Monday, November 12, 2007
Evolution by Dawkins and by me
Some time ago there was a poll made in many countries of the world, the poll concerned the question whether people do more accept the belief of God as creator of everything or if they prefer to believe in evolution. Extremely high percentage of people was found by this poll to believe in God as creator of everything, or at least of humans.
On the other hand we have people like Dawkins, extremely smart and knowledgeable man, scientists who published m any books, e.g. “The selfish Gene” or “The extended Phenotype”. Man who holds many lectures on origin of species, and is overall respected scientist.
Here I would like to quote a part from his book “The extended Phenotype” to show the way of thinking of Dawkins with which I really strongly disagree.
Complex adaptations to an environment may arise in individual organisms through instruction from that environment. In many cases this certainly happens. But, given the assumption of epigenetic, not preformationistic, embryology, to expect such complex adaptation to be translated into the medium of the genetic code, by some other means than the selection undirected variation, is a gross violation of all I hold rational.
I will try to explain why this idea here so beautifully presented by Dawkins is at least partially wrong. It must be wrong. If it were correct we would have really a problem in explaining evolution without any kind of creator, whatever form he might appear.
If genes do not change due to environment, then there must be a question “how did they come to being?” a pretty difficult one to explain. To only expect that genes did create themselves just by undirected variation denies Dawkins himself by his example of evolution of eye.
He correctly describes, in one of his lectures, the evolution of eye as follows. There was a simple organism with light sensitive surface. The organism could not see in our sense of speaking about what we see, but it could recognize whether there is light or not. Like day and night or direct exposition to sun radiation or shade behind some stone. It took then many years until the organism developed a concave part of its surface to specialize in recognizing light. The concave form enables the organism to recognize from what direction the light is coming, compared to the even surface that does not offer this possibility. Later some specific tissue will develop that concentrates the light more precisely, the lens. And so Dawkins actually perfectly describes how environment broadcasts signals, facts to organism and how organism takes these signals and adapts to them. And it makes even more than only that, it can store this information in genetic code and pass this information, in our case the information how to create an eye to next generations, by which it saves energy and time to all offspring of all next generations.
If Dawkins were right with his idea of organisms not reacting, not adapting to their environment, and we would have to accept his idea of undirected variation, we would have to ask many other questions. One of the questions could be “why do we have eyes at all?” Basically we cannot expect that by really stupid undirected variation in genes one possible outcome would be an eye. There are animals that have an eye with similar abilities as our human eye but they also have other means of orientation in their environment. “Why can we see only in the light spectrum we are sensitive to and not also in infrared or ultraviolet parts of light spectrum? “ Some animals do. If there were no influence whatsoever executed by environment upon the organism then we would have to have eyes capable of seeing in the entire spectrum of light. What we certainly do not do.
In order to support this idea I am going to express my idea here about our senses. If we were born on the Moon, we would not have ears at all. Why? Because there is no need for ears in environment where there is no medium carrying sound waves, no atmosphere. We might draw a link to elephants; these animals are believed to have sound receptors in their feet, being able to “hear” somebody walking miles away. Actually they are believed to have developed a system of using their feet to produce sound as well as receipt the sound and so they created a way of communication using their feet for “listening” to sound.
Sound is nothing else than just waves spreading in some environment, some medium. Everybody or nearly everybody knows that water and other materials denser than air can also carry sound and actually these materials do this better than air. So the reason for developing whatever type of hearing, be it with our ears of with feet in elephants, is that there is necessity for such development. As I have said before it would be useless for an organism developing on the Moon to have our ears. It could not hear anything either, as there is no medium carrying these sound waves. On the other hand such organism might develop good receptors for receiving waves from the material The Moon is made of, like elephants.
I would here suggest my idea of evolution as a constant interaction of organism with its environment. All senses that we know, and it really does not matter whether we take our ears or the navigational systems of bats, all such senses are always tuned to receive signals from the environment in which the organism live.
I return here once more to Dawkins. If there were really only undirected variation, then I would suppose we would have to find somewhere some animal having human nose, a fish for example, or mouse with wings. Statistically seen there must have been such cases if Dawkins were right.
On the contrary to Dawkins and many other genetic hard liners I think that the only explanation for life an evolution is to realize how the genetic code as well as epigenetic code came to being. In order to show some other examples I just name two. One is old and known and describes the attempt of cutting the tail of a cat off and expecting that her offspring will be born without the tail. Well, this experiment did not work at all, and is still used as evidence for the fact that environment does not have any influence upon evolution. The second example is much newer. It describes laboratory experiment in which some two wing flies were treated by ether and the started to develop four wings. This was repeated over many generations and after twenty generations they developed four wings without being treated with ether. This shows the perfect influence of environment upon evolution of organism and in this way it supports my ideas and not the ideas of Dawkins.
In order to be careful I would like to say that my ideas are not primitive Lamarckanian ones. It is the question of creating a code in which some information can be passed over to next generations, and also what everything can be coded in such a code and how many levels are there in such a this code. Just recall my example with the Morse code being used by a Czech and a German. If only two Czechs or only two Germans do use Morse code they have no problems to understand each other. If a Czech tries to use Morse code and communicate with a German, well, it will not function, because the second level of coding is not the same, once the message was coded in the Czech language and cannot be therefore decoded by somebody who is capable of using only German language as the next code. In DNA this seems to be the case too, there is level of genes and level of epigenome. I suppose that there are even more levels than only these two. One of them might be the way of storing information by shape of a par of DNA which also seems to be the case according to some scientific works.
