Well let’s look at what natural selection is-
“Natural selection is the result of differences in survival and reproduction among individuals of a population that vary in one or more heritable traits.” Page 11 “Biology: Concepts and Applications” Starr fifth edition
“Natural selection is the simple result of variation, differential reproduction, and heredity—it is mindless and mechanistic.” UBerkley
“Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.” Dawkins in “The Blind Watchmaker”?
“Natural selection is therefore a result of three processes, as first described by Darwin:
Variation
Inheritance
Fecunditywhich together result in non-random, unequal survival and reproduction of individuals, which results in changes in the phenotypes present in populations of organisms over time.”- Allen McNeill prof. introductory biology and evolution at Cornell University
OK so it is a result of three processes- ie an output. But is it really non-random as Allen said? Nope, whatever survives to reproduce survives to reproduce. And that can be any number of variations taht exist in a population.
What drives the output? The inputs.
The variation is said to be random, ie genetic accidents/ mistakes.
With sexually reproducing organisms it is still a crap-shoot as to what gets inherited. For example if a male gets a beneficial variation to his Y chromosome but sires all daughters, that beneficial variation gets lost no matter how many offspring he has.
Fecundity/ differential reproduction- Don’t know until it happens.
Can’t tell what variation will occur. Can’t tell if any of the offspring will inherit even the most beneficial variation and the only way to determine differential reproduction is follow the individuals for their entire reproducing age.
Then there can be competing “beneficial” variations.
In the end it all boils down to whatever survives to reproduce, survives to reproduce.
Evolutionists love to pretend that natural selection is some magical ratchet.
So what does it do?
The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 1971), reissued in 2001 by William Provine:
Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, create, modify, shape, operate, drive, favor, maintain, push, or adjust. Natural selection does nothing….Having natural selection select is nifty because it excuses the necessity of talking about the actual causation of natural selection. Such talk was excusable for Charles Darwin, but inexcusable for evolutionists now. Creationists have discovered our empty “natural selection” language, and the “actions” of natural selection make huge, vulnerable targets. (pp. 199-200)
Thanks for the honesty Will.
Chapter IV of prominent geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti’s book Why is a Fly Not a Horse? is titled “Wobbling Stability”. In that chapter he discusses what I have been talking about in other threads- that populations oscillate. The following is what he has to say which is based on thorough scientific investigation:
Sexuality has brought joy to the world, to the world of the wild beasts, and to the world of flowers, but it has brought an end to evolution. In the lineages of living beings, whenever absent-minded Venus has taken the upper hand, forms have forgotten to make progress. It is only the husbandman that has improved strains, and he has done so by bullying, enslaving, and segregating. All these methods, of course, have made for sad, alienated animals, but they have not resulted in new species. Left to themselves, domesticated breeds would either die out or revert to the wild state—scarcely a commendable model for nature’s progress.
(snip a few paragraphs on peppered moths)
Natural Selection, which indeed occurs in nature (as Bishop Wilberforce, too, was perfectly aware), mainly has the effect of maintaining equilibrium and stability. It eliminates all those that dare depart from the type—the eccentrics and the adventurers and the marginal sort. It is ever adjusting populations, but it does so in each case by bringing them back to the norm. We read in the textbooks that, when environmental conditions change, the selection process may produce a shift in a population’s mean values, by a process known as adaptation. If the climate turns very cold, the cold-adapted beings are favored relative to others.; if it becomes windy, the wind blows away those that are most exposed; if an illness breaks out, those in questionable health will be lost. But all these artful guiles serve their purpose only until the clouds blow away. The species, in fact, is an organic entity, a typical form, which may deviate only to return to the furrow of its destiny; it may wander from the band only to find its proper place by returning to the gang.
Everything that disassembles, upsets proportions or becomes distorted in any way is sooner or later brought back to the type. There has been a tendency to confuse fleeting adjustments with grand destinies, minor shrewdness with signs of the times.
It is true that species may lose something on the way—the mole its eyes, say, and the succulent plant its leaves, never to recover them again. But here we are dealing with unhappy, mutilated species, at the margins of their area of distribution—the extreme and the specialized. These are species with no future; they are not pioneers, but prisoners in nature’s penitentiary.
Not such a powerful designer mimic after all.
But there is one thing it can do– it can undo what artificial selection has done.
You’re not taking Joe seriously, are you, damitall? This thread is actually Sandbox 2. The old one got too unwieldy, so Liz had to create a new container.
