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Selling Evolution
A mixed week: Anne Coulter's latest book bombed Darwians as "liberals" and evolution as "holey" rather than Holy. Coulter is quite radical and I sometimes enjoy her bombast; she's also a bit impulsive. Darwinians fight a two-front battle: traditions to the left reject the notion of human instinct, those to the right dislike our skepticism about top-down designers. "New Scientist" pointed out this stuff several years ago but Coulter probably doesn't read it. (Robin Smith has an intriguing title: "Lies at the Altar" but is a disappointment, a stack of mottos rather than a structure spun from mate selection research.)
Not to worry! Nature and Discovery Channels already converted our kids, I think, because of the immediacy and salience of what Uncle David has to tell them about choosing partners. I've also found the highschoolers to react "cool" when they hear I'm an evolutionist and, over the past decade, more adults know the word and I can spin Buss into recommendations intended to soothe marital partnerships. I've probably lost a couple of chanters, however, and I've compromised: if they hear voices, I don't first reach for my explanations of schizophrenia or tell them that magnetic stimulation to their temporal lobe will keep them in church all the time. Even the chanters still want the utility of mate selection data. Even the chanters want both their immediate and future kids to have some breaks. Even the chanters get into the idea that parents are the best predictor and exploratory system for their offspring... And their Commandments instantiate evolutionary good sense. I sometimes feel like Screwtape recruiting Wormwoods and, like CS Lewis's character, I ratchet ahead unless there's a war... Life is good! JB |
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Re: Selling Evolution
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But not to worry brother Jim—I suspect that Darwinianism will evolve and adapt. |
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Re: Selling Evolution
Not so very much accidents...
Mutation plays a very small part to evolution by natural selection... Mostly you have inheritence and differential fitness... |
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not quite . . .
Mutation is the ultimate source of all variation present within a population . . . without mutation, there would be eventually be nothing for natural selection to select, and evolution would halt.
Perhaps you meant that inheritance and differential reproduction through time are the non-random processes that transform variation generated by random mutation into adaptations . . . ? I would agree with that. By 'accident', Fred refers to the perspective that there is no universally defined (by a supreme intelligence) meaning to life. This notion is very upsetting to Fred and prompts him to cite great minds of the past that, in their dying years, produced platitudes about the necessity and inevitability of a divine creator. |
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Re: Selling Evolution
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Last edited by Fred H.; July 29th, 2006 at 02:49 PM.. |
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Re: Selling Evolution
By randomness, do you refer to an explanation of biological evolution, or of the universe's origin?
If you refer to evolution, then you're mistaken . . . no serious biologist thinks that adaptive evolution is driven by random processes. The generation of variation (by mutation) is effectively random - by which I mean that mutations occur at random with respect to their effect upon organisms (we've had this precise discussion before). Non-random processes, on the other hand, 'select' variants which happen to be better at making copies of themselves, and thereby govern adaptive evolution. If you refer to the creation of the universe, then I'm not really equipped to enter the discussion, as I'm no expert on astro-physics . . . it's hard to believe that anything with inherent order is created totally randomly, but, on the hand, a non-random process doesn't by any means imply the existence of divinity. In other words, "non-random" is not synonymous with "Creator", as you seem to imply. |
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Re: Selling Evolution
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As far as I know Carey, we can’t prove randomness, and randomness is not falsifiable. |
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Re: Selling Evolution
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One cause of mutation is the natural radioactivity of the uranium in the earth. Radioactivity sends alpha particles (protons) in various directions. Occasionally, one of those particles makes a direct hit on a reproductive cell that is still healthy enough to become part of a fertilized egg. This sometimes causes the birth of an organism with a different DNA pattern, which changes the sequence, which changes (or activates or deactivates) a protein which actually affects the fitness of that individual. (Radiation sickness is not a problem with someone having too much radiation in them; it is the overall effect of many cells being disrupted by the alpha particles that flew through them and chopped up too much DNA and proteins.) That is what I mean by random mutation. Granted, in a deterministic world, all mutations are actually predetermined. But at a level that naturally appears random to us. You're welcome, Fred. Quote:
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Re: Selling Evolution
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As best I can tell, we can’t prove randomness, and it’s not falsifiable. And so it remains: Randomness is an illusion, although ignorance certainly seems to be real. |
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Re: Selling Evolution
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