We’ve finished Blind Watchmaker and probably won’t be posting much more about it, simply because we dealt with it pretty thoroughly in class and it doesn’t seem quite interesting enough to merit further discussion. If you disagree and particularly want to debate some part of it you can use this thread to do so; and if you want to challenge our basic conclusions here they are, for the chapters covered Friday.

I’m going to call them opinions, though, and not facts, because I can’t promise any of us will defend them– we’re pretty much ready to move on. :) Still, if you’d like to offer a well-reasoned contrary opinion we’d love to hear it.

• Chapter 9: Puncturing Punctuationism. More of a chapter in the Dawkins-Gould feud than part of the book’s logical progression; moreover, in the years following 1986 the evidence has been leaning more in favor of punctuated equilibrium than gradualism.

• Chapter 10: The one true tree of life. Dawkin’s aim in this chapter doesn not seem very ambitious, as he suggest that, because of its necessary assumptions, cladistics can’t logically support evolution; but it fails even as description. Our general conclusion: his “perfect” scheme is too perfect to have much resemblance to reality, and there is no “one true tree of life”.

• Chapter 11: Doomed rivals. Dawkins would do much better if he could be a bit less dismissive of ideas he disliked, and actually address them in a meaningful way. We didn’t find either his rejection of Lamarckism or neutral theory (the two issues that were focused on) at all convincing.

Question: Are we moving back to a modified version of Lamarckism with the “genotype follows phenotype” of evo-devo?

Right now we’re reading Darwin’s Black Box, by Michael Behe, and discussion of that begins on Tuesday.

We went over the first six chapters of Dawkins’ Blind Watchmaker tonight; most of us, irrespective irregardless of our views on the evolution/design question, came to the conclusion he presented very little in the way of real arguments. The entire book reads more like a rhetorical exercise than any cogent justification of the assertions that are very freely made.

A brief summary of the major points made, as a springboard for discussion:

Chapter 1: Explaining the very improbable
This chapter sets the scene for later arguments; making the case that creationists aren’t the only ones awestruck by the beauty of nature, and staking out Dawkins’ own position. Our question: Are all biological systems really complex, and is it fair to say they have the appearance of design? Our general consensus was yes, though there was a strong dissent.

Chapter 2: Good design
The main part of this chapter is simply description of the marvelous complexity in nature, and the need for a special explanation, with the argument– natural selection is our watchmaker– limited to the last few pages. But, apparently because it is still meant to be introductory material, there is no backing for any of his statements there either.

Chapter 3: Accumulating small change
Here we look for the long-promised case for natural selection, but unfortunately Dawkins disappoints again. To show natural selection forms complex biological organisms, we have an example of artificial selection– a computer program with very little resemblance to natural selection at all– forming biomorphs that have no real resemblance to living things.

Chapter 4: Making tracks through animal space
We were grateful for some biological examples here, but the chapter would definitely be better with a bit less hand-waving.

Chapter 5: The Power and The Archive
Is Dawkins’ simplifying things to the point where it begins to loose all resemblance to the real world? On a positive note, he again brings in a small dose of actual empirical material in the end, though– again– we’re forced to imagine our own extrapolation between artificial and natural selection.

We’ll go through the rest of Blind Watchmaker during our next class, and touch on several interesting topics: origins of life, constructive evolution and and the highly questionable tree of life. And though we might not be able expect much in the way of interesting arguments from Dawkins, Prof. Provine has promised us a sound defense of evolutionary theory.

Our first class is just finished; a brief summary of today’s topics (to be filled in during the next few days, in later posts):

• Inference, the Scientific Method, and Where We Draw the Line
• Natural Selection Game
• Aristotle’s Causes, and Their Roles in Modern Biology
• Natural Selection: More Discussion

We’ve had some questions on who may join in discussions here; to clarify, everyone who keeps to the ground rules is welcome to participate.