…and this is a 
Dennert and the deathbed of Darwinism
Category: Creationism • History
Posted on: April 11, 2007 10:28 AM, by PZ Myers
I've just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin's pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel's genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn't yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it's a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks right up there with bumblebees can't fly, rockets won't work in a vacuum, and no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM…he specifically predicts that 'Darwinism' will be dead and abandoned within ten years, by 1910.
Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past. A few decades hence when people will look back upon the history of the doctrine of Descent, they will confess that the years between 1860 and 1880 were in many respects a time of carnival; and the enthusiasm which at that time took possession of the devotees of natural science will appear to them as the excitement attending some mad revel.
He has a very specific model for the history of failed scientific theories, too.
From the account which Goette gives of the present status of Darwinism we may safely conclude that Darwinism had entered upon a period of decay; it is in the third stage of a development through which many a scientific doctrine has already passed.
The four stages of this development are the following:
The incipient stage: A new doctrine arises, the older representatives of the science oppose it partly because of keener insight and greater experience, partly also from indolence, not wishing to allow themselves to be drawn out of their accustomed equilibrium; among the younger generation there arises a growing sentiment in favor of the new doctrine.
The stage of growth: the new doctrine continually gains greater favor among the young generation, finding vent in bursts of enthusiasm; some of the cautious seniors have passed away, others are carried along by the stream of youthful enthusiasm in spite of better knowledge, and the voices of the thoughtful are no longer heard in the general uproar, exultingly proclaiming that to live is bliss.
The period of decay: the joyous enthusiasm has vanished; depression succeeds intoxication. Now that the young men have themselves grown older and become more sober, many things appear in a different light. The doubts already expressed by the old and prudent during the stage of growth are now better appreciated and gradually increase in weight. Many become indifferent, the present younger generation becomes perplexed and discards the theory entirely.
The final stage: the last adherents of the "new doctrine" are dead or at least old and have ceased to be influential, they sit upon the ruins of a grandeur that even now belongs to the "good old time." The influential and directing spirits have abandoned this doctrine, once so important and seemingly invincible, for the consideration of living issues and the younger generation regards it as an interesting episode in the history of science.
With reference to Darwinism we are in the third stage which is characterized especially by the indifference of the present middle-aged generation and by growing opposition on the part of the younger coming generation. This very characteristic feature is brought into prominence by the discussion of Goette. If all signs, however, are not deceptive, this third stage, that of decay, is drawing to an end; soon we shall enter the final stage and with that the tragic-comedy of Darwinism will be brought to a close.
He's so darned positive and cheerful about the whole process, and makes his own triumphal declaration about where evolutionary theory is going.
If some one were to ask me how according to the count of years, I should determine the extent of the individual stages of Darwinism, this would be my answer:
The incipient stage extends from 1859 (the year during which Darwin's principal work, The Origin of Species, appeared) to the end of the sixties.
The stage of growth: from that time, for about 20 years, to the end of the eighties.
The stage of decay: from that time on to about the year 1900.
The final stage: the first decade of the new century.
I am not by choice a prophet, least of all regarding the weather. But I think it may not be doubted that the fine weather, at least, has passed for Darwinism. So having carefully scanned the firmament of science for signs of the weather, I shall for once make a forecast for Darwinism, namely: Increasing cloudiness with heavy precipitations, indications of a violent storm, which threatens to cause the props of the structure to totter, and to sweep it from the scene.
I don't think Dennert will be remembered as a prophet.
It's a curious read. Dennert really dislikes Haeckel, and strongly opposes Darwin and Weismann; he favors Lamarckism and believes that the evidence is building for the presence of a "vital force" in the protoplasm of cells — he concludes that the destruction of Darwinism will be accompanied by the rise to pre-eminence of Vitalism.
In the place of Darwinian principles, new ideas are gradually winning general acceptance, which, while they are in harmony with the principles of adaptation and use, (Lamarck) enunciated before the time of Darwin, nevertheless attribute a far-reaching importance to internal forces of development. These new conceptions necessarily involve the admission that Evolution has not been a purely mechanical process.
I favor the idea of internal forces of development having far-reaching importance myself, but Dennert means something different by it than I do; he wants to claim that there is an intrinsic vital force in development that cannot be explained by any mechanical, or what we'd call now molecular, events. That hasn't panned out for him, and instead a reductionist and materialist series of explanations have represented a thoroughly successful and highly detailed model of developmental processes.
I rather like the old boy better than the current crop of anti-evolutionists, though. Dennert is drawing on the scientific literature of his time and the work of legitimate scientists who did not accept or were contesting evolution; he's not ignoring or distorting the work of contemporary scientists, the kind of dishonest baloney the DI perpetrates all the time. He also proposes specific, testable ideas, that 'protoplasm' will have teleological properties, and cites experiments that he claims (but, in my quick read, I have not examined carefully) support the existence of a vital force. He's wrong, but I think he's wrong in an honest way.
He's not an idiot. He's standing at a fascinating period of transition and betting that future results will vindicate a particular line of reasoning. They did not, and he could not know how thoroughly the newborn science of genetics would inform and expand our understanding of evolution.
He's missing two important facts. One, he's not in stage 3; we can see with hindsight that he's witnessing stage 1 of evolutionary biology, and he's one of the old guard reluctant to adopt something new. Two, his description of the history of a failed theory is not applicable, since evolution is going to prove to be an exceedingly successful and powerful theory, and with the synthesis of genetics, is about to blast off.
It's an entertaining train-wreck of a read, and we can laugh now at his sensationally wrong predictions, but if you do browse through it, keep this in mind: it's qualitatively far different from the modern creationist literature, and it's far more scholarly than anything the Discovery Institute publishes. Modern creationists are degenerate forms, merely aping the efforts of the last serious gasps of pre-Darwinian thought.
Comments
Do you think he'd still be saying that stuff if he knew what we know now? If he's an honest scientist he almost certainly would, but it would be interesting to see if Lamarckists are as good as creationists at denying data (I would suspect they are not, creationists are in their own league on that account).
Posted by: Stuart Coleman | April 11, 2007 10:47 AM
The Bill Gates 640K quip is an urban legend, no matter how much I want it to be true.
Posted by: Mike Nilsen | April 11, 2007 10:47 AM
Do you think he'd still be saying that stuff if he knew what we know now? If he's an honest scientist he almost certainly would...
I disagree with your definition of an "honest scientist". My definition of "scientist" includes "willing to change one's opinion when presented with convincing evidence." If Dennert where alive today, and an honest scientist, he'd join the rest of us in stating that the evidence for natural selection and genetics, and against Lamarckism, is unequivocal.
