More about how evolution works (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 14:40 (3327 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: My thanks yet again to David, who has posted two items on fruit flies and guppies which once more raise the question of how evolution works.
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> Re fruit flies: QUOTE: “.....this finding opens up a whole new set of questions about how animals behave and react to their environments."
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> David's comment: This looks like a learned behaviour that became an instinct. Family planning with food source.
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> dhw: The premise would be that fruit flies are not machines but thinking beings, and they use whatever materials are at their disposal to investigate ways in which they can best cope with the environment. Whatever works stays (natural selection).-Good definition of natural selection. Remember that fruit flies now do this behaviour automatically as an instinct. I can't tell with certainty how it came about. The first male to do it might have said: "great, I can eat, and might as well get a sex partner to enjoy the feast with me". Others followed and it became instinct.-> David's comment: No question that random chance mutation/natural selection occurs, as above, but it is not present enough to drive evolution in the time scales we know.
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> dhw: I agree with you, but would stress that the two quotes above only concern adaptation and not innovation, ....However, adaptation may hold the key to innovation. If we are sceptical of the notion that God preplanned... we are left with the hypothesis that the cell communities within the guppy make all the necessary adjustments. They are confronted with a new problem, they process the information that comes to them from outside, and they communicate and cooperate with one another in working out how to deal with it. These are manifestations of intelligence. And once you attribute intelligence to organisms, you open up the possibility that as well as adapting, they may also be capable of innovating.-All we know is that their genome is capable of methylating at appropriate spots, using intelligent information in their genome. The rest is inference, and we don't even know how the methylation process originally appeared in evolution. We can recognize the code contains information, and my choice for source is God.