Xixax

Blind as to an ultimate goal definitely, but as a short term goal, it's to survive long enough to reproduce.

What I meant was that unlike random mutation alone, random mutation filtered through natural selection shows a reason, a purpose as to why some mutations are kept and others discarded. There is no ulimate goal of evolution, no final result, other than a constant ambiguous goal of survival.

I agree with the rest of your post as well.

Motorcycle Mama

Must admit I am intrigued as to Clutch's identity.

So I am hinting at what I cannot prove. As I recall I prefaced my initial post on this topic with a statement about reading biographies of Darwin. You will have to take my word I was being honest and that I said in that initial post is not of my own making but of my interpretation of what I have read about Darwin in those biographies and of Darwin himself. Is the incriminating evidence that I've constructed? Maybe others would read the same biographies or his comments where he labels women as intellectually inferior to men and offer a different interpretation. I also realize I should give references but they are not where I happen to have access to a computer and I keep forgetting to get them to pass them along. However, I will ask you to accept my words as being based on things I have read. That others may not arrive at the same interpretations as I have done is not surprising. I am not alone in being a critic of Darwin. Take a read of Himmelfarb's Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution.

The sentence about my accusing anti-creationists of being uninformed in ways I cannot articulate is likely the result of being too brief. How are they uninformed? There has been no indication of proposals linking evolution with thermodynamics which, by the way, is now included within the framework of semiotics. There has been an insistence in linking population change that can be attributed to natural selection to changes above the level of the population in the lack of evidence. I have continually read that natural selection is one of many causes of evolution yet an analysis of natural selection reveals it is a mechanism of evolution, i.e., a means whereby the effect of a cause is carried out. The last way in which the anti-creationists are uninformed is they seem to know nothing about the writings of serious theologians on the relationship between science and religion and how a Christian is to deal with modern science, which includes evolution.

And I shall now cease with one final comment that is perhaps too restricted for a group such as is commenting on this post. If you invoke Hempel's covering law model, as was done in the class you mention, it is seen that natural selection cannot be a cause of evolution since the deduction that natural selection leads to is "evolution does or does not occur."
MM

PS It wasn't a niche that was defined but a population.

Motorcycle Mama

Xixax,

Work is truly a curse, something I came to fully realize when I retired.

I'm not including your post simply so I won't have to jump around in trying to respond.

Most of what you say is part of what has been my understanding of evolution although I would likely state some aspects in different ways.

What I'd like to do is offer a brief description of change. There is a system that functions and survives and that shows a certain kind of organization (I use organization to refer to how parts are arranged relative to each other, a common measure is a correlation coefficient). For whatever reason, thermodynamic instability may be one, changes will occur in that system. But the changes that occur will be restricted by two things, the organization of that system and whether or not the system can still function in the face of the change. If the system continues to survive and function in the face of those changes the variation in that system will increase. This description could apply to a developing organism or an evolving lineage. It seems to me that what is offered here is an a necessary and adequate account for development or evolution. I suspect that the program you are developing may be constructred something like this. So what's the role of natural selection, the elimination of certain forms? Not necessarily determine direction since that will be determined by the changes which are constrained by the organization of the system. Natural selection will eliminate some organisms that can't function but will not distinguish among those that have functions adequate to survive.

There are two points I persist in making. One is that natural selection, while a real phenomenon, has nothing to do with evolution above the level of the populations. The complexity that arises is the result of change within an organized system. The second is that by Darwin's own words in the Origin of Species, natural selection cannot account for evolutionary diversity as revealed in relationships among organisms; Darwin said that you cannot use functional features to establish relationships but it is functional features that will be affected by natural selection.

On reductionism, Darwin himself was not one but, like social Darwinism, his ideas excluded neither social Darwinism, even though he himself may not have liked it, or reductionism.

I must quit as I am suffering caffine withdrawls.
More later
MM

seanie

Originally posted by Motorcycle Mama:

I am not alone in being a critic of Darwin.

You're certainly not. But what's the relevance of criticising Darwin as a person?

How are they uninformed? There has been no indication of proposals linking evolution with thermodynamics which, by the way, is now included within the framework of semiotics.

I don't understand what you're saying. Could you explain?

