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Larry Moran caught quote mining

There are few things that irritate me more than the deliberate distortion of an argument. It’s especially irritating when I end up believing said distortion. An example:

Larry Moran has been railing (as he is wont to do) against what he calls “adaptationists”[1] in a couple recent posts. The “adaptationist” is a scientist who believes that every phenotypic trait is an adaptation to some selective pressure. It is clear that this view is wrong– it’s certainly plausible that phenotypes evolve neutrally, and the examples in Moran’s posts are possible candidates, though there’s no evidence for neutrality (other than Moran’s intuition, of course). The high frequency of the O blood group in Native Americans is a better candidate–the population bottleneck as humans expanded into the Americas likely involved large stochastic changes in allele frequency.

In fact, the view Moran attributes to the “adaptationist” is so obviously wrong I wondered whether perhaps we should append the word “mythical” to this creature’s name. Moran responded, quoting this passage from Richard Dawkins’s The Extended Phenotype:

The biochemical controversy over neutralism is concerned with the interesting and important question of whether all gene substitutions have phenotypic effects. The adaptationism controversy is quite different. It is concerned with whether, given that we are dealing with a phenotypic effect big enough to see and ask questions about, we should assume that it is the product of natural selection. The biochemist’s ‘neutral mutations’ are more than neutral. As far as those of us who look at gross morphology, physiology and behaviour are concerned, they are not mutations at all. It was in this spirit that Maynard Smith (1976b) wrote: “I interpret ‘rate of evolution’ as a rate of adaptive change. In this sense, the substitution of a neutral allele would not constitute evolution …” If a whole-organism biologist sees a genetically determined difference among phenotypes, he already knows he cannot be dealing with neutrality in the sense of the modern controversy among biochemical geneticists.

This certainly seems to place Dawkins as an “adaptationist”, one who thinks that all differences in phenotypes are adaptations. I was a little surprised by this, but the quote seemed clear, and I wasn’t going to take the time to find my original.

Luckily, another commenter pointed out that The Extended Phenotype is searchable at Google Books. And funny, the very next line after Moran stops quoting is possibly relevant:

If a whole-organism biologist sees a genetically determined difference among phenotypes, he already knows he cannot be dealing with neutrality in the sense of the modern controversy among biochemical geneticists. He might, nevertheless, be dealing with a neutral character in the sense of an earlier controversy (Fisher & Ford 1950; Wright 1951). A genetic difference could show itself at the phenotypic level, yet still be selectively neutral.

Dawkins goes on to express some skepticism about some arguments for evolution by drift, but he’s certainly not an “adaptationist” in the Moran sense.

I suppose I’m somewhat naive: distorting someone’s argument through selective quotation is a classic creationist tactic, and Moran has written a bit about the propaganda techniques used by that crowd. Little did I know his familiarity is not of an entirely academic sort.

[1] As opposed to “pluralists”, as he likes to call himself. For someone who (rightfully, in my opinion) is disdainful of “framing” (the view that scientists need to spin their results in order to resonate better with the public), he certainly knows how to frame.

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