Cornelius Hunter seems very confused.
…This brings us back to the UC Berkeley “Understanding Evolution” website. It abuses science in its utterly unfounded claim that “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.”
In fact natural selection, even at its best, does not “produce” anything. Natural selection does not and cannot influence the construction of any adaptations, amazing or not. If a mutation occurs which improves differential reproduction, then it propagates into future generations. Natural selection is simply the name given to that process. It selects for survival that which already exists. Natural selection has no role in the mutation event. It does not induce mutations, helpful or otherwise, to occur. According to evolutionary theory every single mutation, leading to every single species, is a random event with respect to need.
He has forgotten what “adaptation” means. Of course he is correct that “Natural selection is simply the name given to [differential reproduction]”. And that (as far as we know), “every single mutation …is a random event with respect to need”.
And “adaptation” is the name we give to variants that are preferentially reproduced. So while he would be correct to say that “natural selection” is NOT the name we give to “mutation” (duh); it IS the name we give to the very process that SELECTS those mutations that promote reproduction. i.e. the process that produces adaptation.
Cornelius should spend more time at the Understanding Evolution website.
ETA: CharlieM points out below that…
When CH says that natural selection does not produce adaptations he is talking about individual organisms. He is discussing mutations in individuals and adaptations in individuals. Natural selection has nothing to do with the first appearance of an adaptation in an individual.
And that of course is the confusion – I hadn’t seen just where Cornelius’s confusion lay. Because, of course, the term “adaptation” is a population-level concept. At the level of the individual, the equivalent would be “advantageous mutation”. And that makes the Understanding Evolution website absolutely correct.
Well, forget topiary then and just read Darwin. He puts it very clearly.
Oh please. ID claims X but cannot demonstrate X. It’s not that hard.
EL says,
If a student can’t explain a concept clearly in their own words we generally assume they don’t have a firm grasp of the subject matter.
peace
Kantian Naturalist,
Your correction is, um, correct, but in Hunter’s case he has a long history of making erroneous statements and failing to address refutations. He’s just another DI shill.
Right. So what does that tell you about Cornelius?
Petrushka:
A topiary doesn’t build anything..
EL:
All you have done is restate what I have already said; natural selection preserves and distributes that which RM builds. Your step by step mutation scenario doesn’t rebut my point; it demonstrates it. It is each mutation that accumulates over time which is the construction / building process; each added variation resulting in a slightly new feature. NS preses and distributes that ongoing, changing feature throughout that evolutionary process that may take millions of years.
Natural selection, doesn’t build anything; all it does is preserve and distribute that which has been built.
You can say all day long that we just don’t understand, but every time you try to explain, your explanations are exactly the same as mine – only, you are calling a preserving and distribution process “building” or “producing” a feature, which it certainly is not. The feature will exist in one organism via mutation. Random mutaton built it. After that, NS preserves and distributes that feature.
CH is absolutely right, and the website is horribly worded.
Well, in Darwin’s analogic use of the word, it does.
You can redefine it to means something else if you want, but then you aren’t using the metaphor in the way that Darwin intended it.
The environment selects from the variance that mutation creates. That is the sense in which the environment aka “natural” selection, “builds”.
There is no error in the Understanding Evolution website.
Well, if you don’t want to use the words in that way, fine. However, using the words in the way in which the words are used in evolutionary theory (and indeed in the way that Darwin used them) they do. And “build” or “produce” seems a perfectly good way to describe the aggregation of features that promote successful reproduction in the current environment, and result in complex features like fins and wings.
Yes, the genetic sequence for an aspect of that feature (not necessarily the feature) is created by mutation. And yes, “NS preserves and distributes it” is one way of saying “and if the environment proves to be one in which that feature promotes successful reproduction it will become more prevalent”. The part you keep missing (I’m not sure if you are actually reading my posts in full – you say I am saying what you are saying but you omit whole swathes) is that it is natural selection aka the environents that SELECTS genetic variants that promote reproductive success IN THAT ENVIRONMENT, thus resulting in adaptation TO THAT ENVIRONMENT. Those variants might have been around for many generations doing not very much, or doing something else, or doing something reproductively neutral and so not aggregating, then the ENVIRONMENT comes along and SELECTS them, result in an ADAPTIVE FEATURE.
