You can see God sees even the sparrow fall oozing between the lines


sieve

This must be how creationists think a sieve works. The smaller particles see from a distance that they’ll fit through the holes, so they make a beeline for them, while the bigger particles that won’t fit recognize that fact and get out of their way. Adding more material to be filtered reduces the effectiveness of the sieve because the bulk hampers their ability to find their way to the face of the sieve.

You may laugh, but I have to conclude that this is the inevitable rationale that they’d have to make, given their inability to think statistically and impose teleology on every explanation of natural phenomena. So Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig raises a most peculiar argument against evolution. Populations are too large.

…in the 1950s, French biologists, such as Cuénot, Tétry, and Chauvin, who did not follow the modern synthesis, raised the following objection to this kind of reasoning (summed up according to Litynski, 1961, p. 63):

Out of 120,000 fertilized eggs of the green frog only two individuals survive. Are we to conclude that these two frogs out of 120,000 were selected by nature because they were the fittest ones; or rather — as Cuenot said — that natural selection is nothing but blind mortality which selects nothing at all?

Similar questions may be raised for the 700 billion spores of Lycoperdon, the 114 million eggs multiplied with the number of spawning seasons of the American oyster, for the 28 million eggs of salmon and so on.

He doesn’t think evolution can work, because how can it possibly find the two best individuals out of a group of hundreds of thousands or millions? And the problem becomes worse the bigger the population!

Where he sees a million bits of noise obscuring the ability of a purposeful immanentization of selection to zoom in and elevate the ideal pair of eggs to their purpose, I see a million trials of a chance process that might change the statistical properties of the population. There is no ideal pair anywhere, but individuals with advantageous properties merely have a better chance of surviving the winnowing. Bigger population numbers are better for effective selection, rather than somehow hindering it, because evolution is all about the population, not the individual.

But the creationists utterly fail to grasp this fundamental point.

Joe Felsenstein tackles this failure, which is where I first heard about that remarkable Lönnig nonsense.

A retired European geneticist, Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, has made a point that he feels is devastating to population genetic arguments about the effectiveness of natural selection. In a post at the Discovery Institute’s blog Evolution News and Views. He pointed to an argument he made in 2001 in an encyclopedia article. The essence of his criticism is that many organisms produce very large numbers of gametes, or of newborn offspring. Most of those must die. Then

If only a few out of millions and even billions of individuals are to survive and reproduce, then there is some difficulty believing that it should really be the fittest who would do so.

In addition, he was interviewed two days ago by Paul Nelson, in a podcast posted very recently by the Center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute, on their blog Evolution News and Views. You will find it here. He makes the same point (while Nelson misunderstands him and keeps raising an unrelated point about protein spaces).

It is a stunning thought that evolutionary biologists have ignored this issue. Have they? Have population geneticists ever thought about this? Well, actually they have, starting nearly 90 years ago. And the calculations that they made do not offer support to Dr. Lönnig. Let me explain …

You should read the rest. He explains the basic math behind this process, which surprisingly, the fellows at the Discovery Institute do not understand. He also points out that these principles are demonstrated very pragmatically in certain prospering institutions.

If Dr. Lönnig wants to understand these matters more, I recommend to him that he visit a gambling casino – in spite of the wild uncertainty of individual gambles, he might be surprised at how often he would lose his pocket money playing games that are mostly random, but slightly biased in favor of the house.

There’s something they really seem to have missed about casinos. The odds in their favor are usually (but not always!) small, but when games are played repeatedly, they become a powerful force to suck money right out of your pocket. Increasing numbers increases profits for these places; how would that work if Lönnig’s intuitions about statistics were correct?

Comments

  1. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    seems to be confusing about which meaning of “fittest” Darwin was using in his famous catchphrase. It sounds like the objection quoted in the OP is implying that “fittest” can only be assigned to the survivor of an actual test of survival. Like who can last longest on the least food or catch the swiftest prey, or survive actual battle “red in tooth and claw”.

    The casino metaphor is quite appropriate. Even simpler EG: gather a group of 1024 people. give each a coin (one side gold, one side blue) to flip. If the coin shows gold, move into the door on the next room. Repeat, Repeat, … eventually you get two people in the final room. Call one Gold the other Blue, flip the coin to determine the “fittest”, cuz he survived 10 rooms of survival. He must have the gene for luck [ask Niven about that, fallacy]. yet, if during the process, one learns how to flip the coin to always show gold, that may be a feature of the process. Point being that “advances” in capabilities could still occur even without being the driving force of evolution.
    Could be a “confirmation bias” error. As in, we tend to track lineages of successful species, noting each increment that improved it toward the final result. The bias distorts the analysis of the chain we assembled as the driving force that caused the chain, disregarding that we assembled the chain by selecting which creatures to include in the list.

