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EVOLUTION AND NATURAL SELECTION ... A GUEST EDITORIAL
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AN OL' FASHIONED BRAINIAC BEAT-DOWN!
Let's take James the Rocket Scientist's recent Soapbox [June 1st Dirt. - Jerky] apart and re-assemble it, shall we?
First, there IS a definite possibility that some of the molecules necessary for life arrived via a meteorite, comet, or asteroid collision. But that wasn't James' argument. There is no evidence whatsoever that space is "awash with life". We've never seen any. So it must be some other part of space, that the Earth is far away from. Also, lightning hitting complex carbon molecules in a hot broth can probably do the trick. We've demonstrated this in the laboratory -- we have not yet created life, per se, but we HAVE created amino acids by this method.
Next, the Cambrian explosion does NOT represent an evolutionary inconsistency. The Burgess Shale, discussed in glorious detail in Stephen Jay Gould's final magnum opus, It's A Wonderful Life, shows that there was a fantastic degree of diversity and complexity before the biggest comet ever hit the earth and killed off 99 percent of its species. The reason we used to think of the Cambrian as a difficult-to-explain "explosion" of life is that hard-shelled animals did not appear until the tail end of the pre-Cambrian era. Soft-tissued organisms do not leave a fossil record, usually. So we simply can't say how many species there were, or how complex they were, before the point at which they had skeletons to leave imprints.
Next, liquid water, trace nutrients and an energy gradient don't mean diddly. For one thing, energy gradients already presume photosynthesis, in which the protons that have captured energy from the photons (sunlight) can pemeate an atomic membrane between lumen and stroma and produce ATP, the food of life. The ability of protons to briefly capture the energy of electronegative particle waves is a property of all matter everywhere, while their role in photosynthesis is related to process that is already explicitly organic. Besides, single-cell life arose BEFORE photosynthesis. The trace nutrients -- boron, iron, manganese, zinc, and copper -- are important to the production of amino acids and certain enzymes, without a doubt. But once again, the logic is circular -- they can't be nutrients unless you have an organic system already evolved, with something that requires nutrition.
Liquid water? Yup, we're pretty sure it's a key pre-requisite to the development of life, although the liquid methane on Titan is an intriguing counter-example. But again, the logic is ass-backward -- life may require liquid water, the ability of photons to capture sunlight and transfer its energy to complex molecules, and heavy metals. But it is the classic fallacy of affirming the consequent and denying the antecedent to say that these three conditions inevitably lead to life.
And why would it have taken the Earth, our only observation in a sample size of one, one and a half billion years to accomplish it, if every other never-observed and purely speculative place can do it in one third that time??? Particularly since conditions here are ideal for it, while they are not optimal most other places.
As for natural selection, he again confuses cause and effect. Natural selection doesn't require any behavioral change at all. You can keep doing what you've always done and prevail. Natural selection requires genetic variance, period. Let me once again sum up the three postulates underlying natural selection, all undeniably true and obvious:
1) more creatures are born than will survive to adulthood and reproductive success;
2) some features may help them survive to reproductive age;
3) some of these features may be passed on to their children.
Drastic environmental change may hasten the culling implicit in the first postulate. A comet hits at the end of the Cretaceous, a nuclear winter ensues, photosynthesis pretty much stops, and only little burrow-dwelling rats survive as the big plant-eaters all die for lack of food. The little burrow-dwelling rats did nothing different, really, but they emerged into the Age of Mammals, with no big scary lizards stopping their proliferation.
On the other hand, neither behavior nor environment needs to change for some genetic variations to take hold and thrive. Let's look at the Cambrian explosion. There were some mutants who developed a hard exo-skeleton. They might have behaved just the same as their soft predecessors, in exactly the same environment, but now they were less subject to predation or accidental squishing. Voila! Natural selection with no environmental or behavioral change whatsoever.
Natural selection is a numbers game, pure contingency -- it's not a gambler waiting for the right hand, but rather the dealer of various cards, which sometimes come together to form winning or losing hands, dependent upon who else is playing, and what their cards are.
