Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast of the center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute.
I'm Paul Nelson, a fellow of the center, and today I'm joined from Cologne, Germany by biologist wolf Eckhart Lernig. Dr. Lernig is a retired geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research in Cologne. Thank you for being with us today.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: Dr. Lernig, thank you for inviting me and having me.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Recently there was a debate held in Canada between Steve Meyer of the Discovery Institute and Lawrence Krauss, a physicist, and the issue of the randomness of natural selection came up. This is a very important topic, both for the understanding of natural selection, but also for considering possible alternatives to that process and to its role within neo Darwinian evolutionary theory. So let me ask you, first of all, does the process of natural selection include what we might call an inescapable element of randomness?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Well, that's a very interesting, very good question.
You know that usually there's an enormous amount of polemics against any connection between natural selection and randomness, and especially by Richard Dawkins and many others, and law enforcement, which you have just mentioned.
And. Well, Dawkins is, according to a poll of 2013, the world's top thinker and he is especially fond of denying the connection between randomness and natural selection.
But the point is that we have an appallingly great reproductive powers of living being, as Dob Chomsky said it in 1937, and he mentioned some examples like the fungus nicopathy and Bovista producing 700 billion spores and Zofia nicotiana tarbacum, respectively, 730,000 360,000 seed salmon, 28 million eggs per season, the American oyster, 115 million eggs in a single spawning.
And so he was really correct saying, quote, death and destruction of a majority of all of the individuals produced undoubtedly takes place.
So, well, that question was of course, well, dude, from these enormous numbers of progeny are only the very best surviving these reproduce because if a population is to remain numerically stationary, only a very few can reproduce.
And that's why some French biologists have raised the question, as I quoted in the post on Evolution News and Views by Quinault, that the example of the green frog out of 120,000 fertilized eggs of the green frog, quote, 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 Quinot said, that natural selection is nothing but blind mortality, which lacks nothing at all. This is the other extreme in the opinion on natural selection.
But now transfer these questions to the 700 billion spores of lycoperedon or the 140 million eggs multiplied with the number of spawning seasons of the American oyster and so on. And then it is inescapable that a large number of these are due to a random process of, of illumination. And so there is without a doubt a strong element of randomness in natural selection.
And especially so when you think of the neo Darwinian interpretation of selection.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Yes, and it seems that the challenge to the neo Darwinian view of evolution is that in order to find novel structures and functions, the process must search in a very large space.
But because it's doing so without direction, it is unlikely to hit the functional targets. Can you say something about that? The search spaces involved are enormous.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: First, I would like to point out that usually they count with new alleles with even less than 1% selective advantage.
And there has been a long tradition in population genetics to stipulate the numbers how many can survive. And well, there was Fischer in, Dobchansky, Schmidt, Rabin and others, Futuyima, Maynard Smith. They all came to the conclusion that to quote directly griffiths the chance a mutation that is 1% better in fitness than the standard deviation in the population will be lost 98% of the time by genetic drift.
So if 98% of the time are lost by genetic drift with a 1% advantage, well, Fisher stipulated in more than 90% in the next 33 generations will be lost.
So there must be of necessity a strong element of randomness in natural selection, especially as you just pointed out, in this vast space of, as Richard Dawkins formulated, quote, if you think of all possible ways of arranging bits of an animal, almost all of them would turn out to be dead. Yes, more accurately, they'd mostly never be born.
Each species of animal plant is an island of workability set in a vast sea of inconceivable arrangements, most of which would, if they ever came to existence, die. And then also one must consider that the enormous numbers just quoted for some organisms, well, it is the juvenile stages where the loss is most important.
And so most of these will never come to an adult stage in which they reproduce. So an enormous amount of individuals is simply lost due to random situations.
And that why I stress that point that there's the hiding places in, say, speaking of mammals, for example, of predator and prey, distance between them, local differences of biotopes, geographical circumstances, weather conditions, microclimates, all belong to the repertoire of infinitely varying parameters. So necessarily coincidence, accidents and chance occurrences are strongly significant in the life of all individual species, especially so in the juvenile stages. And then there's also the effect of modifications which are by definition non heritable.