Posted by: TheBrummell | April 11, 2007 11:01 AM
Yes, that's all very true, but Dennert fails more drastically in his disregard for mechanism, for physics. Vitalism is, and was, nothing but an anthropomorphizing prejudice, testable, but not necessarily scientific thereby.
I'd give him more credit than the current magical thinkers for the fact that Darwinism was also rather murky in mechanism and in physics. What Darwin had going for him, however, was the undeniable facts that artificial selection worked in an apparently "mechanistic" fashion, and that the evidence from biology were consistent with natural selection and were seemingly inconsistent with teleology. Which is to say that Darwin had evidence, Dennert only had his teleological prejudices and some gaps that he pretended could be filled with his magic.
So yes, he was better in his willingness to make predictions based upon his magical thinking and thus to allow the evidence to knock him out if it could. IDists, by contrast, simply do all that they can to claim every "Darwinistic" prediction for their own, not even trying to come up with a possible alternative science.
That said, Dennert was equally in favor of what are essentially miracles and did nothing to integrate his evolutionism into the causal framework of classical science. It's easy to take potshots at him from our vantage point, of course (and Darwin also accepted the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics, though Wallace did not), but certainly today such magical thinking does not look very scientific at all.
Vestigial organs and second-rate adaptations hardly are consistent with the plainest sense of "Lamarckism", and Dennert's causal forces had to be submerged into virtual meaninglessness, while Darwin's causal forces were palpable (visible) though poorly explained at the time. Darwin had won early on (at least with younger minds) because of factors such as these, and Dennert had done nothing to make teleological evolution more plausible in the intervening period (the failure of pangenesis looked bad for Darwin, but it had no real bearing on the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection). So Dennert wasn't at the level of dishonesty of today's IDists, yet he was at the level of dishonesty of an old guard clinging to ideas which had never given birth to any useful line of scientific investigation. In the latter aspect he mirrored the IDists of today.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 11:06 AM
I have to say that the bumblebee myth has always bugged me. It seems it most often used to point out how ineffectual science is. Look I can see the bumblebee fly, but science can't explain it, look how stupid science is. Nevermind the fact that science can explain it, and that the actual aerodynamics of flexible moving flapping wings are incredibly complex.
Posted by: Robert | April 11, 2007 11:15 AM
Vitalism was quite strong in the early years of the 20th century: remember Hans Driesch? Quite an important embryologist, and the central figure of the Neo-vitalists. The vitalist enchantment might not even be alien to present day organismal biology fans and neo-Lamarckists as Jablonka and Lamb. Many scientists write about the 'internal forces of development' in a mystical way: Kirschner & Gerhard in The Plausibility of Life, Mary Jane West-Eberhard on 'developmental plasticity'. Such thinking is not particularly mechanical or molecular, especially not when 'gene thinking' seems anathema.
Posted by: Gerdien de Jong | April 11, 2007 11:30 AM
Robert, that's so true. The bumblebee thing, even if true, wouldn't demonstrate a problem with science, it would serve as an example of how difficult it can be to construct an accurate mathematical model of reality. (See also: global warming denial.)
Posted by: Kseniya | April 11, 2007 11:37 AM
another one for the list...
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/moreandmore.htm
Posted by: matthew | April 11, 2007 11:44 AM
Cool, that was a book from Distributed Proofreaders.
Posted by: Stacy | April 11, 2007 11:55 AM
I've always thought that while historical tendencies towards vitalism come and go, there's always been a strong inclination towards vitalism in the general public. It's a religious impulse, and an interesting one: generally the rejection of mechanistic and scientific explanations of the world in favour of mysticism. Just look at how popular complementary "medicines" are that trade off the idea of how "natural" they are or the opposition to messing with "nature" in genetically modified crops. Sometimes I think vitalism (at least in my part of the world) runs deeper than Christianity...
Posted by: Tryptamine | April 11, 2007 12:12 PM
Gerdien de Jong wrote
I've read Kirschner & Gerhart's book twice and I recall no "mystical" explanatory elements and no retreat from 'mechanical' explanation. What does de Jong see as "mystical" see in their approach? 'Developmental plasticity' is not mystical; it's an observation, and the various explanations of it I've read don't invoke mysticism.Posted by: RBH | April 11, 2007 12:14 PM
Stage 3 sounds more than a little like what Smolin and Woit are saying about string theory. . . .
Posted by: Blake Stacey | April 11, 2007 12:30 PM
Up comes the bumblebee myth myth again! (There never was a bumblebee myth.) The 'proof' that bumblebees couldn't fly was presented by a Bell Aerodynamics engineer to show how using the wrong methodologies would produce wrong results.
And thus, like King Canute and Lady Godiva, the opposition gains the credit. Makes you laugh.
Posted by: Michael Lockey | April 11, 2007 12:38 PM
Fascinating. Thanks for the tip! I have to go browse Dennert's book now.
Posted by: Zeno | April 11, 2007 12:43 PM
Heck, the aerodynamics of stiff fixed wings are quite complex too, and many (most?) science textbooks make a complete botch of it. Air does go over the top of an aircraft wing faster than over the bottom. And while Bernoulli's principle doesn't strictly apply, it's not a bad approximation. But the explanations given for why air is faster on the topside of a wing are sad jokes, and the streamlines (if shown at all) are usually badly wrong.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that science can't explain lift from wings--it most certainly can. I'm claiming that science textbook writers in general can't.
Posted by: Andrew Wade | April 11, 2007 12:56 PM
The Bill Gates 640K quip is an urban legend, no matter how much I want it to be true.
The money quote in computer science here is Vannevar Bush's prediction that future computers would be the size of the Empire State Building and be cooled by Niagara Falls-scale systems. In fact to "vannevar" has become slang for making absurdly incorrect predictions.
As paraphrased by Professor Frink:
"Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive, don't touch it, but I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them."
Posted by: Sarcastro | April 11, 2007 1:04 PM
Glen D writes "Vitalism is, and was, nothing but an anthropomorphizing prejudice." Doesn't this kind of statement imply that the scientifically or perhaps ideologically pure scientist ought to be able to guess the outcome of research in advance? If, as physiologists as hardboiled as the positivist Claude Bernard expected, non mechanical explanations had turned out to be required to explain heredity, would Glen D be writing that "Materialism in biology is, and was, nothing but a mechanistic prejudice?" The reductionists turned out to be right (apparently), but we shouldn't forget that it's rather easy for us to draw this conclusion. Us late comers have got the teacher's edition of the book with the answers to the exercises in the back.
Posted by: Jim Harrison | April 11, 2007 1:10 PM
The four stage process that Dennert uses does not appear to be "science" to me. In science, something eventually has to be a true depiction of reality. [In the limited context presented here] what Dennert seems to be describing is fashion.
Posted by: natural cynic | April 11, 2007 1:11 PM
As I recall, the "proof that bumblebees can't fly" was a humorous attempt in that it assumed the bee to be a fixed-wing craft.
Posted by: Monado | April 11, 2007 1:14 PM
In my current chapter, I work with Vernon Kellogg's odd little book Darwinism Today (1907). Despite having "Darwinism" in the title, it's a complete rear-guard action, as Darwinism isn't defended so much as put to sleep. The point of the book is to familiarize
Another way to put this is that there's a reason Gould called this a period "of maximal agnosticism and diversity in evolutionary theories." Pre-modern synthesis, all the evidence that looks so convincing now lacked a mechanism, so it's not surprising that other means of development were bandied around. Comments like #4 above may be a little harsh -- historically unforgiving, at least.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | April 11, 2007 1:15 PM
I'll second Tryptamine on the persistent nature of Vitalism. No, it hasn't gone away, it's still around in alternative medicine and most forms of "spirituality." And I suspect that a surprising number of people who accept evolution only do so because they think there is a Vital force driving it towards a progressive goal.
The public has mostly pushed the Life Force back a notch from testable claims such as those made by Dennert, but it's definitely still around, even in modern cultures. In fact, I keep running into people who sneer at the silly, straw-man version of God in Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion and insist that he should have dealt with their deep and serious God, which is nothing like that and which is totally consistent with science: When I question them, it eventually turns out they're promoting some form of Vitalism.
As for Dennert, I noticed something curious. His list of the '4 Stages of Development' for failed science doctrines doesn't resemble other lists I've seen on the same topic. There's no specific mention of the results of tests, experiments and predictions. He doesn't talk about evidence in various fields failing to accumulate towards a single theory, or coming in conflict with it. He doesn't deal with failure to replicate, or lack of a model. No, it's all social and psychological stuff.
Read that list again, and substitute a fad of some kind for the science. Mentally put in an extravagant new style of art, or literature, or fashion, or some newfangled way of having a wedding. It still fits.
That shouldn't be, I think.
Posted by: Sastra | April 11, 2007 1:33 PM
Quote mine! PZ Myers says... "that 'Darwinism' will be dead and abandoned within ten years"
Ok, just had to get that out of my system.
Posted by: Carlie | April 11, 2007 1:37 PM
#17Glen D writes "Vitalism is, and was, nothing but an anthropomorphizing prejudice." Doesn't this kind of statement imply that the scientifically or perhaps ideologically pure scientist ought to be able to guess the outcome of research in advance?
Was Dennert's "prediction" before or after Newton? Was it before or after Woehler's synthesis of urea?
When there was nothing to go on except anthropomorphizing prejudice, I wouldn't fault vitalism as a hypothesis.
If, as physiologists as hardboiled as the positivist Claude Bernard expected, non mechanical explanations had turned out to be required to explain heredity, would Glen D be writing that "Materialism in biology is, and was, nothing but a mechanistic prejudice?"
Try to think this through. Is mechanism the first explanation that humans come up with for motion? Or is vitalism the first idea?
That's why vitalism is an anthropomorphizing prejudice, because it's an "explanation" based on thinking that objects in the world act like we do, they think and then they do whatever they do.
Mechanistic explanations were developed in order to make up for the lack of predictivity from vitalism.
And I don't care about Bernard's prejudices.
The reductionists turned out to be right (apparently), but we shouldn't forget that it's rather easy for us to draw this conclusion.
The "reductionists"? Who the hell are they? Do you mean the scientists who insist on explanations instead of "the vital force did it"?
There's science and then there's magic. There was a time when the two weren't easy to tell apart, but certainly by the beginning of the 20th century they were generally easy to tell apart.
And Jim, nice quote-mining there, since I also addressed the evidence and the lack of productivity of vitalism, which you conveniently left out. Sure, why don't you pretend that science was at the same state as in Aristotle's time when Dennert was writing, and use that utterly out-of-context relationship to fault the person who thinks magic was about as poor an "inference" at the beginning of the 20th century as it is at the beginning of the 21st century.
Us late comers have got the teacher's edition of the book with the answers to the exercises in the back.
And those answers didn't come from the vitalists, now did they? Good psychologists, like Nietzsche and William James were already explaining vitalist prejudices via psychology by Dennert's time, so such prejudices had little excuse in any real intellectual. Furthermore, "mechanism" had explanatory successes in biology by that time, vitalism did not (getting to what your quote-mining left out).
Besides which, you're confusing "materialism", "vitalism", and "mechanism" in a most unwarranted manner. I wrote "mechanistic" with the scare quotes, because these are all just words. Once you go back far enough into the philosophical bases of words like "natural", "materialistic", "mechanistic", you begin to realize that they're pretty worthless in distinguishing "fundamental" characteristics of the world, even if these have good conventional meanings (well, I'm not sure about "materialism"). So in the Kantian (or continentalist philosophy) sense there's little meaning to "materialistic" or "mechanistic". These are just names for phenomena which we witness. As in, we have no real sense that mechanism and vitalism would be separate. IDists conflate the two regularly, and the ancients did often enough.
What is "vitalism" even supposed to mean, then? If you can't explain life by using the processes that coalesced into the "scientific enterprise", what explanation of life would even be possible for humans? Of course life might have turned out to be beyond explanation, but that's all we'd be likely to know if it were. Lamarckism explained nothing of the unknown by the known, which is why it wasn't accepted. Darwin explained the unknown by the known, which is why his ideas were accepted by many. Dennert and the IDists want(ed) to explain the known by the unknown, hence these hardly embody the proper practice of scientific discovery.
Of course there are complications to the whole story, in that some experiments did purportedly support the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But as PZ noted, Mendel's ideas had recently been rediscovered when Dennert was writing this piece, which meant that not only might one doubt the faulty experiments as Wallace did on the grounds of what seems to fit reality, one might also know that there was good evidence for a rather trans-generationally conservative (sans mutation) inheritance process. PZ states that we still didn't know how to incorporate "Mendelianism" into evolution, but it sure suggested that inheritance worked by a non-teleological, non-"Lamarckian" process.
So either deal with what was actually going on, or stay off your soapbox.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 2:32 PM
A couple of posters already beat me to the point about the bumblebee "myth," but I thought I would add my $0.02. I didn't think it was a myth so much as a misinterpretation of what the researchers were saying. That they can't model bumblebee flight was not an attempt to deny reality (obviously the empirical observation that bumblebees fly has been around a lot longer than the field of aerodynamics), nor a refutation of the validity of the field of aerodynamics (the fact that airplanes DO fly indicates that the field has offered us some useful results), but a simple to understand explanation of why there in fact still interesting problems to solve. It's a reason to go into the field of aerodynamics (wow I'd like a crack at that) rather than a reason to avoid it (what a useless field if it can't even explain such a simple insect). It's the "Fermat's last theorem" of aerodynamics (bad analogy perhaps since it has now been solved, but for a while it was an unsolved problem the layman could understand).
Now if I were an advocate of I.D., I'd conclude that if we can't explain bumblebee flight now, we never will and it must be God holding them up.
Posted by: Ian | April 11, 2007 2:33 PM
OT - Woot, which has one deal a day, must be marketing directly to PZ today...they have a 42" LCD TV with a screenshot from the Calamari Wrestler.
Posted by: Cat's Staff | April 11, 2007 2:34 PM
#17Glen D writes "Vitalism is, and was, nothing but an anthropomorphizing prejudice." Doesn't this kind of statement imply that the scientifically or perhaps ideologically pure scientist ought to be able to guess the outcome of research in advance?
Was Dennert's "prediction" before or after Newton? Was it before or after Woehler's synthesis of urea?
When there was nothing to go on except anthropomorphizing prejudice, I wouldn't fault vitalism as a hypothesis.
If, as physiologists as hardboiled as the positivist Claude Bernard expected, non mechanical explanations had turned out to be required to explain heredity, would Glen D be writing that "Materialism in biology is, and was, nothing but a mechanistic prejudice?"
Try to think this through. Is mechanism the first explanation that humans come up with for motion? Or is vitalism the first idea?
That's why vitalism is an anthropomorphizing prejudice, because it's an "explanation" based on thinking that objects in the world act like we do, they think and then they do whatever they do.
Mechanistic explanations were developed in order to make up for the lack of predictivity from vitalism.
And I don't care about Bernard's prejudices.
The reductionists turned out to be right (apparently), but we shouldn't forget that it's rather easy for us to draw this conclusion.
The "reductionists"? Who the hell are they? Do you mean the scientists who insist on explanations instead of "the vital force did it"?
There's science and then there's magic. There was a time when the two weren't easy to tell apart, but certainly by the beginning of the 20th century they were generally easy to tell apart.
And Jim, nice quote-mining there, since I also addressed the evidence and the lack of productivity of vitalism, which you conveniently left out. Sure, why don't you pretend that science was at the same state as in Aristotle's time when Dennert was writing, and use that utterly out-of-context relationship to fault the person who thinks magic was about as poor an "inference" at the beginning of the 20th century as it is at the beginning of the 21st century.
Us late comers have got the teacher's edition of the book with the answers to the exercises in the back.
And those answers didn't come from the vitalists, now did they? Good psychologists, like Nietzsche and William James were already explaining vitalist prejudices via psychology by Dennert's time, so such prejudices had little excuse in any real intellectual. Furthermore, "mechanism" had explanatory successes in biology by that time, vitalism did not (getting to what your quote-mining left out).
Besides which, you're confusing "materialism", "vitalism", and "mechanism" in a most unwarranted manner. I wrote "mechanistic" with the scare quotes, because these are all just words. Once you go back far enough into the philosophical bases of words like "natural", "materialistic", "mechanistic", you begin to realize that they're pretty worthless in distinguishing "fundamental" characteristics of the world, even if these have good conventional meanings (well, I'm not sure about "materialism"). So in the Kantian (or continentalist philosophy) sense there's little meaning to "materialistic" or "mechanistic". These are just names for phenomena which we witness. As in, we have no real sense that mechanism and vitalism would be separate. IDists conflate the two regularly, and the ancients did often enough.
What is "vitalism" even supposed to mean, then? If you can't explain life by using the processes that coalesced into the "scientific enterprise", what explanation of life would even be possible for humans? Of course life might have turned out to be beyond explanation, but that's all we'd be likely to know if it were. Lamarckism failed to explain the unknown by the known, which is why it wasn't accepted. Darwin explained the unknown by the known, which is why his ideas were accepted by many. Dennert and the IDists want(ed) to explain the known by the unknown, hence these hardly embody the proper practice of scientific discovery.
Of course there are complications to the whole story, in that some experiments did purportedly support the inheritance of acquired characteristics. But as PZ noted, Mendel's ideas had recently been rediscovered when Dennert was writing this piece, which meant that not only might one doubt the faulty experiments as Wallace did on the grounds of what seems to fit reality, one might also know that there was good evidence for a rather trans-generationally conservative (sans mutation) inheritance process. PZ states that we still didn't know how to incorporate "Mendelianism" into evolution, but it sure suggested that inheritance worked by a non-teleological, non-"Lamarckian" process.
So either deal with what was actually going on, or stay off your soapbox.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 2:34 PM
You know, I think I may have run across a copy of this in a used/rare book store in New Zealand. Weird, I know. I remember reading the opening paragraph and thinking, "Wow. I ought to buy this thing." Of course, it pretty expensive, so I let it slide.
Still, the language and conclusions are almost identical to creationist literature today. At least, they were in the book I picked up and glanced through, which may not have been this book. But it also might have been. Hooray for indecision!
Posted by: MikeQ | April 11, 2007 2:42 PM
Small note: Fermat's Last Theorem was solved in the 90's. Took 4800 pages, IIRC. The author said he was convinced Fermat never solved it.
They had to do a retcon in Star Trek because of that.
Posted by: Bronze Dog | April 11, 2007 2:49 PM
Well, you know, he did have a point. Darwinism is dead. Evolution has progressed far beyond Darwin's original formulation of it--and that can hardly be a bad thing for a science.
Posted by: Leon | April 11, 2007 3:12 PM
Gee Gleen, if I'd written such an immense post, I guess I'd publish it twice too!
Meanwhile, I don't know how to respond to you since I think you're assuming facts not in evidence. I'm not proposing to resurect vitalism; I'm objecting to a whig retelling of the history of biology. What occurred simply was not a the gradual triumph of the scientific method over obscurantism. I don't propose to duplicate your recent feat of marathon typing by summarizing the last three centuries of history on the fly, though if you really think that Nietzsche was an enemy of vitalism and don't know what's important about Claude Bernard, you could certainly use a bit of instruction on the subject. Suffice it to point out that lots of students of the development of the life sciences have concluded, based on excellent evidence, that various kinds of vitalism played a crucial role in the development of biology. That's not to say that vitalism is right--indeed, since vitalism as such, i.e. the late 19th Century, early 20th Century position whose supporters actually used that name, is only one of a host of points of view that can be called vitalisms in a broader sense, its pretty hard to make global judgements without specifying what you're actually denouncing. Anyhow lots of ideas that turn out to be false or inadequate have played a positive role in the development of science. You do know that, don't you?
Example: Back in the Enlightenment, writers working in the tradition of Newton were hostile to evidence of "vital" phenomena that apparently could not be explained mechanistically. Voltaire, for example, famously denounced reports that fresh water hydra could regenerate themselves after being cut in two because the finding conflicted with mechanistic principles as he undertood them. Now we no longer explain regeneration in hydras by reference to anything like vital principles, but somebody did have to take the phenomenon seriously in order to begin the process of figuring things out and, anyhow, what counts as a reductionist explanation these days is not really the same sort of thing that Voltaire would have expected. Terms like reductionism, materialism, and mechanism change their effective meanings over time.
Alas, history is inconveniently complicated.
Posted by: Jim Harrison | April 11, 2007 3:14 PM
I realized that I confused animism and vitalism here:
That's why vitalism is an anthropomorphizing prejudice, because it's an "explanation" based on thinking that objects in the world act like we do, they think and then they do whatever they do.
When you're dealing with magical ideas, one can lose track of which one you're writing about, especially since vitalism and animism tended to go together in the past.
Probably I should say that vitalism isn't so much an anthropomorphizing prejudice as it is one that supposes that "matter" in us that makes us "special". It is traditionally anthropomorphic in its view of motion, to be sure (in ancient times at least, though later ones wanted to split up animal motion and "Newtonian" motion), even if the spirits which cause motion existed in animals as well (and in the wind, in the older version, one link between vitalism and animism).
Anyway, I mostly thought I'd clear up that error I made in conflating those "concepts".
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 3:16 PM
Don't get hung up on my examples of erroneous conclusions. They fit with my point: yes, Dennert was wrong, but he was wrong in a sort of understandable way, and the bumblebee guy was "wrong", but not really -- he was making a point. There are lots of these kinds of stories around, and if you trace them back you often find some reasonable point that has been made screamingly wrong in the modern context.
I can't fault Dennert too much for conclusions made in 1904. I can fault creationists who make the same wrong conclusions 103 years later, when we have evidence that reveals the original faulty assumptions.
Posted by: PZ Myers | April 11, 2007 3:19 PM
Gee Gleen, if I'd written such an immense post, I guess I'd publish it twice too!
A fair-minded person would take account of the fact that the server's screwing up. And he wouldn't mispell my name so egregiously. But then...
Meanwhile, I don't know how to respond to you since I think you're assuming facts not in evidence. I'm not proposing to resurect vitalism;
What a stupid response. I can see why you're not responding directly to anything I wrote, since you apparently don't know what I wrote. I never suggested at all that you were proposing to resurrect vitalism, you just don't understand history, science, or how to respond to an entire post instead of some bit you quote-mined toi be out of context.
I'm objecting to a whig retelling of the history of biology.
Yes, that was a very lame response. You have to be very dishonest to call mine a whig retelling of the history of biology, but then again, your first "response" to my post was a dishonest quote-mining reply.
What occurred simply was not a the gradual triumph of the scientific method over obscurantism.
Really? Gee, you'd have though I'd have learned that in science and philosophy. Oh yeah, I did, and I don't need someone who can't read at all well telling me that I didn't.
I don't propose to duplicate your recent feat of marathon typing by summarizing the last three centuries of history on the fly, though if you really think that Nietzsche was an enemy of vitalism
Did I say he was the enemy of vitalism, dimwit? I said that he was explaining those prejudices. Since you can't read properly, I suppose all you can do is set up your own strawmen.
Nietzsche's relationship to life, "will to power", and the like was complicated. What he certainly did not do was to suppose that life was somehow separate from the "energies" (not his word) flowing through the world.
and don't know what's important about Claude Bernard, you could certainly use a bit of instruction on the subject.
OK, so you utilize your incomprehension to lie. Not surprising.
What's important about Claude Bernard was not his vitalistic prejudices, moron. What a shocker, the ignorant Jim throws a medical doctor at me as some great authority on these matters. Just like the IDiots.
Suffice it to point out that lots of students of the development of the life sciences have concluded, based on excellent evidence, that various kinds of vitalism played a crucial role in the development of biology.
What "excellent evidence", dullard? I see that not only can't you read what I was discussing, you have no capacity to back up your own claims except by some fallacy of the appeal to authority.
That's not to say that vitalism is right--indeed, since vitalism as such, i.e. the late 19th Century, early 20th Century position whose supporters actually used that name, is only one of a host of points of view that can be called vitalisms in a broader sense, its pretty hard to make global judgements without specifying what you're actually denouncing.
Why yes, obscure the issue and once again ignore the fact that I brought up reasons why vitalism was insufficient for Dennert to use as if it were "science".
Anyhow lots of ideas that turn out to be false or inadequate have played a positive role in the development of science. You do know that, don't you?
Apparently you are so stupid and vile as to imply that I might not. What you, cretin, are unable to do is to show any reason why vitalism could operate as one of those incorrect heuristics at Dennert's time.
Example: Back in the Enlightenment, writers working in the tradition of Newton were hostile to evidence of "vital" phenomena that apparently could not be explained mechanistically. Voltaire, for example, famously denounced reports that fresh water hydra could regenerate themselves after being cut in two because the finding conflicted with mechanistic principles as he undertood them. Now we no longer explain regeneration in hydras by reference to anything like vital principles, but somebody did have to take the phenomenon seriously
They had to take the regeneration phenomenon seriously, not the wrong-headed vitalistic notions. You conflate the two, as stupidly as you write the rest of your posts.
in order to begin the process of figuring things out and, anyhow, what counts as a reductionist explanation these days is not really the same sort of thing that Voltaire would have expected. Terms like reductionism, materialism, and mechanism change their effective meanings over time.
Which is why your ignorant attack was so pathetic, Jim. Now you're lecturing me on the changing meanings of words, when I had pointed out the "fundamental" meaninglessness of such words.
Alas, history is inconveniently complicated.
I'm guessing that's about all you know, or you wouldn't have attacked like such a fool. You can't discuss the situtaion at the time (indeed, being the fool that you are you fault me for addressing these matters much more than you, apparently because you have no patience for the true complexity of these matters), so you blither on about irrelevancies, and make the same insinuations that I somehow don't come up to the low level of education that you have.
