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.
If you simply believe it is true, it is true. So what’s the problem?
Tamara Knight said:
Don’t get carried away. I’m accepting mainstream evolutionary theory here arguendo to make a the point about the assertion that NS “builds” or “produces” adaptations.
No, I’m not. As I alluded to above, as per evolutionary theory, NS provides the design. Mutations build the design, so to speak.
A entirely randomly generated clock will work whether it was naturally selected for or built by a tornado going through a junkyard.
A “feature” would generally encompass everything from a single point mutation to any general “part” of an organism (wing, foot, circulatory system, etc); it doesn’t matter. Mutations built the feature (or the capacity for any particular expression of the feature); NS provided the blueprints (so to speak; environmental pressures over time) and the support systems. The feature becomes an adaptation (by the definition of the website in question) when it is commonly distributed in the population.
Is there a limit to the complexity of an object that can be generated “randomly” William?
Could an intercontinental ballistic missile be generated “randomly” William?
No, in fact you are claiming that random events can generate CSI. A clock (or a mousetrap) has CSI. If such a thing existed because it was generated “randomly” it would have CSI. Therefore random processes can generate CSI. If random processes can generate CSI then random processes filtered by selection can only generate more CSI.
Therefore you are in the processes of disproving large numbers of ID claims currently.
By saying “so to speak” you have undermined every single word you’ve said in this thread. Why not say what you mean, rather than saying something and adding “so to speak”? Could it be that words are flexible? You’ve become caught in your own trap here.
William J. Murray,
That’s not what they say. They say “An adaptation is a feature that is common in a population because it provides some improved function.”
It wasn’t ‘not-an-adaptation’ when it was rare, only becoming so when common. “Common because”, not “must be common before …”. It is a difficult practical matter to establish that a rare feature is adaptive, but all fixed alleles (which includes all adaptive ones) must once have been rare. In the case of adaptations, it was being adaptive that stopped them from being rare or extinct.
But we do have the privilege of observing the development of individuals in real time and what I am arguing is that the part is a reflection of the whole. The old terms macrocosm and microcosm should be reconsidered from a modern perspective. You yourself have argued that adaptations have fractal qualities.
Life as a whole exhibits an evolution of consciousness culminating in human self -onsciousness. Individual humans develop from from a state of unconscious water born existence towards a state of self-consciousness
I would say that these are weak arguments for your position. We see finch beaks oscillating about a mean and bacteria gaining functions by disabling genes. Computers are used to simulate evolution in a very simplified manner which has to be tuned to succeed. I have lost count of the number of times I have read that some life process is “more complex than we thought”. Well the researchers may have originally thought that some process would turn out to be simple, but I never thought that for a moment.
Can you give examples of some novel forms that you think have been demonstrated to have appeared by adapting to an environment?
We also know this from individual development. In order to shape a functioning bone it must both gain and lose mass. With a narrow field of view you could say that osteoblasts and osteoclasts are in competition but looking at the overall picture you will see that they working in harmony for a higher end of adapting the bone to its environment.
Longitudinally life has evolved to a point where it produced organisms which are self-aware, can communicate not only their feelings but their abstract thought to each other. Not only that but our upper limbs have been freed from the job of locomotion in order that they can be put to creative use.
There are good reasons why higher animals have not developed wheels as a form of locomotion. Imagine a biped evolving from a wheel-driven quadruped. How is it going to further develop its upper limbs into equivalent multifunctional mechanisms the likes of which we benefit from.
I’ll ask again what do you think rats have gained in the way of features and attributes which make them more generalists than their ancestors were?
Well I see the journey as having a direction. It is a development of consciousness.
A propensity studiously avoided for three billion years and which shows every evidence of being temporary.
Could I ask specifically what you are referring to here?
