natural selection is wrong

Did I just go through a time warp to last year?Once again for Syamsu, what you want to study is population dynamics while evolution is concerned with population genetics.

Dear Syamsu,Please show how this paper allows, or is favourable to, a useful formulation of a theory of natural selection/ evolution which disregards variation. As you yourself mentioned the author states that "It follows that natural selection is not just a part of evolution: heritable variation leading to differential retention is all that evolution amounts to in the biological domain.".How can such a view possibly be derived from the same information which leads you to such a diametrically opposed conclusion? Please lead us through your thinking as clearly as you can.Your comments on the discussion of teleology is totally misplaced. This discussion is focussed on an adaptationist interpretation of NS/evolution. Can you demonstrate a common teological assumption underlying the fundamental concepts of natural selection?The disparity between Newton laws of motion and the resolution of forces acting in Natural Selection doesn't show that evolution breaks any laws of physics. Simply that the factors acting in evolution are not equatable to the forces of classical Newtonian physics.TTFN,WK

It may be that Syamsu has an idiosyncratic definition of what a reproductive rate is. If a population is really at carrying capacity with a hard population ceiling then it is true that the total population should not be able to increase appreciably over time. This does not, of course as you point out, mean that reproduction only has to occur at replacement levels. All it means is that there will be more death associated with competition for resources.TTFN,WK

I do not agree that the paper shows what you say it does. Please could you do as I asked and explain your reasoning, rather than leaping to your conclusions.If you think the teleology argument concerns seperating neutral drift from natural selection then you clearly failed to understand that argument. As I pointed out, and as you yourself highlighted in the quote, this refers to an adaptionist view that natural selection unopposed will produce optimal solutions. This is not an intrinsic feature of darwinism or natural selection it is one interpretation, and a particularly misleading one. To borrow from another ongoing debate on suboptimal adaptation, our designation of an optimal endpoint for NS relies on the rather arrogant assumption that we know exactly the optimal solution for a given problem and that we can unfailingly determine what problem a given adaptation was intended to solve, if any.TTFN,WKP.S. Please now give a step by step description of how you reach your conclusions from that article, otherwise there is no point, certainly as far as I am concerned, trying to discuss the validity of your conclusions as they are by no means as transparently obviously as you seem to feel.P.P.S. I can say your view is diametrically ipposed as the paper produces a formulation whose entire raison d'etre is inherently wrapped up in variation while you wish to wholly exclude variation from the formulation. Just to note, once again, you thereby render your formulation not a form of natural selection as you are not selecting anything meaningful in an evolutionary sense, there being no heritable component contributing to the reproduction or otherwise of members of the population.

No, this is not what the paper says near its conclusion. "Natural selection sits on top, as it were, of all these influences; it is a trend that sums up all of them. It follows that natural selection is not just a part of evolution: heritable variation leading to differential retention is all that evolution amounts to in the biological domain." The point is that random factors unaffected by heritable differences, such as your hypothetical lightning strikes, are just one more statistical factor thrown in to the interplay of the population genetics. The presence of non-selective pressures such as lightning strikes does not mean that natural selection is not still being driven by selective pressures.To take, once again, your moth example the actual nature of the observations should be.Of a population of 400 hundred moths consisting of 200 black and 200 white,125 Black moths survive to reproduce while only 60 white moths survive to reproduce. For simplicitys sake lets assume reproductive success leads to 2 progeny and furthermore that all the moths are genetically identical apart from the melanic allele and furthermore are homozygotes for that allele and only breed within that homozygotic population, i.e. no heterozygotes ever. In the next generation there are 250 black moths and 120 white moths. Of this 2nd generation 179 black moths and 40 white moths survive to reproduce. Given the low frequency of moth death associated with lightning strikes, unless they were all on the one tree at the time, it is reasonable to assume that the differences in reproductive success are not related to any inheritable resistance to lightning strikes associated with the melanic trait.The paper actuall shows that a statistical population genetic study of evolution does not allow a detailed dissection of the interplay of forces leading to a specific outcome. It does not suggest that selective pressures acting upon heritable variation are a trivial factor which can be cast aside as a sop to your ideological fixation. The paper strongly argues against your idea that looking at individual life histories is meaningful in terms of evolution.In fact the main thrust of the paper is that, as has been pointed out to you many times, in evolution fitness should be seen as a post hoc measurement of an individuals reproductive success and is in no way a value laden judgement of what the observer wishes to consider the most fit.Vernacular fitness is what the paper is concerned with, not vernacular variation. You have appropriated the papers terminology and are now missapplying it. This is not what darwinist in general do it is what adaptionists in particular do.Once again you misinterpret the argument concerning newtonian mechanics. The paper certainly doesn't argue that there is some problem with evolution as it does not follow Newton's laws. If you think that "Newton's principles...apply in all sciences" you are merely showing a grasp of all areas of science as tenuous as your grasp of biology. Please show how quantum physics, for example, acts in accordance with Newton's principles.As to addressing the paper rather than your commentary on it. I thought the paper was pretty good. I don't think it is fair to dissmiss it as some sort of philosophical post-modernist babble. I quite agree with its conclusions that the correct way of looking at evolution is as a probabilistic study of population genetics and not as some sort of newtonian mechanics of evolution. I would also agree that factors like developmental constraints and genetic drifts are important as factors shaping the balance of a populations genetics but are not usefully thought of as factors acting against NS. NS acts as the filter through which all the heritable attributes of the population pass to determine the constitution of the next generation. I certainly agree that "heritable variation leading to differential retention is all that evolution amounts to in the biological domain".TTFN,WK

It wasn't particularly directed at you, although it was your post that I got 'babble' from, Mr. Jack also dismissed it on the grounds that it came from a philosophy department. Of course people might not have jumped to the wrong conclusions about the paper if Syamsu hadn't misrepresented the findings and implications of it quite so grossly.TTFN,WK

Actually all that is said is that non-adaptationists should reject teleology, there is no actual evidence to show thay they do not. If you have some then please present it, otherwise this is an unevidenced claim for which we are to assume the author of the paper has suitable authority, or for which the evidence is so plentiful, for it to be taken as a given, which I don't think they do. This simply shows that you still don't comprehend selection. If a pressure is probabilistically non-selectiv then it is not a selective pressure. If a pressure is selective then it will produce specific trends. Your single incidence of a lightning strike is not an example of natural selection in operation. This makes no sense, there are plenty of possible variants that might be as fit, in reproductive terms, as extant organisms, their theoretical existence in no way argues against the TOE as currently held. Or perhaps I haven't understood your argument. Creationists by their very nature are more teleological than evolutionists, especially the ID camp whose entire raison d'etre is arguably to show teleological forces at work.You seem to have decided that instead of complaining about the value laden nature of evolutionary terms you are going to focus on teleology. That is a much better thing to focus on and a valid criticism of many aspects of current evolutionary thinking, but until you can show any evidence that the prevailing modern view is teleoloogical, which neither you nor this paper have, then it is a straw man as far as knocking down the whole theory of evolution goes, and certainly has no effect on the importance of variation in natural selection.I will whole heartedly agree that the variation that is initially assumed to be the basis for selection, or the selective pressure which has led to the evolution of a given feature, may in many cases be misidentified due to teleological prejudices. This is an error in methodology and individual approach not the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of the TOE, basically most biologists suck at maths, and I say this as both a biologist and someone who sucks at maths. Sure you can when what you need to do is look at the superset of genetic variation in the whole population over several generations. One individual study will never allow you to determine the likelihoood of anything, you can't do meaningful statistics on a population size of 1, and if you agree that NS is a probablilistic phenomenon then you must, now more than ever, allow that the individual is not the correct level of study. Syamsu you would do much better to interpret my words as meaning that you haven't got the first clue about the place of newtonian mechanics in modern science, and then both you and I would be right. Perhaps if you told us exactly which 'principles' of Newton's you were thinking of as being generally applicable to all branches of science it would help.I personally was thinking of the laws of motion as discussed in the paper. They are indeed general principles, general principles relating to the behaviour of bodies at rest and in motion. There is absoloutely no reason to assume they will be generally applicable in biology. Indeed, as I have already pointed out several times, a good proportion of the paper is given over to showing that a newtonian mechanical view is not a suitable way to think of natural selection as selective pressures are not analogous to simple newtonian forces.If you showed even an amateur scientists grasp of having even the faintest idea what we were discussing. Such as the probability of you being able to show how newtonian physics is reconciled with quantum mechanics. Then things would be a lot easier. You seem to blithely assume that we are debating on a level playing field as regards our understanding of science, when in fact you seem to still be in the changing rooms down several flights of stairs, strapping your metaphorical box on.This may not be a fair assessment, but this thread has yet to give me any cause to change it.TTFN,WK

