On evolutionary words

Over at my other weblog, Gene Expression "Classic", I addressed the polemics of one David Stove, author of Darwinian Fairytales. I won't go into the details of Stove and that book, but if you follow the comment thread you will see that sometimes shit can be a very good fertilizer and give rise to food for thought. The comment thread made more explicit in my mind a few issues I have in regards to evolution. First, I hold to the scale independence of evolution, that is, there is no fundamental difference between microevolution and macroevolution. Macroevolution is in reality simply a posterior observation about the nature of microevolutionary dynamics framed by particular subjective criteria. And those criteria relate to species. Not only do I believe in the scale independence of evolution, but I lean toward the continuity of the web of life and am skeptical of "rigorous" definitions of species. I am inclined to take a very instrumentalist view toward this issue and don't dismiss phenetics or cladistics. Certainly species have more of a reality than genera, but their utility is contingent upon the branch of the tree of life you are examining. Myself, I tend to think of species as populations which exhibit a tightly linked correlation of alleles across a broad swath of loci. In other words, there are no idealized Platonic species, they are simply working classifications which allow us to make sense of the genetic architecture of a population. Just because I reject Platonic categories does not mean I neglect order or classification, rather, I believe that such things need to be expressed in a nuanced manner. Rejection of strict universals does not imply that all things are equally true and false and that the gates of Post Modernism should be thrown open, rather, statistics and probability can offer us a rough gauge of various distributions of likelihoods and offer us a way to characterize the more complex topology of some concepts. You saw this crop up in the race debate, I don't deny that races exhibit genetic and phenotypic continuity, but the inability to "objectively" offer up Platonically idealized types does not negate the reality of non-random structure. Evolutionary biology is the science of exceptions to generalizations, but, the reason our generalizations are so prone to being violated is that we don't truly speak in the language of evolutionary biology, which is in discrete genomic packets. Species, individuals and gene loci are simply gestalt approximations that hold, more or less, but they all have their weaknesses. The utility of each level of organization and approximation is framed by the questions you ask and the answers you are seeking. Finally, in regards to language I am beginning to think that it wasn't smart of me to simply concede semantics to evolutionary skeptics and play the rules of the popular game in regards to "species" and "macroevolution." As you can guess from above, I have serious issues with the idea of species as such, but nevertheless I am asked to "prove" speciation. My heart of hearts tells me that in many cases this is irrelevant or incoherent, but my reflexes born from debates in places like alt.atheism tells me that I should rise to the challenge and refute, refute, and refute. Similarly, arguments about macroevolution presuppose that I believe that such a thing as macroevolution is anything more than an extension on microevolution, which I don't, but coupled with the species question I have entertained this topic in rhetorical matches. The reality is that evolutionary biology is beautiful, and the post-genomic era is upon us and we are gazing into the abyss of unimaginable riches. And yet Creationists and their ilk still speak the language of 1906, not 2006, and demand that we battle them on the traditional dueling grounds. But the future beckons, and they are soon going to be irrelevant.