It is a cold, hard reality of the current design debate that we have to say this, but Tufts University biologist Michael Levin is NOT a proponent of intelligent design. Nor did he approve, or review, what follows. Levin occupies his own unique territory in theoretical biology, although — to his delight — since his coming to prominence over the past few years, many like-minded scientists and philosophers have sought Levin out, to pool their ideas with his, and see how the rich bouillabaisse tastes after all the seafood, spices, and vegetables have a chance to simmer on the stovetop. (Anticipating the holidays, with their surfeit of food and drink, forgive the cooking metaphors.)
You’ve got that, loud and clear, right? Professor Levin didn’t okay this beforehand. He doesn’t know a thing about it.
Good Old-Fashioned Courage
Nonetheless, we think he would be happy that you’re reading it. Levin has the gift, not only of scientific creativity, but of good old-fashioned courage. Check out a new article, “Evolution by natural induction,” open access at the Royal Society’s Interface Focus, co-written with his fellow new-idea gourmands Tim Lewens and Richard Watson.
Below is a sample, which — like so much of their work recently — shows that Levin, Watson, and their colleagues are unintimidated by bullies such as Jerry Coyne, Brian Charlesworth, or Richard Dawkins, who labor to forestall a crackup on the orthodox evolutionary team. Watson, Levin, and Lewens start by imagining the sort of neo-Darwinian reply they’d be likely to receive for their speculative idea of evolution by natural induction.
The Neo-Darwinian Objection First
They place this neo-D reply in quotes, and respond to it:
We already have a complete explanation for the complexity and diversity of life, so we do not need another.
To this, their own cheeky, courageous reply (emphasis added):
Richard Dawkins once stated that “What Darwin achieved was nothing less than a complete explanation of the complexity and diversity of all life.” If one really believed this, it might be tempting to disregard the possibility that natural selection and natural induction are both or jointly relevant to biological evolution on the grounds of parsimony. Of course, there are many open questions in evolutionary biology: the origin of life, the pace and tempo of evolution, evolutionary transitions in individuality, and many others. One might retort that although such issues are not completely understood, there is nothing that threatens the completeness of natural selection to explain them all in principle. This is really nothing more than a hopeful gesture to the possibility of an explanation in terms of selection and does nothing by itself to show that an alternative scientific explanation might not be required instead. What is more, one of these open questions is the difficulty in identifying a quantity that natural selection systematically increases. Since selection sometimes leads to a reduction in complexity, and even a reduction in mean fitness, across a population, some appeal to difference-making factors, distinct from selection itself, is therefore necessary to explain when selection promotes adaptive complexity.
There are further reasons to doubt the all-sufficiency of selection. Natural selection explanations depend on the axiomatic mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance. However, these mechanisms are not fixed over evolutionary time. Like any theory, attempts to use the theory of natural selection to explain changes in its own axioms run into problems of circularity.
Like that? Find it promising? We’ll tell the crew in the kitchen.
“Natural induction,” by the way, is the coinage of Levin’s co-author Richard Watson, but we focus here on Levin because his YouTube presence is so compelling. In case you missed this with podcaster Lex Fridman, it’s worth watching: