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.
OMagain,
90% of discussions seem to be on semantics.
The mathematical argument giving the probability that an advantageous allele will nonetheless get lost as a result of genetic drift goes back quite a ways — to a paper by JBS Haldane in 1929. More accurate approximations to Motoo Kimura in 1958 and 1962, and a tight bound is due to PAP Moran in 1958.
That whole discussion is about an adaptation that often doesn’t rise from a few copies in the population to a noticeable frequency.
Well, I’m not going to to to the stake on what we call something that isn’t common but appears to promote reproductive success.
The paradigm cases of adaptations are things that are a characteristic of all members of a population (they are often the features that define them as a species), and are typically polygeneic. [ There are some interesting exceptions, especially in sexually reproducing species, such as variants that are advantageous in the current environment when you only have one copy but deleterious when you have two, e.g. the sickle cell trait, and so optimise at prevalence less than 100%. But even at that, they provide the potential platform for future mutation of the sequence, such that two copies are no longer deleterious, but the benefit retained.]
At the early stages of the process, the only way we can tell whether a variant is beneficial or not is whether it is becoming more prevalent at a rate improbable under the null of neutral drift.
Or, you could do it retropectively, by figuring out that a specific mutation, now common, must have been “adaptive” i.e. reproductively advantageous, even when it was rare.
But liminal cases make bad categories (to abuse an adage).
Alan Miller said:
By the definition on the site, there is a difference between an adaptive feature and an adaptation. OF COURSE a single-organism mutational feature would have to be “adaptive” in order for it to later become an adaptation which as EL and the site has pointed out, refers to the population level.
EL said:
First, when you have to say “that is the sense in which” NS builds, you have admitted that it doesn’t really build, but rather only “builds” in an equivocated interpretation of the word.
Second, you can see the entire problem on this thread encapsulated in the quote above. EL’s argument here is tautological, irrelevant nonsense that doesn’t even address my actual point. OF COURSE, without NS, you get no adaptations – that’s tautological. It’s a nonsensical, trivial thing to go to so much effort to keep repeating as if it is addressing some meaningful part of the debate.
I’m not arguing that adaptations will arise without NS; I’ve never said that. I’ve argued that new features will arise. And they will. They will proliferate wildly and exponentially because nothing will be weeding any mutations out whatsoever. None of them will be detrimental or advantageous; they will all be neutral features.
NS without RM builds no features or adaptatons. RM without NS builds every feature imaginable, eventually, including functional complexity. Any feature that RM + NS can build, RM can build by itself eventually. You just wouldn’t be able to call those features “adaptations” because they wouldn’t meet the definition of that term. Theoretically, RM by itself can build all sorts of features that it cannot build while being acted on by NS because it wouldn’t be limited by NS’s filtering process.
NS constrains and contextualizes what features RM builds, and then preserves and distributes those features into the population which, at that point, we then refer to as an adaptation.
We? No, you are not part of that group. You don’t get to use “we”. Perhaps one day you might earn that right, but not today.
You are delightful fellow. Typically one addresses an adversaries actual arguments thereby demonstrating that they are tautological, irrelevant nonsense.
There is no need to actually explicitly say that, once demonstrated. It’s been demonstrated. Or not.
Please show the mathematical model that demonstrates this.
EL said:
You’d call it an adaptive mutation. That doesn’t make it, by definition, an adaptation because it has not yet become common throughout the population.
But, for god’s sake, don’t call Allan Miller “very confused” because his semantics don’t toe the definitional line you’ve drawn for CH. He is, after all, on the home team.
OMagain,
You don’t need a mathematical model. All you need is logic.
Elizabeth,
Sure, if one is looking to actually identify an adaptation at that microscopic level, one would have nothing to go on while rare. I think the point would be that one assumes an intrinsic rate of increase – a hypothetical mean offspring number which is the expected value from an infinite number of trials; a property of the allele outside its present population context, but in the same environmental context. If such an allele has a higher s than all rival alleles in the present population, it is an adaptation, though I don’t suppose we could say it is an adaptation for the species until it has passed 50% frequency, and become the new norm.
Still, selective sweeps are but an eye-blink compared to the long evolutionary residency of a fixed gene, so we rarely have to fret overmuch about the lag period during which ‘consensus genes’ were not, except when arguing!
Much like when you said
Funny how when one group says something it is “equivocated interpretation” and when you say it it’s ” so to speak”.