HTH
They’re English phrases.
Go to Google scholar. Type in the phrase “evidence for strong selection”. Try to read and properly understand all the papers you can access which contain the phrase. Then, if you ask me the above question again, I’ll give you some more useful phrases.
While you’re at it, as you’re interested in I.D., you could also type in the phrase “evidence of intent in non-living beings”, and try to find some positive research evidence for your position.
William J Murray,
This is the problem in this debate between ID/creationists and evos.
Tell me that evidence will prevent you from “believing whatever you wish”.
If it doesn’t, your view is religious, not scientific or logical.
Just say we might be able to change your mind.
Just say that, to let us know you’re listening to evidence.
After posting the above (took me a while; shame it was blithely ignored!), I notice that WJM gives the familiar “how do you know that ANY selection was natural?” line. We don’t (though it gives an interesting problem for ‘free will’ if we apply it to humanity).
But if “the psychoplasm” is actively removing those variants that are less well suited to the current environment … why in hell would it bother? That’s gonna happen anyway. If the intentional objective is to improve the fitness of populations to their circumstances … there’s an app for that!
That would be my challenge if what you wrote had anything to do with what I wrote. Nobody here challenges that variation occurs, or that selection fixes variations into a population. You are talking about mechanisms; I am arguing about how those mehanisms are characterized. I don’t argue that accumulative variation can generate novel, complex, functional devices; I challenge that accumulative chance/random variation can do so (in any reasonable, scientifically plausible sense). I don’t argue that selection cannot cause the fixation of sequential variations that accumulate into such a novel, functional, complex device into the population along the way; I challenge that natural selection has such a capacity (again, in any scientifically plausible sense).
I don’t challenge the creative power of variation and selection; I challenge the characterization of them as “random”, “chance” and “natural”.
What does it mean to “explain” your rolling the dice ? You mean, explain why you were rolling ? Easy … because – in this analogy for natural selection – you have to roll the dice, whether you want to or not, or else die off. (Free choice, of course, feel free to die off if you want.)
You mean explain how you reached an “improbable” result such as twenty 7s in a row ? Easy … because – in this analogy for natural selection – you get to keep a pair of dice which shows 7, and roll with another pair of dice until eventually, you may accumulate 20 pairs of dice showing 7. Winner! Of course, in the meantime, external forces may change the fitness outcome to something else – say 20 pairs of 8s – in which case you may die off. Too bad. Or maybe, you had a few pairs of 8s also accumulated, in which case you may have the flexibility to head for the new fitness outcome.
Natural selection is Yahtzee. You know, the best score is five of a kind, but rolling 5 of a kind at once is improbable. (Only 1 out of 1296 throws will result in five-of-a-kind.) But with selection, that is, with keeping any two or three of the same, and re-rolling the non-matching dice, the probability of of scoring a Yahtzee is almost 1 out of 22 attempts.
And just like Yahtzee, if you don’t succeed in getting five-of-a-kind, you score them – in this analogy for natural selection – as a pair, two pair, full house, whatever, and see if your overall score is high enough to keep you/your desdendants ahead of the competitors. Don’t despair, even if the competitors score a Yahtzee, their overall score may be weak. If so, that gives you/yours a chance to continue reproducing into the next round.
But even without Yahtzee-like accumulation of “favorable dice” this supposedly improbable example of twenty 7s is certain to happen. True, WJM as a single limited human is probably not going to live long enough for it to happen to him personally. That specified sequence (thrown all at once, or consecutively with no preservation of intermediate favorable throws) is less than one chance out of 10^15. If you could throw 20 pair of dice every second, that would not likely occur in more than 31 million years. Whew! But enlist all 7 billion humans, and we would expect it to happen in a decade or so. And we would expect we’d all die in the attempt as we neglected to eat, sleep, etc 🙁 But enlist all 10^30 bacteria currently on planet Earth, and we would expect this “improbable” sequence to arise every day, more than once.
What’s that French saying: si cʾest possible, cʾest fait; impossible? cela se fera.
If it’s possible, consider it done.
What more is there to explain ? In order to satisfy you, does the explanation have to include some god’s desire to favor some particular outcome ? In which case, why don’t we get an explanation of how that god’s desire was physically implemented before we can accept god as a valid cause? How teleologically warped is your worldview ? How can you sit back satisfied with the explanation that “some god must have wanted it that way” ? Why does your curiosity suddenly run out when you get to the stopper “god’s plan” ? What intellectual capability do you lack to investigate some god’s methods of (hypothetically) fomenting evolution ?
