Natural Selection (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, November 14, 2011, 23:27 (4756 days ago) @ dhw

Natural Selection
by dhw , Saturday, August 13, 2011, 07:31 @ xeno6696
MATT (Under “Science and Religion”, 9 August at 15.58): I will return to the tangled mess I seem to have made regarding Natural Selection. Whether or not I can cleanly cleave those threads is beyond me, the damage may be too great here!
“Tangled mess” is an excellent description. I’m touched by the trouble you have now taken to reduce your ideas to mathematical formulae, and I fear it will seem very ungrateful of me when I express my total agreement with your description of your efforts: “clear as mud”. I’m sorry, but if you cannot use layman’s language to counter arguments put to you in layman’s language (even Dawkins is able to do this, and he is no amateur scientist), I can’t help feeling there is something wrong with your arguments. This is going to sound horribly schoolmasterly, and I apologize in advance, but I’m now going to put some direct questions to you as I think this is the only way I can pin you down.
1) You have defined Natural Selection as “the process by which an organism undergoes environmental pressure and responds to that pressure in its genotype.” How does this definition differ from the description of epigenetics I gave you in my last post?
It doesn’t really: I simply group epigenetics into the same morass. It’s another variable in the equation.
2) Do you agree that innovations and adaptations must take place BEFORE Nature decides whether they will survive or not?
That’s a little harder. We know that some genetic combinations are guaranteed to be disastrous, so I think that in some cases nature “decides” BEFORE something happens. But largely I would agree: There must be something there (OR NOT there) for a selection event to occur.

3) A repeat question: Are you saying that Natural Selection IS epigenetics (IS random mutations) IS Evolution? I.e is the term Natural Selection SYNONYMOUS with the term evolution? Please give me a straight answer yes or no.
You say you took a number of days to meditate on this question, but you appear to have spent all that time looking for a cop-out:
“I do not see how you can separate them.”
The process of evolution entails adaptations and innovations and natural selection. Of course they are interdependent, and so can’t be separated. But they are not the same thing. What I consider to be me consists of various interdependent mechanisms, but that does not mean that my brain IS my heart IS my blood IS my lungs.

Evolution in the way that I have learned it from both training and study—is a function. Like a calculator. However it’s a recursive function. In another attempt at explaining recursion to you, my parents were the inputs that resulted in a temporary output, me. Myself and my wife will be the inputs that result in another temporary output, my child. When I referred to each stage of the equation before, where we choose to stop and study—that is the “Generation” under consideration.

To me, its hard to separate natural selection in any practical sense, because as I said before—the filter is the most important part of the process. My child is the result of the filter I passed through. I am the result of the filter my parents passed through. They are the result of the filter that… [ad nauseum]

The view I take… well brace yourself. You said I was supposed to use “plain language” to try and explain something I understand much more clearly with the language of math.

Life is NOT a sequence of events. Life is an ocean.

Where does an ocean wave begin? Where does it end? We look at creatures based on snapshots of time, and ask ourselves “what happened?” But Heraclitus is right: Everything is in flux. I am not the same being I was even a moment ago.

I am the sum of all the previous events that happened before me.

As life is an ocean, so too can evolution NOT be broken down into constituent pieces. Remove Natural Selection from the equation, and you no longer have speciation—everything gets to stay. Hopefully this answers your question: There is NO evolution without natural selection. Do I equate the moving pieces as identical? No.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"