(Part 2) Reddit mentions: The best organic evolution books

you might like him. i've read most of his stuff; i started with a brief history of everything which does a good job of presenting his overall model, which i've found to be extremely useful.

for a more emotionally-engaging and story-based introduction to his ideas grace and grit is a sure bet.

Although most of his essay is fine, I disagree with Pinker about group selection too, and agree with /u/self-assembled that Pinker is willfully ignoring evidence. I have no dog in the group selection fight, so it is mystifying to see Pinker (who I actually used to like) debase himself by arguing like this.

Major papers have been published as recently as last month showing that group selection happens. Not sure why empirical data from papers published in Nature should be thrown out because they don't agree with Pinker's conception of "the facts of psychology and history".

Pinker admits himself that he's not arguing from empirical data, but from an a priori view that tries to show that group selection as a logical explanation is flawed (i.e. incoherent). As a scientist, that's madness, and it is the special kind of madness that makes creationism happen and helps smart, atheist philosophers like Jerry Fodor write books called *What Darwin Got Wrong". Scientists use data to test theories, and the "proponents of group selection" (like Charles Goodnight, above) are just doing their job. Hell, if Pinker doesn't like their analysis he can redo it himself (here is their raw data).

So when Pinker says:
"the groups made copies of themselves by budding or fissioning, the descendant groups faithfully reproduced traits of the parent group (which cannot be reduced to the traits of their individual members), except for mutations that were blind to their costs and benefits to the group; and groups competed with one another for representation in a meta-population of groups."

Nearly everyone in the evolutionary biology community will agree with him. This is what empirical work is telling us happens in nature, and we're happy to go along with what peer-reviewed studies seem to suggest is the case.

But when Pinker says:
"But everyone agrees that this [natural selection on groups] is not what happens in so-called "group selection." In every case I've seen, the three components that make natural selection so indispensable are absent."

I have no idea how he can conclude this given the evidence. It is actually very much like talking to a creationist.

Micro evolution and macro evolution are the same thing, do you understand? It is hard for us idiot humans to visualize changes over hundreds of thousands of years, but it doesn't make it less true.

I recommend reading this book, which goes over the science about evolution, and the 39 branches from the earliest organism to get to us: https://www.amazon.com/Ancestors-Tale-Pilgrimage-Dawn-Evolution/dp/0544859936

If you lookup "after man" on amazon under books ,you will find a few like this by a couple of authors. I think dougal Dixon stole his ideas from Wayne Barlow.


http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0881623016/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?qid=1463770015&sr=8-5&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=after+man&dpPl=1&dpID=51sdYb6qAfL&ref=plSrch

Or

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0312011636/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1463770015&sr=8-1&pi=SX200_QL40&keywords=after+man&dpPl=1&dpID=519Mv2qbAgL&ref=plSrch

1. I know James Barham is an atheist philosopher who ascribes to ID. As he wrote: "What is certain is that the Darwinian explanatory framework is logically confused and scientifically superficial with respect to the phenomena of normativity, teleology, and agency. Darwinism is a gigantic obstacle obscuring these important problems from our view, and I doubt we will make much progress towards solving them so long as Darwinian dogma retains its death grip on the minds of so many."
   
2. Philosopher and mathemetician David Berlinski, although having Jewish heritage, is an agostic, religion critic, and ID proponent.
   
3. While not a subscriber to ID, atheist Bradley Monton wrote a book defending ID as valid science.
   
4. There's also atheists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who wrote What Darwin Got Wrong. From their interview on salon.com: "Creationism isn't the only doctrine that's heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin a web, you could tell a story of why spinning a web was good in the context of evolution. That is why you should be as suspicious of Darwinism as of creationism. They have spurious consequence in common. And that should be enough to make you worry about either account."
   
   When reading the profiles of ID'ers creation scientists, I frequently find conversions from atheism, deism, and theistic evolution, often only after years of research in their fields. Conversely, the deconversions I read occur at the beginning years of university, after young students reject the sham Hovind-style creationism being taught by people who know nothing about science. Senior NASA climatologist Roy Spencer described the trend:
   
   > Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as 'fact,' I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism. ... In the scientific community, I am not alone. There are many fine books out there on the subject. Curiously, most of the books are written by scientists who lost faith in evolution as adults, after they learned how to apply the analytical tools they were taught in college.
   
   Conversely, TalkOrigin's list of creationist deconversions is all high school and college kids. Seemingly because they encountered the tree of life, junk dna, and haeckel's embryology diagrams in the texbooks and were convinced by such "overwhelming evidence".
   
   
   
   

I traded this for the pamphlet last time JWs came to my door. Do you find humor in it like I do, or would you be offended?

http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Ghost-Origin-Species-Updated/dp/0375501037

This book is the reason why I chose Ecology and Evolutionary Biology as my major.

Dougal Dixon's books After Man and The New Dinosaurs explore alternative evolution scenarios.

Lots of pictures.

here you go

This is a bit like asking which evolved first: males or females. Neither - they evolved at the same time.

With very few and rare exceptions, every organism is the same species as its parents. You are the same species as your mother, and she is the same species as her mother, and so on. It may be that you are the same species as your mother, and her mother's mother, and so on, but it may not be the case that you are the same species as your 40,000th great-grandmother. But your 40,000 great-grandmother would be the same species as your 40,001 great-grandmother. There never was a time when, for example, an Australopithecus mother gave birth to a human baby, in the same way that you never went to sleep one night as a child and woke as a fully-mature adult.

If your question is which came first: the chicken, or the chicken egg, then the answer is neither. Chickens, chicken feathers, chicken eggs, and chicken eyeballs all evolved together, with each generation being the same species as the previous generation, whereby major species-level changes only become apparent when comparing many generations apart.

If you still can't wrap your head around this and are serious about understanding it, check out the book The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins. It's written specifically for those who are struggling with the gradual nature of change over immense periods of time.

>Why? Wouldn't it be evolutionarily advantageous for the brain to model the 'self' as part of its overall strategy of modeling its environment?

This is problematic because the brain does not evolve to model itself.

-or this-

>I do wonder how you explain the spontaneous emergence of an intelligent, capable, knowledgable God without a process like evolution to get you there. But then, I can't ask you, because you have deleted your account.

Because it muddles abiogenesis with evolution. The two don't really have an overlap since abiogenesis necessitates not having a prior generation and evolution requires it.

-or this-

>if you put god into the evolution equation, you're entirely missing the point of evolution. The whole idea was to demonstrate a process through which complex life could form without the need for any kind of intelligence or creator.

As the whole idea of the Theory of Evolution wasn't to demonstrate anything. It was descriptive of observations and allowed falsifiability in certain places. His next post goes even more off base. Evolution is guided by environment as negative mutations to an environment often lead to death of a species or at least those individuals which have negative mutations. That is part of the basis of natural selection.


Here is a whole book that a couple of atheists wrote about evolution that is filled with flaws.

There is an obnoxious amount of misinformation in nearly any demographic and those of us who work in related fields just get used to glossing over them.