natural selection is wrong

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The point is that your 'individual theory' doesn't explain anything, it is simply looking whether one specific organism reproduces or not, you don't even seem interested in how many offspring it has in case it leads to invidious comparisons

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It is the Syamsu wash-rinse-repeat strategywash: make an inane claim (evolution can be measured looking at a single individual)-rinse: provide no evidence, ignore all counter evidence, demand references and then not read them, quote out of context or misquote completely, whine like a smacked puppy that nobody takes you seriously-repeat: After a set number of posts, just start restating the same inane claims that were at the beginning of the thread.You may want to consider WK that you are in a protracted argument with an internet troll who will not be bothered to clarify or support what he is saying because 1) he does not understand (and is not interested in) biology or genetics 2) seems to feel he somehow increases his importance by posting here..who knows, maybe EvC helps him with the ladies in Nganjuk.

Dear Syamsu, You made a specific accusation about something I am supposed to have said, I asked you to tell us where I said it and now you are wittering on about the 'literal meaning of the standard theory'. Either I said it or I didn't, if I didn't then your claim that I did is a lie Q.E.D.. Since you are incapable of showing an instance where I said the things you claimed I did it seems reasonable to say you are lying.Can you even provide any reasoning that shows that this is the literal meaning of the 'standard theory', once again your own baseless assertions are not sufficient evidence for anything. Something in this debate is incoherent but I suspect it isn't natural selection. This argument doesn't even say anything, it is simply a list of claims for things you have never showed any evidence for. Many of these things wouldn't be revealed by a simplistic blind sampling of a populations genetics certainly but their effects on the populations evolution would all be revealed by it, although they would not neccessarily be distinguishable from each other. Natural selection is relevant to a very specific question and it answers it very effectively. It provides us with useful tools for studying the evolution of populations but it is not a tool designed to give every single detail of everything happening to every individual in the population, but neither is your 'individual theory' you just claim it is without ever showing how. That would be a reasonable sentence with the exclusion of the word prejudicially. That is like saying that Newton's theory of gravity was prejudicially concieved as a mechanical theory of the attraction of bodies, the largest masses have the greatest attractive power. Eh? You reiterate the hugely unsupported assertion that 'the reproduction cycle' is the 'mainstay' of biology, something you have never shown to be true and to which many counterexamples have been presented. You then suggest that this reveals something about evolution but don't say how. Do you propose to sequence every individual in a population, note exactly which offspring a specific parent produces and then sequence all those offspring, for several generations? This is clearly an almost impossible task even for a limited population of only a couple of hundred individuals. Even if you had all of this data it still wouldn't tell you anything about evolution until you began comparing things, either variants of like generation or parental and filial genomes in order to identify mutants. You must surely concede that the only way you can ever identify a mutation is by comparing it to someting?In fact even if you ignore every other aspect of this post just answer this one question.Do you agree that the only way you can identify a mutation is by comparing it to something, either an idealised wild type organism or some other gene sequence you are using as a baseline?If not then how do you intend to identify mutations?TTFN,WK

I know, but it is addictive, its like crack! I keep thinking that just one more post and he will finally tell me in clear terms what his theory is and I 'll finally be able to judge for myself if it has any merit whatsoever in any context.Unfortunately Syamsu seems to have given talking about his theory except in the broadest terms of how great it is. Instead he just makes up ludicrous complaints about evolutionary theory/ natural selection, and they are so wrongheaded that I just have to answer them, its like an itch I have to scratch or a scab you have to pick.So there you go, my debates with Syamsu have reduced me to a scabby junkie with a mysterious itch. Oh, the humanity! TTFN,WK