How would you recognize the “real” explanation for something happening when you deny in advance that “it happened because it was possible for it to happen” is ever a satisfactory explanation ?
What are you afraid of, if it turns out that “shit happens because it’s possible” is all the explanation there is, for at least some aspects of reality ? Are you afraid you’ll die if you don’t have a “reason” to live?
Darwinists think that because they can show variation and selection (GA’s) to be capable of constructing complexity or solving problems, they’ve shown the power of random variation and natural selection to do the same. They have not. They simply assume such variation and selection to be non-artificial. Except for Elizabeth, who apparently has defined “natural” as “including the artificial”. So even if an intelligent being was controlling all selection events, it would still be “natural selection” under Elizabeth’s definition.
This is it- drumroll please-
Wow- that makes it all shivery in awe of that power.
And strange that oleg tries to single me out when Provine is the evolutionist who also says natural selection does nothing.
Pathetic evos unable to grasp the reality that their proposed mechanisms have been tested and found wanting.
The point being is that you are an intellectual coward
Again I am talking about NO SUPPORT AT ALL- and yes materialism has no support at all and evolutionism also doesn’t have any support and natural selection as a designer mimic is totally unsupported.
Did you read it all? The ‘baseline’ process I was talking about was the ‘all-chance’ position. That is, if there is nothing but TRULY random breeding going on (which we can model by RANDOM functions), we can expect a certain outcome: the fixation of a RANDOM variant (in the complete absence of selection, natural or otherwise). It happens in a computer population, it happens if you stick balls in a bag, it happens if you use decks of cards. So why should it NOT happen in the wild?
Unless EVERYTHING is intelligently caused, and there is no such thing as chance ‘out there’ …
The ‘bookkeeping’ of a selective environment takes place through birth and death. These are significant events, but the ‘process’ of a life is a continuous one. If an individual breeds, it is because it evaded all prior threats during its life. The idea of an ‘intelligent selection’ does not just require an entity to go to its pen to select a favoured individual; it has to guide it through the vagaries of life, serially. Then do it again, and keep doing it, if the trait being favoured would otherwise be eliminated by the environment (in which case it is less fit!). It has to oppose chance, and nature – factors which, all by themselves, will fix variants. There is a theoretical natural (unguided) process, which is to be expected in any finite population, whenever intelligent entities are not interfering. What is wrong with calling that process Natural Selection, and assuming it to be the default mode in nature?
Far from it. We have absolutely no evidence based reason to suggest that there are or ever have been any other animals on this planet capable of doing artificial selection. There’s no ideology involved in that observation.
What is the matter with you that you are forced to insert “gods will” or “designers plan” or “angels little fingers meddling in the process” in the place of “chance”, before you can pronounce yourself satisfied with accumulative variation generating etc ? Don’t you have free will to accept that undesigned evolution produces the appearance of design ? Why aren’t you mad at your god for giving you a broken brain that sees agency everywhere, even where there is no external evidence for such ? Do you feel envious of all the other, rational, humans who have the free will to accept the educated scientific consensus about evolution via unplanned, undirected natural selection ? What would you give to be able to throw away your crutches ?
Joe G,
If you were shown evidence pertaining to X, would it impact what you believe about X?
I ask because I’m getting the feeling, based on what William J Murray has said, that regardless of what the science says, your side will choose to believe whatever you wish.
Please tell me that scientific evidence has a bearing on what you believe.
If evidence means nothing in this debate, then we might as well leave it to the politicians and church leaders to decide.
Then I think we’re ready for you to announce what replaces them.
Remember, you have it ready.
So name it. What are you waiting for?
Meh. Raindrops can grind away mountains.
The corollary of removing less fit individuals is that the more fit individuals increase in frequency. The corollary of iterated increase in frequency is fixation. If a still newer variant has greater fitness, the old variants suddenly find themselves of (relatively) lower fitness, and hence are removed in their turn. And so it goes on.
Those are two different things.
Specific selections could be “natural” or not.
However you’ll have to specify what “task” “natural selection” is up to before we can come to any conclusion about it’s ability to perform it.
As that’s a very different thing.
So, William, what can unaided evolution do then? Variations on beak size perhaps? Or more? Nothing beyond major bodyplans right?
Pray tell where your “Intelligent Designer” fits into evolution, what is it that evolution cannot do that your designer does for it? What level does your actor act?
