Chapter 112 19.1 Incompleteness of Darwin's theory of evolution

"It's utterly wrong. As wrong as infectious disease medicine before Pasteur. As wrong as phrenology. All its important beliefs are wrong," said the outspoken Lynn Margulies, she's talking about her latest target: the Darwinian belief in evolution. Margulies has said right before about "what's wrong". In 1965, she put forward the astonishing thesis of the symbiotic origin of eukaryotic cells, which shook the microbiology circle at that time.Her claim that bacteria roaming the eukaryotic mesenchyme joined forces to form cells defied conventional theorists. In 1974, Margulies once again shocked mainstream biology.She (with James Lovelock) proposed the idea that the Earth's atmospheric formation, geological changes, and biological processes are so interconnected that they act as a single living, self-regulating system— Gaia.Now, Margulies is publicly attacking the century-old modern framework of Darwinism.Darwinian evolution holds that new species form through a linear process of uninterrupted, gradual, independent and random variation.

Margulies is not alone in challenging the bastion of Darwinian theory, but few are as naked as she is.To the uninformed public, opposing Darwin seemed to agree with creationism; and the possible stain on the scientist's reputation was the weakness of evolution skeptics, which, combined with Darwin's aggressive genius, made Almost all challengers backed off, and only the most reckless heretics dared to openly question Darwin's theory. What sparked Margulies' research interest was the apparent incompleteness of Darwin's theory of evolution.What's wrong with Darwin's theory, she argues, is that it ignores some things and wrongly emphasizes others.

There are microbiologists, geneticists, theoretical biologists, mathematicians, and computer scientists who are proposing that there is more to life than Darwinism says it does.They didn't reject the theory that Darwin had contributed; what they wanted to do was go beyond what Darwin had already done.I call them "post-Darwinists".Neither Lynn Margulies nor any post-Darwinist denies that natural selection prevails in evolution.Their objection was directed at the fact that Darwin's argument had such a sweeping, intolerable nature that in the end it explained nothing at all; Explaining what we see is no longer enough.The major issue raised by post-Darwinist scholars is: Where is the applicable limit of natural selection?What can't be accomplished by evolution?And if there are indeed limits to the natural selection that nature, the blind watchmaker, has let loose, what other forces are at work, within or outside of evolution as we understand it?

Contemporary evolutionary biologists generally believe that everything we see in nature can be explained by the basic process of "natural selection".In academic jargon, this position might be called selectionism.This is the almost universally accepted position of biologists active today.This position is more extreme than Darwin himself held at the time, so it is sometimes called neo-Darwinism. As far as the search for artificial evolution is concerned, the limits of natural selection, if any, or of evolution in general, are of great practical importance.We hope that the process of artificial evolution will generate infinite diversity, but so far, it has not been easy to achieve.We want to extend the dynamics of natural selection to large systems of many scales, but we don't know how far it can go.We would like to have an artificial evolution over which we have slightly more control than we have over organic evolution.Is this possible?

It is questions like these that prompt post-Darwinists to reconsider alternative theories of evolution—many that predated Darwin, but were overshadowed by the dazzling light of Darwin's theories.Following the law of survival of the fittest that extends to the realm of intelligence, contemporary biology pays little attention to these "inferior" losing theories, and they end up surviving in obscure tomes that are out of print.However, some ideas in these pioneering theories of the year are well suited to the new application environment of artificial evolution, so they are carefully revived and tested.

When Darwin first published it in 1859, despite his relentless efforts to convince his colleagues, the most prestigious naturalists and geologists of the era were hesitant to accept his theory in its entirety.They embraced Darwin's theory of transmutation -- "improved succession," or the idea that new species evolve gradually from preexisting species.However, they are still skeptical about his theory of natural selection to explain the mechanism of evolution-that is, everything is only caused by random and cumulative small progress-because they feel that Darwin's theory does not accurately correspond to natural reality, and that It is a reality that they are all too familiar with, and the research methods they use are rare in this age; Not doing research in nature.But because they could neither find overwhelming disproofs nor offer equally high-quality alternative theories, their powerful critiques were ultimately buried in correspondence and academic debate.

