Thus far, I have experienced only the initial comments from social media posts and news articles, and the few people I have talked to. Undoubtedly, the sample is biased. Nevertheless, my experience suggests that between the two tribes, the creationists have a more advanced, scientific mindset. Perhaps this would be expected given that the creationists are long-time critics of the theory of evolution, and are thus ready to adopt a scientific attitude.
To show how the creationists are really beating the evolutionists at their own game, I take an article published by The Discovery Institute on Evolution News entitled, “Can natural reward theory save natural selection?” This article begins by recapitulating my arguments:
To materialists, the promise of evolution is getting humans from chemicals without foresight or design. Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection seemed to be just the trick: it was a deterministic force for progress. Or was it? Gilbert thinks it gave biologists schizophrenia by sending conflicting messages, putting them in a double bind. Worse, the contradiction allowed pseudoscientists to sneak into the hallowed halls of materialistic science…
Gilbert accuses modern evolutionists of coping with their schizophrenia by invoking teleological language such as “fitness maximization” and supposing that the purpose of a trait is its cause. Some actually “take apparent design in nature as evidence of a unifying final cause, and by implication, a design-function final cause.” These bad habits are forbidden to a true naturalist. Gilbert considers teleology a “metaphysical delusion” that was never expunged from biology…
(Gilbert) dismisses Darwin’s metaphor of the struggle for existence that (Darwin) got from Malthus by turning it on its head. Animals don’t struggle against limited resources; they have plenty… Even today, the biosphere is nowhere close to using all the solar energy impinging on the Earth…. If there was ever any struggle, it was a struggle for supremacy…
Having undercut Darwin’s attempt to account for absolute progress, Gilbert presents his own. His new fortified Darwinism does not eliminate natural selection; it supplements it. The new theory involves two deterministic forces that, working hand in hand, yield the coveted explanation for macroevolution…
The first deterministic force is good old natural selection in the Dawkins portrayal of Blind Watchmaker. The second force is Gilbert’s added concept of “natural reward.” It’s a bit like Monopoly…
In this scheme, natural selection is the blind inventor, and natural reward is the blind entrepreneur. Whereas natural selection favors alleles within species, natural reward favors genetic systems within ecosystems. A bacterium, for instance, invents a way to utilize rising oxygen levels for respiration… It wins the monopoly game…until another organism invents a way to exploit another habitat…Stepwise upward it goes over deep time…
For the most part, the Discovery Institute accurately summarizes my argument. It recognizes that I am refining Darwinism to “good old natural selection.” Thus, I did not dismiss Darwin’s struggle-for-existence metaphor; instead, I extended Darwin’s “struggle for life” to include the struggle for supremacy and natural reward. The Discovery Institute understands that natural reward applies to different levels of the genetic hierarchy. It also understands that I invoke a different form of competition, which is more like a race for monopoly.
The Discovery Institute later says, “ID advocates can…thank (Gilbert) for exposing more of the flaws of Darwinism, such as the ‘double bind’ that disqualifies natural selection from extrapolating its limited successes into ‘absolute progress.’ He has demonstrated that… ‘natural selection leads to the origin of idiosyncratic traits that appear as one arbitrary thing after another.’”
So, the Discovery Institute appreciates my critical attitude toward natural selection, and they return the favor by criticizing natural reward.
The Discovery Institute begins with a new section, “now wait just a cotton-picking minute.” Here, it says, “‘The theory of natural reward also suggests an explanation for the seeming sudden appearance of new forms in the fossil record,’” and “(Gilbert) delivers based on the absence of evidence.” In this passage, the Discovery Institute is repeating a well-known argument that one cannot take the absence of evidence as evidence. I agree that the absence of fossils is not evidence, but I provide several lines of evidence for my argument.
