I didn’t say it was. In fact, as you know, I have a consistent track record for striking down that particular canard. What I said (and what Popper had said) was “that which survives is that which survives” or alternatively “that which adapts is that which adapts”.
I don’t understand what you mean. A logical syllogism is a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.
According to TalkOrigins, it is a mistake to anthropomorphize natural selection with such qualities as goals, determinations, and so forth. It really doesn’t determine anything or guide anything.
Your first link didn’t work for me. (I’ll try it again later.) But the other two are merely simulations of natural selection using the rules that define it. That isn’t a test of falsification. To test for whether natural selection can be false, there needs to be some means to determine that evolution might occur even if the mechanism of natural selection fails. But there is no way to cause it to fail because of how it is defined. Definitions are not falsifiable. The reason natural selection is true is because of an analytic, not because of a synthetic.
Neither Popper nor I used the phrase “survival of the fittest”. Popper said natural selection was a tautology. “Natural selection is survival of the fittest” is not a tautology. He recanted because of the theory’s explanatory power, which frankly he considered to be rather mysterious.
Okay, got it. Thanks. But I have no disagreement with you over what natural selection is. What I asked Pun for (and later, Desmostylus, who jumped) was a way to test that natural selection might be false. I asked for this because Pun declared that intelligent design cannot be tested for falsification. If we require something of one theory, we ought to require it of another.
And even this is uncertain. The texts upon which the English translation is based may also be read as “When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void…” [If you have an RSV or other annotated Bible, you should see the alternate translation noted.]
Early translators prefered “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void…” because it implies that first God created the universe and then moved about in it. The alternate translation implies that God existed in some context – a kind of cosmic ocean – of which he was but a part.
I prefer the alternate translation, but I won’t get into my reasons here – too much of a hijack, Jeff Goldblum and glam rock not withstanding.
Btw, I apologize for being telegraphic. You can’t tell from my post why the variations should imply what they do. I didn’t go far enough into the text. Please refer to your Bible.
‘Determines’ (or determination) does not have to imply conscious processes - see the OED. For example, some meanings of determination include: ‘The final condition to which anything has a tendency’, and 'a fixing of the extent, position, or identity (of anything). ’ So, evolution ‘determines’ in the sense of shaping an endpoint, not in the sense of some mystical consciousness ‘deciding’ anything.
Natural selection does ‘fail’ in a sense - sometimes, deleterious behaviours may be selected. A classic example is when a pet dog carries around a stuffed toy in a form of maternal behaviour. Maternal behaviour was presumably strongly selected for in the past, and this selection can lead to the behaviour ‘failing’ in a form of overgeneralisation.
To show that natural selection can fail, you could simply demonstrate an environment where those best suited for survival do not, in fact, survive. I.e., you could demonstrate that being well suited to a given environment does not necessarily lead to an increased chance of reproduction. This is fully open to empirical testing; good luck in your research.
Both of which are still incorrect characterizations of what natural selection really is.
And that is what natural selection is: a conclusion based on premises. The channon.net link I gave spells out the premises involved (“four statements of fact and an inference”).
I don’t know that I did that, but I apologize if that is the impression I gave. There is nothing goal-oriented about the process. Populations shift (specifically, the alleles within a population shift) according to whichever variations prove to be statistically more advantageous at procuring resources. That process of shifting is adaptation, and the shifting occurs because of natural selection (that is, adaptation is the result of natural selection; contrary to the title, On the Origin of Species was largely about the process of adaptation and had relatively little to say about the actual orgins of species).
One can, however, test to see if patterns predicted by those simulations occur in nature. And, one can also determine if those patterns adequately explain the majority of allele shifts in populations. All the simulations in the world don’t do any good if they don’t match reality. Sympatric speciation is an example of a hypothesis wherein it could happen in theory, but has not been identified in practice (or, there are numerous difficulties in doing so to the point where there are no unambiguous instances having been documented). Where that the case with NS, it would hardly be the lynchpin that it is for evolutionary biology.
[upon preview…]
If it can be shown that allele shifts within subsequent generations of a population are independent of external envornmental variables, NS is shot down. If it can be shown that such environmental independence is not the rule, but is prevalent nonetheless, then Darwinism in general is on shaky ground.
Exactly. Natural selection doesn’t produce a best fit, or an optimum adaptation. It results in a constant state of flux in which various forms compete for space. I recall Pinker using the phrase “more or less adapted”. The notions of perfect fit, perfect balance, or harmony are popular misconceptions. Take, for example, males of a certain species of wild boar who, if they live long enough, will die of their curved tusks impinging on their own skulls. By that time, they have successfully procreated, so there is no process to weed out this gruesome and painful method of demise. Nature cares nothing for the individual.
That said, I myself am not a strict Darwinist, and I don’t place as much weight on natural selection as Pinker does (pretty darn near 100%).
I don’t believe Finch used that sense of the word “determine.”
Artificial selection? Lamarckism?
Natural selection would be falsified if, given a population in which some creatures can breathe underwater and some can’t, both did equally well when dumped into the ocean. But that’s not the sort of thing we observe anywhere in nature: we instead find that we can tell particular stories about particular traits aiding or occulding reproductive success, and that because of the way genes in a species population work, this information is then transferred to the genome. Based on that observation, natural selection is more than trivially true.
But this is not synonymous with falsifying ID as an explanatory theory. Natural selection is a prime mechanism used by evolution, not the theory evolution itself. Without a whole host of other elements, natural selection wouldn’t do diddly squat to drive speciation. Without things like variation in a genome, the particulars of reproductive success, pass-down genetics, relative consistency in environments, etc. natural selection wouldn’t say much more than that creatures die before succesfully reproducing non-randomly, relative to the particular traits that are found within the species. It wouldn’t DO anything, and there would be no evolution, just a lot of non-random death that had no real effect on what future generations were like.
Especially because the environment is not an essentialism either. Adaptations that are beneficial in today’s environment can become harmful in the future because they drastically reduce the flexibility of the genome and thus its ability to adapt when the environment changes again.
It’s a minor nit, I know, but I once won a substantial bet by knowing this: Atlas did not hold up the Earth. He supported the sky on his shoulders. [/nitpick]
Perhaps this is a stupid question, but it’s bound to look like one even if it isn’t - it’s sandwiched in between all this other smart-people stuff…
What sort of lift? A curl? A deadlift? A benchpress? Cuz holding something down with your arms is definitely not all the same muscles (particularly, though assuredly not restricted to, triceps) as lifting it up in a curl (biceps, though again not restricted to them). Or am I thinking way too far into this?
Well, I don’t know shit about weight lifting, so I don’t know what you’re asking, exactly. All I’m saying here is that T. Rex had strong arms. They’re short for its size (that okay, Finch?), but powerful. We don’t know why such strong arms were necessary. Incidentally, previous tyrannasaurids had longer arms. As the tyrannaurus evolved, their forelimbs became shorter and shorter.
OK, that’s fine. The thing is that lifting something up - like, say, lifting a bag of groceries - doesn’t involve the same muscles as pushing something down to keep it on the ground. So when you said Rex could lift a lot of weight as an example of strength to hold still-living prey down, it sounded a bit off physiologically.
But of course that’s assuming Rex’s arms/upper body were constructed as primates’ are:D