That's another powerful acusation you make, that I am a liar. You before said that the variation spreads through the population. The literal meaning of that is of variation spreading like a disease throughout a population, the intended meaning is of one variant reproducing more then another variant. You continuously lace your arguments with these ridiculous accusations, is that the result of some kind of insecurity you have over the undeniable scientific merit of viewing in terms of the environment testing fitness to reproduce of individual organisms?Maybe much of the incoherency just applies to older theories of selection, like Darwin's. It is certainly strange that you don't mention Malthusian competition in your formulation of natural selection, where Darwinists have never actually discounted Darwin's reference to Malthusian competition as an error of reason.Consider the place of replacement in the black and white moth example.the effect on black and white moths when white trees turn to black:1 population of white only - 100 -> 20
2 population of black only - 20 -> 150
3 population of white and black 100/20 -> 0/150replacement explains very little in this example, it only explains one incidental extra negative testing factor on the white moth, namely the black moth.Consider how your theory can't even deal with this simple theoretical example, because you require variants. Now you will begin to talk again, that how in cases 1 and 2 we need to go to another brance of biology to describe, but case 3 that case is covered by your theory.I'm not sure what the comparitive case in gravity theory would be. Maybe you would only cover cases of objects of differing weight, and not objects of equal weight. In any case, everyone can see that the formulation of gravity theory is distinct from natural selection in that it doesn't require variation, and that it is not essentially comparitive.Well I only have your word that describing the reproductioncycle of organisms is not the mainstay of biology, against all these books that describe the reproductioncycle of organisms. Regardless I will say that how photosynthesis works, and subjects like that, are the mainstay of biology, because that kind of thing is what explains the most about the organic world. Descent with modification only becomes interesting apart from an abundance of historical factoids, when some predictability is calculable for the evolutionary developments.Yes I agree that basicly you have to compare it to another, to the ancestor, to identify a mutation. I believe you're going to argue now that there are comparisons occuring in nature like a couple of people in this thread did before....regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Dear Syamsu, Splendid, you still have not produced a single scrap of evidence that I ever said that 'individuals are evolving'. There is no proscriptive literal meaning to the phrase 'spreads through the population' as you suggest. The context in which I used the phrase couldn't have been clearer. If you are saying that what I said, in the context I said it suggests an infection then you are lying. I agree that had we been discussing some sort of viral contagion then your interpretation would be reasonable, but we have been discussing evolution in terms of differences in gene frequency over generations over the course of several threads now, the context could not be clearer, your suggestion that the obvious or 'literal' interpretation would be as in the spread of infectious disease is a lie, you can argue that this is how you naturally interpret it, but that only gives us more grounds to doubt your grasp of the fundamentals of this debate. Certainly some of the older theories had elements which we know do not fit in with modern genetics and such like. Luckily these are centrale elements in the modern formulations of natural selection and theories of evolution. You have yet to show any error in reason regarding malthusian assumptions, your presupposition that we all agree with you on this points seems somewhat shaky. As you surely remember I have often pointed out the importance of the concept of carrying capacities in our debates, isn't the concept of a carrying capacity Malthusian enough for you. It is surely obvious, even to you, that where there are unlimited resources, no predation and a lack of other selective pressures then there will be no evolution other than the background noise of random drift, and even that is likely to be greatly attenuated due to the lack of restriction on population size.In fact such a non-selective environment seems much closer to the conditions required for the basic Li growth theorem where initial discrepancies in growth rates of sub-populations over time lead to the average growth rate tending towards the growth rate of the population with the higher growth rate. In fact on consideration I expect that you might see some evolution but only for traits which directly act to maximise fecundity and only happening on scales making even the normally proposed evolutionary time scales seem short term. This is obviously a purely hypothetical suggestion. Yes natural selection is only relevant to that final case, the fact that you can predict that I am going to make the same counterargument as I have previously is not actually support for your argument, it is simply avoiding the counterargument. No, what I am doing is pointing out a gaping hole in your argument. You want to remove comparison from evolution, so you decide to only look at mutation and reproduction, you now admit that you cannot identify mutations without comparison, so how have you removed comparisons from evolution? If comparisons between generations are alright why not comparisons within generations? This in no way gives any reason for the insertion of the word 'prejudicially' in your previous statement. I think it is arguable that there would be effectively nothing to explain or study with gravitational theory in a totally and truly gravitationally homogeneous universe. You would need to either have no mass anywhere or an exactly equivalent density of mass at every point in the universe. Don't take my word for it! Head out of the porn shop and look in the biology section at the local university library you should find books on anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, behaviour, development, immunology, oncology and a host of other topics but only a few wholly concerned with life cycles, and most of those would be concerned with comparing the life cycles of different species. You would also find lots of books about evolution, but we wouldn't want you to taint your mental tabula rasa by actually reading any of them. Something being part of an organisms life history doesn't make it its life cycle. Subjects like anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, behaviour, development, immunology, oncology and others perhaps? All of which are outside the scope of your theory as you have presented it. Well now, either you are arguing that there is a problem in evolution not being directional enough, a somewhat teleological argument, or else you are admitting that the NS view is useful if it allows us to predict future trends in a population, which it does, but it only allows us to do this because we have previously noted the trends in the population, or possibly similar populations in the same environmental conditions.You seem to have run out of steam, you have totally given up putting your own ideas forward and are just bashing out the same old complaints about Natural selection and evolution, complaints that have been rebutted many times before. So many in fact that you yourself know the rebuttals even as you post, and yet rather than counter the rebuttal you just remake your point as if repetition is sufficient to prove your point.TTFN,WKP.S. Your example is really a bit limited. What would the rates be in an environment with white trees? The white moths might just be really crappy at reproducing. From what you gave us I'm not sure you could even put the extinction of the white population down to competition with the black, it could easily be due to genetic drift ( a particualarly stormy breeding season perhaps ). If you had given an estimated carrying capacity for the environment then we might have more of a reason for suspecting competition lead to the extinction of the white population. You should also state your assumptions a bit more clearly, I assume that apart from coat colour the populations are identical for example.This message has been edited by Wounded King, 06-15-2004 09:29 AM