First, I cited an evolutionary experiment of E. coli bacteria that showed the transitional steps through which a complex trait of citrate metabolism evolved (my Fig. 5). Second, I explained how that a sudden population expansion could give the illusion of saltation in hindsight. Particularly, a strain persisted nearly undetectable for about 3000 generations before it tapped into a new citrate resource zone (Fig. 1). Between the early period and the later period when the lineage expanded in population, it was not detectable in the frozen fossil record by standard protocols. If this were a primitive amphibian living 375 mya, we would probably not see the fossils from the “dwindling” period, simply because it was so rare that most fossils would be lost (Fig. 1). Therefore, it would appear as if a saltation happened, simply because the transitional states happened in a low-frequency lineage. In the bacterial experiment, however, we know the strain did not originate by saltation because it had been common earlier, and thus detectable, before it declined in frequency (Fig. 1). From genetic studies, we also know that some of the transitional steps came during the phase of “dwindling” (Fig. 1). Therefore, this study at least demonstrates my principle claim that rarity followed by sudden spreading can give the appearance of saltation. As other evidence of how complex traits evolve gradually, I also reviewed my own model of genetic kin recognition, which is supported by various lines of indirect evidence (my Fig. 6 and Fig. 7), and results of other studies in computer science and biology.
Figure 1. The waxing and waning of an E. coli lineage that inherited the petri-dish world. The steps of evolution (3 to 6 here) are summarized in Gilbert’s (2020) Fig. 5. Adapted from Quandt et al. (2015).
Next, the Discovery Institute says, “The invention of a new body plan was so quick, (Gilbert) surmises, that it became abundant without leaving a trace in the fossil record.” This as an utterly incorrect rendition of my argument, which interprets it as something more familiar (saltation). A more accurate depiction of my argument would be, “The invention of a new body plan is almost always so slow, (Gilbert) surmises, that apparent sudden origins of new body plans must be caused by sudden spreading, in which previously rare types become abundant enough to be recorded by the fossil record.”
To rally the troops, the Discovery Institute also claims that I sneered at political and religion based ideological opponents of evolution—i.e., its readership. However, I did not show any contempt toward them. Instead, I explained how that the opponents of evolution encouraged evolutionists to hide the shortcomings of their theory. Particularly, in prominent publications, the authors of the modern synthesis presented a unified front that their theory was a complete explanation for macroevolution. They did this even though they argued among themselves about whether the theory is a complete explanation. For example, in one conference discussion, A. J. Nicholson claimed that natural selection explains biological advancement. Dobzhansky then responded (Tax and Callender, p. 121),
I should like to emphasize, not how much we know about selection, but how little we know. There is a great temptation, especially when one reaches a certain age—which I have reached, as have most of my colleagues on this panel—to speak about things as really known and to represent them as cut and dried. Perhaps it is better sometimes to talk about how little we know, how much we must learn, and how necessary more research is. We have not properly understood what biological fitness really is. For example, a form may be fit in the short run, but this may injure its fitness in the long run, or vice versa. I think it is very useful to stress that here, as well as in many other areas, more research is what we really need.
Dobzhansky’s caution represents the sort of critical mindset that would have been appropriate in evaluating the theory of natural selection as an explanation for macroevolution. The authors of the modern synthesis, in more prominent venues, instead made sweeping claims, like, “…the phyletic progressions usually characterized as macro-evolution, result from the continuation into geological spans of time of the processes responsible for evolution on the racial and species level…We who are familiar with (the evidence) cannot imagine the appearance of new facts which will either overthrow (this claim) or seriously limit (its) validity” (Stebbins 1959, pp. 305-306). Likewise, Simpson (1949) stated, “Within the realm of what is clearly knowable, the main problem seems to me and many other investigators to be solved (pp. 278-279).”