You can call it “just distributing” if you want – but that “just distributing” in a manner that results in phenotypic adaptation to the environment is what produces adaptive features. Adaptive TO that environment. The one, you know, doing the SELECTING.
Because you still don’t get it.
Here’s an easy way to look at this.
Lets say natural selection comes to an end – meaning, nothing ever dies anymore – but random mutation still exists. Can new features be built? Hell yeah. In fact, more new features than you can imagine will be built because all natural selection really does is get rid of new features and only those it can’t get rid of survive.
Now,.let’s say mutation stops, but natural selection continues. Are we going to get any new features? Nope. And, in all likelihood, most of the ones that already exist will probably die off because there is no means by which to adapt to changes in the environment.
Natural selection doesn’t build any features.
“Natural selection doesn’t build anything” seems to be one of these mantras that people who don’t like evolution come up with rather a lot. It’s a favorite of JoeG’s I think.
If “natural selection doesn’t build anything” – how come complex features evolve in AVIDA if you specify natural selection (i.e. make a virtual environment in which some variants are more successful than others) but not if you don’t? Even though the rate of mutation and novel genetic sequences is the same in both cases?
William?
EL said:
I’m not missing it – it’s irrelevant. Selecting a feature for an environment is not building/constructing the feature. Preserving the feature for generations is not building/constructing the feature.
If an “adaptation” is a feature that has been successfully distributed and preserved in a population, then one can credit NS for the distribution and preservation of that feature, but not for its construction. Without RM, there are no new features; without NS, there’s a whole lot more new features. NS doesn’t build anything.
Who said anything about “complex structures”? Moving the goal posts now, are we?
Take mutation out of Avida and see how much new stuff natural selection builds. Then take natural selection out, leave mutation in, and see how much new stuff gets built.
You don’t have to have a Ph.D. to know the answer tot that one.
OK, so there seems to be one potential problem anyway. “Nothing ever dies any more” would not mean “the end of natural selection”. The “end of natural selection” would mean that the environment was such that no novel genetic sequence gave its bearer any greater or lesser reproductive advantage to over any other novel genetic sequence.
And in that context, no adaptive feature would, or could, occur. As can be readily demonstrated in AVIDA by setting the environment so that all variants have an equal chance of reproductive success.
Absolutely. If there are no mutations there can be no natural selection. That’s why the two things (as I already said) are not really separable – without reproduction with variance there can be no heritable variance in reproductive success. And that is what natural selection IS: heritable variance in reproductive success.
So you can have mutation without selection – variance that has no phenotypic effects, or none that affects the chances of successful reproduction.
But you can’t have selection without mutation – it would by like saying: you can have any colour as long as it’s black. There can be no choice without options to choose from.
Natural selection doesn’t build any features.
EL:
I didn’t say increased “adaptive” features would occur; I said new features would be rampantly occurring. You wouldn’t be setting AVIDA’s environment so that all variants had an equal chance; you’d be setting the environment so that all variants survive. Endlessly.
Without any form of natural selection, there would an exponential increase and proliferation of new features because no new features would be weeded out by natural selection.
Oh ffs. No. Sure you could call a single advantageous mutation an adaptation if you wanted, although it would take very careful observation to determine whether it actually was or not – and even then, you’d only get a probability value on whether it was becoming more prevalent by drift or by selection. Normally the word is applied, as it was applied in the pages Cornelius linked to to features like big ears, or flippers, or tendrils, or chameleon skin (Cornelius’s actual example). So no, nobody is moving any goalposts unless it is you, if you are trying to restrict the term “adaptation” to single mutation features.
Without mutation there is no natural selection.
Very little.
But leave mutation (which is necessary, but not sufficient, for selection) in, and add selection (in the form of an environment that favours some variants more than others) and you will get complex features. And do.
Mutations is necessary for selection, but not sufficient for it. What is also required is an environment in which some variants are more suited to it than others.
