I plan to do a fairly thorough response to Stephen's response to my post,
but this is not it; this is just a note on one issue he raises.
><nip>
>In the end, there is no such thing as "natural selection". It is just an
>unnecessary metaphor that gives the *illusion* of doing something. Chris, if
>he is to be true to his Occam's Razor reductionist principles, should
>eliminate `natural selection' as an unnecessary entity.
Chris
Actually, I largely *do* dispense with it. It's a statistical
generalization, not a thing unto itself. Nevertheless, it is true that some
organisms are excluded from reproducing, and that this affects both the
population of organisms and which ones *will* produce offspring and further
variations.
Further, selection, or failure to reproduce (for *any* reason) determines
which variations, of all possible ones from the first replicating molecule
(or whatever) to now we see as the totality of life. Eliminating
reproductive failures does not determine which variations will be produced,
but which ones we get to see, which ones appear as distinct species, etc.
This is a mind-bogglingly *biased* and minuscule sample. This *extreme*
biasing in favor of those genomes that come with organisms that function in
the real world gives a misguided first impression about the nature of
variation. Exclusion of the non-functional ones from further reproduction
leaves us looking at only variational successes, while we conveniently
ignore the vast multitudes of genomes and organisms which, if they existed
today, would make ID much more obviously flawed than it is. Exclusion of
non-reproducers makes life give a warped statistical impression of a kind
of consistent designed order. If we have a marble-making process that
randomly produces marbles of all colors, but the marble-makers only sell
the white ones (and use the glass from the others to make more marbles), we
could easily, but mistakenly, get the impression that they only *made*
white marbles.
>I have been meaning to do this for some time, but now I will: I am going to
>put natural selection in single quotes, either `natural selection' or natural
>`selection' to indicate that I am talking about is really just a
>*metaphor*, as
>Darwin himself originally admitted:
>
> "If the reader is surprised to find natural selection disintegrating
> under scrutiny, I was no less so. But when we reflect upon the
> matter, is it so surprising? The biologists have innocently
> confessed
> that natural selection is a metaphor. In the sixth edition of The
> Origin of Species ... Darwin himself referred to natural
> selection as a
> "metaphorical expression" and also said: "In the literal sense of
> the
> word, natural selection is a false term....") and every experienced
> person knows that it is dangerous to work with metaphors. As the
> road to hell is paved with good intentions, so the road to confusion
> is paved with good metaphors. Perhaps the sober investigators
> should not have staked so much on a poetic device." (Macbeth N.,
> "Darwin Retried," 1971, p.50)
>
>but in the end came to think of as his God:
>
> "... All he could believe in was 'my deity, `Natural Selection'" '
> (Moore J.R., "The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 1979, p.344, in
> Bird W.R., "The Origin of Species Revisited, Vol. II, 1991, p.210)
>
>Darwinian evolutionary biology must be the only branch of modern science
>whose central mechanism doesn't actually exist!
That the *term* is a metaphor does not mean that the facts being referred
to are not real. In the real world, it is still a fact that the genetic
information that does not reproduce is lost.
But, none of this is important because the key factor in generating new
forms of life, new species, etc., is variations in genetic information.
Selection is *not* the central mechanism of evolution. It is the central
reason why we see *just* the variations we do see rather than a universe
nearly chock full of deformed organisms, great globs of non-viable DNA,
organisms that live but that do have the ability to reproduce on their own,
partially-formed organisms, and so on. But it is not the reason why life
can or does exist at all, or for what little (relatively) diversity of life
there is. Selection determines, from current populations, which organisms
will reproduce and therefore what genetic material may be varied, but it
does not produce evolution. Rather, it *limits* evolution, to just the
functionally viable organisms and their genetic material.
Metaphor or not, the fact referred to by "natural selection" is real.
That is, without selection or exclusion, there would be no naturalistic
explanation of why we see *only* the organisms we see, rather than so many
with such fine gradations of variation that we could never decide where one
species left off and perhaps thousands of others began. Without exclusion,
there would be virtually every imaginable gradation of organisms from ape
to man, for example. Selective factors impose restrictions on which
organisms will have the opportunity to reproduce, and thus leaves
detectable groupings (species, varieties, etc.) wherever there is not
enough ecological "room" for in-between organisms, wherever they would not
be sufficiently "fit").
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