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 know where the idea for GAs came from? Observation of what looks for all the world like a ‘natural’ process suggested a means by which certain solutions could be approached rapidly, by iterative CHANCE amendment and selection (which is a CHANCE process, albeit with bias, in the computer analogues). Build them and – yikes! – they succeed. And because of that you think we have nothing other than ideological grounds for concluding that these representations – derived from a non-interventionist, ‘natural’ view – tell us something about the power of the assumed process on which they were modelled. Yeesh! Why not just say “evos is all fucking morons” and have done with it?
It is all selection, Natural and Artificial just arbitrary categories. Something constrains what survives, and distorts population frequencies for reasons causally related to the qualitties manifest. But underlying that is SAMPLING. It is all sampling. Sampling with bias (Selection + Drift) and without (Drift alone). You cannot sample without becoming hostage to chance, unless you actively oppose it. So when we say the process is ‘natural’ (not interfered with by intelligent agents), it is because it builds from single instances of survival or demise, reproduction or not, which appear to be of exactly the same character as random/biased-random picks from a deck of cards or bags of coloured balls. How do we KNOW that any spin of the roulette wheel is really random? It may simply appear so because a host of WJMs are voting against each other for their preferred outcome from the psychoplasm. Ho hum.
Ultimately, selection and drift, and hence evolutionary change, all arise from ‘atoms’ – individual lives. If assuming those are, individually, ‘natural’ is an ideological position, then by all means carry on touting Cornelius Hunter’s bullshit stance. I’d like to know how he does his science.
If they are individually ‘natural’ but in the long run they are not, it’s like agreeing that individual atoms in a gas are unaffected by celestial will, but the gas which they compose is not. If some survival/death/breeding/non-breeding is ‘natural’ but some not, how do we distinguish these states? If an intelligent agent wishes to create organisms that are better attuned to survival in a given environment, then letting that environment select them is an excellent (if slow) way to do it. You don’t need to interfere, and in fact it’s better if you don’t. If the agent selects, it is part of the environment. What survives is that which is best suited to the selective milieu [Environment + Agent]. As soon as you remove “Agent” from the picture, it goes back to Environment alone – ie, that which survives best changes when the agent buggers off.
Yet another fallacious appeal to authority.
And what part of your OP is supported by what evidence?
Hey joe, how many people (including ones who are scientifically knowledgeable) who consider themselves religious, or creationists, or theistic evolutionists, or IDists, or some other designer/creator/god believing label do you suppose could be found that would be “critical” of your OP, your unsupported assertions about ID, your misrepresentations of science, natural selection, and evolution, your misrepresentative quote mining, your unsupported claims of positive evidence and scientific testability for your “position”, your avoidance of relevant questions, your appeals to authority (many of which contradict your claims), your ignorance and denial of well established scientific evidence for evolution, your complete ignorance of scientific methodology, your burden shifting demands, and your arrogant self promotion? Should they be appealed to?
And what about all the people (including ones who are scientifically knowledgeable) who do not consider themselves religious, creationists, IDists, etc., who would be critical of you and your claims? Should they also be appealed to?
Are you referring to the proximate cause of the selection, or the ultimate cause? And could you please pick a standard definition of the word “natural” that we can use for the purposes of the discussion?
And so? What difference does your opinion make? What does it matter if you are or are not convinced that “natural” selection is natural or not.
I mean, let’s not pretend. I am not a professional scientist. As such I realise that my opinion does not really matter in the grand scheme of science.
But you talk as if yours does. And I’d like to know why!
So what consequences follow, Cornelius, from you not being convinced that such selection is “natural”?
Will it affect your next research project perhaps? Or do you have some up coming lab work that you’ll have to change the parameters of?
And I’m still waiting for that *single* new data point that your worldview is uniquely able to provide. You said yourself that you only use worldviews that produce useful results, so far I’m not seeing it.
I didn’t say that you did. What, in the post you are replying to makes you think that? Have you read some of the papers with the phrase “evidence for positive selection” in yet? I ask because, if you were genuinely interested in the question of what natural selection can and cannot do, you would want to read research papers that relate to the subject. You certainly wouldn’t be reading Dr. Sermonti.
Yes, he is a creationist. He makes lots of standard creationist arguments, which is what defines him as one.
And his claims are no more based on thorough scientific investigation than yours are.
Why do you think I pointed out how you could find research papers that contradict his claims made in the passage you quoted in the O.P.?
Allan Miller,
We don’t know the outcomes of spins of a roulette wheel are without intelligent/intentional direction; we infer it by an examination of the expected distributions of spin outcomes as they would be produced by the materials and processes involved. We suspect intelligent intervention when the distribution of spin outcomes varies too far from the expected “chance” distribution.
As yet, as far as I know, darwinism hasn’t offered a metric for comparing the expected distributions generated by “natural” selection against what actually occurs. What I have done here is challenge Darwinists to provide the metric by which the claim that selective outcomes as we observe in the world (the biological diversity that exists) are “natural” can be vetted.
It simply boils down to vetting the claim, Allan. You can assert that the outcome distributions we see can be produced by “natural” selection all you want, as can others, but I have yet to see any of you provide a metric by which your claim can be evaluated; all I have seen is case after case of shifting the burden and equivocation. I ask for support that such distributions are what we should expect from “natural”; then others demand that I prove otherwise, or that I define the term “natural”, or worse yet, imply there is no difference between “natural” and ‘artificial”; apparently, now, natural selection can also produce artificial outcomes. How’s that for equivocating in an argument?
If there is no difference between “natural” selection and “artificial” selection, then the term “natural” is nonsensical to use. If there is no way to vet the selection outcomes as the product of “natural” selection as opposed to artificial, then the term is necessarily non-scientific.
This is basic, simple logic. One can say all day long that natural selection games the system towards “reproductive success”, but you have no way of even demonstrating that claim. You simply assume conveniently as a magic ratchet, as Joe points out.
For all you know, nature = everything dies, and everything goes extinct; (which seems to be the historical case) that the natural distribution of outcomes has nothing whatsoever to do with “survival”, but rather is nature “attempting”, so to speak, to break down all living matter into non-living matter, to reduce the complex to the simple, and to seek the eventual entropic mean of uniform distribution of thermal energy. For all you know, without intelligence gaming the system, “life” cannot exist at all, much less “compete” for survival. For all you know the only kind of selection whatsoever is artificial selection, because left to nature all life would quickly die off.
Calling the outcomes of a rigged roulette wheel “natural” simply because those are the outcomes the roulette wheel has produced is an non-valid tautology. Calling the outcomes of evolution “selection” is a vaild tautology, calling it “natural” selection is an ideologically-driven non-valid tautology. You don’t get to characterize them as “natural” simply because they occurred.
What “metric” is that exactly, and will you please demonstrate that it works to provide scientifically useful information? Will you also please demonstrate that the “metric” verifies or helps to verify that your imagined designer god exists and is responsible for the things you attribute to it?
!- Alleged “evidence” for positive or strong selection is SPECULATIVE at best.
2- Dr Sermonti is not a creationist. I will go with what he says over what some dishonest anonymous evo says.
3- Not one paper contradicts his claims and you cannot find one that does.
You are a lying PoS as I have discussed ID and te positive evidence for it.
OTOH you still have nothing but lies and belligerence.
LoL! I get it Allan, your position has absolutely nothing so you hurl your ignoarnce at ID and hope it sticks….
The entire OP is supported by the evidence and it is very telling that neither YOU nor any other evo can produce any evidence to refute it.
When all you have are your belligerent rants it is obvious that you are an ignorant coward.
It’s not a question of us “not being convinced”; it’s a question of demonstrating the fundamental logical flaws of the Darwinist argument – and you don’t have to be a professional scientist to apply logic and reason to those arguments. IOW, until Darwinists provide a “nature vs artificial” metric that shows what kinds of outcomes one can expect via “natural” selection, as opposed to “artificial”, they have no rational or scientific basis to characterize selection as natural. (The same can be said for “random” or “chance” variation).