This is what natural selection IS. And once you have that, adaptation can, and often does, occur.
You don’t have to have a Ph.D. to know the answer tot that one.
Are you forgetting that selection is not about survival per se, but about reproductive success? If not, I assume you mean you are setting the environment such that all variants had an equal chance of success.
In such an environment there would be very little evolution, and what there would be would simply be drift. You would be highly unlikely (and this has been demonstrated) to get complex features evolving, and if they did occur, they would be very to unlikely spread through the environment.
But no aggregation of features. Of course if you really did leave it long enough, like the monkeys and typewriter, given worlds enough and time they’d produce the complete works of Marvell.
But, as the IDproponents keep telling us, we don’t have worlds enough and time.
What we do have is natural selections which speeds things up incomparably.
In the case of AVIDA, you get the difference between the most complex function evolving in every run and it not evolving at all.
RM builds/generates/produces features. NS weeds them out, preserves and distributes that which is advantageous; those successfully preserved and distributed features are then called “adaptations”. NS doe not build the feature and it’s sloppy thinking and wording to imply that it does.
One might say that natural selection is the process by which a new feature becomes an adaptation, but the feature was certainly not built by NS.
Then blame Darwin’s wording, not the University of Berkeley. And it’s not sloppy unless you misinterpret it, as you are doing.
It is the process by which a new (or an old) genetic variant becomes an adaptation; it is also the process by which new (or old) genetic variants aggregate in a new environment to produce complex phenotypic features adapt the members of the population to thrive in that environment, and would not evolve were the environment not SELECTING them.
You are trying to separate out things that are not separate.
Mutation is not selection but without variations produced by mutation there can be no heritable differential success which is what natural selection is. Natural selection is not adaptation, but the environment, which is what determines which variants do better than others, is the thing that the population adapts TO. Without the environment doing the selecting the word “adaptation” makes no sense. And without the environment doing any selecting, there’s no natural selection.
So saying “natural selection is what produces adaptation” is absolutely correct.
More goal-post moving – from “feature”, to “complex structure”, to “complex function”!
The reason for my exercise, EL, was to point something out: if you take away mutation, you get no new features of any kind. If you take away natural selection (meaning, everything survives and reproduces endlessly), you get an explosion of new features because every mutation and every sequence of mutations survives in every direction.
Such new features would probably get wildly complex; only a small subset would probably be “functional” in any significant sense; but when you don’t weed anything out, you’re bound to run across some jewels of happenstance here and there.
NS doesn’t build anything.
No. A feature COULD be a single genetic novelty, but to exclude all but single gentic novelties from the term would be to misapply it.
And the feature can be a structure or a function – in AVIDA they are functions.
I am moving no goalposts, William. What you seem to be doing is making them so narrow that nothing except nonsense can get through.
Yes of course. If you have no mutations, you have no natural selection
If all you are saying is that natural selection depends on mutations therefore natural selection doesn’t do anything on its own, then you are sort of correct, but then nobody claims that it does. It would be like saying that rivers don’t create ravines, water does.
No, you don’t. You might get a lot of individuals with quite simple features, but they wouldn’t, by definition, be adaptations, because there would be no environment that they were differentially adapted to. And they wouldn’t form complex features like fins or ears, or chameleon skin, nor, in AVIDA, would they form the most complex functions.
If you left it running long enough you might get the odd complex function, but again, they wouldn’t be adaptations, nor would they have any special chance of becoming more prevalent.
Well, no, because you don’t have anything to aggregate the novelties. Even in a sexually reproducing population you’d have very little chance of any novelty drifting very far. Without “selective sweeps” the novelties would be perpetually diluted.
Well, none would be, in an evolutionary sense, because everything is maximally fit. And more to the point none would be an adaptation because there is nothing to adapt to.
But no adaptations. Maybe the odd poetic masterpiece. Given worlds enough and time.
Sorry, William but you are simply wrong about this. You have an excuse, but Cornelius doesn’t.
