I've been thinking about this for quite some time, what would be a correct analogy of Neo-Darwinian Evolution (Mutations+natural selection) ?
Its seems you always see the same analogies in creationist litterature: Tornado in your backyard would produce a boeing 747, mistakes in a blueprint of a house, etc.
I know Berlinski had an interesting analogy in his Don Quichote 'origins of all novels', which although very different, still doesn't represent evolution and natural selection perfectly.
There is also Sanford's analogy (in Genetic entropy) of an instruction manual to build wagon's, with blind robots etc. That was one of the most accurate I've seen since natural selection acts on the phenotype, not the genotype, etc.
So I thought it would be great to see what analogy you could come up with that would represent the most accurately evolution.
I'll give it a shot, I know it isn't complete, but here's mine:
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I videotape my friends wedding on DVD. So I have one original of the event, and I decide to copy one hundred copies of it. I then watch all the copies and pick out the best one out of them all, and throw away all the other copies.
I then take this copy, and copy it again a hundred times. Once again, out of all these copies of the copy, I pick out the best one and throw out all the others.
At the end of my very exhausting day, having repeated this manoeuvre over a thousand times, I realize that the quality of video that I have is no longer the same as the original, but it is in fact much ____ (worse, better ?)
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Now obviously, this is not a very 'natural' selection. It is truncation selection which doesn't happen in nature.
The fertility rate is also very high, at 99% (which can happen in the case of plants). Also, the poucentage of people available for selection is one hundred percent, which, once again, does not happen in nature.
My example would also represent a static environment. This can happen in nature, and is in fact the reason invoked to explain animals alive today that are the same as their fossil ancestors.
Any comments on how to upgrade my analogy is appreciated (although I want to keep it as simple as possible). If you have any analogy of your own, please post it here.
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