There has been an insistence in linking population change that can be attributed to natural selection to changes above the level of the population in the lack of evidence.

I don't understand. What are you getting at?

I have continually read that natural selection is one of many causes of evolution yet an analysis of natural selection reveals it is a mechanism of evolution, i.e., a means whereby the effect of a cause is carried out.

Again I don't understand the distinction you're trying to draw. Natural Selection is a cause and Evolution is the effect. Natural selection is a mechanism by which evolution occurs. I don't understand your use of the word yet.

If you invoke Hempel's covering law model, as was done in the class you mention, it is seen that natural selection cannot be a cause of evolution since the deduction that natural selection leads to is "evolution does or does not occur."

I don't follow this at all. Who's Hempel?

Motorcycle Mama

[QUOTE]Originally posted by seanie:
[QB]Originally posted by Motorcycle Mama:

I'll try to answer your points briefly.

Why criticize Darwin as a man. Based on my reading of his biographies, I interpret him as someone mainly concerned with the acceptance of his views. Given that interpretation, I ask if his views and be trusted to be those he really believes. If you compare the 1st and 6th editions of the Origin of Species, his views on evolution change quite a bit and I suspect it is to deflect criticism.

About theormodynamics and semiotics. The part about semioitics was meant mainly for clutch, the apparent neglect of a thermodynamic component to evolution, evolution a system of increasing entropy, is something anti-creationists often ignore. Semiotics is the science of signs and signals. It deals with the generation, sending, receiving and interpretation of signals. The generation of signals may be viewed as one of the products of evolution. Semiotics, also, is sort of a more modern and expanded version of information theory.

I mentioned a lack of understanding among anti-creationists in assuming population differentiation, due to natural selection, is adequate to cause evolution at a higher level, i.e., the formation of species. I know of no evidence that natural selection can cause speciation. It has been demonstrated that you can select for infertility in crossing among organisms and then use that in conjunction with the biological species concept to argue that selection can cause speciation. But the biological species concept is badly flawed, i.e., it doesn't work.

Why do a say natural selection is not a cause? That depends on your definition of a cause. By my definition a cause is something that makes an event inevitable, e.g., gravity is the cause of the rise and fall of tides. Natural selection does not make evolution inevitable. First there is stabilizing selection which leads to no change and second in the absence of variation, there can be no change.

Who is Hempel? A philosopher of science who offered a formal account of an explanation. What Hempel said was that given certain conditions and a natural law, certain events were inevitable. I would argue that natural selection, in spite of Darwin's own words, is not a law. If one were to present it as a law, how would it be stated? It is my opinion that by the time natural selection is presented in its most basic form what is says is the equivalent of, "If you have more red balls in a bag than white ones, red balls will predominate." That statement could be make less blunt but at the cost of many, many words.
MM

Motorcycle Mama

Clutch,

Two biographies that I used as a source of information about Darwin. I did read others but they came from the library and have been forgotten. They are the source of information that I used to come to certain conclusions. The conclusions may not be popular but unpopular and wrong are not synonyms.

Charles Darwin, A new life by John Bowlby

Darwin, the life of a tormented evolutionist by Adrain Desmond and James Moore.

MM

Clutch

Mo-ma,

You are correct that "unpopular" does not mean "wrong". I used neither of those terms, however. I said "badly argued", and that, at least, has not changed. It is useful to have the sources that have influenced your opinion; nevertheless, insofar as you have expressed that opinion, it is in the way I described: a bad argument for an irrelevant conclusion.

Suppose your unsound argument for Darwin's being a real shit in fact has a true conclusion (as certainly can happen) -- suppose, that is, that Darwin was somehow a worse than usual person, having attitudes significantly worse by modern standards than were typical for his day and age. What's the pay-off? All you can suggest is that this ought to affect how much trust we put in his expressions of his view.

