It appears (from this and other statements) that you have not been reading any pro-evolution literature. “Survival of the fittest” is in most people’s opinion an unfortunate phrase that does not convey an accurate picture of evolution. Darwin didn’t like it, although he used it a few times. It does not appear in modern literature (say in the last fifty years or so) except in discussions of why it is an unfortunate phrase and in creationist straw-man arguments.
The process of change through evolution is not about differences in survival, it is about differences in reproduction. Differential survival is only one factor that affects reproductive success.
As has been said already, if the mutants are better adapted to their environment they will reproduce better.
It appears that you do not realize that evolution is similar to a design process in that it leads to a “local optimum” solution. In other words, it finds an efficient solution to a problem given the materials with which it is provided, and this solution is a workable but not necessarily best solution. It does this automatically by the nature of the process, with no intelligent intervention. I don’t know about phi, but I do know that the Fibonacci sequence is related to efficient packing (and many other things) and it’s not at all surprising that it is generated by a blind local-optimization process. Phi may be generated by a similar process. Phi and the Fibonacci sequence are the limit of several algorithms, and their presence is not proof of design or evan particularly indicative of design.
My personal favorite example of how evolutionary algorithms work is An Evolved Circuit. A process identical to biological evolution yields an electrical circuit that works, that is simpler than any human designer would do, and humans can’t even figure out how it works.
Still awaiting your response to some of the items earlier in the thread …
Interesting thread, so much so that I think I’ll chime in even though we’re on page 5 (unusual for my limited attention-span to have even opened a thread this big)
Am I right in summing up Hiyruu’s position as follows?:
That divergence into species, subspecies, varieties etc is only caused by the loss (or lack of expression) of genes, and thus (for example) all of the species of dogs that we see around us today are whittled-down versions of some ancestral ‘meta-dog’ which had all of the ready-built-in potential to become any of them.
It’s an attractive idea, certainly (and one that I fancifully entertained myself for a while) and is probably midway between creationism and evolution (it even bears striking resemblance to Plato’s ‘Ideals’), but I have a question:
Where are the dividing lines between the meta-organisms?, for example:
[li]It is fairly easy to see that Rubus Fruticosus(Blackberry) and Rubus Idaeus(Raspberry) are very similar, they can even inter-breed to produce fertile offspring, we could hypothesise that there is some ‘meta-berry’ (like a loganberry maybe) which contained all of the genetic diversity required, and that the two species were ‘isolated’ from it.[/li][li]But on further examination, the Genus Rubus can be shown to be related to other genera in the family Rosacae, for example Potentilla and Spiraea.[/li][li]Furthermore, the family Rosacae and Leguminosae appear to be related by ancestry.[/li][li]And so on, IANABotanist, but my money says that the botanists/genetecists can probably trace the family tree up(down?) a few more levels than this, (possibly all the way to the root, I wouldn’t know).[/li]So, my question: which level of ‘relatedness’ do your proposed common ancestors occupy?
Is it ‘MetaBerry’ or ‘MetaRose’? - in which case how do you account for the evidence of relationship with other branches of the family tree?
Or is it ‘MetaRosePeaOrangeBananaOakSeaweedTurnipFern’? - in which case how did such a plant survive under the weight of all that redundant DNA?
I say again… where did this design come from? You said yourself that order does not come from disorder. So where did the “order” of this “design” come from? Dont’ say “it was always there”, because then I will ask… “How? The universe didn’t always exist, did it?”
And I seem to recall someone else asking these exact same questions… you seem to have ignored it. Why is that?