In a next criticism, the Discovery Institute evaluates my metaphors as if they were literal statements. I have elsewhere gotten this response from evolutionists. The Discovery Institute asks, “Do material organisms care about markets? Do they say, ‘Look at all that oxygen; how can we exploit it?’ Do they understand the concept of an advantage?” This reminds me of a question from an evolutionist who read the first draft of my paper, “is resource abundance really doing the rewarding. ‘Hi, I’m a lot of energy. You’ve figured out how to use me up. Let me reward you?’” These sorts of satirical arguments are nice for currying favor from a biased audience, but they do not stand up to scrutiny. To begin with, it is illogical to evaluate a metaphor as if it were a literal a statement, because they whole point of metaphors is to suggest a resemblance between different things; usually between something that is simple, and something that is more complicated. In that sense, metaphors are much like maps, and they serve as useful guides because they are much simpler depictions of reality. To show the flaw of these satirical arguments, we might suggest a similar critique of a topographical map. The very critical reviewer might say, “are mountain slopes really squiggly lines on a piece of paper? ‘Hi, I’m a mountain top. You can climb me as easily as you can walk across a two-dimensional sheet of paper with lines on it. Let me not kill you?’”
Of course it would be idiotic to assume that you know everything about the terrain because you have a simple depiction of it. To be used properly, a map has to come along with some common sense. If you are going to traverse a mountain range, you better know some mountaineering. Likewise, if you are going to use a thirty-page paper as a guide for studying the past 4 billion years of evolution, you better have a lot more knowledge and background on the subject. Of course, I realize that many evolutionists lack this background, and so I intend to provide longer works that will help a person know how to use this paper as a guide. In some sense, my paper is much like a simple map of the surface of the Mars. Mars still needs to be terraformed by a first wave of extremely tough and exploratory travelers, before it is ready for mass migration.
Finally, the Discovery Institute says that I have erred by portraying natural selection as a force, “It is no more a force than an obstacle course is a force.” I suppose that the Discovery Institute prefers to view natural selection as a sieve. It says, “Material organisms…can just sit there and die…” In other words, the Discovery Institute sees natural selection as a sieve that acts by differential death. Evolutionists also tend to look at natural selection in a similar way, but they generalize differential death to include mating success and fecundity to create a composite function of net reproductive success (NRS). Evolutionists thus tend to object to the force metaphor because they equate natural selection with non-random differences in NRS. However, I do not equate natural selection with non-random differences in NRS, because species and clade-level population increase is important for the long-term course of evolution, but it is not captured by within-species differences in NRS.
Therefore, instead of equating natural selection with differential NRS, I find it convenient to separate natural selection and natural reward as forces. In my view, it is convenient to model natural selection as a force that acts upon traits coded by multilocus genotypes, captured as non-random NRS of organisms with respect to those genotypes. The result of this non-random genotype frequency change is survival of the optimized alleles. In classical mechanics, a force is something that causes an object’s velocity to change. A drill sergeant might provide such a force by pushing a cadet, causing the cadet’s velocity to change. In this case, I am not saying that natural selection is a physical force that causes an object to accelerate. Instead, I am suggesting that natural selection resembles a physical force because it changes the velocity of genotype frequencies, which are otherwise moving around randomly. A similar argument can be made for natural reward.
Therefore, these last two criticisms come from evaluating metaphors as if they were literal statements. This is a tempting rhetorical strategy when there is a history of metaphors that were insufficient to guide macroevolutionary studies. However, Darwin’s metaphors worked for framing microevolutionary studies, meaning that it is also possible that new metaphors could be useful for guiding macroevolutionary studies.
So, the Discovery Institute replied with a thoughtful article that actually spoke to my arguments. Although they did not agree with my alternative theory, their close attention to details allowed me to respond. Importantly, the Discovery Institute seemed to really care about whether evolutionary theory can explain macroevolution.
I will now turn to the evolutionists, who should be huddling in the corner like an ashamed puppy dog. Comments on the Facebook Biodiversity group: (1) “I’ll admit that I can’t quite see the usefulness of the argument at superficial glance.” (2) “I may need to read the paper to be scrupulously fair, but this summary reads like gibberish…” (3) “I’ll need to read this, but it sounds like he’s trying to apply a new term to a set of phenomena that we’ve understood for a very long time now in order to pass it off as something original.” On Phys.org: (1) “The paper…is based on a non-sequitur that biologists analyze selection as teleological.” (2) “’new foundation for biology’ — Oh really? I thought evolution was the foundation and was doing just fine.” (3) “I have not been able to figure out what ‘natural reward’ is supposed to be…” On Reddit: (1) “My opinion – wacko.” (2) “I can’t figure out what the problem is that Natural Reward Theory is intending to fix,” (3) “I saw this article and was immediately suspicious of it…”
I don’t need to define the term dogmatic, because the above comments define the term. The only thoughtful comments on social media that came from non-creationists were from a reddit user named gistya; and Arnaud Martin, who raised a thoughtful question about one section of the paper on Facebook.