Don’t be coy. Remember, I have no idea if “natural” selection is up to the task or not. Let’s assume not.
Your turn. We’re done with what “natural” selection can’t do. It’s over to you and Joe, tell us what the designer does instead. Give us some of that old fashioned positive evidence, for that position you claim you are not advocating and therefore don’t have to support.
Just once.
Tell me one thing about your designer instead then. So far you are running a big fat zero.
E.G.
When did it act?
Where?
Etc etc.
But let’s not go down that well worn path. Let’s play the new record.
….
You’ve won Joe. Natural selection does nothing.
Now name your replacement.
Meh.
Fitness, wrt biology, is an after-the-fact assessment.
No itertations, always shifting, always changing…
Thank you, unfortunately I don’t discuss ID with admitted losers who are also well known to be belligerent and dishonest.
Been there, done that (positive evidence for ID)
Nice cop-out. Just present what you have- the best you have. So far it appears that Lenski is that best shot.
LoL! Evos have sure shit and pissed on this thread enough- meaning they think it is a sandbox…
Did taht- there isn’t anything that says natural selection can do what evos claim.
The ideological part is that because lack of evidence that any other intelligent designers exist is not in itself positive evidence that non-intelligent mechanisms are up to the task, you have no scientific, positive reason to characterize selection as “natural” or “artificial”, nor any reason to characterize variation as random, chance or artificial.
Yet, apparently (and admittedly) bereft of any evidence either way, you go ahead and ideologically characterize both variation and selection as “random”, “chance”, and “natural”.
IOW, you just admitted you cannot make your case, and so you have shifted the burden to those that challenge you. That is, obviously, an tactic used to protect an ideological view. If you cannot show that selection is “natural”, don’t claim it is. If you cannot show that variation is “random” or “chance”, don’t claim that it is.
This is kind of like having a discussion with people who insist there is no such thing as water, there is ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE of any such thing, that those who think otherwise are retarded and stupid and evil. And no, they’re not going to bother wasting their time trying to describe water or provide an operational definition or specify what sort of evidence might change their views, because their audience is too ideologically wedded to the insane concept of water to bother trying to talk to. All that remains is to repeat, like ELIZA, the same Truth the evotards just can’t or won’t grasp.
I agree that there has not been one substantive iota of support for the OP, nor one serious attempt to answer a single question from anyone. Again, “evidence” has been defined as whatever supports the foregone conclusion the anti-water folks refuse to provide, except insofar as they deny that actual water counts as evidence in their “worldview”.
It’s not for me to make such specifications; it is up to those who claim selection is natural to generate such falsifiable parameters and metrics. Otherwise, adding the term “natural” to “selection” is a baldly ideological and scientifically baseless designation.
I’m more than happy to admit selection and variation are up to the task; I challenge those who characterize those mechanisms with the vaues “natural”, “chance” and “random” to rigorously define what that means in scientific terms, how they apply to the mechanisms in question, and how such characterizations are quantified and how they could be falsified.
🙂 How many papers did you read? And how many did you understand?
Yes Flint, except it is the evos that insist there isn’t any water. The OP is supported by the evidence- and also the OP contains a critical piece from an evolutionist.
😛 Any time you think you have evidence to the contrary of what I have posted, please present it.
What scrap of evidence is there to suggest that there have been other animals capable of artificial selection operating on this planet? It’s your suggestion that the selection (and or variation) could be caused by such things. What on earth makes you think that I need to refute a proposition which is completely unsupported?
I did. I gave you the chance to read lots of papers which included the phrase “evidence for strong selection”. But as you won’t be able to understand their implications, you’ll just keep on posting on the internet about what natural selection can and cannot do without actually understanding a thing about the subject.
Incidentally, in your O.P., you state that the views of the Italian creationist whom you quote were “based on thorough scientific investigation”. They’re certainly not.
LoL! I never said natural selection doesn’t exist. And your false accusation just exposes your ignorance.
Also Dr Sermonti is not a creationist and his views are based on thorough scientific investigation.
Again it is noticeable that you cannot present something that refutes either him nor myself.
William J Murray,
But the reverse should apply to the core ID argument, that “the lack of evidence that non-intelligent mechanisms are up to the task…”, is not proof that an intelligent designer has ever existed.
Yet that is ID’s flawed argument that life was designed!
Wrong, again, as usual. The way to the design inference is through necessity and chance, ie materialism/ evolutionism. So it is required taht it be eliminated.