Well anyhow, you managed to get just about everything wrong in some manner yet again, while not in the least supporting the idea that Dennert was justified in appealing to vitalism in the early 20th century. And managed to fail to address any of the specifics in both of the posts you supposedly responded to (though you merely responded to your projected ignorance), which no doubt is because you cannot. It seems that IDists and you are dishonest primarily because you don't know much, and you want to look as if you do.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 3:49 PM
To disagree with Jim for a moment, it's not a whig history Glen intends, but a triumphalist one. As a historian (of sorts) of late nineteenth/early twentieth century evolutionary theory, I can say that there was no consensus as to what Mendel's experiments meant for evolutionary theory. No one knew quite what to make of them, only that they confirmed what Darwin had said about artificial selection ... but that wasn't the problem. Thinkers of the time knew that selection worked, but not how. One scientist's gemmules were another's vital fluids and so forth. To reiterate what PZ said, there is a qualitative difference between what scientists thought at the turn-of-the-last-century and what the ID crowd is up to today. While you can yoke that to a deep-set desire for spiritualism -- and why not, what with the mention of James -- doing so does a deep disservice to the best scientific minds of the time.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | April 11, 2007 4:05 PM
Rats... had PZ not linked the article for all the world to see, it would have been trivially easy to just update the dates on Dennert's article and post it to Uncommon Descent and see how quickly the ID community fell for it.
Would have made a great April Fool's joke, right up there with Onyate Man.
Posted by: Andrew | April 11, 2007 4:08 PM
To disagree with Jim for a moment, it's not a whig history Glen intends, but a triumphalist one.
I guess you proved that you can yap. Since you're not interested in doing anything but labeling what I wrote, I see that you also feel free not to supply any evidence or argumentation, just a dimwitted collection of platitudes.
I even included this:
PZ states that we still didn't know how to incorporate "Mendelianism" into evolution, but it sure suggested that inheritance worked by a non-teleological, non-"Lamarckian" process.
But you yip away and say the same thing as the first clause did, as if it added to anything. "Vital fluids" doesn't tell us anything, and it didn't in 1904 either. "Genes" deal with a constant through the generations, which, though they weren't known as they are today, were the only evidence of inherited material. And Mendel's genetics were not "Lamarckian", even if his experiments didn't rule out inheritance of acquired characteristics (but science doesn't cling to unevidenced assertions, or at least it's acknowledged that it shouldn't.
Of course room for vitalism could be found, and many opponents of evolutionary theory claim that it still can be. But the sciences of genetics and of evolution weren't led by vitalists, and the fact that the latter still existed proves nothing except that vitalism dies hard, at least in Western society.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 4:30 PM
I'm sorry I irritated you so much, Glen, though my mild joke about double posting is not exactly on a par with your non-stop insults. I'm suprised you didn't call me a nappy headed ho while you were at it. I don't understand your extreme hostility, but it's not my problem.
You obviously don't have the background to engage in a serious historical discussion, and I have no reason to want to rile you up. For the possible benefit of others, however, let me add a point of information about Claude Bernard. Bernard was a 19th Century doctor who investigated human digestion in a famous series of experiments and introduced the notion of homeostasis to physiology. He was also well known for promoting a positivist view of how scientists should operate. My point was that even a hard-ass empricist like Bernard thought that something beyond chemical or mechanical explanations would be required to explain heredity. As it happens, he was wrong. I'm just insisting that he wasn't being stupid. And, after all, he could have been right.
Whatever science is, it isn't a perfect information game. It's a form of gambling, but one in which the probabilities are never completely calculable in advance. I guess somebody could criticize Bernard on the theory that he was drawing to an inside straight, but that's the kind of judgment that's easy to make in hindsight.
Posted by: Jim Harrison | April 11, 2007 4:41 PM
There is a biography of Dennert in German at http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/d/dennert_e.shtml
Apparently he lived until 1942, and thus witnessed for himself the outcome of his prediction.
Posted by: John Hynes | April 11, 2007 4:52 PM
I'm sorry I irritated you so much, Glen,
Sure you are.
though my mild joke about double posting is not exactly on a par with your non-stop insults.
You're right, since the double-post is understandable to a reasonable person, which you are not. And insulting you happens to be justified.
I'm suprised you didn't call me a nappy headed ho while you were at it. I don't understand your extreme hostility, but it's not my problem.
You're ignorant, not very bright, and dishonest. What's to like?
You obviously don't have the background to engage in a serious historical discussion, and I have no reason to want to rile you up.
Yeah right, coming from the buffoon who can't discuss Dennerd in context, that's an impressive conclusion. Course, your posts never left the region of dishonesty, but that's your problem...
For the possible benefit of others, however, let me add a point of information about Claude Bernard. Bernard was a 19th Century doctor who investigated human digestion in a famous series of experiments and introduced the notion of homeostasis to physiology. He was also well known for promoting a positivist view of how scientists should operate. My point was that even a hard-ass empricist like Bernard thought that something beyond chemical or mechanical explanations would be required to explain heredity.
Gather round folks, a French physician actually thought that inheritance was beyond chemical and mechanical explanations. What a tale! I'll have to remember this always.
I wouldn't have written "French" like it's relevant, except that may be. I don't know why (didn't like the English, Catholic influences, sheer inertia, they liked their French fellow Lamarck, or other issues in addition to, or instead of, those?), but outside of the region of Paris it is said that Lamarckism lasted up through the mid-20th century. Bernard, of course, was rather earlier (something the buffoon doesn't tell you, but writes as if a guy who died in 1878 justifies Dennard in 1904), dying in 1878, so I'm not sure if Bernard's take was related to that factor in France, but it could have been (Bernard was Jesuit-educated, so Catholicism could be a factor in both, especially with its strong metaphysical tendencies then).
As it happens, he was wrong. I'm just insisting that he wasn't being stupid. And, after all, he could have been right.
Strawman again. I never said vitalists were stupid. Indeed, I tend more to a philosophical view wherein ideas persist in society and undercut incipient empirical views. Apparently ol' Jim doesn't understand these matters, how to read, etc.
Whatever science is, it isn't a perfect information game. It's a form of gambling, but one in which the probabilities are never completely calculable in advance.
And that's the upshot folks, what we've been saying all along is true, and Jimbo here has at last confirmed it by pointing out that a French physician holding to anachronistic ideas wasn't actually stupid.
I guess somebody could criticize Bernard on the theory that he was drawing to an inside straight, but that's the kind of judgment that's easy to make in hindsight.
Wow, everything you write just kind of thuds dully to the ground.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 5:01 PM
Don't know why I wrote "Dennard" above (I know otherwise, as may be seen in earlier posts), but consider it to be "Dennert" instead.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 5:03 PM
Eberhard Dennert, now we know where Thomas Kuhn began in his more recent, and equally faulty, analysis of the progression of scientific ideas-- See Moti Ben-Ari, Just a theory and just a wonderful little evenings read of a book. Also, note that even at this early date, Darwin's proposed mechanism for evolution is being called (framed as) Darwinism rather than the theory of natural selection.