Dear Syamsu,I can't even tell what point you think you are addressing. I have never said that any formulation of NS was based on equal likelihood of reproducing. What you proposed as a great blow to evolutionary theory was a creationist positing something. In other words you suggested that a hypothetical example of something should be taken as hard evidence for its existence. You could very well have some allele running to fixation which was under no selective pressure at all, perhaps if you knew some population genetics you would realise this. Genetic drift in small populations can fix a non-selective allele.All that including neutral selection in natural selection does is say that all changes in population genetics are examples of NS. If you agree to the top down view of NS as the ultimate sum of all the factors affecting the populations genetics you may make neutral selection a part of Natural Selection, but not the whole of it. If you want to call fixation of neutral alleles from genetic drift as Natural Selection then that is up to you but you still need to study the genetics of the whole population to determine what is happening, studying any particular individual or even one population of variants will never be enough.If you assume that our model has to be perfect then you are correct that all our modern theories of evolution are simplistic and flawed. However by these standards so are absoloutely all of our other scientific models and hypotheses none of which take into account and can explain all relevant features of a system.Teaching may focus on simplified examples because it makes things easier to teach, this doesn't neccessarily make it false, just simplified or incomplete. It is the same with the teaching of all sciences, you start of with simplified systems and as the student learns more more of the deeper workings of the systems are explained to them when they have the tools to understand it. Not all examples are of one variation, if you had ever actually studied evolution you might know that.You have no 'exact' error in reasoning, your errors in reasoning are any and varied. Perhaps if you actually addressed the points I put to you and made it clear what point you were addressing we could actually get somewhere.As to being prejudicial, well this is the same error you have made time and again. Fitness is not predicted in advance based on prejudice, fitness is a post-hoc measure of a variants success in propagating through a population. As a post-hoc measurement there is nothing prejudicial involved, this post-hoc measurement can then be used to predict future trends in the populations genetics, and if these predictions are fulfilled then it is reasonable to assume that the variation is being subjected to selection.TTFN,WK

Yes we can exclude it, for the oft repeated reason that you can't meaningfully select between two identical things. If you are still talking about Newtonian laws of motion then you have yet to show the faintest idea what they are or how they fit into the body of modern scientific knowledge. If you are thinking of something else then it would be helpful if you said what. For once you have it exactly right, however you seem to fail to realise that the basis of predictions about coin tosses is the sum of a large history of observed coin tosses. When you say "Variations are not as simple as a coin, but you can make broad guesses about differential proneness to reproduce in advance." this is exactly the sort of approach which leads to the teleological problems which we have both been deploring, you may make such guesses but without any previous observations of the populations genetics over several generations to use as a basis then guesses is all they are, unless your variants are really starkly differentiated. Your first bit here makes sense but even if we were to allow that most deaths/non-reproductive individuals were due to non-selective pressures, which seems very doubtful( do you have any reason to assume that selection neutral causes are more common?) how can you tell they are non-selective without considerable amounts of population genetics analysis, it is irrelevant, as we have previously been discussing non-selective factors such as lightning strikes are just a statistical factor to be brought in but do not produce the sort of trends associated with selective pressures, since these factors are non-directional they simply add to the noise of the system from which we are trying to extract the signal showing the trend of the selective pressures. If the frequency of lightning strikes were high enough then we might expect to see it working as a selective pressure and the same is true of any other factor.TTFN,WK