However that alone is not sufficient to have a design inference, as evidenced by the explanatory filter.
But anyway the lack of evidence for your position is still just that- you don’t have anything and it bothers you…
Joe G,
The way to answer the above question is to type a “yes” or type a “no”.
You claim ID is scientific, so answering the question should be easy.
Joe G,
Read what WJM has said.
He has said that lack of evidence for A is not positive evidence for B.
Either he’s wrong or he’s right.
Which is it?
Joe G,
It bothers WJM, not me, and he’s on your side.
He says that lack of evidence for one position is not positive evidence for the opposing position.
Do you agree with WJM?
I suggest this depends entirely on how “artificial selection” is defined. After all, organisms frequently modify the environment in ways that modify the selection criteria for other organisms. Any naturalist can point to countless symbiotic relationships where each organism has “selected” the environment represented by the other, much as bees “artificially” select for certain types of flowers. I suppose it could be said that people are artificially selected by those bacteria we can’t live without, and which can’t live without us.
So what does “artificial” mean here anyway? Apparently it has nothing to do with one organism selecting for traits in another organism, and everything to do with whether humans decide that non-humans INTEND to do this. And that gets us into an interesting debate about intention. Does the bee “intend” to select certain types of flowers? As far as we can tell, it does. So intention isn’t quite the right idea either.
So maybe “artificial selection” means changing the selection criteria for some other organization with some specific goal in mind in advance. But THAT requires at the very least implicit understanding and acceptance of the principles of evolution. After all, the “artificially selected” organisms have no clue that humans are even involved, much less have long-range plans. To them, it’s all “natural”.
My conclusion: “artificial selection” exists only in the human imagination, and in reality all that exists is selection.
I haven’t made any such suggestion. I have challenged the claim that the selection necessary to generate the biological diversity of functioning features we see all around us can be appropriately and scientifically characterized as “natural”. If you cannot support such a claim, I have no reason to consider such selection “natural”.
No, it isn’t. The ID side proposes positive evidence; they propose a metric for making such determinations. Such a metric is necessary for any claim about how “selection” or “variations” should be characterized. Darwinist don’t even attempt to provide such a metric, and never have, to my knowledge. They just assume that selection is “natural”, and variation is “random” or “by chance”, then when challenged attempt to shift the burden onto those that challenge their ideological assumption.
William J Murray,
We have presented positive evidence for evolution which you may find lacking but the reason you have found it lacking, is that it is there for you to evaluate.
Where is your side’s positive evidence that we can investigate and either find lacking or convincing?
What have you challenged it with?
Have you shown us the proposed mechanisms of your designer so we can compare his capabilities against our claims of non-intelligent mechanisms?
How can we compare capabilities if you won’t present any?
There you go again, moving the goalposts. The topic, according to you, is natural selection, not materialism, evolutionism, designers, or designer mimics. Please stay focused and on topic, guano-tardboy.
Is a grizzly bear natural? How about humans? If they’re not natural, what are they; supernatural, unnatural, artificial, or what?
Take that naked hike in Yellowstone. It will be just you (au natural), your psychoplasmic ideaology, and nature. You’ll find out what natural selection can do.
Well then, you should be practicing what you preach, and you should be telling all the other IDiots (especially joe) to stop shifting the burden, and to support their claims.
In other words, you’re claiming that your chosen designer god intentionally designs and controls all variations and fixations. Can you support that in a “reasonable, scientifically plausible sense”? And what exactly is the intention?
Is there anything, anything at all, that is random, chance, or natural? If so, what?
Religious zealots (which includes IDiots) think that because they say their designer/creator god-did-it, their designer/creator god did it. They simply assume that such a bald assertion is true, and that they have shown it to be true. They have not.
Is your imagined designer/creator god artificial, or is just what it does artificial? If your imagined designer/creator god isn’t artificial, and isn’t natural, what is it?
Evidenced? How does some invention of a Creationist constrain science? Unfortunately, to get to the design inference, you still have to go through the Explanatory Filter Metafilter (Every now and then, a new species just kind of appears, with an audible ‘pop’ as it displaces the air that formerly occupied that space.). Then there is the Explanatory Metafilter Metafilter (organisms think about themselves, and by backwards causation, all their ancestors suddenly start having existed). And then …
You don’t “discuss” ID at all joe, ever. You projectile vomit unsupported, incoherent assertions about it, in between your other cowardly, belligerent, dishonest spewage.