Posted by: mothra | April 11, 2007 5:21 PM
Glen, I'm not sure why you've unhinged here, but you have. Vitalism was a part of turn-of-the-century evolutionary debates. Don't believe me? How about Robert Richards:
This is an off-the-top-of-my-head example. I could dredge up countless more, but I fear my labors would be for naught. Just keep re-reading the above as an example that people who held vitalist principles are numbered among the "evolutionists." It's an important historical fact, the denial of which will severely distort one's perspective on turn-of-the-century evolutionary debates. Why you're ignoring it -- and why with such vehemence and inappropriate aggression -- is beyond me.
Lamarckian thought (and its cognates) informed almost every evolutionary debate of the period. Many attempted to distance themselves from the disgrace of the Lamarck brand, but the changes in their thought were typically cosmetic. See, for another off-the-top-of-my-head example, the mid-period work of James Mark Baldwin.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | April 11, 2007 5:23 PM
Glen, I'm not sure why you've unhinged here, but you have.
The projector is picking up your mind flapping in your gaseous discharges, moron. Did I say that vitalism wasn't a part of the turn-of-the-century evolutionary debates?
Vitalism was a part of turn-of-the-century evolutionary debates. Don't believe me? How about Robert Richards:
You're just free-floating on your own vital fluids, cretin. Why wouldn't I believe you? I wrote this in response to your yammering.
But the sciences of genetics and of evolution weren't led by vitalists, and the fact that the latter still existed proves nothing except that vitalism dies hard, at least in Western society.
I don't care that people held onto their partly religiously-derived prejudices in favor of vitalism (I know that vitalism doesn't need religion for its existence, but anthropocentric prejudices were enhanced in the West by religion), that's why I disagreed with Dennert and said that he was wrong to be one of these saps. You simply imagine that I said that vitalism wasn't a part of the debate, and vigorously attack your strawman.
Now Richards:
"On narrower issues of biological theory, evolutionists of mind and behavior exhibited a wide range of views, from various forms of vitalism at the one extreme, through the varieties of Lamarckism-Darwinism, to the opposite pole of ultra-Darwinism."
Good quote. Now don't you wish that it answered something I had actually written instead of your misrepresentation of what I wrote?
This is an off-the-top-of-my-head example. I could dredge up countless more, but I fear my labors would be for naught.
Since I never said otherwise, of course it would be for naught. Too bad you can't think.
Just keep re-reading the above as an example that people who held vitalist principles are numbered among the "evolutionists." It's an important historical fact, the denial of which will severely distort one's perspective on turn-of-the-century evolutionary debates.
Why yes it would. Now go find someone who denies it, instead of stupidly asserting that I did.
Why you're ignoring it
Did I ignore it? I believe that I attacked the vitalist tendencies precisely because they weren't warranted in that time.
-- and why with such vehemence and inappropriate aggression -- is beyond me.
Neither of you buffoons respond to what I actually wrote, instead you're busily ignoring everything that I wrote and viciously attacking what you simply imagine I wrote.
Lamarckian thought (and its cognates) informed almost every evolutionary debate of the period. Many attempted to distance themselves from the disgrace of the Lamarck brand, but the changes in their thought were typically cosmetic. See, for another off-the-top-of-my-head example, the mid-period work of James Mark Baldwin.
Wow, more facts that I already knew. See, if you were to actually read what I wrote, instead of believing the dishonest imaginings of Harrison, you wouldn't be stepping in your own egregiously incorrect misstatements, dishonest inferences, and hallucinations.
I did point to the long period of time that Lamarckism lasted in France, but I also knew full well that in the Anglo world ideas akin to Lamarckism lasted into the 20th century. Freud managed to hang onto the belief in evolution via the inheritance of acquired characteristics well beyond the time when most of the Western world had given it up, which led to some of his mistakes. When chastised for it he replied that he knew that inheritance of acquired characteristics was accepted for a long time, but he didn't know that it had pretty much gone out of fashion when he was still using it, in the '30s and '40s ('50s perhaps?).
The neo-Darwinian synthesis is what mostly killed of Lamarckism, and that was well after Dennert wrote his piece.
I guess what you and Jim-boy think is that just because many scientists cling to bad ideas that they must be justified. I say that it's not, and instead of dealing with my stance, you stupidly argue that, yes, there were scientists who believed in "Lamarckism" or in vitalism. It's a ridiculous charade, which I can only compare to the constant misunderstandings that the IDists have of "Darwinists" and what they write.
And yes I am rather less than happy over such dull incomprehension. It's impossible to get through the gutta percha filling the crania of both of you that you're making caricatures of what I actually wrote, dishonestly misrepresenting it, and complaining that I respond angrily (or at least make it appear as if it's angry) at your incomprehension and dishonesty.
If there is a next time, why don't you try something that is seemingly novel to you: respond to what I actually wrote, and not to your distortions and outright falsehoods about what you think I wrote
Glen D
http//tinyurl.com/35s39o
Posted by: Glen Davidson | April 11, 2007 5:55 PM
As I said: you've come undone. I'm still not sure why. You're attacking someone for holding onto a belief which many of his compatriots also held, and for which evidence neither more nor less conclusive than that supporting natural selection existed. You're ignoring this in an effort to tar a man dead almost a century for a crime not nearly so severe as you suppose -- perhaps not even severe at all, given the context in which these beliefs were held. Absent DNA, the (apparent) teleology of development had to be accounted for somehow, and some scientists espoused a skeptical attitude towards the available explanations and chose the more nebulous, vitalistic one. They were justified in this inasmuch as there was no conclusive evidence to the contrary. In retrospect, it seems like there was, but they lacked the theories necessary to click those stars into constellations.
I understand that you know better than scientists at the turn-of-the-last-century, but I'm not sure why you feel the need to prove that. Your sense of superiority is unearned, merely a product of the era in which you were born. What next? "Impressive" demonstrations of how much more you know about planetary motion than Aristotle?
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | April 11, 2007 6:37 PM
Settle down, Scott. He's using Dennert as an example to compare and contrast the methods employed by him and the ID creationists. Both have declared "Darwinism" dead because of apparently insoluble problems, yet somehow translating this insufficiency into positive evidence for their own pet theories.
This approach is based solely around the fallacious idea that science will progress no further; that we've learned all the important stuff, and nothing in the future will vindicate "Darwinism." This approach was proven wrong in Dennert's case, and it isn't even currently acccurate in the case of the ID creationists, given that their declarations of the insufficiency of "Darwinism" to explain certain features are based around distortions of the scientific literature.
