Register | Sign In


Understanding through Discussion


EvC Forum active members: 65 (9162 total)
7 online now:
Newest Member: popoi
Post Volume: Total: 915,813 Year: 3,070/9,624 Month: 915/1,588 Week: 98/223 Day: 9/17 Hour: 5/1


Thread  Details

Email This Thread
Newer Topic | Older Topic
  
Author Topic:   Can the theory of evolution be applied to non-living things?
extremophile
Member (Idle past 5594 days)
Posts: 53
Joined: 08-23-2003


Message 12 of 27 (105964)
05-06-2004 1:48 PM


If these non-living things can self-reproduce at cost of the environment and have some form of heredity and variability, it will evolve.
Take culture, more specifically, languages, my favourite example. They're not biologically alive, although we use terms like "dead languages". Languages reproduces itself by means of transmission. It does have "mutations", and geographical isolation, causing the decrease of "memetic flux" will produce and emphasize differences till diverge at the point that will occur a allopatric "speciation". Language also changes through time without necessarily radiating into new ones, and taking distant points of this same lineage is much like a "chronospecies".
Yesterday I had posted (in the topic "panspermia") about a book called "Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution", by Gary Cziko, that I haven't read it yet, but I guess that deals with natural selection acting in a even more generalized way, in means of universal macroevents, or maybe not so macro, I don't know.
I'm not sure if it is really what I'm think that is, but similarly to living things or things capable of self-reproduction, a single event that is just "happening", will keep occurring till it "dies", by its micro-components being selected against, be by competition with another micro-event or simply by enviromental exaustion.... I guess...
But I don't know if it really is helpful to the explanation of something else... at least I think I've never seen...
And it's possible that if that really fits well with a bunch of things, those things will be adeddet to the list of what anti-evolutionists deny =o/
A link to what seems to be the entire book previously referred online:
http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/g-cziko/wm/
(doesn't seems to be piracy, but I'll remove if there's some trouble with that)
This message has been edited by extremophile, 05-06-2004 12:50 PM
This message has been edited by extremophile, 05-06-2004 12:52 PM

  
Newer Topic | Older Topic
Jump to:


Copyright 2001-2023 by EvC Forum, All Rights Reserved

™ Version 4.2
Innovative software from Qwixotic © 2024