And. Well, a textbook example typical is take a young dandelion, cut it in half, plant it in the lower end and the other half in the high mountains, and you will have strongly different plants, one where they are different in size three times the lowland form is larger, the leaves, the flowers are larger, and if you compare them with the hyaline form, you will find enormous differences. And these are all non heritable.
So these modifications may be much more powerful than the effects of mutations which have only slight or even invisible effects of the phenotype, which is always stressed and emphasized by Meier and many others, by Dawkins also.
So there must of necessity be an enormous amount of randomness in natural selection.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: Do you think that introducing randomness into biological explanation when we are dealing with complex structures and the origin of novelty, do you think that randomness creates a problem for biologists when they try to explain how things came to be?
[00:09:31] Speaker B: Well, the point is that randomness is often viewed very negatively. Yes, I have here some Casaubo's definitions.
Proceeding, made or occurring without definite aim, without definite reason.
Then it is of course in slang, it is also unknown, identified while these negative overtones to sell such a theory to the public and stressing randomness as Jacques Monod, the French Nobel laureate, seems to be counterproductible.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Jacques Monod, in Chance and necessity, near the end of the book, says our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.
In other words, he, for philosophical reasons makes it very clear that the only options open to a biologist to explain life are chance and necessity.
And for that reason he says, we must rely on a significant inescapable element of. In English we call it luck.
But I think many people, both lay people and scientists, regard that as implausible. Can you say why you think that relying on randomness or luck or the Monte Carlo outcome is implausible?
[00:11:04] Speaker B: Well, if you look at an animal, if you look at human beings, if you look at any organ normally functioning all in a human being, it's. It is so well designed that immediately, that's a thought which occurs to almost everybody immediately, without reflection, these structures working together, consisting of many different parts attuned to each other, and then an explanation like randomness as the origin of all these structures and forms which called most beautiful. Well, they are really most beautiful, but to explain them by an endless series of accidental mutations doesn't seem reasonable at first glance at least. And so I think that is an important point. That's why in the studying strategy or the propaganda to sell Darwinism, that's why they shrink back from these points. But these things are really so obvious that there is an enormous amount of randomness evolved about this. It contradicts the immediate impression. If you take any textbook of human anatomy or animal anatomy, or in the posterior we have that beautiful cat, that cheetah.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: And well, just to explain it by this endless series of even small or even effects on the mutations, with small or even effects on the phenotype. This is something which is hard to digest for any unbiased people.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: You know, I think you're right and I think that evolutionary biologists themselves feel that same intuition looking at the astonishing co adaptation and complexity of all living things, from bacteria right on up to the mightiest redwood or blue whale.
So I think that what we see in the debate about the cogency of neo Darwinism and the attempt to avoid randomness is really a response to a deep seated intuition that all human beings have. And I think Dawkins is right about this. Living things occupy tiny neighborhoods of functionality in enormous spaces of non function. As he put it so beautifully in the Blind Watchmaker. There are many more ways of being dead than alive. The possible arrangement.
Yeah. So I think that gives us some insight into why randomness is such a controversial topic in these debates.
And I thank you for identifying some of the key features of neo Darwinian theory with respect to the enormous number of possibilities that are out there.
For any living thing, randomness is in a sense the enemy. Organisms do what they can to, for instance, as they're transmitting their genetic information, maintain its fidelity against the degrading processes of mutation and so forth.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: I say something?
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:34] Speaker B: This is just. We have just touched some of these things and there's much more to be said I would like to say to the hero of that podcast. Have a look please at these posts and especially on the other many other topics which are discussed in connection with these things in my encyclopedia article which is referenced in the post of Evolution News and Views.
[00:15:01] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Once again, this is Paul Nelson coming to you from the center for Science and Culture of the Discovery Institute. And we thank Wolf Eckhart Lernig for joining us today from Cologne, Germany.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: I thank you, Paul Nelson, for this interesting discussion and I hope in the.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Future we can continue our discussion on this topic. Thank you. So much.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: Thanks. You too.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for science and culture. ID the Future's Copyright Discovery Institute 2016.
For more information, visit intelligent design.org or idthefuture.com.
[00:15:49] Speaker B: SAM.
