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.
What did then, as per your understanding?
William you have wandered so from the OP, I don’t know where to start.
My point was that Cornelius said that natural selection doesn’t produce adaptations.
It does.
Indeed, it is part of the definition of natural selection.
He also said it doesn’t construct adaptations. Again, it does.
As Darwin wrote, natural selection results in the gradual accumulation of small changes that promote successful reproduction.
And we can actually see this happening in computer instantiations of evolution.
You can redefine all the terms if you like, in such a way that Cornelius is correct, and the Understanding Evolution website wrong, but under the way they are defined on the website, as used by Darwin, and as used in evolutionary theory, there is no error on the Understanding Evolution website. Cornelius ought to know this even if you don’t.
You and Cornelius are simply incorrect. Adaptation is what natural selection does, and those adaptations include the accumulation of small changes into substantial and complex features, i.e. the construction of adaptive features.
Which in many cases it does – I gave a hypothetical example but there are many real ones. Take any adaptive feature that that took more than one mutation to produce.
EL said:
EL, you said: “Not all features are adaptions.” Immediately following that, you said: “A feature is an adaptation….” No scare quotes involved in these two sentences. How can they be reconciled? If a feature is some kind of adaptation, how can your prior sentence possibly be true?
BTW, where do you get your definition of “feature” from?
However, looking over EL’s posts, she admits that the idea of NS “building” a feature is a metaphor or an analogy, not an actual statement of fact. This is apparently why she keeps referring to Darwin’s words. The website doesn’t say it is using the term “build” metaphorically. It reads as a claim of fact – that it is NS that is building the feature.
RM builds features; NS then acts on those features. The feature may be available for additional construction because NS preserved it and distributed it, but it is not NS that does any actual construction on the feature. That is always mutation.
I for one am glad to see you have made the jump over to the winning team.
EL said:
Would you like to chastise EL and ask her if she intends to have an adult conversation?
This is the kind of prejudicial bias I’m talking about; take every opportunity to attack the phrasings and interpretations of ID advocates, and give all anti-ID advocates a pass even though they say the same thing.
Petrushka, do you really think I don’t know that according to standard evolutionary theory, which is what we are talking about, there isn’t any postulated intention? Did you know that things can be built without intention, petrushka? Natural forces can build a volcano, for example. Would you insert yourself into a conversation if a geologist said something to the effect that erosion, over time, built the grand canyon? Or that natural forces like gravity built the solar system?
In your world, Petrushka, are “adult” conversations all biased snark?
No, but typically they consist of point – counter point – response.
Whereas you just ignore points you can’t counter. So no, you are yet to have an adult conversation here IMHO.
I have no idea what you mean by this.
As you did not qualify your statement I took it at face value – you are now a Darwinist.
ROFL. Yeah. Sure you did.
Lizzy, no matter how hard we try, our language is so full of implicit intentionality, that just about everything we say can be twisted and quote mined.
Things that are alive are already adapted. To produce more offspring than your neighbor of the same species, you do not have to evolve. You just have to run a bit faster or somehow be a tiny bit more attractive to mates,
But there is a more important issue. Most change is not the result of being better than your neighbor. It just happens.
Is a pheasant better or more adapted than a grouse? Can you really point to an adaptive reason why there are so many beetles?
As per my understanding of standard evolutionary theory, mutation.
In that case forget the metaphor, or, at least, apply it to the relevant parts of the process.
The environment (which is the nearest thing to a selecting agent in the metaphor) obviously can’t “select” a variant that doesn’t exist yet.
Nobody even tries to claim, and the Understanding Evolution website doesn’t imply, that “natural selection” magically constructs new sequences. In fact that would be the opposite of the theory of evolution – if the environment even partly determined what variants emerged, that would mean a major change to classical evolutionary theory.
But what the environment DOES do is filter out those variants that don’t thrive in it – because they don’t thrive in it – and allow preferential replication of those that do, thus allowing the population to adapt to that environment. It thus aggregates advantageous genetic variants in the population.
As a result, not only do those advantageous genetic variants become more common, but more individuals exist in whom additional mutations can occur that result in enhancement of the original phenotypic feature. Without that selection, the chances of two positively interacting variants would be small. With the environment doing the selecting, the chances are greatly enhanced.