Your right, it is a subjective argument, but when it comes to extracting meaning I only have my own subjective ability to go on, any other readers are welcome to chip in and explain to me why what you are saying is emminently reasonable. Only in your own unique version of Natural Selection, as it is usually understood the selection is between distinct variants within a population. This selection occurs as the result of differing reproductive success but whether any specific individual reproduces or not is not Natural Selection. How can you know this without knowing the exact composition of the coin? It may have two faces but that doesn't neccessarily mean that the weighting of both sides is identical. Are you claiming that people taking as granted that a coin will land heads or tails with roughly equal probability is due to an incredibly detailed analysis of the composition of a coin and the mechanics of coin tossing, rather than being due to the accumulated experiences of coin tossers down the ages? My point is that statistical analysis of previous examples is by far the more reliable and effective measure, and the same is true of Natural Selection, you are falling into exactly the same trap as the teleologically inclined adaptationists, you think you can tell what is best and why without actually testing it. I refer to them as such because they are pressures whose action on the genetic constitution of the population is independent of genetic variance. I don't know what you mean by eating, if you mean either predation or the ability to find food then I would suggest you are entirely wrong and that indeed the ability to find food or to be able to exploit different sources of food is likely to be a common outcome of selective pressure due to competing for food, this is suggested by examples such as Darwin's finches where different beaks allow different food sources to be exploited by otherwise highly similar species, and by the highly variable jaws and feeding niches seen in cichlid fish populations such as those in Lake Victoria.Acts of god such as floods or sudden freak weather conditions may be selectively neutral, it all rather depends upon the specific population and it constituent members. I am still using this terminology because neither you nor the paper gives me cause not to. The paper doesn't say it is meaningless to differentiate between factors which act as selective pressures and effectively random factors which operate independently of the genetic constitution of the population, all it says is that you cannot predict the extent to which all non-selective factors will affect the genetic constitution of a population and thereby predict beforehand how they will interct with selctive pressure towards some optimal strategy. All you can do is detect selective forces in action through statistical analysis of population genetics.TTFN,WK

And round we go again to looking at two variants, but individually mind you, none of that nazi like comparison going on around here thank you very much. You can say sampling if you like, but the fact remains that when the likelihood of a particular variant being sampled is greater than that of its competitors then it is effectively being selected. Changing the terms to sampling or filtering does not alter what happens.Could you be more specific in your name dropping? Some sort of usable reference might make it easier to see in exactly how and in what context the term sampling was used. If you are talking about sampling error then this is just back to genetic drift and alleles with no fitness benefit becoming fixed in small populations, I don't know what you mean of course because you only gave the very loosest of references.TTFN,WK

Wow, you suddenly morphed into Brad!!! Even down to name-dropping Gould!!!!

Thats great Syamsu, now please give me an actual reference for Wilkins use of the term, ideally one more specific than the whole of talk.origins, so I can see what the context was. I sincerely doubt that Wilkins coined the word 'sampling' and until you show me the particular instance you are talking about I am highly skeptical that he was the first to use it in the context of evolution without selection between variants.TTFN,WK

Most impresive Syamsu, you have managed a post with absoloutely no informative content. First you make a bald assertion with no evidence to back it up and then repeat a quote from a paper whose reasoning, we have already established, you have severe problems in understanding which also makes a bald assertion with no evidence to back it up.Shows us the prominent teleological aspects of modern evolutionary theory? What is the teleological conception of natural selection used by all Darwinists?I am quite happy to agree that the term selection can be said to have teleological overtones, which was why Alfred Wallace objected to natural selection as a term. This does not mean that Natural Selection is a teleological phenomenon.Show us some evidence that the widely held paradigm in evolutionary biology is that NS on its own would result in the evolution of optima.TTFN,WK

We will never know how 'terrible' what you did was as there is absoloutely no way for us to find out just what the hell you were talking about!I agree the terminology is irrelevant, that was my point, you are the one who has ideological prejudices which render you incapable of accepting the term selection, thats the word I would suggest by the way since it is already in common usage to describe exactly the phenomenon we are discussing. Also sampling is already a term with a soecific uasge in the study of population genetics, which is the context I suspect Wilkins was using it in and which renders your representation of his usage completely off base. Which is hardly surprising given your complete missing of the point behind the paper this thread is about, a paper you seem to have given up discussing just so you can reiterate all your usual cant.TTFN,WK