Thus, in my encounter with two tribes on social media, the creationists and the evolutionists, I have found that the creationists behaved in a more civilized manner. The creationists adopted a critical mindset, and they questioned whether the big claims of science are really true. In contrast, the evolutionists behaved like savages.
References
Evolution News. Can the natural reward theory save natural selection?
Gilbert, O. M. (2020). Natural reward drives the advancement of life. Rethinking Ecology, 5, 1.
Phys.org. Natural reward theory could provide new foundation for biology.
Quandt EM, Gollihar J, Blount ZD, Ellington AD, Georgiou G, Barrick JE (2015) Fine-tuning citrate synthase flux potentiates and refines metabolic innovation in the Lenski evolution experiment. Elife 4: e09696. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.09696
Reddit. Natural reward theory.
Stebbins GL (1959) The synthetic approach to problems of organic evolution. Cold Springs Harbor Symposium in Quantitative Biology 24: 305–311. https://doi.org/10.1101/SQB.1959.024.01.028
Simpson GG (1949) The Meaning of Evolution. Yale University Press, New Haven, 364 pp.
Tax S, Callender C [Eds] (1960) Evolution after Darwin (Vol. III): Issues in Evolution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Interested in your hypothesis. I’m not sure I fully understand it.
If two male rabbits are born together in a field, and one has a mutation that causes it to create (at no extra cost) a more effective digestive enzyme, on average that rabbit will outreproduce the other. Do you agree?
Do you also agree that this will happen regardless of whether the supply of grass in the field is restricted or abundant?
If so, then if I understand you correctly, you want to give a different name to mutations leading to beneficial changes depending on whether there was restricted grass in the field (‘natural selection’) or abundant grass (‘natural reward’). But it’s the same process both times. Is this just a renaming, a splitting of one concept (natural selection) into two different concepts for some reason?
Dear Jake,
Thank you for your questions. To answer your first question, it depends on whether you are talking about two particular rabbits, or all rabbits that share an allele or gene complex that codes for a more effective digestive enzyme. If you are talking about two particular rabbits, then which outreproduces the other will depend on a host of factors, including which rabbit happens to falls victim to a predator (e.g. hawk, coyote) or parasitoid (e.g., bot fly); or which rabbit is more healthy and adapted to its environment, which may depend on many other genes and gene complexes, and various environmental factors. If you are talking about all rabbits that share a particular allele or gene complex, then the question depends on which you are referring to. If you are referring to all rabbits that share an allele, then you are talking about natural selection and the survival of the optimized allele within a species. If you are talking about all rabbits that have a more effective digestive enzyme coded by a gene complex, then you are talking about natural reward and the success of innovative gene complexes.
To answer your second question, whether grass is abundant in one a particular field has little bearing on how those questions are answered. The answers depend on whether you are talking about particular rabbits, particular alleles, or particular gene complexes.