Posted by: minimalist | April 11, 2007 7:45 PM
That's what I get for going "too long; didn't read" at the whole thread; I thought you were talking to PZ, since your comment (#44) could apply to the original post equally well.
Posted by: minimalist | April 11, 2007 7:51 PM
As I said: you've come undone.
Why yes, you did say that, and the repetition of your mindless assertion no doubt means that it's true.
Oh yeah, you ignore your previous false accusations, in order to make more false accusations. Good idea, as you could hardly defend your lies.
I'm still not sure why. You're attacking someone for holding onto a belief which many of his compatriots also held, and for which evidence neither more nor less conclusive than that supporting natural selection existed.
I'm "attacking him", am I? I see that you provided as much evidence as you did for all of your earlier false attributions. My opinion is that he was wrong, and there was much reason to think that he was wrong, both because vitalism had failed in chemistry, and because natural selection utilized known (if poorly understood) processes to effect an explanation which fits previous notions of what science is. Furthermore, he was rubbishing the better idea as a dying theory.
It's pure prejudice and dishonesty to say that I'm "attacking him" because I judged him to be wrong. You're like the IDiots, for when we judge them to be using faulty methods of science they yell "martyr", with no credible discussions of the reasons given for our judgments.
Of course you don't supply this "evidence" which supposedly is as strong as that for natural selection. Why? Because there is none (I did mention some faulty "experiments" which were supposed to show it, but without reliably repeatable results one ought not take them so very seriously). You may know that and simply be lying (again), or you may just be as simple as you appear to be.
You're ignoring this in an effort to tar a man dead almost a century for a crime not nearly so severe as you suppose
How severe do I suppose his "crime" to be? Not that you care to do anything but impute false motives and a supposed "tarring" to me, but then that's you.
The fact is that I see no real justification for Paleyism, nor for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The biologists who accepted either one were insufficiently rigorous--possibly not in the 1870s, but after a half century had gone by without reasonable evidence for inheritance of acquired characteristics there ought to have been considerable doubt about it (meanwhile, it remained the case that some evidence for inheritance of non-acquired characteristics remained for all to see.
-- perhaps not even severe at all, given the context in which these beliefs were held. Absent DNA, the (apparent) teleology of development had to be accounted for somehow, and some scientists espoused a skeptical attitude towards the available explanations and chose the more nebulous, vitalistic one.
What are you saying, that vitalism wasn't one of the "available explanations"? Maybe this is a quibble (perhaps you misspoke), however you seem to be using this claim to justify the "nebulous, vitalistic one". So unless you mis-wrote that, it appears that you seem to implicitly acknowledge that the vitalistic "explanation" is no explanation at all, given that it had no credible evidence in favor of it. But it may be that you did just make a mistake there, even though there is in fact no credible evidence in favor of vitalistic transmission of characteristics.
They were justified in this inasmuch as there was no conclusive evidence to the contrary.
You might in fact be an IDist, for that is exactly the sort of faulty argument that they use. They say, 'well until someone shows that everything in biology can be explained by "Darwinism", we have reason to think that our beliefs are correct.' This is backward from the scientific understanding, for one is not guilty until proven innocent, nor is mere prejudice considered to be science until one shows with rigor that the prejudice is incorrect. You might want to learn about science.
In retrospect, it seems like there was, but they lacked the theories necessary to click those stars into constellations.
So yeah, we'll just throw in undefined and unobserved vital influences in as "explanation" until these can be falsified. That's not science.
I wrote:
Dennert only had his teleological prejudices and some gaps that he pretended could be filled with his magic.
Evidently you have little with which to counter that assertion. All that you do is to ignore the reasons that I gave for natural selection being a better explanation (well, you could be seen as "responding" to the what I wrote about natural selection having evidence (wherein I gave some examples, vestigials and poor adaptations) by flatly denying it, without any sort of evidence or reasoning--gee, a prejudiced defense of vitalist prejudices, how surprised could I be?) and you support the vitalism of the gaps, sans sufficient reason.
Perhaps you think that just because I write of "prejudice" and filling gaps with magic that I'm "tarring" Dennert. That would be quite an assumption, as this is how we tend to understand the history of thought in philosophy, as necessarily tinged with prejudice. Indeed, I would claim that we all have prejudices, including the non-vitalists, however science depends upon those who rely upon more than just their prejudices. Dennert may have done so in most areas, but I can see no scientific justification for the non-explanatory (though at least falsifiable) "vitalism" which he espoused. Agnosticism is what ought to exist where lack of justifiable knowledge prevails.
I understand that you know better than scientists at the turn-of-the-last-century, but I'm not sure why you feel the need to prove that.
Well, dishonest dimbulb, I don't feel the need to prove it. I feel the need to say what is justifiable and what is not in a given context. Because you have utterly failed to demonstrate that his claims are warranted, you unjustly accuse me of something you have no evidence for (gee, what a surprise) in order to cover up your inadequacy and inability even to keep straight what was written.
I merely wrote a reasonable response to the attack that Dennert made on Darwinism which is coupled with his own inadequate and unevidenced "explanatory model" (which explains nothing, really). You and Jim blew it up with your dishonesty and dimwitted readings of what I had written, and you conveniently neglected to notice that Dennert had attempted to smear Darwinism as a dying theory (as the IDiots do now, even if they've tapered off now that the opposite has become obvious to even many of them).
Had he merely said, 'there is much to be explained about evolutionary processes as yet, so we might at least keep our minds open to vitalism', he'd be wrong but not egregiously wrong with respect to the best concept, which was Darwinism (and "Darwinism" is at least arguably a correct label at that time). That you fail to account for context and Dennert's glaringly obvious desire to declare triumph over the "dying" of Darwinism is, I'm afraid, par for your level of thought, at least on this thread.
Your sense of superiority is unearned, merely a product of the era in which you were born.
What a fuck-up you are. You can't point to anything that suggests that I feel a sense of superiority for knowing better than Dennert. If I were as stupid as your projections I wouldn't have made a case against Dennert's conception in that context. And if you were intelligent and honest you'd deal with that case, rather than attempting to smear yet again without basis or truth.
What next? "Impressive" demonstrations of how much more you know about planetary motion than Aristotle?
Yes, I know that you stupidly bought into Harrison's lies, cretin that you are. The fact is that I write quite differently than your dishonest and cretinous mind supposes. For instance, I wrote this, which defended the sort of thought that early (religious) intellectuals had:
http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/06/ron_numbers_int.html#comment-109053
And there I was attacked for not "knowing" that science really is simple and that our "supposedly"