Equally, unless ID proponents offer such a metric, they similarly have no basis for calling such selections artificial (intelligently designed). But, at least the ID proponents are attempting to create, and have offered, and have published attempts at such a metric. Darwinists, to my knowledge, have not only never tried, they often deny any such metric is possible. If such a metric is not possible, or at least doesn’t yet exist, there is no means by which the term “natural” can be reasonably or scientifically applied to “selection” as a descriptor in any group of selection events.
IOW, unless Darwinists can point me or anyone who asks towards a metric that predicts what distribution of selection outcomes should occur via “natural” influences, they simply cannot meaningfully characterize those outcomes as “natural”; they can only insist they are natural out of a priori ideological commitment.
I’m not insisting that such selection events were artificial, or caused by ID. I’m challenging those who claim otherwise to put up or shut up. As Joe has pointed out, nobody to date has put up, even though they refuse to shut up. Insisting that Joe and I provide evidence to the contrary is called “shifting the burden”, we are not obligated to provide evidence to the contrary of a claim that as yet has offered no metric by which it can be evaluated in the first place.
If you claim that the distribution of selection can be scientifically characterized as “natural”, then support that claim by defining what “natural” means, and by what scientific means you determined that said selection events are best characterized as “natural”. You cannot say that there is a lack of evidence to the contrary unless you describe what evidence to the contrary would look like if it were present in whatever it is you are examining, and further, lack of evidence to the contrary is not positive evidence in support of your claim. It is certainly not sufficient to assert as fact or even as supported theory that such selection events were “natural”.
Science is by nature provisional.
What is being asserted as a fact is that there is no evidence being provided by you and yours to support your notion that a “selection event” not seen to be influenced by X has in fact been influenced by X.
Presumably then it cannot be shown to your satisfaction that a fair dice is fair? Would you agree with that? If not, please explain how you would go about satisfying yourself that a given dice was fair.
You seem to be saying here that you are not taking the position that they are are artificial but are asking those who say otherwise (i.e. the default position) to justify their position.
Which is of course fine. But given your metaphysical position, that what seems to us to be random might not actually be random (stochastic) after all.
So whatever evidence is presented (e.g. statistical analysis of mutation rates and locations) will be by (your) definition unconvincing.
If that gap is the one you have chosen to make your foxhole of last resort, good luck with that.
And it’s amusing that you are unwilling to defend the idea that such selection events are artificial, even though it’s obviously what you believe. You appear to realise what Joe does not, that there is no defence of such an idea without *positive* evidence. A fact you yourself recently noted on this site. So your position is reduced to sniping at the “telic” word choices in popular science summary pieces.
What is ID’s position on the sudden appearance of new species? Can you spare a few details of how/when/why new species come about according to ID?
“You don’t get to characterize them as “natural” simply because they occurred.”
But you get to characterize them as……, er, what?
Here are some more questions that you’ll likely avoid:
Is there such a thing as nature?
Is there such a thing as natural?
Is there such a thing as random?
Is there such a thing as chance?
Is there such a thing as stochastic?
Since you believe that your designer/creator god is everything and everything is your designer/creator god, and you apparently believe that everything is artificial, is your designer/creator god artificial?
What sort of evidence will refute an opinion Joe? The question you asked
is a simple one.
Your claim is that even very beneficial traits might not reach fixation in a population due to random events outside replication deciding if a given organism lives or dies. Tree falling, meteor strike etc.
Which is trivially true.
The question I have is, on average, what % of beneficial traits will be wiped out like that, and what % will in fact reach fixation?
Do you have an answer?
It’s a good question for the ID folk.
Designers contain CSI which they impart to their creations. Those creations are known to be designed because of the large amount of CSI they contain.
Therefore CSI indicates design. Large amounts of CSI indicate design even more so!
Therefore the designer of life/the universe must have more CSI then the universe contains. As the universe cannot generate more CSI (just as GAs cannot generate more CSI then was programmed/smuggled into them) then it’s designer put in the designer must contain more or equal amounts of CSI then the universe has.
So we detect design by finding CSI. Everything with CSI was designed, and therefore has a designer.
So where did the designer, with it’s massive amount of CSI come from? ID says that everything with CSI was designed. The designer has CSI. The designer was designed.