  2. Usernames! (╯°□°)╯︵ ʎuʎbosıɯ says

    Well, hello Argument from Personal Incredulity!

    For those not familiar with this limp beast, it is simply the false conclusion that “because one finds something difficult to understand, it is therefore not true.”

    Next up: Tu Quoque

  3. Scientismist says

    I’m pretty sure the problem here is that naturalistic evolution ignores the role of Divine Providence. Of all those eggs, the two survivors are quite obviously the fittest in the eyes of God. God can easily pick out the correct two among all the candidates — but how is a mindless, merely physical (biological) process going to do that? Similarly with the sieve. The wire screen is just a request to God to allow only the favored particles to pass. God must always be the determining agent, since all that happens is God’s Will.

    At least that’s how I understood it, back when I was reading the creationist pamphlets and the Watchtower magazine.

  4. wcorvi says

    Maybe this is the strong opposition to abortion, and no help for the kid later, is that natural selection and evolution only acts on the born?

  5. Ed Seedhouse says

    Thanks for that last comment PZ. I am under the impression that everything that reproduces itself and is subject to mutation is subject to selection. Nice to have authority to support me.

    Well, frogs of course, are just sperm’s method of producing more sperm.

  6. Owlmirror says

    What’s odd is that the above examples are all just microevolution; you know, the basic sort of change within species that creationists supposedly have no problem with?

    (Of course, creationists are very confused and contradict themselves regularly, so this isn’t really that surprising)

  7. anbheal says

    To me the more obvious inanity is that he doesn’t realize that “fitness” is a post-hoc phenomenon. The example I give my daughter is that if a great plague kills almost everyone, but there’s some enzyme associated with the albinism gene that allows albinos to survive it, then albinos will be deemed the fittest humans. So at one level, the clod is correct, those two out of a million eggs who survive might not have any particular characteristic that allowed them to survive. But the survival itself is what determines their relative fitness. They are fitter, by definition, by having survived, whether or not they actually had any advantage. If, on the other hand, there WAS some characteristic that abetted their survival, then those alleles ought to proliferate, after a sufficient number of spins of the casino wheel.

  8. jblumenfeld says

    Wow. And I thought folks in MY field (finance) didn’t understand statistics – and abused basic principles wherever possible. This is just a whole different level of ignorance and abuse. Just wow.

  9. Owlmirror says

    @Scientismist:

    I’m pretty sure the problem here is that naturalistic evolution ignores the role of Divine Providence. Of all those eggs, the two survivors are quite obviously the fittest in the eyes of God. God can easily pick out the correct two among all the candidates — but how is a mindless, merely physical (biological) process going to do that?

    So, wait, even microevolution is theistic? If they don’t have a problem with theistic microevolution, why do they get their panties in a bunch over theistic macroevolution?

    Similarly with the sieve. The wire screen is just a request to God to allow only the favored particles to pass. God must always be the determining agent, since all that happens is God’s Will.

    I think we need to re-introduce Intelligent Falling

  10. raven says

    The fallacy fails because, natural selection and differential survival (survival of the fittest) are emperically observed. They are facts.

    We see them around us every day. The most obvious example is resistance to anti-pathogens. Spray Roundup herbicide every where and watch what happens. Sooner or later you end up with glyphosphate resistant weeds.

    It’s a dumb argument. How can all the trillions or so of H2O molecules in the air find each other to coalesce and make a rain drop? And yet they do so and it rains somewhere every day.

  11. Peter the Mediocre says

    The fundamental(ist) problem seems to be that some people cannot imagine anything happening by chance and without purpose. If “everything happens for a reason,” and random chance in obedience to the laws of physics is not an acceptable reason, then most natural processes are incomprehensible.

  12. moarscienceplz says

    From the article:

    King Solomon wrote around 1000 BC: “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,…but time and chance happeneth to all of them” (KJV 1611).

    Seems to me Lönnig is wasting his time writing articles like this. He should go to the nearest racetrack and bet on the horse with the longest odds in every race. If the outcome of the race is just random, some of his horses are bound to win and pay off big time.

  13. Scientismist says

    How can all the trillions or so of H2O molecules in the air find each other to coalesce and make a rain drop?

    God maketh the rain to fall on the just and the unjust…

    No, really. If you take the creationist viewpoint seriously, then nothing at any level is merely physical. I recall a debate many years ago in which a prominent academic philosopher, a self-defined “fideist” (who said you can’t prove God exists, you just have to take it on faith) was arguing that nothing happened by chance, and that it was ridiculous to expect that random particles could ever come together to accomplish anything without divine guidance.