But of course we need not put any "trust" whatever in Darwin's expression of his view. This is not a matter of faith in Darwin. That's what evidence, justification, testing, consilience, prediction, and so forth, are all about. For all we care, Darwin was a high-seas pirate, a tax-cheat, and a a card-shark, as well as being a covert Young Earth Creationist who insincerely wrote Origins and Descent as colossal hoaxes, and was then secretly appalled at the efficacy of the ideas they promulgated, and at the weight of evidence that accrued in support of them. So what? What would this show about the explanatory power of, the evidence in favour of -- and, for that matter, any recalcitrant phenomena bearing negatively upon -- the theory that bears his name? Short and obvious answer: Nothing at all. So what on earth is your relevant point?

Now, as to the second ongoing strand of your comments, that anti-creationists demonstrate some sort of problematic ignorance. You have simply failed to give any substance to the charge. It is quite correct that they have not "often" described natural selection in thermodynamical terms. Indeed, this underdescribes matters; they have virtually never attempted such a thing. But nor have they attempted to describe natural selection in sub-atomic terms, nor in purely kinematic terms, nor in terms of the specific densities of all biological systems... even though there are presumably true ways of describing selection events that focus on each of these levels of analysis.

You need to do more than point this triviality out. You need to argue that anti-creationists have somehow egregiously failed in not seeking to represent events of selection by describing them in thermodynamical idiom. On the face of it, this is about as sensible as taking geologists to task for not seeking to frame the laws and regularities of geology in the language of quantum physics. Notice, moreover, that this entirely grants that your semiotic thermodynamics approach actually captures truths at some level of description. There's is no clear reason to grant this, given the poverty of semiotics more generally, but even were it so there is no implication of an error in evolutionary biology standardly conceived.

Finally, let me say that I would be happy to see a more precise use of the term "law" in science. But it seems pretty clear that the accepted use is self-consciously permissive -- that some things called "laws" are intended to permit exceptions, or are even false. Scientists speak all the time of Newton's laws, even though they know full well that they are false, prescinding from strong idealizations. Snell's Law, Hardy-Weinberg, Gresham's Law... a wide range of things with vastly different degrees of precision and generality, in a disparate array of discplines, get called laws. What matters is that everyone understands the actual role of these things individually; what you call them after that doesn't much matter.

Indeed, it is partly for this reason that the covering-law model of scientific explanation has long been recognized as fraught. It's a good idea, but one that has many exceptions. If you think that it conflicts with natural selection's being a law, well, so much the worse for the idea that the covering-law model exhaustively describes the phenomenon of scientific explanation. Natural selection helps explain speciation -- it's the dog, Hempel's view is the tail. You seem to have this relation backwards.

lpetrich

So what? MM, what does that have to do with the validity of evolutionary biology? The correctness of it does not stand or fall on Darwin's character -- even if he had been as uniquely depraved as you imply, O MM.

(stuff about semiotics...)

Is this anything more than pseudo-profound gibberish?

Why is the biological-species concept flawed? What conception of "species" would you prefer, O MM?

Natural selection can cause change, and it can cause stasis, depending on the circumstances.

I'm not sure how well MM understands natural selection, because natural selection alone is not responsible for evolution; natural selection works from whatever variations that organisms have. And variations can be preserved for reasons other than natural selection, like neutrality and small-population statistical effects. Much molecular evolution, for example, is known to be purely neutral; natural selection operating on a protein does not select between different codons that code for the same amino acid, and it operates weakly on parts of the protein that have little functional constraint, and also weakly between chemically-similar amino acids.

Autonemesis

That's absolutely appalling! An entire webpage of text that is presented in the form of a GIF image! Savages!

Synaesthesia

I would say we attribute evolutionary theory to Darwin because of Darwin's brilliant synthesis, development and profliferation of it.

As has been pointed out several times, his character is utterly irrelavant, I think the brilliance of this theory speaks for itself. His conception of epistemology was very far ahead of his time (for example, his recognition of what was significant about embryology was only recently seem to be ahead of the idea of recapitulation)

If it's the organizational complexity of organisms that we are talking about, it is most certainly a mistake to say EITHER mutation or selection is responsible. They's the very essence of darwin's theory: mutation AND selection. Either one by itself is simply not evolution at all.

Now the fact that you reccomend Darin on Trial to "lay out the problems with evolution" very obviously suggests to me that you have yet to grasp the basics. The philosophical implications, Motorcycle Man, are very difficult to tangle with if you don't know what's doing the implying.