Keep telling yourself that.
I’m not saying you need one, I’m saying are you capable of providing one?
Not “equivocated”, William. To “equivocate” means to use a word in one sense in one part of your argument, then another in another, as in:
I’m not doing that. I’m telling you exactly what I mean by the word at all points.
Precisely. So Cornelius was simply shit-stirring.
Yes. But the kinds of features that ID proponents point to and say: Random Chance could not do that – won’t. For precisely the reasons ID proponents give. Something else is needed.
That something could be selection by an Intelligent Designer. It could also be Natural Selection.
Prove it. Give me an example of “NS without RM”.
Just a hypothetical example will do.
A thought experiment if you like.
And while you are thinking it up, try suggesting to kairosfocus that RM is perfectly able to “create every feature imaginable, eventually, including functional complexity.”
Your infinte monkeys point is irrelevant – the point is that with NS, those features will emerge rapidly and reliably. Without it you could wait until Heat Death, and even if you got the odd “functional” feature, it wouldn’t actually have any function other than entertainment.
Indeed 🙂
Yes, how is William defining function at this point? There is nothing to “do” and therefore nothing can do anything. RM proceeds, presumably on some magical basis, regardless of what it produces and how that can continue to generate new generations. That we might call some features “functional” form our perspective means nothing at that point. We’re just exploring the entire possible mutation space at that point.
It’s actually an interesting point. When KF makes his “haystack” argument I’ve often asked him in the past what process he has in mind that is doing the “searching”. It seems a similar situation here. William thinks that RM can continue to infinity yet the only way I can imagine that is like some sort of experiment – from a bucket is poured mutations, but the mutation never affects the operation of the “bucket”. The “process” of producing the mutations cannot be linked to the mutations themselves.
So another IDer constructs a contrived argument to make a point that’s not really work making. Surprise.
William J. Murray,
I think you can allow some legitimate metaphorical language use – see also ‘select’. If a walking automaton develops improved capacity through a GA, the GA’s selection routine ‘builds’ that capacity, albeit not in isolation.
Yet CH says “Natural selection does not and cannot influence the construction of any adaptations, amazing or not.”. That was Lizzie’s original point.
OMagain said:
It depends on if what one says is a misleading equivocation or an illustrative metaphor.
The “so to speak” I use to refers to “design”, not “build”. I’m identifying “design” as a metaphor. RM actually builds, in the literal sense, the feature. NS only provides a “design” metaphorically. So, RM can only be “building the design” in a metaphorical sense (“so to speak”), even though it is literally building the feature.
The claim that NS “builds” adaptations also uses the term “build” metaphorically in an attempt to characterize NS’s role in the generation of adaptations (which is why EL uses the term “in that sense”. Not all metaphors are equal.
I think that, from the arguendo perspective of mainstream evolutionary theory, saying that NS provides the “design” or “blueprint” is an acceptable illustrative metaphor. My case here is that saying that NS “builds” or “consructs” or “produces” adaptations is not a good metaphor. I think it is a misleading equivocation on that site and for anyone to use. I think this is essentially CH’s issue with those terms.
So, when I say RM builds the feature, I am saying it in the literal sense. When EL says that NS builds an adaptation, if she means it literally, she is just flat out wrong. If she means it metaphorically (which the weight of her posts indicate, especially above where she says “sense” of the term “build”), the metaphor is a bad one because it equivocates the term “build” into something it simply doesn’t mean in order portray NS as something it is not. It is a misleading, not an illustrative, metaphor.
See my reply to OMagain above. Not all metaphors are equal.
First, CH is wrong about that.
Second, what does it matter what EL’s “original point” was? My argument is that it is a misleading equivocation (whether promoted on that site or by EL here) to refer to what NS does as “building” or “constructing” or “producing” an adaptation.
Here is what Cornelius said:
Cornelius takes issue with the statement “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.”
It can. That is not an error at all, far less an “egregious” one.
The page, also, explicitly, says:
In other words it actually defines natural selection as a function of variation.
Again, correctly. Much as William keeps arguing that “NS without RM” could produce no adaptation, that argument remains a nonsense, because NS doesn’t exist without heritable variation.
Here’s the “Logic”:
I do believe I have just invoked the Law of Non-Contradiction, and I think that William lost.
William J. Murray,
Heh! But yours are more equal than others’.