    When questions from the peanut gallery were allowed at the end, I asked how it was possible that all the disparate paths of the people in the room (a thousand or more, a big room) managed to cross so that we all found ourselves there at the same time. The answer: God’s will. Not human will, not disparate humans with their own thoughts and will finding a common interest in the subject under discussion. Everything that happens must have one single cause: God’s will.

    Which is why I have always found “creation science” to be an amusing oxymoron. It’s just an exercise in storytelling, deciding where to imagine the border to be between physical reality and divine magic, just to make it more palatable for public consumption. Why bother? If some of it is divine providence, then all of it is divine providence. As I’ve often said, it’s like debating whether Superman can only see through Lois Lane’s dress, or does the X-ray vision work on her underwear too? And whatever the answer, as Sally said to Linus about the Great Pumpkin, “That’s a good story.”

  14. says

    As some of you have said, Lönnig’s argument is precisely an argument that natural selection does not work within a single population. It is a classical creationist argument, there’s nothing about Intelligent Design in it. We’re always being told by Discovery Institute types that they of course accept evolution “because everyone knows that things change”. Meanwhile many of their supporters, including many of the commenters at Uncommon Descent, actually do not accept evolution, in the sense of long-term change and common descent.

    Lönnig is unusual because he is not just another creationist who gets population genetics wrong, he is a plant geneticist who gets it wrong, yet insists on publicizing his bad arguments. In the podcast I linked to, the creationist Paul Nelson interviews Lönnig. In a remarkable double display of misconceptions, Nelson manages to misunderstand him as talking about the rarity of function in protein space. Which is precisely what he is not talking about.

  15. raven says

    Everything that happens must have one single cause: God’s will.

    Some Moslems say this too. Inshallah.

    1. It’s Fatalism.
    2. It also reduces humans down to meat puppets. With no free will. No personal responsibility. No choices.

    It’s cuckoo at best. At worst it is malevolent. And it is unprovable. so why bother believing it?

    If you want to believe something silly, believe in Last Thursdayism. The world gets created every Thursday and lasts for a week and our memories are all part of that creation. Next week is Intelligent Space Faring Dinosaurs week. There is as much proof for Last Thursdayism as their is for Fatalism.

  16. Vicki, duly vaccinated tool of the feminist conspiracy says

    Of course, iif everything that happens is God’s will, then people rejecting theism and studying evolution is also God’s will.

    “It’s all God’s will” isn’t just unprovable, it’s useless epistemologically and as a way of making decisions. “You can’t get it wrong, because whatever you choose is God’s will” might be comforting, but it doesn’t actually help someone decide what to do.

  17. Owlmirror says

    @Vicki:

    Of course, iif everything that happens is God’s will, then people rejecting theism and studying evolution is also God’s will.

    I suspect that at this point, many theists would say, that no, that’s Satan’s will. Of course, you could point out that Satan must be doing God’s will, since everything is God’s will. This is where, once again, the contradictions come seeping in no matter how hard they try to keep them out.

    I think theists start to get that divide-by-zero feeling when they think about it too hard, so they do their best to stop thinking.

  18. Vivec says

    With no free will.

    Depending on the definition of free will, I might agree with that point in particular.

    The whole compatibilism/determinism debate is a big one, but I don’t see how your #2 is absurd on its face.

  19. What a Maroon, living up to the 'nym says

    And if everything is “God’s will”, then the whole concept of sin falls apart. Sin depends on free will; if you can’t choose your actions, you cannot sin. Which of course ends up making the whole business of eternal damnation that much more atrocious–basically, God creates certain souls expressly for the purpose of populating hell. I guess he’s in debt to Satan or something.

    The contradictions just keep coming….

  20. Scientismist says

    Vicki @19:

    “You can’t get it wrong, because whatever you choose is God’s will” might be comforting, but it doesn’t actually help someone decide what to do.

    I think that it only seems to be that way to a non-theistic outsider. As an outsider myself, I can’t be sure, and it’s one of those conundrums that the insiders, God’s fanboys that call themselves theologians, have been arguing about for over a thousand years. But it looks like if your own free will exists (as a gift from God), then it’s your job to figure out God’s will (or let your religious guru figure it out for you) and make your own free choices so as to act according to divine will, because you want the omniscient God to know you’re a person of good will, so he doesn’t destroy your world with earthquakes and volcanoes.

    On the other hand, if you have no divinely-provided free will, then you have the same job to do God’s will, in this case as a Godly automaton, but you nevertheless bear full responsibility when God’s will is thwarted, so it’s still your fault when California sinks into the sea. But God’s will only seemed to be thwarted, because that was the way God planned it in the first place. It’s all part of those transcendental mysteries.