And if you want to find out more about it, I suggest playing with AVIDA. Or any simple evolutionary simulation. They are truly remarkable things. Change the environment and your population adapts. Change it again, and it adapts again. The environment is simultaneously the selector and the thing the population adapts TO. That is why it is an oxymoron to say that natural selection doesn’t produce adaptation. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be natural selection.
William,
Now repeat your exercise in a finite environment If you take away mutation, you don’t get complex adaptations. If you take away selection, you don’t get complex adaptations.
Selection’s role is to winnow, and winnowing is essential. It’s analogous to Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” in economics.
So saying “natural selection is what produces adaptation” is absolutely correct.
The website defines adaptation:
So, if we substitute the definition provided on the site for “adaptation”, we have: “Natural selection is what produces a feature produced by natural selection for its current function.”
Isn’t that a little circular? It’s rather incoherent. And, it’s just wrong: NS doesn’t produce features. A better way to define adaptation would be: A feature that has been preserved and distributed through a population by natural selection.
Natural selection doesn’t generate the feature; the feature is what natural selection acts on which results in it becoming an “adaptation”. There are two parts to the term “adaptation”; (1) the feature, and (2) its preservation and distribution.
To say natural selection “produced” the adaptation is misleading. You can say it produced (2), but not (1).
Except big ears, trunks, spines, flippers, drip-tips, tendrils, and thumbs are not features of populations, they are features of individuals, and you think Sober is wrong too then.
Keith said:
If you take away selection you don’t get any adaptations. What you get are a lot of new features.
I didn’t claim that its role wasn’t essential. I said, it doesn’t build the feature.
Is that site you linked to an authority on logical fallacies?
keiths
Repeat the exercise in most environments with both RM and NS present and you get don’t get complex adaptations.
It’s only in a very small subset of finite environments that RM and NS produce anything at all of interest.
It’s only when an environment is “pregnant” with complexity do you get complex adaptations.
RM and NS are by themselves profoundly impotent either alone or viewed together.
peace
You see, William, if it is but a single mutation that spreads through the population because it confers some advantage that leads to differential reproductive success, that is NOT an adaptation.
How many mutations does it take, I wonder. What’s the minimum?
Behe’s edge perhaps?
EL said:
You’re the one changing terminology with each post, EL. Not me.
Now you are attempting, apparently, to equivocate the term “feature” to mean “adaptation” to salvage your argument. If “feature” is not a different thing than “adaptation”, why would the site say:
.
Would it be safe to say that the difference between a “feature” and an “adaptation” is its “commonality” in the population? That seems to be the distinction to me. So, before we have “adaptations”, we have features. IOW, feature + commonality in population = adaptation. Feature + NS = Adaptation.
So, NS does not produce “features”, nor does it produce the “feature” part of an adaptation. Which is exactly what CH said.
An even simpler way of putting it: NS cannot act on that which doesn’t yet exist. A feature must exist before NS can act on it. NS cannot build a feature; it can only act on a feature that already exists.
Well it would be circular if you were trying to make a causal argument. If you are trying to explain the terms it’s perfectly fine. Natural selection is the rather clumsy term Darwin gave to a very simple process (it was an analogy – nothing is actively selecting, obviously) by which the environment itself determines which of the variants in the population gene pool is advantageous or disadvantageous at any give time. They might be very new, or they might be very old. But the point is that they get “selected” by the environment if they are “adaptive” i.e. useful in that environment. So yes, it’s circular, because it’s ways of saying something very straightforward, but applying different words to different aspects: a population adapts to its enviroment i.e. evolves adaptive features when the environment favours some variants and disfavours others.
Well, you keep saying this, but you are incorrect. It does. First of all, by definition an feature is an adaptation to an environment if it is advantageous in that environment and not in some other environment, even if it’s a single mutation. But more importantly most adaptive features are the result of many genes that often interact to produce the adaptive phenotypic features. That kind of assembly of interacting genes is a direct consequence of environmental selection. It doesn’t happen if the environment isn’t doing the selecting, and even if it did, by extraordinary chance, the combination would have no tendency to propagate (the contributing sequences would not tend cluster in the same individual), and even IF it did (two IFs so far) it still wouldn’t be an adaptation because it wouldn’t be an adaptation to the environment!
