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Author Topic:   natural selection is wrong
Dr Jack
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Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.4


Message 3 of 276 (110127)
05-24-2004 11:24 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Syamsu
05-24-2004 6:06 AM


Seems to me like the kind of wonky thinking one expects from a philosophy department.
Do you include lightning strikes in a theory related to the motion of balls along a plane? No, of course you don't. That's not to say they won't happen, just that they're not what your dealing with.
Natural selection is not the whole of evolution and it's path is often altered by events outside of it's scope - most famously by a bloody great asteroid hitting the earth. Natural selection is a description of the driving mechanism - and it's the one that we're interested in because it is capable of explaining the emergence of apparent design, of complexity and of ecological fitness. Lightning strikes are not included because they have no explanatory power.

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.4


Message 5 of 276 (110132)
05-24-2004 11:50 AM
Reply to: Message 4 by mark24
05-24-2004 11:39 AM


Sure they are - they select organisms into two groups: those struck by lightning, and those not.

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.4


Message 7 of 276 (110141)
05-24-2004 12:12 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by mark24
05-24-2004 11:56 AM


No, actually I'm not.
There are an awful lot of potential classes for selection, we ignore them in natural selection because random processes are not useful in explaining biological diversity, not because they don't select.

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.4


Message 10 of 276 (110151)
05-24-2004 12:44 PM
Reply to: Message 9 by mark24
05-24-2004 12:25 PM


Either the species whose individuals are being struck by lightning possess variants that are able to better resist lightning, or they don't. It is implicit that the article is using the lightning as an indiscriminate culler. Given that the population posesses no variation that can be selected for or against from the organisms point of view, then no adaptive evolution can occur; therefore no selection occurs.
Yup. That's why it isn't part of Natural Selection. However there is still selection, it just isn't selection affected by the alleles.
I do concede that random culling can change the allele frequency within a population, however, but I put it to you that this is better described as genetic or neutral drift, rather than natural selection, since the alteration of allele frequency has nought to do with the alleles themselves.
I agree. The idea is stupid.

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