    Oh Thou who didst with Pitfall and with Gin
    Beset the Road I was to wander in,
    Thou wilt not with Predestination round
    Enmesh me, and impute my Fall to Sin?

    That’s Fitzgerald’s translation, but I think Omar might be in danger of assassination if he blogged something like that today…

  21. raefn says

    anbheal @ 10, you’re close to an actual genetic disease with your example of albinism and plague.

    My husband suffers from Hereditary Hemochromatosis. https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/hereditary-hemochromatosis This disease alters how the body stores iron, with many harmful effects. One helpful effect is that it causes resistance to the Bubonic Plague. http://jid.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2012/08/14/infdis.jis433.full

    Hemochromatosis is one of the most common genetic disorders among white people because it was selected as a set of genes that aid survival during outbreaks of the Plague in Europe. It allowed people to live long enough to reproduce and pass on the genes.

    Additional info, not necessary to my main point – the only treatment for it is, believe it or not, bloodletting. My husband feels best when he regularly donates blood, thus getting rid of the excess iron in his system. Women who have this disease are protected from it while they are menstruating, because they are losing some iron. The consequences of hemochromatosis – heart and liver trouble, gout, diabetes – tend not to show up in men until their 30s, so it gave plague survivors plenty of time to reproduce before they became sick and died.

  22. raefn says

    Addendum: evolution, natural selection, and heredity are a lot more complex than creationists think they are.

  23. CJO says

    anbheal
    But the survival itself is what determines their relative fitness. They are fitter, by definition, by having survived, whether or not they actually had any advantage.

    This is wrong. Survival does not confer fitness. The theory requires that fitness be a quantifiable property independent of actual results. Natural selection doesn’t require that the fittest always survive and reproduce, only that the more fit do more frequently than the less fit. Defining fitness post hoc with reference to individual survival is circular, and renders natural selection incoherent.

    The Wiki entry on fitness

  24. CJO says

    Further, in your albinism example, survival did not make the albinos fitter, changing circumstances made them more likely to survive and reproduce than the non-albinos in the population, that is, fitter.

  25. Intaglio says

    Surely the point is that reproduction is an inefficient process, the frog produces far more eggs than are necessary. That said I do wonder whether the original experiment of Cuénot, Tétry, and Chauvin was free from pollutants or other unnatural interventions.

    Also a vague memory stirs of New Scientist reports from decades ago, weren’t those 3 trying to revive Lamarckianism? Apologies to their memory if I am wrong.

  26. dick says

    Scientismist @ 16, your quote reminds me of this charming bit of doggerel, & as this thread contains some poetry, here it is:

    The rain it raineth on the just
    And also on the unjust fella;
    But chiefly on the just, because
    The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.

    (Charles Synge Christopher Bowen, Baron Bowen QC 1835 to 1894)

  27. anbheal says

    @26/27 CJO — I see your point here, but is that parsing the logic by way of changing the wording. The general conditions may not have changed, unless at some future point a revived ISIS or CIA releases another worldwide plague. In the post-plague world, first time around, the albinos may not have any particular fitness, the conditions may be roughly the same, and the specific characteristics required to eat and fend off predators and reproduce may not have changed at all. So, at least at a basic logical level, the fitness is defined by the fact that they survived, when looked at from future evolutionary biologists. Please understand that I’m not trying to be argumentative, but as far as i can perceive it, the conditions may only have changed for that three months of pruning — after that, the conditions may be identical, but the survivorship defines fitness. If albinos then can’t go out hunting on sunny days…..well, you see my point. It might be naïve, and I’m happy to be educated here. But it still strikes me that two out of a million eggs CAN survive with NO characteristic advantage. Dumb luck. And that’s still fitter, compared to the 999,998 who didn’t. At least for their descendants keeping tally.

    It’s if it keeps happening that there’s real selection involved, beyond the dumb luck. I mean, sure, the conditions changed after the comet struck the Caribbean basin, but there were still some species who survived by luck, and then didn’t, versus others who actually had a characteristic advantage, yes? What am I missing here?

  28. machintelligence says

    Looking at it from another perspective, with all of those offspring, think of the high selection pressures that the population could tolerate. A less fecund population could go to extinction just by random chance. There are advantages to being an “r” strategist.

  29. starskeptic says

    Jeez, how does the winning Thoroughbred ever find the finish line?

  30. footface says

    But aren’t all of my eggs more like me than any of your eggs are?

    If more of my eggs than your eggs “win,” doesn’t that mean I “win”?

    That is, does it matter which of my eggs win as long as more of mine win than yours?