To answer your third question, it is NOT the same process both times, so it is not a matter of renaming. Natural reward involves a form of competition that happens as a race to innovate. The first to tap a new resource zone expands and diversifies. Its advantage is that it is the first to evolve a diverse and specialized set of species. So if all rabbits with a particular gene complex coding for a more effective enzyme expanded and diversified first, then even if some other small mammal comes along with a better digestive enzyme, it may not be able to displace the rabbits simply because the rabbits got there first, and have an incumbent advantage. However, if a mass extinction event happens, then the small mammals may find themselves in a new struggle for supremacy (now, the resource zone of grasses, shrubs, small trees, etc. being “abundant” with respect to herbivore consumption). If another small mammal has a better digestive enzyme, then it might reproduce more quickly than the rabbits, expand and diversify, and repopulate the resource zones quicker than the rabbits. The other small mammal might ultimately yield a more diverse and specialized set of species than the rabbits ever did. Its better digestive enzyme might allow it to exploit a few additional niches, or more effectively exploit the niches that the rabbits once did. Therefore, the extinction event might facilitate evolutionary progress, by means of expansion; as well as an increase of innovativeness—especially if the small mammal with the more effective digestive enzyme also has other advantages, which allow it to expand into yet other habitats.
Thank you for your full reply. There’s a lot of interesting questions raised here. Rather than try to go into all of them at once, I’d like to kind of go through them slowly, if that’s ok with you?
> If you are referring to all rabbits that share an allele, then you are talking about natural selection
> If you are talking about all rabbits that have a more effective digestive enzyme coded by a gene complex, then you are talking about natural reward
My first question is, I’m not sure why you’re differentiating between alleles and gene complexes. As I understand it (and interested if you see things the same way), a gene complex is just a collection of ‘n’ alleles. Why are you suggesting there is something special about the case where n=1 as opposed to where n>1? After all, you could have a single allele change whose effects are pleiotropic, and which has a much bigger effect on the phenotype than other cases where n>1. By your definitions you’d call the former, larger effect ‘natural selection’ and the latter, smaller effect ‘natural reward’. Is that your intention?
Thanks.
Hello Jake,
In my lingo, a “gene complex” usually has n = 0 variable alleles. For example, a core gene regulatory network will be invariant within the species. There may not even be existing variation between species or higher taxa. But if there is no variation, why would we care about the gene complex?
Take again the example of rabbits, and their ability to eat grass. I don’t know much about how rabbits evolved this ability, so I will speak hypothetically. Let us assume that to digest grass, rabbits needed a digestive enzyme, as well as some particular types of teeth, saliva secretion, and a tweak to the intestinal lining. Thus, for the enzyme to work properly to digest grass, it had to come along with these various other characters also.
Let us assume furthermore that to achieve this novel digestive ability, rabbits had to have the correct alleles at five different loci. Perhaps locus 1 tweaked the digestive enzyme, loci 2 and 3 affected the teeth, locus 4 affects saliva, and locus 5 affects the intestine. How do you get the right combination of alleles at these different loci in the same organism? Moreover, is there any difference between the cause for origin of this “gene complex,” and the cause for its success?
Assuming gradual evolution by allelic substitutions at individual loci, it may be that only the last substitution achieved the novel ability to digest grass. Moreover, it could be that grasslands did not even exist yet, when this novel ability was achieved. It could be that at the time of origin, the novel digestive ability allowed rabbits to better digest shrubs or small trees, and the ability to digest grass was an incidental consequence.
Now consider this: when grasslands appeared, the “gene complex” was already present in an invariant form. It already had the correct 5 alleles at the 5 loci. It was “pre-adapted” for digesting grass, and it seized a resource zone.
My argument is that competition in macroevolution happens as a race to innovate. In this example, the rabbits will win the race, because they already has the ability to digest grass. Over time, this natural reward for being the first to tap a new resource zone favors those organisms that are more capable of evolving or disseminating their “inventions.” It could be that the reason rabbits were pre-adapted, and not some other small mammal, is that they evolved quicker. Some other animal might have gained a similar digestive ability 2 million years later, but by that time it was too late. The rabbits had already conquered the resource zone.
In some other examples, it could be that two organisms have the necessary prerequisite characteristics to tap into some new resource zone, and what distinguishes them is the ability to disperse to it. That would reflect the entrepreneurial side of innovation (rather than the invention / evolvability side).
I have argued that natural reward acts on the random variation of invention produced by natural selection. Natural selection acts through these small and short-sighted steps, as captured by allelic substitutions at individual loci. It has no regard for the future. However, because natural selection can produce complex traits that interact with the environment in various ways, it is possible that “inventions” occur somewhat randomly just like “mutations.” It can thus be useful to invoke a deterministic force of natural reward, which favors those inventions that tap new resource zones and naturally rewards them with an incumbent advantage (so to speak).
I hope this passage helps, though I realize much more explaining will be required.
best,
Owen
Hi Owen
Thanks for your reply. I think I’m starting to see where you’re coming from. If I understand you correctly, you’re suggesting that it’s useful to distinguish two different situations. Situation 1 is where a novel allele is favored because it causes a small change in the phenotype that gives that phenotype a reproductive advantage. Situation 2 is where an organism outbreeds another due to its having an ‘invention’, a very significant difference in phenotype that gives it a reproductive advantage when a new resource zone opens up. You want to give different terms to these two situations, ‘natural selection’ and ‘natural reward’ respectively.
My main question is whether it’s useful to do that.
My first point is the simple (and hopefully not facetiously so) point that sometimes having single terms is a good thing and sometimes it’s not. For example, I’m sure we can agree that having separate terms for ‘oranges’ and ‘houses’, rather than one term ‘honges’ that can refer to either, is a good thing. The reason of course is that oranges and houses are very different things, and there’s no obvious scenario in which you would want to refer to something that’s either an orange or a house but nothing else. It’s just not a useful grouping. On the other hand, I think we can agree that it’s useful to have a single term for ‘gravity’, rather than having ‘Monday gravity’, ‘Tuesday gravity’, ‘Wednesday gravity’ and so on. The reason again is obvious. It’s the same force operating on every day of the week. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which we would want to distinguish the operation of gravity on Mondays from the operation of gravity on Wednesdays.
So what I want to consider is the extent to which it’s useful to have two separate terms ‘natural selection’ and ‘natural reward’.
Of course the argument for it would be that there are two different things going on in reality, so there should be different terms. Let’s go into it.
1) Inventions and mutations
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> it is possible that “inventions” occur somewhat randomly just like “mutations.”
If I understand you correctly, you’re making a distinction between “inventions” and “mutations”. Inventions are the phenotypic result of entire gene complexes, whereas beneficial mutations just give rise to small phenotypic differences. I’m not sure that you’ve specified a term for these small phenotypic differences, but can we call them ‘improvements’ perhaps? By your definitions, natural selection involves the winning of ‘improvements’ whereas natural reward involves the winning of ‘inventions’.
I must admit that I can’t see any reason for seeing a difference between an ‘improvement’ (a small beneficial phenotypic difference) and an ‘invention’ (a large beneficial phenotypic difference) except one of scale. Isn’t this like the difference between a small orange and a large orange or between a small house and a large house, rather than between a house and an orange? Wouldn’t it be perfectly sensible and parsimonious to call every beneficial phenotypic difference an ‘invention’? After all, a slightly more pointy tooth that cuts meat better is an invention, but could easily result from a point mutation.
If you use separate terms, ‘improvement’ for small changes and ‘invention’ for bigger ones, you open yourself up to all kinds of problems. Exactly how big does an improvement need to be before it qualifies as an invention? Do you measure it by weight, by volume, by cost, by benefit or what? Do you really want to have endless discussions about whether this tooth change consitutes an ‘improvement’ or an ‘invention’?
Much easier to call them all ‘beneficial phenotypic differences’ and leave it at that. What benefit are you gaining by having two separate terms?
2) Mutations and genotypes
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I suspect your answer to my improvement/invention question above might be that the key difference between them is that one is caused by a point mutation, and one refers to entire differences of gene complexes.
But the precise genes that build the phenotype are surely irrelevant. The reproductive results an organism gets are a function of its phenotype and its environment. Whether a phenotype, once built, is successful in its environment is in no way causally influenced by the genes that built it (obviously aside cases where a gene continues to modify the phenotype, but this is a subtlety not relevant to our discussion). What benefit is gained by having two terms that depend for their application on an irrelevant factor? It’s like saying there’s a difference between a house built from paper blueprints and a house built from blueprints on a computer. The same house results, with the same features and the same affordances.
