Inference and its role in NS (General)

by David Turell , Monday, January 24, 2011, 05:20 (4862 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT: It's in the language of biologists; an event that begins the process is called "selective pressure." While the organism is under pressure, it must find a way to adapt, behaviourally or molecularly. -'Selective pressure' is just another way of saying 'natural selection'. As we now know environmental or other pressures cause epigenetic modifications which become inherited.
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> At core, is selective pressure. I understand evolution to be destructive as well as constructive; selective pressure is the cause that moves an organism to continue to survive or become extinct.- Just another way of saying natural selection.
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> We need to consider what Dawkins is saying here. For natural selection to explain the "whole of life," we need to define what it is that it is selecting for. Ultimately we know that it is genes that are being selected for. I will have to dig up the name of the experiment done in the 1980's, but the experimenters deliberately knocked out a bacteria's natural ability to digest lactose. They then cultured these bacteria and reintroduced them into a lactose-rich media. What ended up happening was that the bacteria appropriated machinery that performed some other function, and used that (inefficiently) to again be able to ingest lactose. In this case the selective pressure was lactose, and the selection was for the new gene. -A very well-know study, new genetics, same species. Microevolultion, and it doesn't prove macroevolution. 
 
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> Modifying "what are we selecting for" the answer becomes clear: Selective pressure operates against only the genetic material that came before that date. The mechanism for change relies solely upon the collective history of the organism. Natural Selection explains both why organisms live and die out, and why we have the diversity we have today. Natural Selection works against existing genes to accomplish all of this. -Or works for the gene structure.- > So I think your #2 above is answered as it can be. In the Dawkins view, your question gets pushed all the way back to abiogenesis, because life is defined as a recursive function that consistently relies upon its prior states. Explanations such as the exact mechanisms that created eyes or sex are seen as only filling in the details of what is explained by what I discussed above. -Agreed