Questioning The Evolutionary Process

And don't forget the evils of atomic energy. We need a better nuclear energy theory, too! For individuals, "dynamic response" is too general and undescriptive a term. "Selection" much more precisely describes what actually happens, as Darwin illustrated so long ago when he introduced natural selection by first covering in the detail the breeders art of artificial selection.On the other hand, if you're talking about entire populations instead of individuals then "dynamic response" is more useful. One could say that a population dynamically responds to changes in its environment by changing the distribution of alleles in the collective gene pool. Of course, the dynamic response is due to selection factors, so you still can't escape the term "selection".--Percy

Hi Elmer,You're drawing enough responses, I'll be brief. I suppose you could say that assertions with a broad degree of support could be considered statements of fact, but declaring assertions to be facts just doesn't do the job. If terms like "selection" and "natural selection" lacked empirical support, that would not make them meaningless, it would just make them unsupported by evidence. But we don't have to worry about that because they have broad and deep observational and experimental empirical support, as reflected in the technical literature. Breeders knew about selection long before Darwin came along.--Percy

EvC Forum is moderated. If you have are having a problem then it is suggested that you post to the General Discussion Of Moderation Procedures 13.0 thread rather than taking problems into your own hands. Simply ignoring responses has a tendency to cause people to just up the volume.EvC Forum also has a set of Forum Guidelines, and referring to other thread participants as adolescent and ill-mannered and so forth is discouraged by rule 10, which attempts to encourage civility in discussion. Again, you should take any moderation issues to the moderation thread linked to above.--Percy

By this I take it you mean that the view you're espousing is not uniquely your own, but is one that is gaining acceptance within science. If I understand you correctly, how do you arrive at this conclusion?About abstractions, it isn't your definition of abstraction that is in question, but your claim that anything that is an abstraction can be dismissed simply because it is an abstraction. 49.26% of the American population are males. If you want to call it an abstraction, go ahead, but you can't dismiss it simply because it's an abstraction. You can challenge the data gathering techniques and the analysis and all that sort of stuff, but you can't say something silly like, "I don't believe 49.26% of the population are males because it's just an abstraction."So call fitness an abstraction if you like, but the concept is strongly rooted in reality and has great relevance for biology. You'll have to challenge the concept of fitness on the merits, not just call it "an arithmetical abstraction from the non-empirical world of mathematics" (quote is from your Message 80).I don't know if anyone has offered the Wikipedia definition of fitness yet, but the opening paragraph is, I think, a more clear statement than I've seen so far in this thread: --Percy

Interesting. So in a discussion about transportation you would rule out mention of transmissions, engines and headlights? Word meanings are not fixed, they change over time. I would question your etymology for the word "selection", but whether you're right or wrong, today the word "selection" has a very clear meaning within biology. If you want to debate past heists of word meanings you should go to another site, this one is for discussing creation/evolution. Even if you were correct about the original meaning of "selection" and Darwin committed the crime of the century in co-opting it for his own use, it is now a fait accompli, and the current definition of selection in biology is just something you'll have to accept. Darwinism is not synonymous with modern biology. It is isn't even synonymous with the modern theory of evolution, more properly known as the modern synthesis because it combined (synthesized) Darwin's theory with genetics. Whether you accept the terminology of modern biology or not, in order to understand what we're saying and what biology books and websites are saying you have to use the proper definitions of that terminology. You can't take a sentence out of a biology book and interpret it using different definitions than the author originally used to compose the sentence, because obviously the result will be nonsense. You've misunderstood the analogy, in fact, misunderstood analogies in general. An analogy is employed to illustrate unfamiliar principles using a familiar example that in some way shares some of those principles. So you would say to someone who never saw a pedal car, "A pedal car is like a real car, only instead of an engine you have to pedal it yourself."So in Darwin's analogy he was saying, "Natural selection is like the artificial selection of breeders, only instead of the breeder making reproductive decisions, the environment influences those choices."--PercyEdited by Percy, : Minor grammar fix.