Maybe there is some effect from repeatedly being presented with such examples like the black and white moth. I'm sure the point of organization in knowledge comes across quite clear, that you *ridiculously* need to make yet another theory for scenario's which are decidely similar, because of the obscure formulation of natural selection.That is where the prejudice comes in, which is totally unlike gravity theory. Gravity applies generally throughout nature, where natural selection is constricted to that particular scenario, and that particular kind of describing. Gravity is also solely constricted to describing physical relationships between objects, and does not describe comparitive relationships. The individual theory of the environment testing organisms in terms of fitness to reproduce, is also a general theory which just describes physical relationships. It is not prejudicially constricted to one scenario. But of course later on you will say that you have rebutted this point of mine, while you have done no such thing.Other sciences don't organize knowledge in the way Darwinists do. The only reason that people from other sciences allow it to occur in biology, is because of the fudge with competitive encroachment. There is a seeming physical relationship posited between the variants in the theory, competitive encroachment, but actually there is nothing posited but a comparison. The photosynthesis mutant might have encroached on it's ancestor, but since the photosynthesistrait also confers a cost, we might expect that it didn't encroach on it's ancestor in dark places. What happened to the black and white moths, what happened to photosynthesis, isn't at all that well covered with replacement, as theoretical examples show.I am not lying, since what I say is true. The literal meaning of the words you use indicate individuals evolving. You have no business to accuse me of lying, you should rather use other words which are clearly distinct from individuals evolving. Science is supposed to be straightforward like that, the literal meaning of words must coincide with the intended meaning.When you say something like "the importance of the carryingcapacity", then that just means another vague notion being thrown into the soup of natural selection, just like Percy sought to throw "comparisons occurring in nature" in the soup. These things are better understood separately rather then taken all together at once, because otherwise we might ignore scenario's where neither variation or competition play any significant role whatsoever. And as before, the basic understanding about competition that Darwinists have, about it being related to variation, one or the other variant, is simply false. Competition to reproduce is more intense between same. That kind of misunderstanding is what you get when you don't organize knowledge systematically, starting from a simple theory, and then adding elements, such as competition, as essentially coincedental factors, just another scenario.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Lets see now. You are trying to say that all Scientific theories are rqual, but some are more equal than others? It frankly seems like your understanding of how the Scientific Method works is somewhat deficient. That Evolution has a Scientific Theory to explain the process means that explanatory model has been evaluated through the Scientific Method and found valid as the best descriptor of the process. One Scientific Theory is not better than another. The very fact of them being Scientific Theories makes them equally valid and supported. So that claim is outright nonsense.[I am not lying, since what I say is true. The literal meaning of the words you use indicate individuals evolving.]Hmm, so you are saying that because YOU interpreted something, it MUST be a fact? OK, that's the usual creationist idea that wishful thinking is equal to evidence. That is still a lame idea.

Ah but Wounded King himself indicated that the literal meaning of his words is of individuals evolving, because he said to get the intended meaning from the context. You wouldn't have to refer to context if the literal meaning was the same as intended.No, I'm saying that Darwinism does not comply to basic standards of organization of knowledge. Giving no argument to the point at issue, you are in effect saying that grouping facts this way is valid, because scientists say it is valid.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

No I didn't indicate that, that is another lie. Your 'interpretation' had nothing to do with a literal meaning, it had to do with taking the meaning from a totally different context. From the phrase in and of itself you couldn't conclude either way. The fact that you can't grasp basic concepts of language is hardly a stunning argument in your favour.TTFN,WK