Well, that would leave out the most important aspect, which is that natural selection can result complexity – the very things that IDists say it evolution can’t! Mutations alone can’t do this. It’s the selection by the environment of those traits that promote reproductive success in that environment that produce that kind of complexity. I mean, you may not believe it, but that is the theory – and we can demonstrate it in simulation. There are any number of simulations on youtube showing how complex adaptive features can arise as a result of an environment making mutations differentially successful.
It doesn’t generate the mutation. And at its simplest, all natural selection does is make a single mutation more prevalent – and you can call that then, an adaptation. But it can also make much more complex things, which won’t happen in the absence of selection, and wouldn’t even be adaptation in the unlikely event that they did.
No. Or, at least, only in the special case of a single-mutation feature, and even then, you wouldn’t call it an adaptation unless it was, well adaptive, i.e. was reproductively beneficial in that environment, i.e. had been “naturally selected”. But the vast majority of adaptations are way more complex than single gene variants, and they are built – constructed, whatever, by successive generations in each of which the current environment “selects” the variants that are best suited to it, or, to put it more straightfowardly, in which the current environment filters what variants go on to the next generation. And that repeating filtering is what “builds” the adaptive features – what is a small fin in one generation is a slightly bigger fin in the next, and has a narrowed trailing edge in the next, and so on. “Building” seems an excellent term for that process. Mutation provides the blocks; Selection assembles them into an adaptive feature.
But that’s just an analogy. The proof of the pudding is in the simulations: without selection complex functions [which in AVIDA are adaptive features] don’t evolve in AVIDA; with selection they do. Change the environment i.e. change natural selection in an EA and your population of critters adapts.
Only because it’s an anthropomorphisation arising from Darwin’s original analogy. It would be better, possibly, to say that the environment filtered out those features that best adapted the population to thrive within it. But as the article is about “what is meant by natural selection” then clearly that term is the one used. And what natural selection “does” is produce adaptations. By definition. A feature that adapts a population to its environment is a naturally selected one.
That’s why I suggested that Cornelius (and you as it turns out) should check on what “adaptation” means. It is a feature that adapts the lineage to a new environment (flippers on penguins; wings on bats) and comes about by what Darwin called “natural selection”
Wjm:
An even simpler way of putting it: NS cannot act on that which doesn’t yet exist. A feature must exist before NS can act on it. NS cannot build a feature; it can only act on a feature that already exists.
Factories cannot act on what does not exist.Raw materials must exist before a factory can act on them, therefore factories cannot produce anything.
LoL. Actually, in case it hasn’t become clear yet, you’re being accused of having re-written too much already. 🙂
But if you’re really in the mood to re-write stuff I have some more for you:
Adaptation:
“The adjustment or changes in behavior, physiology, and structure of an organism to become more suited to an environment. ”
http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Adaptation
“Natural selection is the cornerstone of Darwin’s theory of evolution; adaptations are the traits that allow organisms to survive the selection process.”
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/index.html
“Adaptations enhance the fitness and survival of individuals.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation
“Adaptation is “a special and onerous concept that should not be used unnecessarily”.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_and_Natural_Selection
And from the NCSE website!
“An adaptation is a characteristic that enhances the survival or reproduction of organisms that bear it, relative to alternative character states (especially the ancestral condition in the population in which the adaptation evolved).”
http://ncse.com/files/pub/evolution/Evolution–Futuyma–chap11.pdf
Now if only Joe F. will come along and tell us what “adaptation” really means, we’ll have heard from an authority.
And from my first post in this thread:
“Adaptation refers to all the structural, functional and behavioral characteristics that enhance the organism’s reproductive success in its natural environment. ”
And:
The exact definition of an adaptation is a very contentious issue in evolutionary biology.
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Adaptation.asp
Elizabeth offers a definition of adaptation as if her chosen definition somehow refutes Hunter, when it does no such thing. Now THAT is a logical fallacy. Elizabeth’s proffered definition may even be correct in some situations. It does not follow that Dr. Hunter is wrong.
