Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100
Joined: May 2006
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This by Coyne bothers me (comment 2 by BA, quot[min]ing Coyne, "Dr. No on Evolution"):
| Quote | [T]ruth be told, evolution hasn’t yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn’t evolution helped guide animal and plant breeding? Not very much. Most improvement in crop plants and animals occurred long before we knew anything about evolution, and came about by people following the genetic principle of ‘like begets like’. Even now, as its practitioners admit, the field of quantitative genetics has been of little value in helping improve varieties. Future advances will almost certainly come from transgenics, which is not based on evolution at all.
(Jerry Coyne, “Selling Darwin: Does it matter whether evolution has any commercial applications?,” reviewing The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life by David P. Mindell, in Nature, 442:983-984 (August 31, 2006).) |
Of course it is a quotemine, and Coyne went on to mention evolution's explanatory value. Here is the same, but with more context. I believe that he has backed away from it some since then, as well. But even Coyne's mention of the explanatory value of evolution shorts the practical value of having an explanatory model like evolution. The comparison I'd like to make is with language evolution.
Now clearly our understanding that English evolved from Germanic roots (with a heavy French influx in vocabulary) and, those from Indo-European hasn't led to many directly practical or economic benefits, but understanding English necessarily involves understanding at least its more recent evolution. Why do we have the plural "mice" for "mouse," and why are wedded couples pronounced "man and wife" (wife used to simply mean "woman")?
Of course one needn't understand language evolution in order to use language. But how would anyone really come to understand English without recognizing language and how it evolved, or teach it properly without such an understanding? Likewise, a neurologist needn't really accept evolution (even more so since brain evolution isn't as well understood as evolution of most of the rest of the body), but I'd hate for Carson to try to explain the descent of the testes without using (unintelligent) evolution to do so. As for a president, I wouldn't think that accepting evolution would be essential, but one hates to see one in scientific denial in partial control of the science budget (imagine O'Leary budgeting science research).
Dobzhansky was clearly more correct, that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. I've seen Massimo-Piglucci argue against that claim (physiology makes no sense without referencing evolution?), as if it were an absolute claim, rather than an aphorism. Well, his problem. We know biology via evolution, and it is useful to know biology.
Why have medical researchers cared about the mouse genome more so than, say, the chicken genome? Because the extent and ways in which mice have diverged from us matters to medical research that often tests on mice prior to human testing. It's "just explanation," but that explanation has practical effects in science, in fact.
Glen Davidson
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http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p....p
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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