Darwin also failed to provide some specific mechanism to explain how the "natural selection" he proposed occurred.He knew nothing about genetic factors research, which was just emerging at the time.In the fifty years after the publication of Darwin's masterpiece, various supplementary theories about the theory of evolution emerged in an endless stream. It was not until the concept of "gene" and later "DNA" was discovered and established that Darwin's theory truly gained a dominant position.In fact, almost all of the radical evolutionary ideas we see today can be traced back to some time between the time Darwin published his theory and the time it was accepted as dogma. The thinker finds its roots there.

No one knew better than Darwin himself the weaknesses of Darwin's theory.One example Darwin offered to illustrate the difficulties his theory encountered was the highly complex human eye (an example that has been used by every critic of Darwin's theory since then).The delicately designed and interacting structures of the lens, iris, retina, etc. do seem to challenge the credibility of Darwin's "slight, progressive" random improvement mechanism.As Darwin wrote to his American friend Asa Gray: "I agree with you about the weakness. To this day the eyes still make me shudder." Gray's difficulty was that he could not think What use would certain parts be in an eye that was not fully evolved, that is, he could not think of a retina without a lens to match it, or conversely, a lens without a retina to match its own What is the use of them.And since organisms don't hoard their inventions ("Hey, wait until the Cretaceous and this stuff will work!"), each stage of species advancement has to be immediately usable and effective.For every breakthrough, it must be a successful debut.Not even intelligent human beings can stay committed to planning for finicky needs so far in the future.Taking this as an example, nature with such extraordinary creativity seems to have a divine Creator behind it.

We can already see that "microevolutionary" change in the process of domestication - those beans with particularly large pods will breed beans with even larger pods, or, shorter horses will produce shorter ones. horse.Well, let's imagine, Darwin said, and let's make an extrapolation from what we've seen.If we generalize these small changes due to artificial selection over millions of years, then when we add up all these small differences, what we see is a fundamental change.The changes, Darwin said, are the changes that make bacteria into coral reefs and armadillos, incremental small changes.And what Darwin wants us to do is to extend the logical rationality of this small change all the way to the point where it can be applied to the scale of space and time of the earth and natural history.

Darwin's argument that natural selection can be extended to explain all living things is a claim based on logical reasoning.However, human imagination and past experience let people know that what is logical may not be the truth.Being logical is only a necessary condition for being true, but not a sufficient condition for being true.Neo-Darwinism ascribes every flap of a butterfly's wing, every curve of a leaf, every species of fish to adaptive selection.There seems to be nothing that cannot be attributed to the result of adaptation.But, as Richard Levanton, the famous neo-Darwinist, puts it, "just because natural selection can explain everything, it really doesn't explain anything".

Biologists cannot (or at least not yet) rule out the possibility that other forces are at work in nature, producing similar effects to natural selection in evolution.Thus, until "evolution" can be replicated in the field or in the laboratory under controlled conditions, neo-Darwinism remains just a nice "should be" story; More like history than science.The philosopher of science Karl Popper outright argued that neo-Darwinism is not science at all because it cannot be falsified. "Neither Darwin nor any Darwinian has hitherto been able to provide a concrete, tangible causal explanation for the adaptive evolution of any single organism or any single organ. All arguments— — quite a few [sic] — are simply saying that this explanation is possible, meaning that [these theories] are not logically impossible.” Life forms have a causal conundrum.Any co-evolving organism appears to have created itself.In this way, the work of establishing causal relationship between them is extremely onerous.Part of the task of seeking a more complete explanation for evolution is to seek a more complete logical explanation for the complexity of nature and the rules by which entities emerge from networks of parts.In addition, the research on artificial evolution (which is still mainly done through computer simulation) is actually tied to a new scientific proof method to a large extent.Before the large-scale application of computers, science consisted of two aspects: theory and experiment.A theory constructs an experiment, and experiments either confirm or disprove the theory. However, a third way of doing scientific work was born in the computer: simulation.A simulation is both theory and experiment at the same time.In fact, when we run a computer model (say, Tom Ray's model of artificial evolution), we're not only testing a theory, we're making something real work, and Falsifiable data are constantly accumulating.Figuring out causality in complex systems has always been a difficult problem, but perhaps this new way of understanding—the study of reality by building surrogates of models that work successfully—will allow us to bypass such a dilemma situation. Artificial evolution was once a simulation of natural evolution, but now it has carved out a world of its own.