Natural Selection (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Monday, November 28, 2011, 23:53 (4742 days ago) @ dhw

MATT: I am prepared to modify my position, but only after I get some more clarity on what my fundamental problems ARE. (It became clear to me that in the intervening months, my inability to communicate is NOT helping things... your questions were good, but they lead me to the conclusion that we're not talking about the same thing, and this is MY fault.)

David has answered most of your numbered points, so I’ll summarize what I see as your fundamental problems. The main one is that you’ve obviously been under such pressure lately that you’ve forgotten what we were actually discussing! I asked you five specific questions on 13 August, and on 14 November you gave direct, very grudging answers to only two of them. The bones of contention between us were your insistence 1) that your definition of NS as “the process by which an organism undergoes environmental pressure and responds to that pressure in its genotype” had superseded the conventional one, which for brevity’s sake I will simplify to “NS is the process by which those forms of life best suited to the environment will survive”; 2) that NS and evolution were synonymous.

I don't see a material difference between my definition of evolution or the one you provide here in 1. 2 is harder for me to tackle, because again, if you remove it from the equation of evolution, you no longer have evolution. It is irreducible. Natural Selection is not removable from the theory of evolution. Because of this, I have a difficult time answering yes or no to the synonymous question, because again, my hands are tied by the ropes of methodological materialism. I have attempted (and failed) to explain why I hold this view, both through a mathematical argument as well as an attempt to explain the mathematical argument in plain english. Is it synonymous? Not syntactically, but Natural Selection is such an important part of the process that I cannot remove it. Does this clear the mud for you?

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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.\"