Therefore ID postulates an infinite regression of designers, or alternatively a special case of it’s “CSI indicates design rule but not this once, honest it’s legitimate” to get out of that obvious problem. Just like all the other religions do.
That they “seem’ to be random, or that it “seems” to be “natural”. is not a scientifically rigorous designation. Provide how you have rigorously arrived at the conclusion that the distribution of variations in question are “random”, or that the distribution of selection outcomes are “natural”. I’m not interested in what it “seems” to be to you and others.
LoL! YOU need to answer that, not me.
As I said “beneficial” is relative and changes- meaing what is beneficial for one year or one generation may not be beneficial the next year/ generation.
How do you know the designer(s) came from somewhere/ some place?
Reference please- everyone knows that you are dishonest, especially pertaining to ID.
That it could happen.
As I have been telling you and obvioulsy you are too ignorant to understand- THAT is what science is for. And looking at your position, which is totally void of details, they are not importatnt.
And yet another appeal to authority.
Sermonti is obviously a lunatic, and of course you go with what he says because you’re also a lunatic. That crap you quoted from him is some seriously ignorant bullshit. I’m still laughing.
LoL! You are nothing but a shit-munching hack and a coward.
So it’s science’s job to investigate and prove that your imagined, immaterial, supernatural, extra cosmic, designer/creator sky daddy god allah magically POOFS new species into existence. That fall from a tree really did a number on you, joe, although I strongly suspect that you were already noticeably brain damaged before the fall.
By the way, how can your imagined sky daddy allah POOF new species into existence when there’s no such thing as a species according to the bible, the koran, and baraminology?
What’s the next species or kind on your sky daddy allah’s list to be POOFED into existence and when will it be POOFED? I hope it’s a new and really big dinosaur with a built in saddle, and that it’s soon. Does allah take requests?
LoL! Your continued appeal to ignorance and belligerence is amusing.
Reference please.
Have you ever considered writing a paper to formalise your views? I’m sure any top-tier journal would jump at the chance to publish your wise words.
Says the internet tough guy who challenges people to a fight and then gives a distant parking lot as his address.
Says the internet tough guy who won’t specify a place and time to meet OM or anyone else, and actually show up.
Says the sissy who talks big but always backs out.
Yeah joe, you’re one brave dude!
And so? Do you have an actual point?
Heck joe, you need a reference to figure out what your own dogma is? Strange that. Go figure.
Brave enough to spend 3 months in the Colombian jungle- brave enough to take an unarmored SUV from Baghdad International Airport down RPG ally and then up to Balad.
And I have never backed out of any fight. If some evo shows up I will put him down.
YOU don’t have an actuual point beyond your pointy little head.
ID tells us that objects that contain CSI are designed. Designed objects come from “some place”.
My pleasure.
The UD faq notes:
The source of CSI, the only source of such CSI according to UD, is an intelligent agent. The designer contains CSI. That CSI must be there because of another intelligent agent. Infinite regress.
Does the one on the top of his head count? 😀
Nope- you are nothing but an ignorant PoS, and it shows.
ID is not about the designer(s).
You say that the fitness targets can change from year to year. That is non-responsive to my question
So, taking into account the fact that “beneficial” is relative and changes, on average what % of beneficial traits will be wiped out by random events , and what % will in fact reach fixation?
The fact that a currently beneficial trait might not be next year does not change or invalidate the question I asked.
But this thread is. You claim that natural selection can only break, not create.
So Joe, what creates? How? When? Why?
No need to write a paper to explain the obvious.
LoL! Of course if what is beneficial changes than that affects the fixation rate.
Then the question I have is, on average, what % of beneficial traits will be wiped out by random events, what % will stop being beneficial because of a change in the environment before they can be fixed and what % will in fact reach fixation?
Do you have an answer?
That’s your excuse, it seems that everybody involved has their own personal excuse.
Books are better.
Peer review is too slow.
The Darwinists won’t let my paper be published.
My paper would not get a fair reading so I’m not going to bother.
And so on and on.
The trouble is Joe, as you’d know if you knew anything about science, that we often need papers to explain “the obvious” most of all.