On the other hand we have people like Dawkins, extremely smart and knowledgeable man, scientists who published m any books, e.g. “The selfish Gene” or “The extended Phenotype”. Man who holds many lectures on origin of species, and is overall respected scientist.
Here I would like to quote a part from his book “The extended Phenotype” to show the way of thinking of Dawkins with which I really strongly disagree.
Complex adaptations to an environment may arise in individual organisms through instruction from that environment. In many cases this certainly happens. But, given the assumption of epigenetic, not preformationistic, embryology, to expect such complex adaptation to be translated into the medium of the genetic code, by some other means than the selection undirected variation, is a gross violation of all I hold rational.
I will try to explain why this idea here so beautifully presented by Dawkins is at least partially wrong. It must be wrong. If it were correct we would have really a problem in explaining evolution without any kind of creator, whatever form he might appear.
If genes do not change due to environment, then there must be a question “how did they come to being?” a pretty difficult one to explain. To only expect that genes did create themselves just by undirected variation denies Dawkins himself by his example of evolution of eye.
He correctly describes, in one of his lectures, the evolution of eye as follows. There was a simple organism with light sensitive surface. The organism could not see in our sense of speaking about what we see, but it could recognize whether there is light or not. Like day and night or direct exposition to sun radiation or shade behind some stone. It took then many years until the organism developed a concave part of its surface to specialize in recognizing light. The concave form enables the organism to recognize from what direction the light is coming, compared to the even surface that does not offer this possibility. Later some specific tissue will develop that concentrates the light more precisely, the lens. And so Dawkins actually perfectly describes how environment broadcasts signals, facts to organism and how organism takes these signals and adapts to them. And it makes even more than only that, it can store this information in genetic code and pass this information, in our case the information how to create an eye to next generations, by which it saves energy and time to all offspring of all next generations.
If Dawkins were right with his idea of organisms not reacting, not adapting to their environment, and we would have to accept his idea of undirected variation, we would have to ask many other questions. One of the questions could be “why do we have eyes at all?” Basically we cannot expect that by really stupid undirected variation in genes one possible outcome would be an eye. There are animals that have an eye with similar abilities as our human eye but they also have other means of orientation in their environment. “Why can we see only in the light spectrum we are sensitive to and not also in infrared or ultraviolet parts of light spectrum? “ Some animals do. If there were no influence whatsoever executed by environment upon the organism then we would have to have eyes capable of seeing in the entire spectrum of light. What we certainly do not do.
In order to support this idea I am going to express my idea here about our senses. If we were born on the Moon, we would not have ears at all. Why? Because there is no need for ears in environment where there is no medium carrying sound waves, no atmosphere. We might draw a link to elephants; these animals are believed to have sound receptors in their feet, being able to “hear” somebody walking miles away. Actually they are believed to have developed a system of using their feet to produce sound as well as receipt the sound and so they created a way of communication using their feet for “listening” to sound.
Sound is nothing else than just waves spreading in some environment, some medium. Everybody or nearly everybody knows that water and other materials denser than air can also carry sound and actually these materials do this better than air. So the reason for developing whatever type of hearing, be it with our ears of with feet in elephants, is that there is necessity for such development. As I have said before it would be useless for an organism developing on the Moon to have our ears. It could not hear anything either, as there is no medium carrying these sound waves. On the other hand such organism might develop good receptors for receiving waves from the material The Moon is made of, like elephants.
I would here suggest my idea of evolution as a constant interaction of organism with its environment. All senses that we know, and it really does not matter whether we take our ears or the navigational systems of bats, all such senses are always tuned to receive signals from the environment in which the organism live.
I return here once more to Dawkins. If there were really only undirected variation, then I would suppose we would have to find somewhere some animal having human nose, a fish for example, or mouse with wings. Statistically seen there must have been such cases if Dawkins were right.
On the contrary to Dawkins and many other genetic hard liners I think that the only explanation for life an evolution is to realize how the genetic code as well as epigenetic code came to being. In order to show some other examples I just name two. One is old and known and describes the attempt of cutting the tail of a cat off and expecting that her offspring will be born without the tail. Well, this experiment did not work at all, and is still used as evidence for the fact that environment does not have any influence upon evolution. The second example is much newer. It describes laboratory experiment in which some two wing flies were treated by ether and the started to develop four wings. This was repeated over many generations and after twenty generations they developed four wings without being treated with ether. This shows the perfect influence of environment upon evolution of organism and in this way it supports my ideas and not the ideas of Dawkins.
In order to be careful I would like to say that my ideas are not primitive Lamarckanian ones. It is the question of creating a code in which some information can be passed over to next generations, and also what everything can be coded in such a code and how many levels are there in such a this code. Just recall my example with the Morse code being used by a Czech and a German. If only two Czechs or only two Germans do use Morse code they have no problems to understand each other. If a Czech tries to use Morse code and communicate with a German, well, it will not function, because the second level of coding is not the same, once the message was coded in the Czech language and cannot be therefore decoded by somebody who is capable of using only German language as the next code. In DNA this seems to be the case too, there is level of genes and level of epigenome. I suppose that there are even more levels than only these two. One of them might be the way of storing information by shape of a par of DNA which also seems to be the case according to some scientific works.
# posted by Dalibor @ 1:57 AM 
