PZ Myers vs. Adaptationism

That's because I haven't watched the video. I don't stand for argumentum ad videum, either. I was trying to encourage you to talk about something specific - "Trait A is argued to be selected for because of X adaptive advantage, but this is unjustified because Y" is something you can have a serious discussion about. "Some biologists somewhere sometime say some things that are wrong" is going nowhere.I see that RAZD has mentioned some specifc arguments from the video; and I think the female orgasm one is a good one, for a couple of reasons. Firstly there's the variety of female experience. Women vary a lot more in their ability to acheive orgasm than men - according to self-reporting a signifcant minority of women never acheive orgasm, which makes me sad. If the ability to orgasm is selected for in women to encourage them to have sex, then the selective pressure does not appear to be very strong.Secondly, there's the fact that most women do not orgasm just from penetrative sex. If female orgasm came about because women who orgasm are more likely to have sex and thus reproduce, why aren't nerves rearranged so that penetration is the easiest way to orgasm. Surely this would be the way to make pleasure-seeking most likely to result in pregnancy.

I think I speak for many men when I say that most organisms during our teenage years was not due to penetrative sex. Just sayin'.

So you don't feel obliged to understand what the discussion is even about before you declare it to be completely meaningless.I think I see the problem here.

How would drift, sans selection, yield a phenotypic feature that looks designed?

Pretty loaded question, isn't it? You're using a vague (and suspiciously teleological) definition of design to support the notion that such-and-such a feature is the product of selection, just because you've decided that that's prima facie evidence of a selected-for trait. As Myers and others are saying, in most cases we have no other evidence that it's the product of natural selection; there's plenty of evidence that such traits may have originally served different functions, rather than that they conveniently arose to ensure the organism's survival. We just make assumptions like these because of the pervasive influence of adaptationist thinking.

I can't make any connection between the things that you are complaining about biologists doing, and the things that biologists are actually doing.

And if I may venture to add that many pregnancies had little to do with the Big "O" either.

.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I've watched about a third of the video and may eventually watch the rest. It's interesting to me mostly because the argument against adaptationism makes somewhat similar points to my own in my argument that evolution reduces genetic diversity so has a natural stopping point. I keep being amazed that this obvious fact is never ever mentioned though. Even if mutation really were the source of novel alleles, there have to be many stages in the processes of variation where it is fueled entirely by the elimination of competing alleles. Natural selection is one way competing alleles are eliminated, but as Myers is saying, NS isn't as big a factor in evolution as has been claimed. Simple recombination accounts for a lot of variation and most traits develop randomly. All of this requires the loss of competing alleles in any case. Funny how the discussion continues as if new traits could arise without the reduction of genetic diversity.As for adaptation, seems to me I've made a good case that it isn't the organism adapting to the environment, as often as it is the environment's offering enough of a range of possibilities to whatever traits arise randomly in the organism, to account for most of the cases of observed adaptation. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well, it appears then that you "don't know what is [unapologetic adaptionism]". The two sentences you quote from Dawkins certainly aren't. There being plenty of neutral evolution is entirely compatible with them. The first sentence actually implies it by defining the type of changes that natural selection would act on. To understand the second, imagine self-replicators in a void evolving with the three processes other than natural selection that Myers identifies as important. In the void, there are no environmental constraints; nothing to promote or preserve what Dawkins describes as functional beauty and apparently "designed" complexity, leaving natural selection as the best explanation of those things without claiming that it is the sole cause of evolutionary novelty.Either you've misunderstood what Dawkins is saying there, or what Myers is saying in the video, or both.

"In a void"? Setting up a completely unrealistic hypothetical situation doesn't prove a point about natural selection, all it does is allow you to deal yourself a winning hand. You've already decided that "functional beauty and apparently designed complexity" are properties that can only be attributed to natural selection, so in your hypothetical setup, it's by definition impossible for such things to evolve.It looks like you're the one who's misunderstanding what Myers and others are saying. They're not saying natural selection isn't important to evolution, just that other nonselective forces have to be considered too, particularly when they're necessary precursors to selective processes having any truly adaptive effect in many researched instances.

It could be that the female orgasm is a spandrel from selection for the male organism.It could also be that the female orgasm helps to forge a stronger relationship between mates which increases the number of children and protection for those children.

And no biologists in the world would disagree. Including Dawkins. So what the hell are you trying to say??

Perhaps that's because it is false.

OK, what do you think would happen in his proposed hypothetical situation? You are mercifully free of his preconceptions, let's hear your take on it.