Darwinist ignorance and confusion (Introduction)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Sunday, June 13, 2010, 17:14 (5276 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: Speciation occurs after natural selection has made some kind of decision on the innovation.
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> DAVID: I'll accept that as stated.
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> So will I. However, in an earlier post Matt says that "NS is the lynchpin of evolution", and I think this is where so many misunderstandings arise. A lynchpin, yes, but not THE lynchpin. If there was no innovation, NS would not have anything to decide on. NS is an absolutely logical process which I don't think any of us would dispute, but for that very reason some materialists try to make out that NS is synonymous with evolution. By doing so, they can cover up gaps in the theory. The gaps relate not to NS but to innovation. A third vital factor for the theory itself (which perhaps we take for granted now) was the starting-point of this particular discussion: common ancestry, as discussed in Elliott Sober's article. All these factors are, in my view, lynchpins of evolution because ... if I may flog Matt's metaphor to its messy end ... take any one of them away, and the wheels fall off.-I've thought about this for a few days, but I'm not sure I'm fully on board:-We agree that evolution requires these things:
1. An organism capable of change
2. A change must happen (by whatever mechanism we've discussed)
3. Natural Selection must be applied to it. -We already have discussed and agreed that 1 & 2 have three categories: Good changes, Neutral changes, and bad changes. Natural selection operates on both Good and bad, and ignores neutral. So when we're discussing speciation it seems clear that at this level it's a two step process, and in terms of speciation, step 3 is the most important.

--
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