Argue away, silly people.
EL said:
Not according to the adaptation page of the website in question:
You’re wrong. Gobsmackingly, obviously wrong. A single point mutation in a single organism is not an adaption because – according to the website – natural selection has not acted upon it yet. All you are doing now is equivocating – (subconsciously, I’m sure) to avoid the fact that CH is right and you are thunderously wrong, and becoming more wrong with each post.
keiths:
William:
To build a house in the middle of a dense forest, you have to clear some trees first. The house doesn’t get built otherwise (unless it’s a treehouse). To argue that clearing the trees isn’t part of the building process is merely a semantic quibble.
And mung brings the point home: There are many favorable ways of interpreting CH’s post; there is plenty of dispute even in mainstream evolutionary biology about the role of natural selection and even how to apply the terms; a lot of this boils down to what can be called rather vague terminologies; so to assert that CH is “confused” and “doesn’t know what he is talking about” is, IMO, an interpretation produced largely by an ideologically biased perspective … an intention, so to speak, to find ID supporter’s understandings of evolutionary flawed.
No I am talking about the word “adaptation”. And it’s not my argument – it was Charles Darwin’s!
Cornelius said that natural selection does not produce adaptations. It does. That’s what adaptations are, by Darwin’s definition – features that adapt a population to its environment by virtue of the “natural” selection by that environment of those variants that thrive best within it.
No, there is no “difference” between a “feature” and an “adaptation”. An adaptation IS a feature – but not all features are adaptations. A feature is an adaptation to an environment (as in “I adapted my technique to a shorter stringlength”). And if there isn’t an environment affecting what is advantageous and what isn’t, and thus what is adaptive and what isn’t, then there’s no natural selection going on.
Yes, it does produce features. It doesn’t produce the sequences that contribute to them, as I’ve said, but it does build features directly, by concentrating the advantagous sequences in individual organisms, instead of the sequences simply drifting. And adaptive features, by definition, are those that the environment has selected.
I think this misunderstanding goes to the heart of what people find non-credible about Darwinian evolution. They get hung up on the random mutation part, and dismiss the natural selection part as “not doing anything” or “not being creative” – and then ask where the “complexity” comes from? Well, the complexity comes from the natural selection part – that’s exactly what it does! But when I mention complexity, William accuses me of “moving the goal posts”!
No it isn’t. There’s nothing vague about evolutionary theory, and the page Cornelius criticises is not wrong. It’s very precise, and it’s absolutely correct. Only someone not just ignorant, but confused, about evolutionary theory could possibly interpret as meaning anything other than what it was intended to mean, and to think that “natural selection” doesn’t refer to the very process that produces complex adaptations is simply to miss the entire point of Darwin’s theory.
Of course mutations are necessary – nobody, least of all “evolutionists” would claim otherwise. Natural selection is actually defined in terms of the heritable variation that genetic mutation (as we now know) produces. But it is not simply “mutation” – it is the differential reproductive success of variants within a given environment
And that differentinal reproductive success within a given environment that is called “adaptation”. And this can, at its simplest, be a single genetic variant (no, “NS” did not create the variant – it “selected” it as an “adaptation”); but it can also do much much more than that, which is to result in the evolution of complex features that are produced by interactions between many genes within the same individual, something that would be vanishing unlikely in the absence of any adaptive advantage of the emerging feature, but which happens regularly in the presence of it.
As I said, that is probably a poorly worded sentence (in my view it is). But it is not the sentence CH critiqued. And it’s not so much wrong as a bit garbled.
And I am not equivocating at all. I have said precisely how I am using the term “adaptation”, and I’ve given you a quotation from Darwin in which he uses it in just that way.
If anyone is equivocating it is you – because in your thought experiment of the “no death” scenario (and presumably no heritable variance in reproductive success, i.e no selection) you sort of implied that “adaptation” would still occur. But of course it would not, because whatever did occur, could not possibly be “adaptation” in the precise use of the term as it is used in evolutionary biology.
