He had wussy little hands, too.
Sorry for the asynchronous simulpost. Great minds sometimes think alike.
I dunno: if your side can blithely argue that voting for Kerry emboldens terrorists, why isn’t it fair game to note that voting for Bush emboldens these people?
Natural selection is not a tautology.
First, the term “survival of the fittest” is a popular phrase rarely, if ever, used by evolutionary biologists.
Second, natural selection is a concept which underlies specific research programs. A scientist might be interested in studying the role of protective coloration in a species of moths. They will look at the possible roles for coloration and see how it affects say, mating ability, as well as predator avoidance. This is a specific question that can be answered through empircal tests and statistical analysis. Again, scientists might want to study the effect of placental mammals on Austrailia’s marsupial popluation. They may be interested in the advantages being placental has over being marsupial. Or scientists may be interested in population genetics and may wish to chart the distribution of allele pairs, in which case specific fitness numbers can be assigned. Scientists have found that lethal alleles such as sickle cell persist in population at certain numbers.
In short a scientific theory is not to be judged by its overarching statements, but by its specific results.
As for Popper maybe he recanted because he realized he was, you know, wrong?
Also most of the above is drawn from this book which I cannot, cannot recommend too highly. It is simply the best book of its kind.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/026261037X/qid=1104780424/sr=v=glance&s=books&n=507846
try this link instead
Link does not work for me, and I am very interested in your recommendations. A little help?
We seem to have entered a time warp. Is God maybe telling me not to buy the book?
Did you try the link below my first post? I think there were too many characters in the original link.
While I’m back let me point out that Kitcher spends three whole pages on the tautology argument, and my first post was a crude re-statement of his ideas. He also devotes nearly a whole chapter to falsifiability and evolution. The book provides a great one chapter intro to the basics of evolution and also serves as a good intro to philosophy of science, with good discussions of falsifiability in general as well as in relation to evolution. The book refutes nearly every major creationist claim. (Sadly it was written before Behe et. al. started their “Intelligent Design” pseudo-controversy.) It is short, well written, erudite but not overly technical, and even fun at times.
If the second link doesn’t work for you, the book is:
Abusing Science: The case against creationsim By Philip Kitcher (MIT press 1982; 213pp.)
Let’s do the Time Warp again!
Second link works, book is ordered. If it gets here yesterday I’ll let you know.
Gensis 5:13
“And the Lord Smote them and sent them out of the garden, unleashing giant lizards to swallow them whole”
Genisis 5:14
"And Adam did say to his comtemptible mate “We must runnth more quickly! More qucikly I sayth!”
Actually, this isn’t true. T. Rex did have very short arms, but they were massively powerful. A full grown T. Rex could lift 1000-1500 pounds with those stumpy arms. Why, when their arms weren’t even long enough to reach their mouths? Paleontologists aren’t sure. It’s possible that they needed to hold their prey down if their meal wasn’t quite dead.
Yeah, I’m a Sue* docent at the Field Museum.
*Sue is the world’s largest and most complete T. Rex ever discovered.
What Darwin actually argued was this: heritable variations can in practice lead to differential reproductive success, and that in turn is the mechanism that can explain speciation. He didn’t use or invent the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and no one in the field pretends that it’s anything other than a crude and ill-designed shorthand that Wallace coined that happened to stick: in large part having more to do with Spencer and the social-Darwinists than biology itself.
This is the same error that Popper initially made: he was misled by the “survival of the fittest” boilerplate. You can spin his recanting any way you want, but the fact is that adaptation is a functional notion, not a general a priori as Popper originally and incorrectly thought, and it relates to populations/genomes, not to individual survivors, as he originally and incorrectly implied.
It requires a particular causal story to be told and defended as to why reproduction rates in a population would be skewed towards particular corners of the genome rather than randomly distributed and why this would give the successive generation a reproductive advantage on the past generation in the same environment (as opposed to a different environment). It is not simply a backwards designation of “fit” upon any survivors (random survival rates would not be expected to confer any sort of adapative advantage to a species). These causal stories can be subjected to critique and the testing of their assumptions: and indeed this is a lot of what biologists spend their time doing in their journals. The effects on simple representations of genomes can be modeled and shown to respond exactly the way that Darwin predicted that they would.
Ultimately, natural selection is the process by which information is passed from the current environment to the genome. It’s the equivalent of burning your hand on the stove, only it’s the genome that feels the burn and “learns” rather than any one individual. However, it only works if the environment and the causal story continues to function. An adaptation to not touching hot stoves becomes harmful if, in the next generation, stoves become the sole place to get food. Last generations best adapted design can be the next generation’s downfall.
Excellent post, Apos!
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species-6th-edition/chapter-04.html
It’s true that Darwin didn’t invent the phrase, but it’s not accurate that it wasn’t used by him or other biologists. It’s also not true that it was coined by someone named Wallace (not sure who you’re referring to here) – it was coined by Herbert Spencer.
I love this place.
Where else can you get an intelligent discussion on evolution vs. intelligent design, a debate on whether or not a T Rex was strong enough to wield a flaming sword, and rewrites of the King James Bible to include dinosaurs?
And no, Dio, I was completely serious. I was unaware there were two versions of the creation story. All I remembered was “In the beginning…” Once again, I have learned something from SDMB.
So, is the conclusion then that Mr. Ham truly believes this nonsense, or he’s trying to make it over the top as possible to attract the believers as well as those who will point and laugh?
Hopefully, there will be a nearby dairy farm.
“Crammed.” I like that word in this context.
You’re right that Spencer originally coined the phrase, but it was Wallace that urged it on Darwin, who didn’t include it until the 6th edition of Origin. And if you don’t know who the particular Wallace to whom I’m refferring was, then how can you claim to speak with authority on this subject? Your own cite points out that modern biologists don’t like to use the term.
You should know better than this. First off, natural selection is not “that which survives is that which is fittest”. Natural selection is a logical syllogism (and surely you, of all people, will not argue that a syllogism is equivalent ot a tautology). It’s also a statistical phenomenon, which determines how, in the grand scale, populations will shift. You might want to examine some of these papers to see how natural selection can be tested in the field (specifically, whether it applies, and whether it is statistically dominant in terms of possible mechanisms; in Darwin’s formulation, it is not sufficient that NS simply work, it must also be the primary mechanism which shapes a trait within a population). You can also get a glimpse of some statistical models for NS here and here (as just a couple examples).
Yes and no. They were relatively short (in relation to the size of the rest of the beast), but they were about as long as an adult human’s arms. They just look laughably small when attached to a 50’-long monster.
Shoot. The link to Nature articles doesn’t work. Just go to Nature.com, and do a search on “natural selection”. You’ll see plenty of papers on the topic.
I claim no authority, but having looked up “survival of the fittest” and thereby immediately spotted the minor discrepancies in your own informative post with that of Wikipedia. If you know Spencer originally coined the phrase, and that Darwin used it, you shouldn’t have said Wallace coined it and Darwin never used it. That’s all. No argument with the main points of your post.