Actually Syamsu I think you will find that Dawkins said that "living complexity" was "the antithesis of chance", not natural selection. He did then argue that this suggests that 'Darwinism' is not a theory of chance. I don't think for a second that Dawkins
The problem here is that chance and choice are not the same thing.
They don't much go into why Darwinists made that mistake
Because 'Darwinists' as a group don't. The people they suggest do fall into this trap are the extreme adaptationists who try to seek an adaptationary basis for almost any trait.
I guess this contrasting just shows that the way stochastic could be deterministic is a philosophcal point, and not a practical point, much.
It is emminently practical, if it wasn't then a statistical approach to thermodynamics or quantum mechanics would not yield the valuable results they have.
The problem is that all you can suggest as far as determinism goes is that the population should move towards stable peaks in the fitness environment, you can't predict the exact peak they will arrive at, unless perhaps you have a highly restrictive experimental system.
It's not neccesarily the case that the outcome in NS may be different for same startingpoints.
Its certainly not necessarily the case that the results of similar identical pressures acting on initially identical populations will lead to completely different outcomes, but it depends a lot on what you are studying. You could easily get two populations which both ended up with increases in their average height but arrived at that result by two distinct pathways, i.e. one had an upregulation of growth hormone during development and the other had changes in the genes governing bone development leading to extension of the long bones of the leg.
There are certainly many different ways in which a particular gene may be mutated leading to the same outcome. Would you consider each different mutation producing a non-functional gene to be a different outcome even though the phenotypes would all be similar.
For one example from the literature there are several distinct mutations identified which allow resistance to be re-gained in
E. coli populations with a non functional mutant beta-lactamase.
A natural polymorphism in beta-lactamase is a global suppressor.Huang W, Palzkill T.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1997 Aug 5;94(16):8801-6.
A M182T substitution was discovered as a second-site suppressor of a missense mutation in TEM-1 -lactamase. The combination of the M182T substitution with other substitutions in the enzyme indicates the M182T substitution is a global suppressor of missense mutations in -lactamase. The M182T substitution also is found in natural variants of TEM-1 -lactamase with altered substrate specificity that have evolved in response to antibiotic therapy. The M182T substitution may have been selected in natural isolates as a suppressor of folding or stability defects resulting from mutations associated with drug resistance. This pathway of protein evolution may occur in other targets of antimicrobial drugs such as the HIV protease.
How can you say that there is no stochastic element in NS when the entire point of the Mathen paper was that there are stochastic elements affecting NS.
TTFN,
WK
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