It’s obvious that cells are designed. It’s obvious that the sun revolves around the earth. It’s obvious that illness is caused by bad humours.
WJM,
Indeed, and no-one is interested in how life ‘seems to be designed’ to you and Joe. Life replicates or not, and in a finite world that has consequences that can be subject to investigation, by various means. A ‘natural’ (not-interfered-with) process would have all the fundamental characteristics of the one we observe. An interfered-with one would need an extra mechanism – the interferer. Absent any direct evidence of such a mechanism, it is hardly unreasonable to tentatively conclude that the ‘blind’ process amends genomes serially all by its little self.
Please note that we are not saying that all selection is natural, but that ‘artificial’ and the ‘natural’ are simply subcategories relating to the intent of the agents, not the results. God sticking a rock in a river, or one simply rolling off a crag, cannot be distinguished by someone coming along after. Are we entitled to say, therefore, that those who assert that rocks can move without intentional agency must provide some scientific means of distinguishing those that have from those that haven’t? There’s all these cliffs! There’s freeze-thaw! There’s gravity! Here comes one now! Are you serious?
But did you bravely fight any clowns or “evos” while you were there joe?
Natural selection is differential reproductive success! Differential reproductive success ‘games the system’ towards adaptation – concentrating the qualities that give more, diluting those that give less. I could demonstrate that claim with a bag of M&M’s.
Just to reiterate a point I don’t think you appreciate, about sampling being the fundamental process of evolution, not selection per se. Each birth and death is a sampling event wrt the pool of gene copies in the population.
There is an extensive mathematics of probability. One of the fundamental results of it is that a sample, even a ‘random’ one, is highly likely to be a distorted representation of the wider group from which it is drawn. Iterative sampling (further generations) distorts the distortions, inexorably towards retention of multiple copies of just one of the original population. I could prove that mathematically. This is not just a ‘magic ratchet’. It is the basic process inescapably operating upon a finite population. It has NOTHING to do with selection, natural or artificial. Under such a regime – the background process – populations will still evolve. They cannot stay still. Do we have to prove that this process is ‘natural’? There is a mathematical law governing this subsetting behaviour, and I cannot for the life of me see why we should exempt wild populations from it, just because some people think there is some mysterious essence permeating the cosmos. Your suggestion that an intelligence may be required to stop replicating populations from disappearing is akin to Joe’s idea that the rest of the universe holds the earth up.
If you have decided that roulette wheels and card decks are legitimate stochastic sampling environments, and populations are not, well, bully for you! I have purposefully NOT shifted any burden onto you to prove it. But your view is eccentric, despite your self-congratulatory view that raw (frequently erroneous) logic trumps a better understanding of the science.
Tens of thousands of extremely able minds cannot see what WJM lights upon like a swooping peregrine. I wonder why? Oh, hang on, that’s an appeal to authority. Bad evo!
Why did you feel the need to make that up?
How many papers did you read before making that up?
This.
OM asked: “So where did the designer, with it’s massive amount of CSI come from?”
joe cowardly twisted things around: “How do you know the designer(s) came from somewhere/ some place?”
OM said: “ID says that everything with CSI was designed.”
joe ran away again and tried to avoid reality: “Reference please- everyone knows that you are dishonest, especially pertaining to ID.”
Is there any low, cowardly, dishonest game that you won’t resort to joe? You know damn well that YOU and the other IDiots claim that the existence of CSI = design and a designer (even though you can’t test or coherently define CSI or design or a designer).
OM’s points and questions are right on the button. You can run but you can’t hide your evasive, dishonest games. The more you say (and lie) the more you prove that you and ID are a farce. With friends like you ID doesn’t need any enemies.
That’s like calling what might just be the remainder of division problem the quotient. Because you happen to be left with some living things doesn’t mean “natural” selection is the reason why those things remain. You assume that life can continue **at all** via “natural” selection. For all you know, for life to continue existing beyond a very short span of time (if at all), artificial selection is necessary. The true quotient of “natural” selection might be death and extinction
Reiterating improper, ideological tautologies via “argument by definition” adds nothing of value to the debate.