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Do we need a new theory of evolution?

#1
C C Offline
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022...-evolution

INTRO: Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection.

You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to random mutations, then that tiny bit more vision gives them more chance of survival. The longer they survive, the more chance they have to reproduce and pass on the genes that equipped them with slightly better eyesight. Some of their offspring might, in turn, have better eyesight than their parents, making it likelier that they, too, will reproduce. And so on. Generation by generation, over unfathomably long periods of time, tiny advantages add up. Eventually, after a few hundred million years, you have creatures who can see as well as humans, or cats, or owls.

This is the basic story of evolution, as recounted in countless textbooks and pop-science bestsellers. The problem, according to a growing number of scientists, is that it is absurdly crude and misleading.

For one thing, it starts midway through the story, taking for granted the existence of light-sensitive cells, lenses and irises, without explaining where they came from in the first place. Nor does it adequately explain how such delicate and easily disrupted components meshed together to form a single organ. And it isn’t just eyes that the traditional theory struggles with. “The first eye, the first wing, the first placenta. How they emerge. Explaining these is the foundational motivation of evolutionary biology,” says Armin Moczek, a biologist at Indiana University. “And yet, we still do not have a good answer. This classic idea of gradual change, one happy accident at a time, has so far fallen flat.”

There are certain core evolutionary principles that no scientist seriously questions. Everyone agrees that natural selection plays a role, as does mutation and random chance. But how exactly these processes interact – and whether other forces might also be at work – has become the subject of bitter dispute. “If we cannot explain things with the tools we have right now,” the Yale University biologist Günter Wagner told me, “we must find new ways of explaining.”

In 2014, eight scientists took up this challenge, publishing an article in the leading journal Nature that asked “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?” Their answer was: “Yes, urgently.” Each of the authors came from cutting-edge scientific subfields, from the study of the way organisms alter their environment in order to reduce the normal pressure of natural selection – think of beavers building dams – to new research showing that chemical modifications added to DNA during our lifetimes can be passed on to our offspring. The authors called for a new understanding of evolution that could make room for such discoveries. The name they gave this new framework was rather bland – the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) – but their proposals were, to many fellow scientists, incendiary.

In 2015, the Royal Society in London agreed to host New Trends in Evolution, a conference at which some of the article’s authors would speak alongside a distinguished lineup of scientists. The aim was to discuss “new interpretations, new questions, a whole new causal structure for biology”, one of the organisers told me. But when the conference was announced, 23 fellows of the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest and most prestigious scientific organisation, wrote a letter of protest to its then president, the Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse. “The fact that the society would hold a meeting that gave the public the idea that this stuff is mainstream is disgraceful,” one of the signatories told me. Nurse was surprised by the reaction. “They thought I was giving it too much credibility,” he told me. But, he said: “There’s no harm in discussing things.”

Traditional evolutionary theorists were invited, but few showed up. Nick Barton, recipient of the 2008 Darwin-Wallace medal, evolutionary biology’s highest honour, told me he “decided not to go because it would add more fuel to the strange enterprise”. The influential biologists Brian and Deborah Charlesworth of the University of Edinburgh told me they didn’t attend because they found the premise “irritating”. The evolutionary theorist Jerry Coyne later wrote that the scientists behind the EES were playing “revolutionaries” to advance their own careers. One 2017 paper even suggested some of the theorists behind the EES were part of an “increasing post-truth tendency” within science. The personal attacks and insinuations against the scientists involved were “shocking” and “ugly”, said one scientist, who is nonetheless sceptical of the EES.

What accounts for the ferocity of this backlash? For one thing, this is a battle of ideas over the fate of one of the grand theories that shaped the modern age. But it is also a struggle for professional recognition and status, about who gets to decide what is core and what is peripheral to the discipline. “The issue at stake,” says Arlin Stoltzfus, an evolutionary theorist at the IBBR research institute in Maryland, “is who is going to write the grand narrative of biology.” And underneath all this lurks another, deeper question: whether the idea of a grand story of biology is a fairytale we need to finally give up... (MORE - details)
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#2
Zinjanthropos Offline
Bitching and squawking is evolving nicely.

For some reason I thought of the critters who don’t have eyes or have lost the use of them.
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#3
confused2 Offline
(Jun 30, 2022 11:35 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Bitching and squawking is evolving nicely.

For some reason I thought of the critters who don’t have eyes or have lost the use of them.
For some reason I thought about guts. Let's imagine the first set of guts evolved (say) 430 millions years ago. Animals both large and small get a set of guts appropriate to their size which is fine when the animal and their guts evolve together. But. Looking at dogs - we've bred large and small dogs over a few thousand and maybe a few hundred years - no way have the guts had time to evolve 'the right size' over such a short time - dogs are bred for size, legs and noses leaving the guts to look after themselves. It is vaguely possible that even big dogs have chihuahua sized guts and are otherwise mostly empty but I don't think so. Inside a mammal the guts have to share space with the lungs - too much guts and the mammal suffocates. So I am proposing guts have evolved to be pressure sensitive. The guts die along with the host so, like a good parasite, guts have evolved a way to share space inside their host without killing it.
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#4
Zinjanthropos Offline
(Jul 1, 2022 02:30 PM)confused2 Wrote:
(Jun 30, 2022 11:35 AM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Bitching and squawking is evolving nicely.

For some reason I thought of the critters who don’t have eyes or have lost the use of them.
For some reason I thought about guts. Let's imagine the first set of guts evolved (say) 430 millions years ago. Animals both large and small get a set of guts appropriate to their size which is fine when the animal and their guts evolve together. But. Looking at dogs - we've bred large and small dogs over a few thousand and maybe a few hundred years - no way have the guts had time to evolve 'the right size' over such a short time - dogs are bred for size, legs and noses leaving the guts to look after themselves. It is vaguely possible that even big dogs have chihuahua sized guts and are otherwise mostly empty but I don't think so. Inside a mammal the guts have to share space with the lungs - too much guts and the mammal suffocates. So I am proposing guts have evolved to be pressure sensitive. The guts die along with the host so, like a good parasite, guts have evolved a way to share space inside their host without killing it.

I think you’re on to something C2. What came first….guts or the sizing of guts? Is the sizing of internal organs non evolutionary as in already there…..looking for the right word here…innate?
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#7
confused2 Offline
After reading the OP I thought Darwin was pretty safe. If we adhered strictly to protocol 'dog guts' would be off-topic. One of the things Mrs C2 has run over happens to be a large dog but I'm reluctant to ask what was inside it.
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