Evolution doesn't work the same way in "primitive ecologies"? First off, there's no such thing as a primitive ecology. There are merely niches that are more or less competitive. If a fire burns down a forest, there will be certain plants and bugs that will colonize the newly non-competitive eco-niche rapidly, and you may see a handful of these early colonists dominate the entire landscape for a while. Then others will enter, compete more vigorously, and a new balance will be struck. But there's nothing primitive about it, and natural selection is every bit as relevant in the empty eco-niche as in the full one.
If he means that things took their time back in the single-celled day, well sure, in terms of developing into any multi-cellular critters whose remnants were left for us to find. But that doesn't mean there wasn't evolution. Mutations took place, at a rate not so different from the frequency today. The great leap from prokaryotic to eukaryotic cells occured. And it's pretty likely that mitochondria evolved as their own form of life before wrapping themselves around cell nucleuses to create eukaryotes. Additionally, look at any given virus or bacteria that evolve new strains, or any given day at the lab at Genentech or Amgen -- lots of evolution occurs in single-celled organisms. Photosynthesis arose in algae. It's not as if all evolutionary processes stood on the sidelines for a billion years.
Next, there are indeed cosmological constants in the fabric of space-time. Six of them, in fact. The gravitational constant, the ratio of actual density to critical density, the efficiency of nuclear reactions, cosmic repulsion, rest-mass energy, and the number of spatial dimensions larger than the Planck-length. The Earth obeys them all, as do all the molecules and life forms on Earth, as well as those critters locked in comets... um, where there's no liquid water... ahem.
To spew silly metaphors about a cosmic bartender is identical to Creationism and Intelligent Design -- "the world is confusing to dummies like me, so someone much smarter must be acting as puppetmaster". That's the opposite of science, pure voodoo. Physics, chemsitry, astronomy, and biology actually work just fine to explain it all, and it is only those who lack the intellect or openness to inform themselves of the experimentally consistent and objectively observable facts who must resort to such primitive mythologies. Read some fucking Hawking or Gould or Sagan, if you can't handle anything more rigorous, but for god's sake don't call yourself a rocket "scientist" when your whole exegesis is fundamentally religious rather than empirical in its underpinnings.
If not for Tom Cruise and John Travolta sending in their mysterious star seeds, the Cambrian explosion would have taken longer than the lifetime of the sun? Hello, I thought you said life could and would happen everywhere that had water, heavy metals, and normally-behaving protons, within a half billion years. And then all it would need is a push from the critters on comets. But if the prerequisite critters are already on comets, why don't they have their own cambrian explosion? Why only here would it take 7 billion years or more? And also, if anyplace with those three conditions will be "crawling with critters" within a half billion years, and the Earth had all three, then why would the earth need the alien assistance? Why wouldn't all of those wonderful critters have originated here, rather than on comets and the like, whose environments are far less conducive to life? The argument begins to descend into idiocy rather quickly.
Let's finish with his "kicker". Contrary to his L. Ron Hubbard fancies, and the incessant yapping of Intelligent Design morons, it is easy to get VERY complicated systems containing a tremendous amount of information starting from very simple, low information systems: for example:
Fractal structures - They start with a very simple rule and repeat it over and over and over. The resulting structure can be (usually is) VERY complicated, but the formation equations can be very, very simple. And the universe has had a long time to do so. Example: Look at a snowflake.
Chaos - You can get very, very complicated systems if you use nonlinearities in the progression. This is why weather forecasting doesn't work.
Non-designed structural expression - The patterns within a kaleidoscope are very complex, and extremely organized (in the sense of symmetrical patterning) but are not designed, nor do they require external drivers for internal complexity and diversity.
He makes fun of the I.D. crowd, but his explanation is actually dumber -- it wasn't God, it was "smart comets", delivering "critters" expressly intended to generate more complex life forms from a "soup full of bugs". Oh yeah, and the comet critters had also stopped by earlier, to create the original proto-bugs in the original proto-soup a billion or two years earlier. They just did a really shitty job, and needed to come back to tidy up when the bugs weren't pleasing enough to the comet critters' heuristic ideal of complexity.
Genesis I and II sound positively flawless in their explanatory powers by comparison.
- A.C.D.
*** **** ***
Yer old pal Jerky's Words of Wisdom #268:
Note to self: Never write anything that will upset ACD!
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