this article talks about "The problem now becomes one of linking an ancestor to Archaeopteryx then linking Archaeopteryx to modern birds." The problem is that while it is fairly easy to establish that Archaeopteryx and modern birds had a common ancestor. It is almost impossible to establish that Archaeopteryx is a common ancestor of modern birds.

To take up on the invited question: It invites the question of whether the opponents of things like intelligent design are hampered by their own outdated understanding of contemporary thought in the study of evolution.

IMNSHO yes. For example, one of the claims frequently made is that ID is not falsifiable. However, one can do a cladistic analysis of organisms and compare it to a cladistic analysis of artefacts created by intelligent designers (pots, musical instruments, GUI computer interfaces). What we find is that the patterns of features in organisms are consistant with the theory of evolution, and inconsistant with patterns we find with intelligent designers.

Evolution deniers know that theories of natural history are based on relatively weak evidence and are speculative based on additional evidence. By presenting natural history with more certainty than is prudent, we miss out on the much stronger evidence for evolution as a comprehensive theory in biology.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 10:30 PM on November 27, 2005

You can use DNA sequence analysis of modern organism to discover a lot about how their ancestors are related on the evolutionary tree. Not at the level of "how did mouse species A evolve into species B", but at the level of "did mice evolve into gophers, or do they have a common ancestor" etc., and the time spans are correspondingly longer, 10 of millions of years perhaps. And this information is pretty solid, not at all weak.
It is the same with morphological comparisons of fossils. The evidence is not weak, it is just probabilistic in nature.
posted by snoktruix at 3:45 AM on November 28, 2005

snoktruix: You can use DNA sequence analysis of modern organism to discover a lot about how their ancestors are related on the evolutionary tree. Not at the level of "how did mouse species A evolve into species B", but at the level of "did mice evolve into gophers, or do they have a common ancestor" etc., and the time spans are correspondingly longer, 10 of millions of years perhaps. And this information is pretty solid, not at all weak.
It is the same with morphological comparisons of fossils. The evidence is not weak, it is just probabilistic in nature.


*bangs head against wall.*

Gee's point, and where I agree with him is that the media and well-intentioned textbooks don't limit themeselves to the "pretty solid" claim but extend to claims that really cannot be supported. It is one thing to claim that Aves, a modern group represented by thousands of living species had a common ancestor among Maniraptora a group that may have been represented by thousands or millions of species over the 200 Million years of the Mesozoic. It is another one to elevate Archaeopteryx, one or more species represented by 8 examples with a small geographic distribution to the status of a common ancestor of modern birds.

The fossil evidence is too weak to support narratives at the species level. For every species where we have fossil specimens, there are an unknown number of species that lived and became extinct without leaving a fossil.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:03 AM on November 28, 2005

Missed all this over the weekend. First off, Paleology was a typo. Second off, the denial of a narrative form IS a tenet of post-modern philosophy. If you want to argue about post-modernism, I'm more than prepared to point out that what Gee says does echo post-narrative theorists, especially in the political science realm (and in the use of similar arguments as those advanced against "logocentrism.")
Third, while it may cause Kirk more consternation, I think that the benefit of narrative forms in explaining science to the layperson does outweigh the potential cost. I can't think of any books that I've read that have put forth the idea that, to continue with the accepted example, birds descended from the Archaeopteryx. I have seen plenty that have advanced the idea that lizards most likely evolved into Archaeopteryx, and that the Archaeopteryx has birdlike forms, which suggests that it or something like it was part of the descent from lizards to birds. The only time I can think of linearity being the common conception is with the descent of man, and the pop culture graphic of man slowly walking more and more upright.
I will glady yeild to his expretise (even though that seems to be something Gee rails against) that cladistics are a much more useful analytic tool than simply assuming a linear timeline. The point with the War and Peace bit was that neither seemed likely to give a very complete picture, though I'll cop to having started that with a narrative preconception that probably colored the example unduly.
posted by klangklangston at 8:56 AM on November 28, 2005

How will we find evidence, if it [physics changing with time] exists?

from looking at distant objects. the light that comes from them was emitted much earlier. so you can get quite a few constraints on thngs by looking at motion/mass, emission line frequency, etc.

it's not perfect, because our knowledge of cosmology is pretty flakey too (hence people considering varying physical constants; it might be a possible solution to various current problems), but as far as i know there's little support for the idea (the current model - dark this, dark that - is hardly wonderful, that suggests alternatives are pretty bad indeed, if you see what i mean...)
posted by andrew cooke at 11:48 AM on November 28, 2005

klangklangston: Well, I think that there are plenty of other ways one can be skeptical of narrative without invoking post-modernism. One of the big ones is the old maxim that correlation does not prove causation, much less mechanism.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:13 PM on November 28, 2005

andrew cooke : "from looking at distant objects. the light that comes from them was emitted much earlier"

