Re: Findings on Hostility at Smithsonian Noted in NRO Article

[Ed Brayton]

Gene Summerlin wrote: Ed, There is a huge difference between mutation creating variation which combined with natural selection results in a given population and saying that genetic mutations can take an organism from being a fish to being a giraffe.  Even with respect to variation, genetic variation for many phenotypical traits do not involve mutations as much as it involves a statistical result from a number of given possible outcomes.  Again, we could fight about this all day.  I think that from a genetics standpoint your argument that mutations can result in different species is impossible to defend.  You disagree with me.  Fine, but this is not the forum in which to have that fight. Again, you are attacking a caricature of evolution. No one - I repeat, no one - thinks that "genetic mutations can take an organism from being a fish to being a giraffe". Mutation is only the primary source of variation (not the only source because, as you point out, there is also natural variation that occurs through recombination, which is the hallmark of diploid species and likely the reason that sexual reproduction is the dominant form of reproduction in the natural world). Natural selection is the primary means of preserving useful variations, but not the only means (there are also genetic drift, species selection and others). But no one in the world, ever, under any circumstances, has taken the position that you object to. So when you say that my position is "impossible to defend", you aren't talking about my position, you are talking about a simplistic parody that not only do I not take, but no one anywhere takes. This is the very definition of beating up a straw man. Evolution says that speciation is the result of not only mutations, but natural selection combined with other non-adaptive mechanisms and reproductive isolation over time. You're not attacking evolution, you're attacking a crude and simplistic cartoon version of evolution that has nothing to do with the real world. Ed Brayton

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