Inference and its role in NS (General)

by dhw, Friday, January 21, 2011, 12:28 (5054 days ago) @ xeno6696

MATT assumes that that the explanation for each specimen of horse "was that it was under pressure of natural selection to reach the form it took."-Straight away, you link the changes in form to natural selection, but NS does not change the form of any creature. The pressure may have been exerted by changes in the environment, and certainly those specimens that adapted best survived, but NS ONLY accounts for their survival ... not for the ability to adapt, let alone to innovate.
 
MATT: When you compare this explanation versus any others concerning how life has taken the form it does today--I find it a pretty convincing argument. So at this point generalizing to all of life is a natural next step. (Epistemology aside.) Evolution and natural selection are seen as synonymous...-Stop there, because this is the point at issue. Evolution would be impossible without adaptation and innovation, which provide the diversification from which Nature selects. Maybe these mechanisms are interlinked ... maybe environmental pressures actually cause innovations, or maybe they're caused by accidental mutations, or maybe cells have an inventive intelligence of their own (David thinks they have been programmed by a UI). No-one would claim that NS itself requires design ... it is a straightforward process which, as David says, is basically a tautology: whatever survives is suited to survival. But it is these all-important mechanisms that enable evolution to move on. Stating this fact is not a denial of evolution; it is a criticism of those who try to oversimplify the process by kidding themselves and others that NS explains "the whole of life". -The complete sentence in Dawkins (The God Delusion, p. 116) reads: "Natural selection not only explains the whole of life; it also raises our consciousness to the power of science to explain how organized complexity can emerge from simple beginnings without any deliberate guidance."-Simplicity is relative. We still haven't figured out how these so-called "simple beginnings" began (the origin of life). And if you can explain to me how natural selection PRODUCES ... as opposed to PRESERVES ... adaptations and innovations (organized complexity), I will jump off my fence.