Science Forums 2

[Michaelangelica]

My problems with Darwin
1 The language used.
The value laden nature of it and the circular nature of the argument.
Lets try to define natural

nat·u·ral Listen: [ nchr-l, nchrl ]
adj.
http://www.yourdictionary.com

1. Present in or produced by nature: a natural pearl.

2. Of, relating to, or concerning nature: a natural environment.

3. Conforming to the usual or ordinary course of nature: a natural death.

4. a. Not acquired; inherent: Love of power is natural to some people. b. Having a particular character by nature: a natural leader. c. Biology Not produced or changed artificially; not conditioned: natural immunity; a natural reflex.
# Produced by nature; not artificial or manmade:

organic, unadulterated.
Idiom: pure as the driven snow.
# In a primitive state; not domesticated or cultivated; produced by nature:

native, rough, uncultivated, undomesticated, untamed, wild.
See wild.

Now how is Genetic engineering, IVF, immunisation, atomic bombs, bacterial warfare, new man-made tetrogenic & cancinogenic compounds/chemicals,machine-guns, surgery, pesticides, The Terminator Gene, hybridisation,heart transplants "natural".( I will leave "war" & terrorism off the list because sociobiologists will probably argue that it is natural.)

-- selection
noun

The act of choosing:

choice, election, option, preference.
See choice.
se·lec·tion Listen: [ s-lkshn ]
n.


1. a. The act or an instance of selecting or the fact of having been selected. b. One that is selected.

2. A carefully chosen or representative collection of people or things. See Synonyms at choice.

3. A literary or musical text chosen for reading or performance.

4. Biology A natural or artificial process that favors or induces survival and perpetuation of one kind of organism over others that die or fail to produce offspring.

(That last one is nasty but i will bravely include it and push on.)
Here the language is really "loaded'. "Selection" implies that a choice is made. when I buy apples from the supermarket I choose one over another. One apple I think is better than another. (marketers will tell me i choose the shiniest reddest plumpest apple. Organic farmers tell me I should be choosing the one with blemishes as this means I will be poisioning myself with less pesticide)
Now my argument is real choices are not being made. (Especially if you throw in the even more emotionally loaded word "fittest" as in survival of).
It is just a lottery. Lady Luck running wild. It is blind chance that favours one individual species or individual over another.
To use tems like natural selection "removes the chaff and allows the wheat though " is emotionally loaded.
NS does no such thing. What we have left of life is not the 'best" we can even use words like 'best'

(Genetic engineering
Genetic engineering i always thought a very precise careful accurate, 'engineering ed process after reading David Suzuki and Holy dressel's "Naked Ape to Super species" i realise it shoul be be called something like "Genetic Buckshot"there are many more problems with Genetic engineering than I thought possible. The near release of the bacterium Klebsiella planticula is a chilling story.)
They say

Is "survival of the fittest" a tautology?(Wikapedia)

The phrase "survival of the fittest" is sometimes claimed to be a tautology (i.e. it is a statement which is true by its own definition, and is therefore intrinsically uninformative). Unfortunately, although in evolutionary biology the word "fitness" has nothing to do with being "fit" since it quantifies potential or realized reproductive success (as in "realized fitness"), the noun's etymological connection with the adjective "fit" leads many to charge the phrase "survival of the fittest" is equivalent to saying "those who survive best are those who survive best" or "those who reproduce most are those who reproduce most", i.e., that it is a tautology. The reasoning is that if we take the word "fit" to mean "fitness" then "survival of the fittest" means "highest fitness of those with highest fitness".

However, Darwin and Spencer used "survival" as a proxy for "fitness" in the modern sense and "fittest" to refer to those individuals that are functionally most capable to tackle life challenges, i.e. to individuals endowed with phenotypic characteristics which improve most strongly one's probability of survival and reproduction. Therefore "survival of the fittest" intends to be a short version of the statement "those who are best at surviving and reproducing will have higher fitness" and this is not a circular statement since the sentence indicates that fitness is the consequence of one's ability to tackle life challenges.

Sure as long as you are also lucky
Cataclysms such as Volcanic eruption etc. obviously don't "select" unless you are immune to hot Lava of course, they simply wipe out.

The full cause-and-effect picture of how natural selection generates fitness differences is that those individuals which end up reproducing more do it because they differed from others in biologically relevant traits that affected their probability of surviving and/or reaching reproduction in better condition.

No they just happened to be in the right place at the right time in history

For instance, a gazelle that for some biomechanical reason runs faster than average will be more likely to escape predators and will therefore be more likely to produce more offspring than slower ones since the latter would get to reproduce during fewer breeding seasons. The faster gazelle would therefore be "selected", i.e., it would have higher relative fitness than slower ones, etc, but not "because it is selected" but rather because it can run faster and thus can escape better from predators so that ultimately it will go through more breeding seasons than average gazelles and thus will reproduce more (will have higher fitness).

Are you going to tell me that the 99.99% of life now extinct had a 'lower relative fitness'. Nonsense. they just happened to be in the way of a passing meteor.

2 the Question of diversity
The more diversity the more chance of survival. So why does natural selection reduce diversity?
99.99% of all life that has lived on earth is now extinct. (leaving us with a mere c1.5 million species)
How can this be an efficient sytem? It is a mind-numbingly profligately wasteful system. How can reducing diversity help survival?
To quote Suzuki and Dressel

"It is the differences that maximise the chance that there will be survivors under new conditions or different circumstances. Homogencity and monoculture run counter to this basic principle, making us vulnerable to sudden changes.. . .What if there is a mistake?"

and again they quote Tewolde Egziather

"If you were to go back to the time of the dinosaurs, and you were to see a little mammal running about, you would never think that this mammal would succeed the dinosaurs. who can tell which is the dinosaur and which is the mammal in our time, in this era of really frightening possibilities?. . .what is successful now and what will be successful in the future. . . is not something linear that proceeds from what we know at the moment (places) have destroyed many of the bridges they would of had into other possibilities.

As you say

Extinction does not help diversity. diversity helps prevent extinction

Sure the invention of sex gives us diversity but overall diversity is selected against. Why? What part of Darwin explains this phenomenon?

3 Socio-biology.
The inheritance of acquired behaviours.
I have many problems here. OK you can have altruism but if we have been selected for that behavior what selects for homosexuality? How does that removal of some of our brightest and best from the gene pool help diversity and any sort of individual or species survival?

I need to stop now but
What if natural selection has made a major mistake with man?
Edward Wilson professor of Biology at Harvard notes that If man were to become extinct this would benefit the ecology of the planet enormously.
If ants went extinct the results would be catastrophic. There would be major extinctions and ecosystem collapse.

Gaia anyone?