You might argue that as a matter of fact, phenotypic differences stemming from a whole gene-complex difference are more substantial than those stemming from a point mutation.
But is that really the case? Consider atavisms. For your readers that aren’t familiar with them, an atavism is a gene complex that used to build something in the organism’s history (for example a tail), but which at some point stopped being expressed in the phenotype (eg humans losing the tails their ancestors had). In some organisms’ genomes, this gene complex is still present, just not expressed, for example because the chemical required to start off the required developmental cascade is no longer being manufactured. Sometimes it only requires a single point mutation to start manufacturing that chemical again, and the whole feature is reproduced. Thus some human babies are born with long tails, or develop large teeth similar to those of our primate ancestors.
Depending on the current environment, the appearance of an atavism could be superbly beneficial. Suppose grass has got tougher due to global warming. An atavism in a rabbit that gave it the larger teeth that it hypothetically used to have could well give it a significant advantage over its peers.
But now you’ve got something that by any sensible definition is an invention, but it’s caused by a single point mutation.
As noted above, I’m not convinced it makes sense to tie the definition of invention to its genetic origins at all, but let’s assume there is case for it. What benefit do you gain by tying the definition of ‘invention’ to a gene complex, rather than any genetic change including point mutations, especially when as in the example of atavisms, a point mutation can produce something that otherwise would clearly qualify as an invention? It feels like an arbitrary and counterproductive distinction.
3) Abundant resources versus limited resources
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By your terminology, when one phenotype is outreproducing another, ‘natural reward’ can only happen when resources are abundant, otherwise the term ‘natural selection’ should be used.
As noted above, you’re of course free to define your terms that way, but is it a useful distinction to make?
> My argument is that competition in macroevolution happens as a race to innovate.
> It can thus be useful to invoke a deterministic force of natural reward, which favors those inventions that tap new resource zones and naturally rewards them with an incumbent advantage (so to speak)
If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that when resources are abundant, a certain phenotypic feature may cause one organism to exploit those novel resources first and give it the advantages that accrue to the occupier of a niche.
I of course agree with you. If we gave a new field full of lush grass to lots of rabbit-like organisms, the ones best suited to exploiting that environment would reproduce the most rapidly and by their presence make it difficult for other organisms to invade their niche.
My question is, how materially different is that from what is going on everywhere in the world anyway? After all, a tree might be occupied by one type of monkey. If a stronger monkey (one with a stronger phenotype) comes along, it may oust the other monkey from the tree and now it has the advantage of being the incumbent.
Superior phenotypes by definition have some causal results that lead to their improved reproduction. Why have a separate term just for the situation where there were no competitors in picture first? Slightly facetious, but why not have “natural arboration” for the process of one phenotype gaining control of trees and “natural lakation” for a phenotype ousting competitors from lakes and ponds?
My point is that, viewed abstractly, the same thing is going on all over the world regardless of the abundance or otherwise of resources – some phenotypes are outreproducing other phenotypes by virtue of their phenotypic difference. This of course is the modern definition natural selection – “the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype”. Your term ‘natural reward’, I would argue, identifies a subset of the situations covered by the term ‘natural selection’ rather than presenting an alternative process to natural selection.
Summary
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It’s not clear to me why you want to exclude from the very useful definition of natural selection – “the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype” – the cases where it covers large phenotypic differences in environments of abundant resources. It seems like an arbitrary exclusion to make, like saying let’s exclude from the definition of gravity the times when it’s operating on Sundays and give that a different name. Of course, we’re free to do that, but it’s not useful as it muddies clear waters and forces intellectual acrobatics when trying to say whether gravity is operating or not in a given scenario.