Would it be illegitimate to say that the GA ‘built’ the walking capacity in the automata linked above? (What is really built is a good-walking genotype, the code for a good-walking phenotype, and ‘build’ is very much part of the lingua franca of programming). It didn’t build it through mutation alone. It couldn’t.
Yup.
Well, it matters to me because your very first post in this thread was:
So I’m glad we now have that straight. Contra CH, UE was not making an “egregious error” (not an error at all) and it was CH, not I, who was showing evidence of interpreting “anything [the other side] says as being in some way erroneous wrt to understanding basic evolutionary terms and meanings”. And getting it wrong on top.
Nope. If you don’t like “building” (my word) or “constructing” (Cornelius’s), then stick with UE’s, which is “producing”.
Your argument that the features we call adaptations would happen anyway even without NS, therefore NS doesn’t produce those features, is equivalent to arguing that since infinite monkeys with typewriters will eventually produce Hamlet, therefore Shakespeare didn’t write/construct/produce Hamlet.
And as NS is what produces not only adaptations (by definition) but those adaptations include complex structures that require the aggregation within organisms of many interacting parts. I do not think that “build” or “construct” is an inappropriate term for that process, even if it is not the one you would choose. But “produce” is surely unexceptionable.
pwoned.
No, EL. That is not what “equivocate” means. Look it up.
I don’t know what his intent was; I just gave him a charitable reading where – although he was wrong about the “influence” part – he makes a sound point about whether or not it is appropriate to use the terms “build” or “produce” the way the site does.
Wrong. They say that random chance probably won’t (to the point of scientific implausibility) produce those features given the available time and resources of our universe. And they’re right; but time and resources are selective pressures. Without selective pressures – including limited time and resources – random mutation will, eventually, produce every imaginable configuration of biological diversity, in the same sense that given virtually infinite universes (as Hawking makes a case for), one like ours with its apparent fine-tuning becomes inevitable, no matter how implausible. This is a simple logical extrapolation.
I already did this in a prior post in response to the first time you asked for it. Go find it. It’s odd that you would even ask for this. Just imagine if all RM stopped right now. What would natural selection be doing? Weeding out that which couldn’t survive any new pressures – selecting (so to speak) existing species for survival and proliferation in changing environments based solely on their current features.
Increasing the odds that something will be built – even from scientific implausibility to scientific certainty – is not the same thing as actually building the thing in question. There are many, many, many physics-related force settings and interactive chemical constants that are also all absolutely necessary in order for a functioning eye to be built; we don’t claim gravity, or electromagnetism, etc., built the eye. Just because natural selection was necessary for an eye to be built in the lifetime of this universe, doesn’t mean natural selection built the eye.
The definition of “equivocate” as stated by Lizzie is correct, William. You may want to double check yourself. Here for instance:
You look it up, William.
Here’s the wiki example:
I did not equivocate. I provided a clear guide to what I meant by “build” at all points (aggregate, accumulate, cause to occur within the same organism) . I did not say:
NS causes advantageous mutations to build up within the same individuals
Building up means fitting components together to build a structure
Therefore NS means fitting components together to build a structure.
But then “RM” doesn’t do that either.
This is incorrect William and there are many mathematical models that demonstrate this. Without NS, few mutations proliferate in any population because they all have less influence as the total number increases. Eventually, populations hit a state of dimished returns where mutatations counter the effects of other mutations. It becomes a lose-lose situation quite rapidly.
RM without NS can’t really build anything.
William J. Murray,
If RM stopped right now, NS (and drift) would gradually squeeze all the variation out of the living world. Genomes would slowly freeze. One by one, alleles would go extinct (which means another becomes fixed, if the species itself remains extant). And once all the variation has been squeezed out at a locus, NS must stop operating at that locus. And at higher levels, species too would start to wink out one by one, with no new speciation to feed in at the base.
NS can only work for a while without RM, just as we can only breathe for a while in a sealed box. Variation is part of the process; the thing that NS sorts.
How is it “charitable” to read someone as being correct about someone else being wrong, when you in fact think they are wrong?
What about charity to the person accused of being wrong who is in fact correct?
Your accusation to me was of jumping to the conclusion that ID proponents are wrong, and yet the very example was of an ID proponent wrongly jumping to the conclusion that an evolution website was wrong!
How curly can your logic get??!!!!
Nothing. It wouldn’t exist.
I’m sorry I missed your post. I still cannot find it. It’s possible that I simple did not recognise it as an answer to my request, seeing as no answer is possible – without variance there is no NS, so NS without RM is a nonsense. Please provide a link to where you think you answered my request.
Well, it pretty well is. Pretty well all causal factors are probabilistic, even what seem like near-deterministic physical laws. Pumping air into a balloon causes the balloon to expand. But actually, it only increases the probability that the balloon will expand. The air molecules might actually huddle in the centre of the balloon, and the balloon collapse. Given an infinite number of monkeys blowing up balloons at an infinitely long monkey birthday party, and it will happen.
In science, “increasing the odds that X will happen” is equivalent to “causes X to happen”.
Which is how we know that smoking causes lung cancer, even though you can still get lung cancer without smoking, and you can smoke and not get lung cancer (at least not unless you live to be infinitely old).
In the cases of NS, NS so massively stacks the deck towards the building of complex adaptive features that it reliably happens, time after time.
And and even that is to artificially separate two sides of the same coin.
Heritable variation in reproductive success IS NS. No heritable variation, no heritable variation in reproductive success, therefore no NS.
You’re still letting your side down William. Now you’re claiming CSI is not conserved, but that the rate it leaks into our universe is insufficient to explain evolution?
But it means that RM+NS is an explanation for the development of complex organisms, and the most likely one too. Science doesn’t do proof, even if it were possible to document every mutation since the last common ancestor of all life. When presented with the evidence you could still claim that the fact that unguided processes could have done it does not mean “The Designer” didn’t.
OK, so I guess this was the post William was referring to when he said he’d provide an example of “NS by itself”.
And what is it? It’s an example of when RM stops..
Without variation, there can be no NS. As I said.
About a thousand flippin’ times.
I should also point out that with or without N, if mutation stops, variation drops to zero.
And when variation drops to zero, there CAN be no NS.
There is no such thing as NS without variation.
EL said:
Nope. Not the same thing at all. You are employing a deeply flawed analogy. If “shakespeare” is representing “natural selection”, then “shakespeare” is not actually typing anything; at best, it can be said that “shakespeare” is looking over the shoulders of the randomly-typing monkeys and moving stacks of typewritten pages around, duplicating some and substituting them for other stacks, removing some stacks and disposing of them. The monkeys are still doing all the actual writing – typing at keyboards.
Also, unlike Shakespeare, NS is neither creative nor intentional, so we can give it no related credit for the construction of the story. So NS, unlike a Shakespeare, cannot arrange the output of the monkeys in any manner that the monkeys would not eventually produce on their own, nor can it generate any keystrokes unavailable to the monkeys.
The reason I brought up the point about RM being able to generate any feature (eventually) without NS, and NS being incapable of building any feature at all on its own, was to illustrate the utter inappropriateness of assigning the credit for “building” or “producing” an adaption to NS. It cannot build any feature on its own while RM can build all features on its own – eventually.
So no, I’m not saying that because the monkeys can do it, then Shakespeare didn’t do it. What an absurd, uncharitable paraphrasing. I’m saying monkeys can do it without shakespeare, and shakespeare cannot do it without the monkeys, so assigning shakespeare credit for writing hamlet is unreasonable and inappropriate.
In standard evolutionary theory, the monkeys write hamlet. All NS did was unintentionally, mechanically edit the output of the monkeys so that hamlet happened to be produced faster than it would have been produced otherwise.
And note: this may not always be the case. Depending on selective constraints, some feature construction my be – by chance – unavailable if filtered via selective constraints, or may take much longer (via loss of what could have been beneficial mutations in the long run). Or, just pure bad luck might wipe out some beneficial feature. Logically, on its own, RM could produce identical features faster because nothing is limiting the exponential explosion of features and diversification.
It may be, mathematically, that some, most or even all features that RM produces while constrained by NS would be more likely produced faster without NS, in addition to producing many, many more features.
EL said:
You’re equivocating again. “variation” doesn’t mean the same thing as “random mutation” or even “mutation”. I didn’t say anything about NS without “variation”; I said something about NS without RM. If random mutation stopped raight now, you’d still have variation in terms of a variety of currently existing life forms which NS would still act on.
Take away random mutation, and NS doesn’t build any features, period. As I said.
What “side” do you think I’m defending? I’m not defending ID here and I’m not making an ID argument. Try to focus on what I actually, specifically say instead of trying to interpret it “as if” I’m making an ID argument. I’m not. I don’t claim to represent or argue for anything “ID”. I’m making an argument here that referring to NS as that which “builds” an adaptation is misleading based on nothing more than logic applied to current evolutionary theory, terms and definitions. ID has nothing to do with what I’m arguing here.
Positing mainstream evolutionary theory as fact arguendo, I agree completely. But the website in question doesn’t say that; it defines adaptation in its glossary thusly:
First, the teleological nature of the definition is misleading (produced ..”for” its function”). Second, no mention of RM whatsoever, giving the misleading impression that NS is entirely responsible for “producing” an adaptation.
Then, on that “Understanding Evolution”‘s “adaptation” page, it says:
Again, no mention of RM, giving the misleading impression that NS produces “features”. NS does not produce features. It does not produce the “feature” aspect of an adaptation. NS preserves and distributes the feature into the population; after it has done so, the feature is then called an adaptation. In fact, NS cannot act on a feature until the feature has been produced by RM. How is it reasonable for the site to imply that NS “produces” adaptations, or for EL or anyone to say that NS “builds” features or adaptations, when NS cannot build any feature whatsoever on its own?
I agree.
I agree, which is why it is absurd to say NS “builds” features. It doesn’t. It destroys them.
I entirely agree. Without RM, not only does nothing get built, but eventually NS destroys everything. Which – again – is why it is absurd to refer to NS as “building” or “producing” features/adaptations.
EL said:
I’m now not so sure that it does actually increase the odds that it will happen. I think I might have been wrong to agree to this. After considering it further, natural selection might actually reduce the probability that any particular feature will appear in a given length of time.
Logically, if you consider the monkeys-producing-hamlet thought experiment, if you begin with infinite monkeys typing, you will immediately get hamlet; the monkeys will produce it faster, or at least as fast, as Shakeseare. With constant reproduction at a given rate and zero NS (no death or diminished reproduction), mutational diversity would expand unchecked exponentially. The sequences of variant features such a system would explore would immediately surpass a system constraind by natural selection. All paths to all features would be explored unhindered by resources, competition or death.
Since RM is still the only way features are actually built even in a NS-filtered system, the only thing NS can be doing is blocking off RM pathways that would otherwise be simultaneously explored via unchecked exponential reproduction, and killing off (via extinction) entire sets of accumulated variations which, if left to develop, might eventually give rise to the same features that require a more circuitous route, if they can be reached at all under the influence of NS.
Logically, from any starting point, RM would likely produce any feature faster than RM & NS. All NS can be doing (wrt to how fast) is slowing RM down and entirely blocking it from generating perhaps most features that could possibly exist, because those features (somewhere along the path of development) would be detrimental to the organism’s fecundity under NS.
Not equivocating (do look that term up, William).
Clearly there has been mutation (actually it doesn’t have to be random, but let’s try to keep things simple) in the past to produce that variation.
Without it i.e. in a scenario in which there had never been any variance generation, there could be no NS. None.
I take it you agree.
As long as that residual variation is present, and that the environment favours one variant rather than another, NS may continue to produce new adaptations. But its capacity to do so is limited by the amount of variation, which is steadily dropping.
And that’s my point – well, not mine, but the key to understanding evolutionary theory and the extraordinary role of NS: variance is intrinsic to NS – without a steady drip-feed of new variants, the capacity of a population to adapt is severely impaired.
But even WITH variance, however initially generated, the population STILL won’t adapt unless there is a correlation between variance and reproductive success.
So the key to adaptive features – the component that makes the difference between mere variance and variance that produces adaptive features – is the heritable variance in reproductive success part i.e. NS i.e the correlation between variation and success. Without that link (termed “NS”), there won’t be adaptation.
Well, the devil is in “any particular feature”. Clearly the probability that a feature that would be disastrous in an NS scenario but harmless in an NS-free scenario will be less likely in the NS scenario than in the NS-free scenario.
That’s the essence of the No Free Lunch story.
So you need to specify your feature. If the feature is specified as one that will, say, cause its owner to run fast, then that feature will arise with far greater probability in an environment in which running fast is one way of getting to lunch before someone else eats it , and/or escaping from a predator before you become their lunch.
In other words what “NS” does (and the “RM+NS” formulation is a poor one, and one I mostly see used by ID proponents in fact) i.e. what differential reproductive success does is make more likely the emergence of complex features that promote the thriving of members of a population within that environment.
This is why it is of great practical use in engineering and other problems. You design an environment in which to surprise, your virtual organisms have to solve the problem that you happen to want solved. And they will find a solution with high probability. There may be many many solutions, and some will be really complex.
If you don’t supply the problem, in the form of their environment, the chances of a solution emerging are vanishingly small.
However, if your “target space” includes every possible combination of things that could emerge, then clearly most of them are more likely under a “RM” only scenario than an “NS” scenario because the beauty of NS is that reduces the probability of some outcomes and greatly increase the probability of others.
No. At the risk of spawning a stupid WEASEL derail, this was exactly what Dawkins rebutted with WEASEL. If the environment selects for Hamlet-like phrases, then you will get to Hamlet much faster than if it doesn’t.
Much more interestingly, though, if the environment selects for “motility” you might get a whole range of solutions, from walking to swimming, to flying, to flagelling. There’s at least one nice video on YouTube by a guy who tried to evolve virtual creatures that would walk by letting them breed if they managed to move, and ended up with a population of rolling creatures.
No.
Without a drip feed of novel variants, the variation will drop to zero whether there is NS or not. I’ve run models where I’ve done that. Under some conditions, NS will help retain variance for longer (because the population survives for longer).
You keep saying this, but your use of “build” no less metaphorical than mine.
Let’s drop it.
Phenotypic features are physically built by cell machinery. “Random mutation” does not build the phenotype. It merely affects what is built.
Please try and address my point about novel phenotypic features appearing as a direct result of NS, even in the absence of ongoing RM.
And while you are at it, William, perhaps you’d like to comment on some of those videos, and tell us what you think would have happened had the environments not been selective, i.e. had reproductive success not been linked to genetics.
Elizabeth,
I think I finally see why you believe in evolution-you don’t understand anything about the theory.
As such, you just throw out nice sounding phrases without a thought in the world, i.e. “Phenotypic features are physically built by cell machinery.”
What does it mean? What does it have to do with the theory of evolution? Well, nevermind that, its sounds catchy, that’s the important thing. Its like saying “emergence”. It has the power of removing any meaning from a topic.
Novel features most certainly DO NOT appear as a direct result of NS, unless you are talking about some new theory that no one has ever heard of. Things dying does absolutely zero to create a novel feature, unless, you have some theory that says vultures eating dead things makes them produce new mutations.
Stick to music Lizzie.
It’s sad really.
In a minute I’m sure we’ll see WJM repeat something along the lines of JoeG’s “yeah, but sometimes the fittest will get hit by a meteor so the fittest don’t always survive”. Anything but accept that he does not have a full and total understanding of evolution.
So demonstrate it with numbers. There are existing simulators, or write your own. How hard can it be for you?
You say “Logically, from any starting point, RM would likely produce any feature faster than RM & NS.”
How likely is likely? Every time? Just sometimes? Can you put a ratio there?
If not, does that not give you pause?
Well, yes, I understand it pretty well.
Well, it’s basic developmental and cell biology. Are you disputing it?
Well, it has a lot to do with the theory of evolution, in fact, because it is the phenotype interacts with the environment, and the phenotype is what gets “built”. A feature, like a fin, or a wing, is a “phenotypic feature” and if a more muscular fin or a lighter wing helps you survive your environment, the genes that triggered your cell biology to make them so will more likely to be left behind in the next generation.
Well, as hope I have argued, yes, they do. Novel sequences don’t – they are, we think, independent of environmental factors. That’s what is meant by the “random” as in “random mutations”. But the aggregation of those sequences in the same individuals is often a result of NS (and sometimes of drift). And many notable adaptive phenotypic features are the result of that aggregation.
But if you are saying that without the mutations then the mutations can’t aggregate – sure. Nobody is saying different.
What I am saying, and what Darwin said, was that if those mutations result in slight reproductive advantage, they will aggregate.
You might not believe it – but that’s what the theory says. I understand the theory.
So what do you do, phoodoo?
(she writes, demonstrating at least her poetic skills…)
William, if I turn a piece of wood on a lathe and end up with a decorative table leg, have I produced anything? The wood was already there, after all. I just removed some of it.
Lenski et al, 2003