Yes, it does follow that Hunter is wrong. He claimed that natural selection does not produce adaptation.
It does. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be natural selection, because natural selection is the effect the environment has on the relative differential success of genetic variants. And that environmental effect is what we call “adapting to the environment.
This is actually simple logic.
Keith’s said:
Clearing the trees is not building the house.
Clearing trees is not necessarily a part of any building process. Since evolution doesn’t act teleologically, NS is not clearing trees for the purpose of building a house; it’s just clearing trees that aren’t fit for survival. If a house happens to be built in the area it is clearing trees, that’s a happenstance event. It could as easily be that no house gets built there at all.
If you want to call that a semantic quibble, then CH is simply quibbling over semantics and not “very confused”, as EL uncharitably insists.
Never underestimate the power of design, check it out
http://treechurch.co.nz/
peace
EL said:
Your confused inference is not my implication. You are mistaken. I have clearly delineated between “new feature” and “adapatation”. You are the one now equivocating “feature” and “adaptation”.
There is no difference between a feature an an adaptation.
An adaptation is a feature.
Not all features are adaptations.
Yet there is no difference between a feature an an adaptation.
Now all we need is Adapa and OMagain to drop in and fire off a few insults and the circle will be complete.
“… to avoid the fact that CH is right and you are thunderously wrong, and becoming more wrong with each post.”
Prophetic.
It’s a silly analogy.
If anything is doing any selecting, it’s the environment. And the environment is the thing that an “adaptation” is an adaptation TO.
So clearly, selection is producing adaptations. It can’t not.
If CH is “quibbling over semantics” then I suggest that CH is being the “uncharitable one”.
And his quibble is a very silly one, and his quarrel should be with Darwin’s language, not the Understanding Evolution website. If Darwin hadn’t used the analogy “natural selection”, Understanding Evolution wouldn’t have to explain the term. And if his analogy separated out what is in fact all part of a single process (heritable variation in reproductive success in the current environment resulting in adaptation of the lineage to that environment) then we wouldn’t even be having this argument.
Not that it’s very difficult, or wouldn’t be if people like Cornelius didn’t try to make it seem so. It’s actually dead simple.
“Natural selection” is the aspect of the evolutionary process that accounts for the teleology (or teleonomy as I prefer, but teleology if we leave out intention from our definition of teleology) – the functional nature of adaptive features.
That was Darwin’s key insight. And for better or worse, we are stuck with his term.
EL said:
Let’s look at what CH more fully explained:
It is clear what aspect of an “adaption” CH is talking about; he agrees that NS preserves and distributes the beneficial mutational variation; he insists that NS doesn’t generate the mutational variances that construct the feature which NS then acts upon.
He is exactly right. If anyone is “quibbling over semantics”, it’s EL and those who insist CH has said anything worth criticizing in the first place.
Selection shapes populations, not individuals.
No, I am not. An adaptation is a feature. Not all features are adaptations.
And a feature that does not adapt an organism to its environment is not an adaptation to that environment. duh.
Therefore if the environment plays no role in determining which variants will thrive and which won’t there can be no adaptation.
Ergo natural selection is what produces adaptation – by definition.
Which is why we can define adaptation in terms of natural selection.
That is the very OPPOSITE of equivocation – it is precision.
Also, another point you keep missing: not all natural selection acts on new sequences. Mostly it acts on sequences that have been around for many generations, but have until recently been neutral.
As I said in my OP, Cornelius is exactly right about all that.
And absolutely nothing in the Understanding Evolution pages he linked to says anything different.
What he faults them for is for saying that Natural Selection produces adaptations.
And it does. Not genetic novelties – adaptations to an environment. And it does. By definition. A genetic variant is not an adaptation until it has been “selected” by the environment i.e. has turned out to be adaptive in that environment, i.e has undergone natural selection.
And then there’s the build up thing. Which you keep ignoring.
As Charlie M pointed out many posts back. And which Cornelius should know.
True — directional selection is a population-level effect, thought it is still individual organisms (or the traits that they have?) that are selected against.