I could see a case for having a particular term that covers the situation where organisms suddenly find themselves in unoccupied territory, and ‘natural reward’ is fine for that. After all, there’s lots of useful terms that cover situations that recur when phenotypes interact with their environment (‘allopatric speciation’, ‘assortative mating’, ‘character displacement’, ‘niche differentiation’ etc)
But I don’t see any case for suggesting that the behaviour of organisms in new territory in some way involves something happening that is not neatly covered by the existing parsimonious definition of natural selection – “the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype”. I don’t see the utility in modifying a definition that successfully operates at a very high level of abstraction so that it covers less cases. After all, I would suggest the goal of science is to try to capture regularities parsimoniously rather than using separate terms to cover every instance of phenomena. The further one moves along this continuum towards parsimony while maintaining accuracy, the more powerful and useful a theory is.
Dear Jake,
Thank you for your additional comments.
At this point, what I am going to do is write a new blog post that addresses the role of metaphor in the theories of natural selection and natural reward. I believe that your beef with the theory of natural reward comes from defining natural selection as a literal concept with a precise definition. In contrast, Darwin used natural selection as a metaphor.
My blog post will explain why that natural selection is much more powerfully used as a metaphor. I will also review how the theory of natural reward employs metaphor and has implications also for definitions of terms. To speak to your question of economizing the theory by dispensing with superfluous terms, I will explain how the theory of natural reward can allow us to rid evolutionary theory of a one term that has confused biologists for a century.
After I publish the blog post, we can continue this discussion in the comments.
cheers,
Owen
Hi Owen
Thanks for your reply.
I must admit I’m a little surprised by your response. To my mind, the holy grail of science is arriving at “literal concept[s] with a precise definition”, arriving at ever more precise definitions that allow us to understand our world more closely and take successful actions within it. Newtonian mechanics and other literal concepts with precise definitions that have enabled flying to and landing on the moon, Mars, etc. Concepts in medicine like germ theory that have saved millions of lives, and so on.
Metaphor by comparison is weak sauce. Saying “A is like B” is much less useful statement scientifically than “A is B” or “A causes B”. The reason is that if A is only “like” B, then there are differences between A and B by definition, and the more deeply one acts as if A _is_ B, the more one will run foul of the cases where A is _not_ like B. As George Eliot puts it:
> Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
I am skeptical that a powerful explanatory concept with a precise definition, such as the modern definition of natural selection, is better supplanted with a less literal or less precise definition and used as a metaphor. If I were to approach NASA and tell them that I had a superior way of calculating the trajectory of rockets, which used a metaphor for gravity, rather than the known rigorous equations that accurately predict gravity itself, it is unlikely they would take me seriously.
However, I am happy to (try to!) keep an open mind. I wonder if perhaps you have different ideas about the utility of science of something? Perhaps for you the end goal is not to arrive at accurate knowledge but something else?
Certainly, metaphor might help us expand our imagination and go beyond the known into areas we hadn’t considered before. As a sort of _exploratory_ strategy I can see it having value, but those forays into the unknown are then much better supplanted with literal concepts with precise definitions. There is superior utility in having accurate knowledge about a domain rather than having familiarity with it merely through metaphor. It’s also very dangerous to explain things in terms of metaphor. For example, sometimes it is suggested that the flow of water in a pipe makes a good analogy for electricity. However, as this electrical engineer makes clear on quora, https://www.quora.com/Is-water-flow-through-a-pipe-a-good-analogy-for-current-flow-in-an-electric-circuit , it quickly leads to problems because of the differences:
> When does the water analogy for electric circuits break down?
> Like any analogy, there are always places where the comparison breaks down essentially immediately. As Ned noted, there’s no water analog to fields, and yet fields are really what’s at the heart of even the most basic electrical phenomenon. Hence there are no antennas possible in the “water analog” world, no transformers, and reactive effects (capacitance and inductance) are modeled only in a very, very crude manner. And one of the most fundamental differences is one which leads to a very common misconception about electricity, which is that it’s due to electrons “flowing” through a circuit the way water flows through a pipe, which isn’t the case at all. So this analogy might be useful in a few very, very simple cases, but it’s good to get away from it and to an intuitive understanding of electricity which is more fields-based as quickly as you can.
At any rate, I’m sure it will be an interesting discussion. Look forward to your post.