Yes. It’ll cost you £1 for a 5 minute argument and £8 for a ten minute one;)
CharlieM,
A massive and vital difference is that all the cells and genes in a multicellular individual have common cause – they share the gametic exit, and all perish together if they don’t get there. There is real no equivalent with a disparate population.
Analogising things may be appealing, but it’s not really explanatory.
CharlieM,
Something to do with the absence of roads, perhaps?
You do realise that time is relative, don’t you? Even from a human perspective 8 hours spent sleeping and 8 hours awake are experienced in a totally different way.
I have no idea what post you are responding to. Certainly not mine.
See here
And what is your point?
Behe’s pet parasite, malaria, has — in the wild — developed multi-drug resistance without being degraded to the point where it is less virulent.
Not sure what you’re trying to say here. Do you mean they all came from the same source?
If they don’t get where? There is a huge variety of cells in any multicellular animal and there is continuous birth and death of these cells thoughout the life of the animal.
I wrote:
There are good reasons why higher animals have not developed wheels as a form of locomotion.
Good point.
If you want to see the advantage of legs and feet over wheels take a look at a mountain goat.
And what is your point?
But Elizabeth doesn’t like that definition. She likes her own “perfectly standard” definition. She wants to re-write the UCB site to match her favored definition.
Maybe there’s just something wrong with me, but I think that’s what William and I have been arguing all along.
But when adaptations start out as rare they still have a very real chance to be lost due to drift.
I didn’t know I needed one.
This sentence exemplifies precisely the confusion that has dogged this thread (and Hunter’s post).
All mutations start out as rare (duh), including potentially beneficial ones.
But mutations are unlikely to be beneficial when they first arise – they might be but they more likely they will be near-neutral or deleterious. And some are lost due to to drift, even the slightly beneficial ones and some are propagated, again due to drift.
But one day, the environment changes. At that point, one of those mutations may become advantageous – because the environment has changed to favour those that bear it, and therefore those individuals that bear it will, by the definition of “favour”, leave more copies of that mutation in the next generation.
Now, we start to call the phenotypic feature conferred by that mutation, an “adaptation”.
Moreoever, that same environmental change is likely to also have altered the advantageousness/deleteriousness of lots of other once-neutral genetic variants.
And so the newly-beneficial variants, already quite numerous, due to drift build up in the population, due to what Darwin called “natural selection”.
And the resulting novel phenotypic features of the now adaptively evolving population are called “adaptations”.
Built. By. Natural Selection.
Have a good weekend!
I’ll spend my weekend looking for any “natural selection” taking place in any computer programs I have written. I’d hate to think I wrote a program and “natural selection” is now busy “building” the program into something completely different.
CharlieM,
No, I am saying that they all end up in the same place, being constrained through the same bottleneck. The only way out of a sexual organism and into the future is in a gamete. It therefore behooves them to act in concert (‘them’ being somatic cells and the genes therein contained). That common interest does not exist with the individuals in a diffuse population or ecological collection. Cabbage genes do not get into the next generation through concerted behaviour between cabbages. But they do get into the next generation through concerted behaviour between somatic cells. That common interest exists because ultimately every gene in a somatic cell has the same chance of ending up in a gamete. Without that constraint, there is no reason for somatic cells to forego reproduction on their own account.
Don’t get to the ‘gametic exit’ – that is, they fail to generate a successful gamete. All except the germ line cells in an organism are ultimately dead ends, regardless of the differential culling of somatic cell lineages (apoptosis) during life. There isn’t an equivalent in populations. Everyone can reproduce on their own account. Therefore, differentiated populations and ‘good-of-the-group’ altruism are rare.
And your response to my post shows that you haven’t learned a single thing from anything that’s been written in this thread.
First, I didn’t say anything about a mutation. That’s you “changing” what I said to suit your purposes.
Second, I was merely commenting on what Allen wrote. If you had a beef with what he wrote take it up with him. Instead you decide to cherry pick my post.
What precisely is your objection to what I wrote?
