From the Royal Society meeting:
"Complex behaviors such as nest-building by birds, or dam construction by beavers, represent examples of
niche construction in which some organisms themselves demonstrate the capacity to alter their environment in ways that may affect the adaptation of subsequent generations to the environment. Yet no advocate of niche construction at the meeting explained how the capacity for such complex behaviors arose
de novo in ancestral populations, as they must have done if the naturalistic evolutionary story is true.
"Rather, these complex behaviors were taken as
givens , leaving the critical question of their origins more or less untouched. While there is abundant evidence that animals can learn and transmit new behaviors to their offspring — [crows in Japan], for instance, have learned how to use automobile traffic to crack open nuts — all such evidence presupposes the prior existence of specific functional capacities enabling observation, learning, and the like. The evolutionary accounts of niche construction theory therefore collide repeatedly with a brick wall marked “ORIGINAL COMPLEX FUNCTIONAL CAPACITY REQUIRED HERE” — without, or beyond which, there would simply be nothing interesting to observe.
“Jim Shapiro’s talk, clearly one of the most interesting of the conference, highlighted this difficulty in its most fundamental form. Shapiro presented fascinating evidence showing,
contra neo-Darwinism, the
non -random nature of many mutational processes — processes that allow organisms to respond to various environmental challenges or stresses. The evidence he presented suggests that many organisms possess a kind of pre-programmed adaptive capacity — a capacity that Shapiro has elsewhere described as operating under “algorithmic control.” Yet, neither Shapiro, nor anyone else at the conference, attempted to explain how the information inherent in such algorithmic control or pre-programmed capacity might have originated.”
