David Coppege makes it clear a refresher course is needed

A frequent contributor of posts at the Discovery Institute’s site “Science and Culture Today”, David Coppege, has sternly lectured us evolutionary biologists: we “need a refresher course in natural selection”. He is really trying to straighten us out, wagging finger and all.

I agree that someone needs a refresher, but in this case think it’s David Coppege. Did he ever get “freshed” in the first case?

Let’s look at the points he made, and see whether any of them are misconceptions, particularly ones we have exposed here as misconceptions, long before Coppege’s call for a refresher course.

Coppege sets out his task thusly:

Abuses of the concept of natural selection abound not only in science news articles but in research papers in major scientific journals as well. It’s time for a remedial course.

At best, natural selection allows the fortunate to continue existing. I say fortunate, because a mindless process could not care what exists or not, and there is no guarantee that survivors will represent an improvement over what existed before; the survivors might be lucky bums. At worst, natural selection (hereafter NS) commits the fallacy of personification, ascribing the power of choice to impersonal happenstance. This makes as much sense as speaking of “natural voting.” NS doesn’t care who wins. NS is not a person. Extinction is just as valid an outcome of “selection” as innovating a new organ, eye, or wing. Other blatant cases of personification can be found in descriptions of NS as a “blind watchmaker” or a “tinkerer” or a “driver” and in Dawkins’ concept of “selfish genes.”

Before continuing, clear your mind of any idea of foresight, plan, or purpose as we consider what natural selection means and does not mean. Notice I do not call NS a process. The word “process” carries with it the baggage of programming or an algorithm. NS has neither.

Oy! “impersonal happenstance” does not tend to result in organisms with greater fitness? The particular happenstances that we talk about when we call them natural selection certainly do. Fitness is a combination of viability and fertility. And when an indvidual has higher fitness, it survives better and/or has greater fertility. Its descendants are better-represented in the next generation. By definition. No personification needed. It is just a matter of bookkeeping. And that bookkeeping results in changes in the genetic composition of the population.

Wasn’t Coppege taught this in his high school (secondary school) biology class? Or in college? He has a B.S. degree in science education. Maybe he missed a few lectures. The university where he studied was Bob Jones University. Maybe there was no good lecture on natural selection.

Coppege then says that none of the following forms of “selection” (which he uses with those scare quotes) can “add new functional information”. (Note that functional information, as defined by Jack Szostak, Robert Hazen, and colleagues, means any change in the genomes of the population that gives the organisms higher fitness).

Artificial selection. By definition, this can only be done by intelligent design. Darwin was notorious for analogizing human breeding into an argument for natural selection. As Robert Shedinger shows in his book Darwin’s Bluff, Darwin never corrected this fallacy even when it was pointed out to him. Artificial selection includes so-called “directed evolution” experiments that employ random variations, because the “selector” is a human with foresight.

This is confused. Coppege is mad at Darwin for analogizing natural selection to artificial selection. And Darwin did not “correct” himself. Probably because Darwin did not agree that he had been incorrect. Coppege knows artificial selection works, and wants us to ignore the conclusion that natural selection – situations where a character has higher or lower fitnesses depending on its value – would by direct analogy, result in change.

For an explanation of why artificial selection is not a form of intelligent design, but is more similar to natural selection, see my post of 15 September 2024 at PT.

Coppege again:

Negative selection. This only eliminates information or weeds out the “unfit.”

In standard information theory,there is no difference between choosing an outcome or eliminating all other outcomes. In evolutionary biology we are interested in the frequencies of genotypes in the population. If you kill off some, then the fraction of the population that consists of the other genotypes gets larger. And of course species have an excess of offspring, so the unfit are then replaced.

Purifying selection, stabilizing selection, and balancing selection. These only remove harmful variations or preserve existing information.

Same problem with Coppege’s argument.

And we have already had a post at PT on this, my post of 6 June 2023 at PT

Conservation. Genes that have been “conserved” over time imply that nothing has evolved.

If they’re not completely conserved, then they are evidence both for common ancestry and for change since then.

Hybridization. This combines existing information but does not add information. Introgression. This inserts existing information from another source. Same with horizontal gene transfer.

These may form the basis for extra change by natural selection. In general large genome changes like this are deleterious, but they can occasionally be preserved if the new genomes are advantageous. The ID-friendly biologist James Shapiro seems to think they are “natural genetic engineering” which somehow always comes up with the very changes that are needed. How it knows to do this, Shapiro does not explain.

Genetic drift. This is neutral variation without innovation, foresight or purpose. As geneticist John Sanford has shown, the accumulation of non-lethal mutations leads to genetic entropy, which trends toward extinction.

I’m not sure anyone thinks genetic drift, by itself, has a tendency to make adaptive change. It can cause the genotypes to wander into an area of genotypic space that has new peaks. But it can equally-well do the opposite.

And so on …

Polyploidy and gene duplication. These events merely copy existing information. Subfunctionalization. Splitting functions of a gene into two genes adds no information. Co-option. This is a question-begging concept wrapped in personification. It portrays organisms borrowing existing information and repurposing it for another function.

Evolutionists sometimes claim that items in the above list, particularly 5 through 9, help the theory because they create opportunities for evolution. This is like saying that duplicating a dictionary, or splitting it in half, allows for new words with new meanings to “emerge.” Such question-begging is unlikely to convince a critical thinker.

The dictionary example is particularly lame.

Does Positive Selection Exist?

The rest of Coppege’s post is a diatribe about how positive selection can only succeed if it can bring about “voluminous instances of innovation”. This is the same old argument we have seen many times from ID advocates and creationists. Coppege actually admits that positive selection exists while trying to make it sound as if it can’t accomplish anything of interest.

He ends by citing some examples of biologists invoking selection too broadly. He would be in a better place to lecture them, if he had a better understanding of natural selection.