“All mutations start out as rare (duh)…”
This is not a rebuttal to anything I wrote. It’s just your agreement with an added gratuitous insult.
“…including potentially beneficial ones.”
This is not a rebuttal to anything I wrote. It’s just you going off on a tangent involving the absence of any immediate benefit, which has nothing to do with anything.
“But mutations are unlikely to be beneficial when they first arise – they might be but they more likely they will be near-neutral or deleterious.”
This is not a rebuttal to anything I wrote. It’s just you off on an irrelevant tangent
“And some are lost due to to drift, even the slightly beneficial ones…”
Which is almost exactly what I said, except I wasn’t using the word “mutation” and I did not restricted what I said to only the “slightly beneficial.”
So again, you’ve refuted nothing that I wrote and in fact agree with what I write. You merely put it in words that you preferred and in a way that made it look like I was wrong. Good faith. Hah.
“Now, we start to call the phenotypic feature conferred by that mutation, an ‘adaptation’. ”
When, precisely? When it actually confers some benefit, even if only “slightly”?
But this can only happen if there is a change in the environment? Well, no. You’ve already admitted a mutation can be slightly beneficial” as soon as it appears.
So what on earth is your objection to what I wrote?
How so? You have yet to demonstrate any point of disagreement with what I wrote.
Mung,
I’m not rehashing the entire thread. William was talking as if Berkeley require some kind of threshold of common-ness being crossed before a feature can be considered adaptive, and the Berkeley quote does not say that. I don’t see the Berkeley quote as being radically different from Elizabeth’s approach, either.
Dunno. I can’t say I have followed the thread in minute detail. I thought it was about builders. But ‘being adaptive’ means ‘is subject to NS’, which means ‘has a difference in mean fitness of carriers and non-carriers which is (usually) irrespective of how common it is’. If that’s what you’ve been arguing all along, well done.
Stop the presses, we need to get that into the textbooks. Oh hang on, it already is. If a feature produces/experiences an increase in mean fitness between carriers and non-carriers, it is adaptive. If it is lost by drift, it is still adaptive. What makes it adaptive? NS. NS can indeed be opposed by other forces, in any given run. A favourite can still lose.
Mung,
Ah, the Programmer’s Gambit! Argumentum ad badanalogium 🙂
I’ll have to see if I can get that turned into an officially recognized chess opening!
If i do this then she must do that then if I do that she must do this… I win!
I look at the programs that are running on my desktop today. And they are not the programs that I would have been using 10 years ago.
Yes, there has been a lot of natural selection. The population of available programs has changed.
Join Elizabeth in the “that doesn’t rebut anything I said queue.”
Am I the only one here who thinks that Elizabeth is absolutely bonkers in thinking that clocks can assemble themselves?
Process A: Attempt all combinations of clock parts until a working clock is produced.
Process B: Attempt all combinations of clock parts until a working clock is produced. But in this process keep the combinations of parts that have a “function” regardless of whether the “function” that is selected for has anything to do with being a clock. And given that this is entirely instantiated in an artificial world, let’s call it “natural selection” if it actually produces a working clock.
No. So why do modern Epicureans resist the idea? Why do they feel compelled to introduce “natural selection” as a limiting factor while at the same time attributing to natural selection unlimited God-like powers?
Mung,
Don’t think they go quite that far. Perhaps people attribute to God Natural-Selection-like powers.
If there is a differential in reproductive output between two variants, then there are two rates of increase – two compounded exponents due to offspring numbers alone. The one with the higher rate of increase will tend to increase to fixation, the one with the lower rate will tend to decrease towards extinction. Both things happen at once – proportionate increase for one is inevitably decrease for the other, and vice versa.
So NS is both a limiting factor (because it tends to remove deleterious alleles, including new ones) and an adaptive one (because it tends to promote beneficial alleles, including new ones). Much like a sieve, which is a concentrator of both large and small objects simultaneously.
Mung,
They don’t assemble themselves. The basic elements of Natural Selection are programmed in, including replication and ‘death’. The program rewards timekeeping, however rudimentary, and rudimentary timekeepers become better ones in that selective milieu. It shows how optimisation can be achieved by a close analogue of NS, with only at-the-time comparison, rather than long-term goal, as the deciding factor on retention or extinction.
The result looks designed, doesn’t it? If you didn’t know what the method was, you’d swear that that configuration was the intention all along, and the Programmer whipped it up in that form after a bit of pencil-chewing. Whereas all the intentional mind has done is create a library of parts and a reward for the better timekeepers around at a given moment.
There are indeed natural clocks. Many plants and animals can measure day (or night) length. Could such a facility evolve, based on the reward for flowering, mating or hibernating at the optimal time of year? Or does it have to be designed in toto?
Pig headed would be more appropriate than bonkers.
Assembled is a metaphor intended to communicate a concept.
Theists, of all people, should appreciate the power and the limitations of parables and metaphors. Communication requires two sides trying in good faith to understand each other. If one side actively resists the concept, communication fails.
Of course you didn’t. I was telling you something, not quoting you. That’s why I put the word “mutation” in bold. So it was clear that I wasn’t saying what you were saying.
jings.
An adaptation doesn’t “start out as rare”. It’s on called an adaptation BECAUSE it is something that has become COMMON because its promotes reproductive success in that environment.
The “duh” wasn’t an insult. It was an indication that what I wrote was a statement of the obvious, but one that I nonetheless wanted to state for the purpose of what I was going on to say.
I was not trying to “rebut” your post at all. I didn’t think your post was rebuttable. I thought it was garbled.
What I wrote was what I think IS an ungarbled account of how natural selection works and the sense in which I think it absolutely right to say that natural selection “produces” or “constructs” or “builds” adaptations.
Try reading it again, not as a “rebuttal” of your post, but as an attempt to explain something.
And what I was attempting to explain was something that is often missed: that most novel mutations are near-neutral at the time of first appearance. So most healthy populations are rich in variants that don’t make much, if any, difference to the reproductive success of their bearers. That richness is what allows the population to adapt when a change of environment comes along. And what produces that adaptation, therefore, is the change of environment, which alters the “selection coefficient” of many variants.
And the point of the clock video (and many other similar videos, as well as AVIDA) is that you can actually demonstrate that WITH natural selection, complex adaptive functional features evolve and WITHOUT it, but the same mutation rate, they don’t.
That is the sense in which “Natural Selection” produces/constructs/builds adaptations. It’s the essential component – unless the environment acts differentially on different variants, adaptation and adaptationss won’t occur.
And I don’t mean that single mutation features won’t aggregate – they will, due to drift, although they won’t confer reproductive advantage, by definition. Nor do I mean that “build” simply means “become more common”. I actually mean that without of natural selection, complex polygeneic features won’t even occur. In neither silico nor biology, get clocks, or obstruction avoiders, or the logic gates, all of which are “built up” over generations by natural selection simply won’t occur.
So the UE site is absolutely fine. No “error” there at all. Cornelius, either deliberately or through ignorance is misunderstanding Darwin’s entire “natural selection” argument.
One post moved to guano.
I think this is why so many IDists recoil at the idea of a mathematical foundation to their claims. There is little ambiguity in mathematics, and they love ambiguity. So they avoid it at all costs.
Yeah, sorry about that. I have to remember who I’m talking to sometimes, and sometimes I forget.
Do you have a reference from an unbiased source?
What? What idea? Who introduces what? Who attributes god-like posters to natural selection? What sort of god is it whose only power is to ensure that the next generation has been selected according to the environment?
Garbled nonsense.
Mung claims to own and have read many textbooks on evolution. As such, none of this should be a revelation and nor should it need explaining.
Mung, are you sure you’ve actually read the books you claim to own?
I dunno. Dembski, who is probably the best brain they’ve got, bases his case on math.
Oh, sure, but I find it hard to think of Dembski as an Intelligent Design supporter anymore given his total commitment to the theistic side of things these days. But you are right. Perhaps what I’m really trying to say is that the better you are at mathematics the less likely you seem to be an ID supporter, with the exception of the top-tier ID people.
I was more thinking of people like KF and Upright Biped who make grandiose claims but then fail at the starting gate of formalisation.
At the bottom of this essentially rather silly argument about the best word to describe the extraordinary power of natural selection to give rise to (that’s the most neutral phrase I can muster) complex adaptive features (and indeed simple ones, but it’s the complex ones, like wings and eyes that demand explanation) is, I think, the fundamental disagreement about whether evolutionary processes, whichever aspect of them we give the credit to, can do such things at all.
I look at that clock video, or that video of evolving obstruction-avoiders, or indeed the output of any computer instantiation of evolution, and see the randomly assorted population of incompetents that the system starts with, and the ingenious problem-solving systems that emerge at the end, and am constantly amazed. No solutions are programmed in – only the environment with its hazards and resources. Yet human-creativity-defying solutions are the result.
It really does work. Anyone who sees that, and still thinks “evolution is random processes, it can’t create complexity/function” has massively missed the point.
And anyone who sees that and says “yabbut humans designed that system” have even more massively missed the point. All the humans designed was an environment with hazards and opportunities, and you don’t need a designer to do that – and a population of critters with no more than the capacity to reproduce with variance.
That last thing is still the big unknown of course, and if all ID proponents were saying is, yes, but what about OoL? they’d have a better case. But their target is always “Darwinism” (sometimes “neo-Darwinism”). Although to be fair, Dembski seems to be finally seeing the point, hence his retreat to “search for a search”.
You have to wonder if the same sorts of “arguments” go on in other languages.
Elizabeth,
Cool bipeds
It’s curious how one can take a process that is insisted not to work in the wild, yet use it in a genetic algorithm that yields something that really is not designed in at the start (if they could do it that way, why build the algorithm?). A sellable product, no less – computer games are big business, and realistic motion a useful application. All from something that does nothing, and can’t ‘build’. So what built the best walkers? They certainly didn’t just happen.
Well, I agree, but my view would be not that ID isn’t based on math, but that the part that is is based on bad math – and people who are good at math can see the problem with the bad math.
What remains are essentially arguments from incredulity. Which is fair enough, actually. Except that this is where it becomes annoying (well, I become annoyed) when people like Cornelius Hunter try to propagate the idea that natural selection is “only” differential reproduction and doesn’t “do” anything.
In my more cynical moments, I think that the dismissal of “NS” as “only” differential reproduction is because it focusses attention back on the “random” part (scare quotes intentional), which isn’t the important part, but does seem like the daft part. NS will work whether or not the variance-producing mechanism is “random” or not – the idea of “randomness” wasn’t key to Darwin’s theory at all.
His insight was that the hazards and opportunities of the environment act like an intelligent chooser – hence “natural” as a qualifier on the word “selection”.
I sometimes wish I believed in an afterlife, so that I could think that Darwin could look at what EAs can produce! He’d be so vindicated.
NS is the “Intelligent Designer”, the thing that has “intelligence”, using Dembski’s definition of “intelligence: “the power and facility to choose between options–this coincides with the Latin etymology of ‘intelligence’, namely, ‘to choose between'”.
The key difference between ‘natural’ selection and human selection is that humans can look beyond the next generation. ‘natural’ selection can’t (at least not without stretching the analogy to beyond what it can bear). But it can sure as heck look as far as the next – the environment biases what goes through to the next round in favour of what will reproduce better in that environment in the next round.
Elizabeth,
I’d disagree. I don’t think that commonness is a requirement to be termed an adaptation; commonness is (frequently) a consequence of being adaptive.