Syamsu,Please, please, read some basic texts on evolution and population genetics and then come back to this thread. YOu aren't even making coherent arguments for me to respond to. You have never shown your theory to do any such thing, you have never given any indication of how it can descrive physical relationships, all it describes is whether one particular individual has had any offspring. Perhaps if you actually put your theory forward as a coherent whole, rather than ever shifting dribs and drabs, I might be better able to understand it. Natural selection is only prejudicially constricted to those situations which meet certain neccessary criteria, well duh! That is kind of the point of a scientific theory that it applies to a set situation in which certain criteria are met, it is the fact that we are able to define those criteria that make it valuable.The comparison is how we measure the effect not the effect itself. If you measure the movement of bodies you are comparing their positions at different points in time. You have to do the comparison to get meaningful data, the outcome of 'the environment testing organisms in terms of fitness to reproduce' is what you are measuring. You have never shown this to be the case. I might agree that practices in Biology traditionally differ from those in physics, but then that is to be expected from such radically different disciplines surely? Give any evidence of this other than your own words. Your interpretation is no morre 'literal' than mine, you simply choose to shoehorn the phrase from a very clear and specific context into a different context in order to misrepresent my views. I don't mind you lying really, but I object to you lying about what I have said. This is an unsupported assertion. There is a large amount of variation which would have absoloutely no effect of reducing competition. Only traits which allowed the exploitation of some new resource would have this effect and it is these sorts of changes which often lead to populations dividing and allow speciation to occur. But it is not a general truth that there is more competition in populations with no variation. The competition is dependent on the levels of resources, another of those malthusian concepts you so dislike.If you ever gave any inkling of having any knowledge of evolutionary biology it would be easier to discuss this with you. Your total intransigent resistance to even reading any primary literature which is suggested to you shows how incapable you are of looking at this issue even moderately evenhandedly. Your total refusal to actually look at how the theory operates in reality, and your argument that factoring in the actual realities of the world is somehow muddying the waters of pure science, makes it very hard to reach any sort of common ground for a discussion. You don't even seem to want to reach such a ground. I spend ages answering your questions about natural selection but you never give any actual illustration of how your theory could ever work, even theoretically let alone in the real world.TTFN,WK

It's rubbish of course, it's my opinion that is the literal meaning, that can't be a lie, it's an opinion. And I have good reason to think that is the literal meaning, because I might use the same words when individuals are actually evolving.It is a generally valid notion, if not truth, that competition between same is more intense. That doesn't just have to do with variants possibly using different resources. Competition intensity is like: (100*a)*(100*b) where a and b are mutually exclusive chances of an outcome, a and b totalling one. Since the outcome in natural selection is said to be weighted in favour of one of the outcomes, the intensity of competition is less, the maximum intensity being with equal likelyhood of outcomes. You are just deluding yourself that there is no competitive replacement going on between variant a's, and between variant b's, because it's not interesting from the point of view of evolution.(edited to add
On second thought I guess the formula should better read(100*(a/a+b))*(100*(b/a+b))because I see no reason why the sum should be one, actually.regards,
Mohammad Nor SyamsuThis message has been edited by Syamsu, 06-16-2004 11:59 AM

Dear Syamsu, A characteristically idiosyncratic understanding of the phrase 'literal meaning' here Syamsu and absoloutely nothing which counters my accusation that you lied about what I said. If you want to say that you misunderstood me then fine, but don't try and make out that what I said corresponds to your own bizzarely twisted interpretation. An unsupported assertion. If your formula is supposed to support it then you are going to have to make the assumptions behind it and what you think you are showing considerably clearer. Are a and b measures of probability? How are you factoring the weighting into the equation? Do you mean that when a and b are equal the compettion is greatest or what? That is how I would understand it if a and b are the probabilities of either specific outcome. And if that is what you mean then you are wrong, put the formula in a spreadsheet and generate yourself some data, you will soon see that that formula does not yield the greatest values when a=b. What is this even in reference to? If you don't start defining something at some point then this is going to get even wierder. Are these variants our usual sub-populations or totally different species? If they are sub-populations and there is a change in their proportions then that is exactly what I have been talking about all along. If not then what situaton do you think you are describing?If you are going to give some sort of formula like this and expect people to accept it then you will have to explain it considerably more clearly. Just think of it as if you were trying to explain it to an idiot, surely that shouldn't be much of a stretch for you.TTFN,WK

No, he is correct. The greatest sum is when a = b. Wether or not the equation actually correlates to anything important is not for me to say, but he is correct in his math.

I see, I missed off a couple of bracket. Thanks Mel, apologies Syamsu.Off course, whether that actually means anything is a different matter, you still have to say what this is actually supposed to be.TTFN,WK

It's not an ideosyncratic understanding, it just holds literal and intended meaning separate. I never misrepresented your intended meaning, which would be lying, I just said the literal meaning was not very distinct from individuals evolving.The formula is just a reasonable formalising of common understanding of intensity of competition. The variants may be black and white moths, the standard variants in natural selection.This is in reference to Darwinists throwing all kinds of principles together in one particular scenario, in stead of systematically building up theories from the simple testing for fitness to reproduce, and mutation principles, which throwing together leads to misconceptions of those principles to the point of them being prejudicially understood in terms of that particular scenario.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu