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.
Elizabeth asserted that equivocate means:
I told her she was in error, and to look the term up. She responded with a referral to Wikipedia, but only offered an “example” of equivocation, but didn’t quote the actual definition Wikipedia offered.
(An aside: I wonder – as a scientist, does EL depend on Wikipedia for accurate information? Does she depend on it for definitions? Why not refer to a dictionary? Why not post an actual dictionary entry that supports her contention about what “equivocate” means? Hmm.)
Let’s see how Wikipedia actually defines “equivocate”:
It doesn’t say anything about using a term two different ways in the same argument. Perhaps she is referring to the following line at Wiki:
But, in my post which she responded to, did I accuse her of making a logical fallacy? I said:
I’m not accusing her of using two different meanings of the term “build” in the course of the argument; I’m accusing her of using meaning of the term “build” in a way that is misleading or deceitful (subconsciously, I’m sure) way.
Because, you know, when you go to actual dictionaries and look up “equivocate”, this is what you get:
From Merriam-Webster:
Again – I mean this in the sense that she is deceiving herself via biased interpretations and phrasings and then errantly using the misleading terms and phrasings in an argument – I’m not accusing her of deliberately lying. I think it’s all generated subconsciously via ideological bias.
From the Free Dictionary (online):
From dictionary.com:
Cambridge dictionaries:
Oxford:
Please note that in all of the dictionaries, nothing remotely like what EL claimed to be the “meaning” of “equivocate”, nor what Wiki said about it’s “logical fallacy” meaning, even appeared.
An interesting question here is, why go to Wikipedia to find a definition in the first place; and then, after finding that definition, not even post it, but only post a snippet of an example found under a highly specified version of the definition?
Did she not try any other source? Or, did she find a snippet on Wiki that could possibly be used to support her assertion, even though the context of our discussion at that point did not, in any way, indicate that I was accusing her of a “logical fallacy of equivocation”, which is a highly specified meaning apparently only found on Wikipedia?
And this is how all of this is demonstrating my point: I don’t for a minute think EL deliberately attempts to mislead or deceive people about the role of NS; I don’t think she deliberately sets out to be uncharitable to ID proponents or misconstrue their meaning; just as I don’t think EL intentionally ignored all available dictionaries and only provided a snippet of a highly specific definition of “equivocation” that supported her original claim about what it meant.
I think that she actually believes (at least right now) that what she said “is what equivocate means”, and that what she provided was a fair answer to my challenge. But, obviously, she is incorrect, because even the highly-specified, uncommon definition obviously does not apply to the context of when I said the use of the world “built” was an equivocation.
This is a symptom of how ideological bias influences how a person can negatively interpret that which comes form their ideological opponents, even to the point of doubling down over a challenged definition which anyone can look up from multiple, authoritative sources.
Anyway, differential reproduction isn’t just “removal”. Differential reproductive success means that some variants reproduce more than they otherwise would, as well as others reproducting less.
If a mutation means that seeds fly further before landing in the ground, you may get far more successful seedlings from that plant than from its neighbour whose seeds land in the shade of the parent.
This idea that natural selection “only takes away” is a myth.
I do blame the term “natural selection” though – it forces a certain kind of grammar that can then be misleading. That’s why I prefer “heritable variance in reproductive sucsess in the current environment” but it’s a bit of a mouthful.
HVRSCE?
Heritable variance in reproductive success can include greater than average as well as less than average success, and that can be relative to parent, peer, or the same genotype in a different environment.
I suppose what WJM is saying is something akin to what’s happening in this video:
Or perhaps this is more accurate:
https://libraryofbabel.info/About.html
Here is phoodoo’s last comment in the “library”:
https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?phoodoo
It’s all already there, waiting.
So yes, in a different universe without any constraints, all possible pathways could be explored faster then with the “constraint” of NS. They are, after all, just “waiting” to be explored. Congrats WJM, in that other universe anyway.
https://libraryofbabel.info/browse.cgi
William, please look in the mirror.
Elizabeth,
So you mean through all that, you wanted to say, that random mutations cause the novel features, and NS helps to preserve those feature?
Wow, what a revelation.
Now on to second grade. The problem people who doubt this narrative have, is the ability of random mutations to actually create anything useful. Because the obvious problem that is hard to accept (well, it should be obvious, but there sure seem to be a lot of people who don’t bother to consider it) is that mistakes in the form of a creature are very likely to add up to something well designed, if the design requires a lot of elements to make it useful. The canard that ken Miller and the like make, that well, the usefulness of the individual parts doesn’t matter, because maybe they were useful for something else previously, is really just a strained argument, that has no basis in evidence. You can’t make up uses for all the elements of all the complex systems organisms require. Just trying to explain the previous use of elements of a cell, let alone a complete body, is an impossibility.
But I guess you just need faith.
Mistakes don’t build things of useful complexity. No matter how many you have.
However, if by “equivocate” you did not mean “commit the fallacy of equivocation” but merely “inadvertently mislead by using an ambiguous term”, then I accept the charge.
However, as almost every single word in the English language has several meanings, and as I have taken pains to explain the sense in which I intended the ones I used, I have to lay at least part of the responsibility for the miscommunication on the reader.
*harrumph*
Anyway, I’m done with this thread. I may start another, but I’ve still got 55 essays to mark, so it will be tomorrow at the earliest.
I will also say this: if I, or any ID advocate, had made a claim about what a word meant, and then when challenged did exactly what EL did – ignore all dictionaries, the main definition on Wiki, not even quote the main definition but rather a snippet of an example that could be used to support my contention albeit from an inapplicable, specified definition that didn’t appear in any available dictionary other than Wiki and which didn’t even apply to the use of the word, imagine the reaction.
Now, if anyone here was capable of an unbiased interpretation, you’d agree that EL’s definition of “equivocate” was wrong, and that her correction of me on that matter was in error. Let’s see what happens.
No, I did not.
I meant what I said, which is that random mutations are novel sequences which may or may not have phenotypic effects, and which may or many not be aggregated by natural selection.
When they are so aggregated, they often result in novel features that are different from those that result from the mutations alone. So it’s the aggregation that produces the effect, rather than the mutations per se.
And those novel features are often highly adaptive.
Right. Because to “create anything useful” they often have to be aggregated. One mutation won’t produce anything very complex and only minimally advantageous. Or even deleterious.
But because the fact that they are minimally advantageous means that they will tend to aggregate in individuals, they can, together, create features that are highly useful rather than minimally useful – indeed, can be very complex.
Exactly. Thank you for clarifying the point I have been trying to make to William, namely that most of the things we call “adaptations” are quite complex features that require a lot of elements. And while each of these elements, singly, might provide a trivial advantage (and, as Lenski’s paper shows, some might be actually deleterious), the filtering effect of slight reproductive results in the co-occurrence of each of the elements that contribute to the feature that we observe being useful.
Oh, there’s plenty of basis in evidence. And it doesn’t have to be “useful for something else” – it can be “useful for the same thing, but not as useful as the thing we observe”.
The point is that little usefulnesses aggregate to produce a big usefulness. And, as Lenski shows, even the neutral or downward steps can be preserved (i.e. NS is not the only preserver) and be important steps on the pathway to complex functions.
I do recommend the Lenski paper.
OK, really gone now…
What I meant by “equivocate” is what every single dictionary I found said “equivocate” means. What I did not mean was anything totally absent from all dictionaries and only referred to on one notoriously error-prone site as a relatively obscure meaning of the word – that meaning’s obscurity evidenced by it’s absence from every dictionary I could find.
Scientifically speaking, EL, that means I used the term “equivocate” correctly, and you interpreted it not only incorrectly, but in a very unusual way – the only possible way it could be interpreted where you could be “right”.
AND FURTHER, to drive home the point, if you cannot even be relied on to get “equivocate” right in context even after you’ve been challenged to look it up, then I have demonstrated good reason to have little confidence in your ability to charitably understand anything your ideological opponents say. If you will (subconsciously) resort to cherry-picking an obscure meaning and only providing an example of that obscure meaning, I can easily see why you so grossly misconstrue many things ID proponents say and argue them down the obscure pathways you go down,
William, if you did not mean to accuse me of the fallacy of equivocation, I accept that you did not.
However, it is the use with which I am most familiar, especially in the context of debate, and is the first meaning given in several dictionaries, as well as wikipedia.
I accept your clarification, and that you did not mean to accuse me of a logical fallacy, merely of ambiguity.
Please do feel free to fuck off back to that UD shithole of “ID advocates” any time you wish, WIlliam.
You were equivocating on the word “equivocate” in a deliberately miksleading fashion hoping Elizabeth would fall into it so you could gloat over it? Oh no, of course not, you were simply using the word without bothering to explain yourself until you happened to collect comments you thought were sufficient for a GOTCHA? Oh, not that either, you’re even more innocent than that, using it in its purest dictionary definition until you were ambushed by Elizabeth’s deliberate mis-use. and your comment above could only be read as a “gotcha” by an evil evolutionist who is reading with bias anything an IDiot has to say?
Oh, yeah, that exactly!
Not as if we don’t have all the evidence we would ever need to draw a conclusion about you and your godawful behavior. Not as if we’d have to be biased against you to start with, in order to end up seeing your shit for what it is.
Please do take this comment back to your den at UD and use it to prove that you correctly “predicted” the biased TSZ reaction.
Elizabeth’s usage of the word “equivocate” was one hundred percent correct in this thread, in context, and one hundred percent understandable to every unbiased reader. Concede the point, or don’t; I could not care less. Crow victory or don’t, claim that I couldn’t possibly be an unbiased person (that’s me – hello!! ) merely because I don’t succumb to your manipulations.
Do go, scoot, run, dear, you’ve got minions to impress elsewhere.
Oh, Elizabeth, you are far far too nice.
keiths:
Lizzie,
Differential reproduction isn’t necessarily, but selection is.
Right. Selection removes fewer of the former and more of the latter.
My point to William is that removal can be a constructive process. It’s absurd to argue that I’m not actually producing anything when I turn a table leg on a lathe.
However, I regard this paragraph as uncharitable in the extreme.
It seems to me to comprise precisely the very thing you accuse me of. Yes, I thought you were using the word in the sense with which I am familiar (not an “obscure” sense at all, btw)
In turn, the least you can do is to grant me the return courtesy of assuming that the sense in which I took it was not driven by bias against you, but by my own understanding of the term in the context of debate. I did not “cherry-pick” an “obscure meaning”.
You should examine your own default assumptions, William, before casting stones at mine.
Natural selection IS heritable differential reproduction.
And that can include variations that increase reproductive rate as well as variations that reduce it.
Yes, it’s a good point.
But it is also worth pointing out that novel sequences can result in increased reproductive success and that this is also an example of “natural selection”.
I’m not feeling nice. I’m feeling bloody cross.
Hence my re-clicking on this thread when I should be marking essays.
Lizzie,
No, because you can have heritable differential reproduction in the absence of selection. Mutation alone is sufficient.
Suppose I have a bacterial population growing in the absence of any selective pressures. One lucky bacterium experiences a mutation that cuts its generation time in half. Its descendants will soon dominate the population despite the total absence of selection.
It’s heritable differential reproduction without selection.
William, if you’d used the correct word (“equivocal”) instead of the incorrect one (“equivocated”) in that passage, this whole kerfluffle (that’s about absolutely nothing) would never have occurred. Terms may be equivocal; to say that they have been “equivocated ” (or that their interpretations have been!) suggests (to me anyhow) that somebody has committed a fallacy (although it does so in an extremely inelegant way).
Your passage, incidentally, reads like a cop’s deposition: “We incahcerated the alleged poipetratah at 3 PM in the afternoon.”
Let me try to be clearer:
If the differential reproduction is heritable, then, by definition, you have natural selection.
In other words, if what you inherit increases your chances of reproducing, then that is natural selection.
If what you inherit merely makes you different from some of your fellows, without affecting your chances of reproducting, than that isn’t heritable variance in reproductive success. It’s just heritable variance. Your reproductive success is just down to chance.
And that can matter – it could be that bearers of that variant do very well, but that doing well has nothing to do with the fact that they carry the variant. It could be, for instance, that they are all members of a family whose burrow is the only one to escape a flood.
But when what you inherit DOES influence your chances of reproductive success, then we call that “natural selection”. And what you inherit can make you extra fecund, compared to those without your particular genotype, or extra fecund compared to the same genotype in a different environment, or extra fecund compared to your ancestors without your novel variant.
Nothing is being “removed” “by” “natural selection” in that scenario (and the scenario is a good example of why “natural selection” can force us into grammatical straitjackets that can obscure the meaning of Darwin’s insight). In fact, in that scenario, extra organisms are being added to the population that would not otherwise have been added. Either the population will grow, as a result, or, if resources are limited, they and their progeny, together with their fecund genes, will increasingly dominate the population.
Ah, he meant I was being equivocal?
phoodoo,
Lenski’s experiment addresses that problem, as do numerous computer simulations, as does paleontology, etc., etc.
I’m glad you recognize that faith is not a virtue.
Having that many essays to grade would make me cross, too. (Ok, just having a little fun, but I did find ways of procrastinating when it came to grading. I’m now enjoying retirement.)
We mark online, so I can’t even get away from the computer. Or even firefox.
Lizzie,
From Charles himself:
In my bacterial example, there is no rejection, even though the original variant is injurious relative to the mutant. All offspring are preserved. There is no selection of one variant over another.
We have heritable differential reproduction but no selection — by Darwin’s own definition.
Well, there is, in that the new variant becomes more prevalent than the others, and in the competition for resources, its descendents will outcompete the old one.
However, it’s worth bearing in mind that in cloning populations things are a bit different, because novel mutations can’t propagate through the population independently of the rest of the genome (except through HGT).
Nonetheless, you would still call that selection – and so would Darwin. The environment consists at least partly of your fellow organisms, hence his chapter on “The Struggle for Existence” and the limited nature of resources.
And this is reflected in the term “selection coefficient”. Whereas the two lineages before the mutation would have had a selection coefficient of one relative to the other, after the mutation the selection coefficient of the unmutated lineage is .5 relative to the other.
Yeah, walto. Given that I had been making the argument that “build” was an inappropriate & misleading term from the beginning, I’m sure you thought I meant something completely different than that when I used a term that means exactly that in every dictionary I can find.
Or, maybe hotshoe is correct. I’m a freaking psychological, linguistic genius and I spend my time manipulating Ph.Ds like EL into flailing confusion so that I can make them look ridiculous when they insist some word means a thing that no authoritative dictionary I can find supports. Because I knew that’s what she’d think “equivocate means – some obscure wiki sub-definition not even mentioned – apparently – in any actual dictionary.
Yes, I’m just that good at my manipulations. Just ask … who was it? Richardhughes? Omagain? According to whomever it was, I manipulated them into paraphrasing me in a way they couldn’t provide a quote to support. Because, apparently, I deliberately devise equally plausible but distinct meanings by using highly crafted, specific terms throughout a debate, then I wait for them to think I mean the one thing, then “boom” I tell them they’re wrong, I meant the other thing. And then giggle madly, muttering “gotcha gotcha gotcha”.
good friggin grief.
Can anyone here just say – “Hey, you were right. I was wrong. My bad.”?
Anyway, William, I’m pleased to know that you did not think I was commiting a logical fallacy.
That’s good.
I’ll put up a new thread.
Sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about, William. I don’t know or care how you were using “build”–I’ve read very little of this thread, to tell the truth. I was commenting only on your misuse of “equivocating” not on some other words you may have used correctly in your life.
So, officer, do you now realize you misued THAT word? Or do I have to read the rest of your whine about other stuff?
Lizzie,
There is no competition for resources. Remember, there’s no selective pressure in my hypothetical example:
Lizzie:
Ditto. Darwin was talking about competition for resources, and competition implies selective pressure. That’s why Malthus was so important as an inspiration for Darwin’s ideas.
In my thought experiment, there is no selective pressure. All offspring survive. There is no selection (or equivalently, every organism is selected).
Under those conditions, we still have heritable differential reproduction — the mutant population grows faster than the original — but there is no selection.
Why on earth would I want to do that?
We don’t call this The Uncharitable Zone for nothing!
It must be my own confirmation bias or something, but I don’t see where what most of what you’re saying is even worth arguing against. I guess people just have a lot of spare time on their hands. I think I’ll go read another book on evolution now.
And the Darwin quote I provided certainly isn’t a one-off. Here he is again at the end of Chapter 4 of the Origin:
The bolded sections show us that Darwin saw Malthusian struggle as a prerequisite for natural selection.
In my thought experiment there is no struggle for life — all organisms survive and reproduce. No “struggle for life” means no selection, according to Darwin. So in my experiment we have no selection, yet we do have heritable differential reproduction.
Therefore this cannot be correct:
I find it somewhat amusing that in a case where something actually is being built you put “built” in scare quotes. A bacterial flagellum, for example, actually is constructed, and natural selection plays no role in it’s construction.
OldMung:
NewMung:
Go for it, NewMung!
Define “constructed”.
🙂
I’ve managed to resist the urge to comment from work. Too easy to get caught up in a back and forth.
You could get Neil to block your ip. 😉
William,
Your entire argument rests on a ludicrously narrow interpretation of the words “build” and “produce” — one that I doubt you hew to anywhere outside of this thread.
For example, you still haven’t answered my question:
Would you seriously claim that I hadn’t “produced” the table leg? I doubt it very much. Yet in this thread you are using the same narrow interpretation of “produce”.
When I turned my table leg on the lathe (it was actually a lamp post in 7th grade wood shop) I was only removing material, yet I nevertheless produced something. Why then do you argue that natural selection has no role in the production of adaptations?
hotshoe, to Mung:
And then prove it. 🙂
Not sure how much about evolution is in it, but given the thread on color I might crack open Nature’s Palette: The Science of Plant Color.
That should be interesting. I’ll bet they have a chapter on how plants use flower color to attract pollinators. There are some interesting color differences that depend on whether the plant uses birds or insects for pollination.
William,
Here’s another example. I will go out on a limb and speculate that you never had a conversation like this with one of your kids:
Kid: Look, Daddy! They’re building a house.
William: No, dear. That man wheeling the bricks over isn’t building anything. The guy hammering nails into the joists is building a house, but that lady sawing the joists isn’t. The foreman certainly isn’t building anything — he’s just reading the blueprints and giving orders.
Such a conversation would be ridiculous, because we all recognize that building a house involves more than just those actions that literally add to the structure.
You and Cornelius are using absurdly narrow definitions for “build” and “produce”, and you’re doing so quite selectively — only in this context — as an attempt to score points against natural selection, which is in fact an essential part of building and producing adaptations.
Absence of penalty for some trait is still a property of the environment. If your environment is so rich in resources that there’s no penalty for fast breeding, then that environment will favour fast breeders and “select against” slower breeders. In a different environment, the trait that enables that lineage to breed fast in a resource-rich environment may kill them faster than they can breed.
Which is why “selection coefficients” are always relative.
Nor does mutation.
Or both do, depending on how literally you want to use the word “build”.
Lizzie,
Yes — a selection-free environment for that trait. My hypothetical experiment is selection-free for the shortened generation time trait. Whether you have it or not, all your offfspring survive.
The slower breeders aren’t being selected against. No one is — all offspring survive.
“Natural selection” is Darwin’s term, and we should go by his definition unless we have good reason for doing otherwise. Nothing bad comes of sticking with Darwin’s definition in this case, so why change it if it ain’t broken?
keith’s said:
I’m not trying to “score points against natural selection”, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. I’ve agreed that it’s essential to the production of adaptations. As far as I can tell, we all agree about the nuts and bolts of what NS actually does. All we disagree about is whether or not “build” or “produce” or “construct” as the site and others use it is an appropriate term to use to metaphorically describe what NS contributes to the generation of adaptations.
I’ve made my case that it is not an appropriate term – that it is misleading. I’m satisfied with the case I made. Although CH got a pretty big part of it wrong, I think he has a reasonable case for having a problem with that terminology – especially on a site for beginners, and especially since nothing was mentioned in those particular definitions about RM, implying that NS was solely responsible.
Sometimes, people are fully informed, understand the facts, and disagree. I don’t think it makes CH “very confused”, I think it just makes part of what he said in his argument factually wrong, but being wrong about that particular part – that NS doesn’t influence the building of adaptations – doesn’t mean he was wrong about his general point – that to say NS “built” adaptations is misleading. I agree with him. It’s grossly misleading.
William,
It’s no more misleading than saying that the foreman, the joist sawyer and the brick carrier participate in the building of the house.
Which is to say, it’s not misleading at all. Someone has to saw the joists, and something — natural selection — has to select against unfavorable mutations so that the favorable ones can get a foothold, leading to cumulative selection and eventually to highly adaptive features.
Well, it was a metaphor, not a definition. It would be foolish to apply the metaphor so rigidly that it missed out important elements of his theory.
But in any case, Darwin did not envisage “natural selection” as only applying to culling the weak. He also applied it to traits that exploited opportunities – of which your magical infinite resource environment is theoretically (I guess) one. Here’s Darwin:
.
Even your magical infinite-resource environment is not “selection free”. By virtue of its infinite resources it can support fast-breeders. Your infinite resources are the “opportunity offered” to a strain that can double its reproduction rate.
Excellent.
Can you cite the specific part of the page that CH linked to that you think is misleading?
IIRC, the term used was “produce” – and you yourself used the term “production”.
What is the misleading part, in your view?
I don’t recall CH saying that. He said it was wrong to claim NS “produced” adaptation. Yet you say that you agree that NS is “essential to the production” of adaptations.
What is the difference between saying NS “produces” adaptations and saying they are “essential to the production” of adaptations?
Given that on that same place, they explicitly include variation and heredity as part of “NS”?