Except if the laws of physics did change, we don't know if the light was emitted "much earlier". My point is that the only interface we have is the here & now. Within here & now, we have direct perception, memory & inference to establish beliefs. Space archeology, among a few other fields, relies on assumptions that can't be tested. We look for an internally consistent (& aesthetic) theory, and declare that the (provisional) truth.
posted by Gyan at 12:24 PM on November 28, 2005

that's true, but they have to change in quite well-constrained ways (i don't know, but you might find, for example, that the gravitational constant has to increase as the square of the inverse decrease of planck's constant, for example). that's either one hell of an coincidence, or unifies physics beautifully...
posted by andrew cooke at 2:49 PM on November 28, 2005

andrew cooke : "but they have to change in quite well-constrained ways"

"that's either one hell of an coincidence"

It just means that the empirical universe is consistently ordered. How will one disprove that the universe doesn't follow a step function: laws(even billion years) = A; law(odd billion years) = B. Imagine an sentient species whose individuals have an average life span of 2 minutes, and who emerged at noon, and who are extinct by 6 PM. Stop laughing. They'll have no concept of night. To channel Rumsfeld, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. That last category is a sticky one.
posted by Gyan at 3:12 PM on November 28, 2005

well, if the step functin changed planck's constant then at the reshift corresponding to the change from A to B you wouldn't get any Lyman-alpha absorption cloud absorption (or twice as much, depending on whether it got bigger or smaller). so a spectrum of a distant quasar would have this very obvious jump in the density of absorbers.

see the second spectrum here. the left hand part of the spectrum has loads of absorption lines which are believed to be due to intervening clouds of hydrogen. each frequency is slightly different because each cloud has a different redshift (spread throughout an expanding universe - hubble, etc). the frequency of the absorptino depends on a bunch of things including (i assume) planck's constant. so if planck's constant changed at some time (which corresponds to some distance, which corresponds to some redshift) then one cloud (in A) would absorb at one frequency and another, neighbouring one (in B) would absorb at a very different one, so you'd geta gap or an overlap.

now obviously you can refine you argument so that objection doesn't hold - like arguing it's not a step function but a smooth variation, which might be interpreted as a variation in cloud number density. but on the other hand, there are other constraints. and what i was saying is that i believe the final outcome is that you end up being restricted to having to rely on co-incidences.

hope that makes some sense; this was my thesis subject (these clouds, not time-varying physics) many years ago so it's an easy example for me, but obviously it's going to be pretty obscure for everyone else.
posted by andrew cooke at 4:09 PM on November 28, 2005

maybe that's just confusing detail. the important point really is that you can read an absorption spectrum of a high redshift object as whole series of objects running back through time, because of the finite speed of light (so distance propto time) and the expanding universe (so frequency shift prop to time).

in other words, all those lines are the same physics - same hydrogen transition (same frequency in the local rest frame of the cloud) - at different times (and frequencies).
posted by andrew cooke at 4:17 PM on November 28, 2005

andrew cooke : "well, if the step functin changed planck's constant then at the reshift corresponding to the change from A to B you wouldn't get any Lyman-alpha absorption cloud absorption"

No, the entire universe's laws change from A to B. There's no "information" that preserves A's effects.
posted by Gyan at 6:20 PM on November 28, 2005

so it's effectively outside this universe? then who cares?
posted by andrew cooke at 6:57 AM on November 29, 2005

Andrew: On the other hand, there was work by a Portuguese physicist that seemed to imply that the speed of light was not necessarily constant within a small period of time near the Big Bang (billionths of a second or some such). While I don't know enough about math to argue his hypotheses, I remember seeing it dismissed by the argument that the speed of light is constant now, so it has ever been constant, therefore there must be some other explanation for the mathematical models that he was hypothesizing over.
posted by klangklangston at 10:26 AM on November 29, 2005

(Gyan - sorry prev post sounded a bit dismissive; i just don't get what you're saying, perhaps)

kk - near the big bang (not sure exactly how near) all bets are off, because the conditions are so unlike what we have today (even in particle accelerators) and we have little that we can observe from that time (it was all very dense and opaque, so "looking back" at distant objects doesn't work - all we have is the microwave background, which was much later (in billionth of a second terms). so it's possible, afaik, and the dismissal you mention sounds as silly to me as it probably sound to you....
posted by andrew cooke at 11:47 AM on November 29, 2005

andrew cooke : "i just don't get what you're saying"

Your rebuttal assumes that some forensic information is preserved when the laws change from A to B. Suppose it happened 1 million years ago. So according to you, data from the light cone from 1 mn LY away will show some sort of discontinuity. But the laws of physics determine both the entities inside the B zone and outside it, so the change is uniform.
posted by Gyan at 8:12 PM on November 29, 2005