And you can calculate it, and observe the results on a computer. I assume you’ve seen this:
Without the environment selecting for time-keeping, the clocks could not evolve, even though all the mutations required to make one kept on occurring. But with the environment selecting for time keeping a clock is built
And if mutation alone doesn’t build a clock, but mutation plus NS does, then it is perfectly correct to say that “NS builds adaptive features”. Yes, it does it by “distributing” the mutations in a pattern that forms clocks, but then you could equally say that I build a house by “distributing” bricks in the pattern that forms a house.
To claim that the house isn’t “built” because I merely “distributed” the bricks and did not “produce” them would be to massively miss the point – and misuse the word “build”.
EL said:
No, it doesn’t. That’s the point I’ve been arguing all this time. It is responsible for one aspect of an adaptation, not the other.
Let’s see how the site in question defines natural selection:
Do you see anything about “adaptation”? No. Hmm. What “the definition of natural selection” is EL referring to here?
No, it doesn’t. You yourself have admitted that the idea of NS “building” anything is an analogy or a metaphor. It doesn’t actually build features or adaptations.
All those small changes were not made by NS. Protecting a building site is not the same thing as building the thing that is being built.
I’m not the one redefining anything; I’m using either (1) the website’s own definitions, or (2) standard definitions of terms. It is you, rather, that is using your own convenient, made-up definitions to defend the site and attack CH’s post.
No, you are the one that is simply incorrect (about this point – CH is incorrect when he says NS doesn’t influence the construction of features/adaptations). You have taken a metaphor or an analogy and have confused it for an actual fact. NS doesn’t actually build anything; it preserves and distributes what RM builds.
EL said:
Nobody has said anything about “magic”. The website indeed implies that natural selection constructs new features – since you yourself have admitted that a feature can be nothing more than a new point mutation. So yes, the implication is there.
“Filtering” is not building. Allowing preferential replication is not “building”. “Allowing the population to adapt” is not building. “Aggregating advantageous variants in the population” is not building the feature. Indeed, none of the above can happen until the feature (or the preceding one) has been built.
A clock couldn’t “evolve”, but it could certainly come to exist without any selection “for” a clock. An environment without NS but with RM could eventually generate a clock; it just wouldn’t do so as an evolutionary adaptation, but rather as the result of random accumulated heritable sequences.
No, it isn’t. It is perfectly correct to say that NS makes possible the building of adaptive features. It doesn’t, however, actually do any building.
When the “phrasings” of ID advocates cause a sentence written by an “evolutionist” to mean the opposite of what it was intended to mean, William, then I call that “prejudicial bias”.
Cornelius interpreted the word “adaptation” to mean what it was not intended to mean, as opposed to the way it is defined in their own glossary, and by Darwin, and in evolutionary theory, and then accused the site of error.
How did you manage to turn that spectacular bit of “prejudicial bias” into an accusation against me???!!!
There is no error on the site, as long as you interpret the words written there as they were intended to be interpreted, and as defined in the site glossary.
There is only an error on the site if you insist on interpreting the words in different manner, even though it makes a complete nonsense of the meaning – actually makes it say the opposite of what evolutionary theory actually proposes!
That seems to have been a mistype. I meant to type: “An adaptation is a feature adapted to the environment”. Happy to accept correction on that error.
Well, it does. What is a metaphorical is the idea of “Natural selection” being some active agent putting something together. Clearly, there is no Selector sitting in the environment, choosing genetic variants she fancies and assembling them into an adaptive feature. But yes, the environment does build adaptive features. Remember that selection acts at the level of the phenotype, not the genotype. Genes are selected if they occur, either singly, or in combination, in a way that results in a thriving phenotype. Only when that happens are the genes selected, and, if the advantageous phenotype depends on the combination, it will be the combination that is selected. And because the combination is advantageous, the prevalence of the constituents of the combination will increase, thus making future instances of the combination more likely.
I’d say that was “building” a “feature” (the adaptive phenotypic feature specified by the gene combo). And “NS” is doing the building. Without selection of the phenotypic feature, the genetic components of the combination will simply drift.
You could just as easily write:
“RM supplies a population with a steady supply of novel genetic sequences. NS (i.e. the environment) then “selects” those sequences and combinations of sequences that result in features that are reproductively advantageous in that environment, aggregating those sequences in the population, and rejecting those that are reproductively disadvantageous. As a result, more and more members of the population exhibit this feature. We call this phenomenon the population “adapting” to the environment, and the selected feature we call an “adaptation”.
In that formulation, NS is clearly the aspect of the process that produces the adaptation. Without the environment doing the selecting the population will not adapt to it. Not only that, but there will no concentration of the genes that contribute to the feature and thus enhancements to the feature will be orders of magnitude less likely.
It doesn’t have hammers and trowels, for sure. But that clock won’t get built without NS, and it will with.
NS is necessary to build the clock. It is therefore perfectly decent English to say that NS does the building.
Which is why Darwin put it that way.
So you are claiming that BECAUSE RM alone could build a clock, therefore NS is unnecessary?
How about: “BECAUSE” RM alone could build a clock, therefore ID is unnecessary?
One thing that ID proponents and Evolutionists do agree on (apart from you, apparently) is that without something OTHER than “RM”, complex adaptive features won’t evolve, or at least not in the time they’ve had to do it.
The evolutionist answer is NS – because that hugely increases the chances of it happening, just as having Shakespeare write his plays is a huge improvement on waiting for a billion immortal monkeys to do it.
The ID answer is ID, because they don’t believe NS can do it.
Are you saying that NS makes no difference to the probability that those clocks will evolve? In a given period of time? Because if so, you are demonstrably wrong.
Well, quite. Therefore to get an adaptation, you need NS. As the UE website says, and as CH disputes.
So he was wrong.
But the accumulation was. How many ways do you have of missing this point, William? What part of “aggregate”, or “accumulate” or “build” or “construct” don’t you understand?
That clock won’t evolve in the lifetime of the guy’s computer without NS. With NS it will.
So NS is building the clock.
If you stare at the words used to describe evolution long and hard enough, they lose all meaning, and evolution magically disappears.
William is sounding like those stupid people who refuse to recognize gay marriage because, they claim, “marriage” is defined as one-man-one-woman. Nothing else can be “marriage” to them, even though their tiny-minded narrow definition clearly misses all the important parts of love and mutual commitment. And William sounds like he’s saying “build” is defined as “hand-places-brick-on-another-brick”. NS can’t be “building” to him, by definition, because it doesn’t have agency (or hands 🙂 ), even though his definition makes it impossible to understand such perfectly ordinary English language as “Every summer, the river builds a sandbar in the mouth of the harbor.” or the anti-evolutionists favorite jibe “The mutation load builds up too much in the population”.
It’s impossible to communicate with WJM when he’s in one of those moods.
You are making yourself plenty clear, but some people just can’t listen.
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edit: fixed the sentence about mutation load
Heh. Yes. Magic!
Heh, yes.
Mung,
Absolutely no mileage to be gained here, Mung. Adaptationism is/was controversial because of arguments about the extent of NS’s role, not because the combatants had different views of what ‘adaptation’ meant.
Yeah, but oops is better said “builds up in” — edited in comment above — sorry.
I’m not missing your point, EL. I understand your point perfectly. I just disagree with you on your conclusion. We actually agree on everything except one thing: whether or not one can accurately characterize what NS does as “building” a feature.
I disagree that it is “perfectly good” or even reasonable to refer to a process of preservation and distribution as a “building” process. I don’t consider it a reasonable term to use in place of “making possible”. NS makes adaptation possible – I agree with this. NS preserves and distributes – I agree with this. Adaptation would not be possible without NS – I agree with this. However, everything you use to describe what NS does is a perfect fit onlyfor the second part of what “adaptation” means (producing population commonality) and not the first (producing the feature).
We agree on everything that factually occurs; what NS actually does, what RM actually does. What I disagree with is that it is proper, or even reasonable, to characterize what NS does (which we agree upon) as “building” or “producing” a feature, or building or producing the “feature” aspect of what an “adaptation” is.
The clock won’t evolve ever without NS because evolution is impossible without NS. I didn’t say it would evolve. I said, it would come to exist.
Nope. Take away RM, and nothing gets built. Period. NS doesn’t build anything. Without NS, mutation will eventually build a clock; it just won’t be due to evolution.
EL said:
I just got finished saying that NS is necessary in order for there to be any adaptations. My point here is that RM builds things; NS does not. Put NS by itself and it builds nothing; put RM by itself and it builds all kinds of stuff. SO, RM is not building anything; it’s influencing how RM builds things and what kinds of things RM builds. Influencing the building process is not the same as the building process. Because something is necessary for a particular kind of thing to be built, doesn’t mean that thing can be said to be doing the building.
Sure it will. RM will build all kinds of things – it will build exponentially more things much faster than RM & NS could ever dream of. And, the building won’t be limited to whatever might give the organism an advantage. The building won’t be limited or culled at all.
EL said:
No, I never said anything like any of that. Increasing the probability that a clock will evolve is not the same thing as building the clock.
EL said:
No, it doesn’t. It may allow for and influence their construction, but it doesn’t do any of the actual construction. RM does all of that.
Well in that case you are missing the Darwin’s entire point. If you do something that massively increases the chance that something will be built, then that something is “building” it.
As you can see in the clock video. Those clocks have zero chance of assembling themselves with RM only. They assemble themselves reliably with NS. So it is perfectly reasonable to say NS, not RM, “constructs” the clocks.
If you don’t like the metaphor, fine. But meaning conveyed by the metaphor is correct: NS builds adaptive features i.e. it is the aspect of evolution that causes adaptive features to be erm built.
Without it, those adaptive features are not built, and even if they were, by fluke, they would not be adaptive. But the most important point is that they would not be built.
Oh, have it your own way, William.
If you want to insist on only using the metaphor “build” to refer to the construction of a phenotypic feature, then “RM” doesn’t do that either. What does it are the developmental processes within the organism’s cells. Neither the biochemical process that creates the novel sequence, nor the sequence itself does any “building” at all, in your narrow literalist sense.
So you have not only lost the plot, but you are still wrong.
To return to the plot: in the sense in which Darwin used the term, Natural Selection produces/builds adaptations, where adaptations are features of the members of population that help them thrive within their current environment. It builds them because it is the term we use to refer to the accumulation of slight variants that can “build”. Without that accumulator process, those variants won’t “build”. As any number of online simulations can demonstrate. Here is another one:
As you can see, the adaptation “object avoidance” gets better and better over time. The population “adapts” to an environment in which obstructions are a threat to reproductive success. NS results in the accumulation, within the same individuals, of multiple components that contribute to the adaptation.
And when multiple components assemble to make a whole, a common term for this phenomenon is “build”.
Without NS, this would not happen. With NS it happens reliably. Therefore we call NS the “builder”. If you prefer “architect” that’s fine with me.
Either way, Cornelius Hunter is wrong.
As that UE website says. If you don’t like metaphors, don’t use them at all.
No, it won’t William. You are wrong about this. Demonstrably wrong.
With no selection AVIDA never ever produced the most complex function “EQU”. With selection it reliably did so. Same with any EA you set up – abolish selection, and you get very little. Add in selection (i.e. make procreation contingent on some feature being present) and you rapidly get complex and ingenious structures and functions.
Mutation will not build that clock without natural selection, William.
And NS alone can’t build it because you can’t have NS without a source of variation. It doesn’t exist.
So your objection is trivial.
Variance generation+NS makes the clock happen.
Variance generation alone won’t.
NS alone is an oxymoron.
So what makes the clock happen? Specifically, what aggregates the clock parts into a clock? – the part that does the aggregating, namely, NS.
Perhaps you could give me an example: show me a scenario with “NS by itself” and tell me whether it produces anything.
Go on.
Or just describe it, if you like: a situation in which there is “NS by itself” with no variance generating system.
There are 100 houses in a development. Every day one step in the building process occurs. In each house it is done slightly differently (RM). At night the architect comes and says, I like how it looks in houses 7, 32, and 64. Have the rest of them redone to match one of those three (S). Then the rest are modified to match either 7, 32, or 64. But in biology this modification in the frequency of various alleles occurs over a period of generations, as members of the population are differentially replaced, NOT as a result of additional mutations.
So the initial appearance of a feature/adaptation/genotype is due to mutation; the expansion of it in the population results from selection. That allows the next good mutation to occur in a better genotype.
Ah, it’s all a semantic disagreement. Another example of how some people think everything is categorizable as one thing or another, and other people always (or almost always) see grey areas between categories.
Organisms stop mutating. No more mutations. The environment changes. Some organisms are better suited to the environment than others; some die out while others thrive. Eventually, environmental changes probably kill off most species because they cannot adapt to environmental pressures, which will affect other species that depend on the first species for an ecological balance.
Natural selection, then, becomes a process of selecting that which can survive the longest while biological diversity deteriorates. It’s not selecting anything newly built; it’s selecting only from what already exists, because nothing new is being built. Because NS doesn’t build anything. RM is what does the building.
EL said:
Sure it will. Eventually. There’s nothing preventing mutations from aggregating via inheritance that eventually become a clock. Avida doesn’t run the parameters I’ve outlined – all mutations live, all mutations procreate. Of course you’ll get the clock – eventually. Eventually, you’ll get every possible mutational arrangement because nothing is ever being weeded out.
I guess that depends on your definition of “Natural Selection”. If you already have diversity, NS can still select from what already exists. It just won’t have anything new to evaluate via its selection process.
EL said:
I”m not missing “Darwin’s” point because I’m not arguing with Darwin nor am I arguing about anything Darwin said. I’m arguing about what the website in question says, and about what CH said.
EL said:
No, it’s entirely misleading, because NS doesn’t build anything.
hotshoe_,
EL is communicating just fine. I understand what she is saying. I disagree with her that “build” or “produce” is a reasonable characterization of NS’s role in the creation of adaptations. Just because people disagree doesn’t mean there has been a breakdown in communication or understanding.
OK. Well, let’s leave it there. I’m not convinced that you have yet understood that Natural Selection i.e. environmental filtering of the traits of each generation is an extraordinary powerful mechanism for, I dunno, generating?, producing? giving rise to? complex adaptive traits, nor understood the point that without it such complex adaptation would be vanishingly unlikely to arise, and it’s a pretty critical point, as most ID proponents don’t understand that NS is precisely what makes such things quite probable, but people have survived someone being wrong on the internet before now, so I guess I’ll survive.
Thanks for playing anyway 🙂
Poor Michelangelo, he thought he was actually producing something when he sculpted David.
Turns out that he wasn’t, he was just taking away some stuff while keeping other stuff.
Glen Davidson
‘Built’! Hee hee. What a funny word! What’s the u doing? Built. Chortle. BUILT.
Built built built built.
Did people build Chihuahuas out of wolves? Hahahaha. Silly Darwinists.
Pearls before swine.
Without it they are not built or produced (in the lifetime of this universe) so you are simply, demonstrably wrong.
:You are committing an elementary logical error I’ve already addressed. Just because X is necessary for Y to be built doesn’t mean X actually builds Y.
EL said:
I completely understand what you are saying. I agree that under evolutionary theory, NS is what makes such things “quite probable”. It’s like comparing NS to machines that clear a site, bring raw materials to a site, provide the blueprints (via environmental pressures), and safeguard the site. However, none of those mechanisms or services actually build the house.
The “house-building crew” with the actual “hammers and nails”, so to speak, are random mutations. Clearing the site, providing a road to the site, bringing materials and the blueprint to the site is not actually building the house. None of that will ever actually build a house without the RM crew. Natural selection doesn’t actually build anything (in terms of the feature or “house” in question).
NS contributes to the generation of adaptions by providing the contextual support and preservation & distribution mechanisms, but to say that NS builds the adaptation implies that NS builds the feature which then becomes an adaptation by being distributed through the population by NS. That’s simply not true.
William J. Murray,
Essentially, RM is depositing bricks all over the place, not just ‘on-site’. Those that land in the wrong place disappear, due to NS. Those that land in the right place remain, due to NS. So to accuse NS of ‘not building’ because it is not actively engaged in lobbing bricks around seems pedantic.
So, you end up with a nice little pile of bricks, as if someone had put them there and only there. The same happens with filters – you get a neat little piles of sorted material from unsorted inputs.
Perhaps you’d be happier if we called NS the buildings inspectorate … nonetheless, only mutation+NS in concert can cause lineage adaptation. This is definitional.
William, I fear some of my biases may have lead to me misinterpret your earlier posts. I read them assuming you were an ID proponent, when it is now obvious you are anything but. You’re claiming that random events produce design, no injection of CSI needed. I would contend that your scenario requires at least a single instance of selection to detemine which is the working clock from amongst the ten^^(some massive number) objects in your junk pile. But throw enough tornados at the rest afterwards and you’ll get a 747 thrown in gratis.
I also wonder if your problem with “feature” stems from what you envisage it to be. I wonder does your argument results from thinking of a feature as a “wing” rather than as a “teeny weeny slightly bit better” wing?
Sometimes it does however. And this is one of those times.