Re: [asa] fun- an evolution test question ... a hint (was "riddle")

Again, I suppose it depends on how you look at it.

You could argue that cars may not have genes to inherit, but they do have
aspects in common with earlier 'inventions' of humans. Car seats are like
regular seats, wheels were used in wheelbarrows and other creations, lights
were used just as lights at first, etc. So treat past inventions,
engineering concepts, and otherwise as things that were 'selected for'.

Or maybe assert that the creations were products of genes or results of the
expression of genes. An argument would go that what humans do (including
what they create) is directly related to their genes along with reaction to
environment input, so just as the pig was successively bred to have certain
features, the car was successively designed to have certain features, and in
both cases the key to their evolutionary future was action on the part of
the environment. In this case, human designers (or, getting closer to a
Dawkins viewpoint, genes. In which cars do have 'genes to inherit' because
they're 'evolving' by way of humans, who do have genes.)

... And as David just said, yeah, I suppose this is where Dawkins would
classify all this as memes.

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 4:17 PM, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>wrote:

> Schwarzwald is getting really hot... he said:
>
> "One would be to argue that cars/machines in general are just another kind
> of offspring of humans. That could arguably put them in the evolutionary
> chain, at which point you just have to draw the lines of descent back to the
> common ancestor between them."
>
> According to evolution (using Dawkins' terms), how are cars the "offspring"
> of humans, since cars don't have genes, and "offspring" usually inherit the
> genes of their ancestors (for biological systems, anyway)? You're super
> close!
>
> ...Bernie
>
> ________________________________________
> From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
> Behalf Of Schwarzwald
> Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 1:00 PM
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Subject: Re: [asa] fun- an evolution test question ... a hint (was
> "riddle")
>
> I'm not sure if anyone gave this answer yet, but I can think of two
> possibilities.
>
> One would be to argue that cars/machines in general are just another kind
> of offspring of humans. That could arguably put them in the evolutionary
> chain, at which point you just have to draw the lines of descent back to the
> common ancestor between them.
>
> Another way would be to argue that they're both the result artificial
> selection by humans. Pigs have been successively bred to have certain
> features, cars have been made to have certain features, therefore another
> link is that they're both human-guided 'artificial' products of a descent
> line.
>
> I can think of other ways to justify as much, which alone probably
> highlights some problems with the whole evolutionary debate.
> - - - - - - -
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 1:20 PM, Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>
> wrote:
> As I think about it more- maybe "riddle" was a bad word, because it implies
> a play on words or some kind of trick. Actually, I'm thinking this could be
> on an actual exam if Richard Dawkins was teaching a class on evolution.
>
> And yes- it should say 'evolutionarily' not 'evolutionary.'
>
> Here's a further hint:
>
> If it was a picture of a mother big and a baby pig, you'd say "that is
> easy- the baby is the offspring, descended from, the mother." If I gave a
> picture of a fish and a human, you'd say "that's easy- they are 'cousins'
> because they have a common ancestor. All mammals directly descended from
> some kind of fish." This is expanding the range- can you see the
> evolutionary link, as proposed by Dawkins?
>
> ...Bernie
>
>
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Received on Sat Jan 10 16:41:24 2009