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Author Topic:   Mendel innocent, Darwin guilty
Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 4 of 18 (11012)
06-05-2002 1:21 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Syamsu
06-05-2002 11:09 AM


Before responding I'd like to introduce the information you're referring to.
First, the joint Wallace/Darwin paper can be found here:
http://www.inform.umd.edu/PBIO/darwin/darwindex.html
It's not actually a paper so much as a collection of various writings by Darwin and Wallace, with an introduction by Lyell and Hooker. It was published in the Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society, Zoology 3:45-62. Aug 20, 1858.
Second, the "Fischer" you've mentioned in several messages is actually R. A. Fisher, a mathematician and geneticist. He first raised the possibility of Mendel fudging his data in a 1936 paper in the Annals of Science called Has Mendel's Work Been Rediscovered? (Annals of Science 1, 115-137).
Syamsu writes:

Often Darwinists say that the reason that there is no formal treatment of the theory is because...
Since Darwinists do not agree with you that there is no formal treatment of the theory, they would not be attempting to justify something they don't believe to be the case. What led you to this belief?

Because I like formalcy in science, it is grating for me to see a prozawriter like Fischer accuse a formalist like Mendel of fudging his data. Fischer used some statistical argument to "prove" Mendel fudged his data,...
I don't know what a "prozawriter" is, but it doesn't sound like a compliment. Anyway, given Fisher's large number of publications he was probably a pretty good writer, and he was a statistician of the first rank, but he didn't claim to have proved "fudging", he only raised questions as to whether Mendel had been honest in reporting his data. The debate continues somewhat today, but the consensus of science has been, and still is, that problems with Mendel's data were both inadvertent and inconsequential.

...and then argued that this fudging was the reason that Darwinists did not accept Mendel's theories for up to 40 years.
Fisher couldn't possibly have argued this, since he only introduced the possibility of fudging in 1936. Prior to Fisher's statistical arguments there was no suspicion of fudged data, and by the time he published his suspicions in 1936, Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics had already been combined, through the efforts of the population geneticists, into the Synthetic Theory of Evolution, usually referred to today as the Modern Synthesis.

Mendel's texts today are held up by Darwinists as an example of how not to do science, as a warning not to falsify your data else it might be ignored.
Almost all scientists view Mendel's work as an example of good science. His pea breeding experiments are mentioned in all introductory biology texts and evolution texts. Most scientists are probably barely aware or even completely unaware that there is any debate concerning Mendel's data.

Before publishing "The origin of species" Darwin and Wallace published what should have been a formal treatment of the theory of Natural Selection to a science journal. The paper...is a hopeless mess...
But why should it be such a mess, when Darwin's "Origin of Species" was already finished?

The joint paper was published in 1858, the Origin of Species in 1859. In the 1858 paper Darwin included only material he had written prior to receiving Wallace's letters, which was a 1844 essay and in 1857 letter to Asa Gray. He didn't include any more recent material because his primary goal was to establish priority.
Syamsu quoting the 1858 Darwin/Wallace paper:

"Natural Selection acts by and for the good of each being, and therefore each corpereal and mental endowment will tend to progress towards perfection."
This sentence does not appear in the on-line copy of the paper. What is the source of your quote?

Darwin's fudging of the sciencepaper, is the reason why there is no formal theory now.
We can't really discuss this until you show us evidence supporting this interpretation.

Can any Darwinist-Creationist, or Darwinist-evolutionist reference me a formal treatment of the mechanism of Natural Selection (defined as for an individual to reproduce or not to reproduce)?
Uh, the Nganjuk Public Library?
I don't know why the principle of natural selection is such a problem in your eyes. Perhaps you're trying to build it up to be more than it is. All it says is that the environment will exert survival pressures on organisms, providing reproductive advantages to those best suited. I think you've said as much yourself.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Syamsu, posted 06-05-2002 11:09 AM Syamsu has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 6 by Syamsu, posted 06-05-2002 2:04 PM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 5 of 18 (11015)
06-05-2002 1:49 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Syamsu
06-05-2002 11:09 AM


I found that quote. I misinterpreted you as saying it came from the Darwin/Wallace paper, but I see now that you were referring to Darwin's Origin of Species. The quote was:
Darwin in the Origin of Species:

"Natural Selection acts by and for the good of each being, and therefore each corpereal and mental endowment will tend to progress towards perfection."
About this quote you said:
Syamsu writes:

Also, I'm pretty sure you can't get away with positing something like a natural force of goodness in a science paper, but you can get away with it in pop-science proza.
I agree that you can't posit a "natural force of goodness" and remain scientific, but that wasn't what Darwin was positing. He's stating the same natural selection principle we know today, but in 19th century prose. It helps to view this sentence in context where it becomes clear that even though he uses the term "being", he's really speaking about species:
Darwin in the Origin of Species:

"We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Cambrian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of great length. And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection."
--Percy
[This message has been edited by Percipient, 06-05-2002]

This message is a reply to:
 Message 1 by Syamsu, posted 06-05-2002 11:09 AM Syamsu has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 7 of 18 (11018)
06-05-2002 2:44 PM
Reply to: Message 6 by Syamsu
06-05-2002 2:04 PM


I don't really buy that you can blame anything about modern evolutionary theory on Darwin. He just got things going on the right track. Lots of people have contributed since then.
I think you may have misclassified Fisher with the Darwinists. He was a statistician and geneticist, so you would normally include him with the Mendelians. He was one of the principals in the development of population genetics, and wrote the landmark book on the Modern Synthesis.
Syamsu writes:

Elsewhere you said that differential reproductive success is as a synonym for competition, where other biologists say that competition is not even required to occur for differential reproductive success to apply. You can't say that there is no problem here.
Depends how you define competition. I was being brief at the time, and in that context I meant competition to be interpreted broadly as including competition with anything, including with independent environmental factors. For example two different rodent species might be competing for the same resources, and so would be competing with each other. But their environment may also be changing, perhaps getting colder, and so they would also be competing with the environment to maintain reproductive rates.

Please reference me a formal treatment of the mechanism of Natural Selection.
You seem pretty well read already, so I'm going to skip a couple steps and assume that no matter what reference you're provided you'll deny it contains the requested information. Why don't we just discuss why the definitions of natural selection you've been provided are inadequate?
But this is off topic for this thread. You were already discussing natural selection in another thread, so we should pick up the discussion there.
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 6 by Syamsu, posted 06-05-2002 2:04 PM Syamsu has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 9 by Syamsu, posted 06-05-2002 11:12 PM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22388
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 10 of 18 (11075)
06-06-2002 9:29 AM
Reply to: Message 9 by Syamsu
06-05-2002 11:12 PM


You may never find such a book. Natural selection is a general principle. A treatment of how it plays out in specific scenarios would be ad hoc, and error prone given the huge number of variables. The principle of natural selection gives us a framework within which to interpret evidence from the past, but there are far too many variables in the real world for it to have much forward looking predictive power, if that's what you're looking for.
If you've read any of Gould's books or articles you may have come across his oft repeated point that if you rewound the tape of life back to some point and then started things going again that the outcome would be very different. There's no determinism.
You can take the general principle of natural selection and apply it using logic and knowledge, working out a number of rules all by yourself, such as, "As the climate gets colder, mammals will develop thicker fur coats. As predators get faster, prey will, too."
But you'll never know enough to make accurate predictions. For example, as predators get faster, perhaps some prey will become smaller so as not to be noticed, or become more evasive, or become burrow dwellers, or change the time of day when they graze. As a lizard species develops internal toxins to kill snakes that prey upon it, will the snakes evolve an immunity, or select other prey, or migrate to better hunting grounds, or go extinct?
Natural selection is a general principle. It is not without predictive power, but those predictions are necessarily general. An analog that is a bit strained but might be helpful nonetheless is physical mechanics, ie, the principles of moving bodies. You can use the laws of motion to predict with great accuracy the behavior of any body in any situation, but once you start trying to predict how bodies will interact with each other the possibilities become too numerous and complex to enumerate. What happens when two bodies collide head on? At 179o? At 178o? When one is rock and the other is ice? When one is homogenously half rock and half ice while the other is rock? When one is made up homogenously of different types of rock? When the other is non-homogenously composed, with different parts having different compositions? When the collision takes place in a weak gravitational field? A strong gravitational field? When the bodies are large enough to have their own gravitational fields? When one is hot and the other cold? When both are hot? When one has a molten core? When they collide in a nebular cloud? At an event horizon? I'm not even near done.
Now do the same for three bodies. See the problem? Scientists haven't produced an enumeration like this for physics, and they're not going to do it for natural selection, either.
That being said, there is much greater determinism in dealing with simpler life forms, primarily because the variables come under our complete control. The best example is bacteria in a petri dish. Starting with some known bacterial species, you can change the petri dish environment in proscribed ways and know in advance that bacteria possessing certain qualities will be selected for and that in some number of generations the bacterial population in your petri dish will be adapted to the changes you introduced.
I think you've somehow decided that scientists should by now have enumerated all the different environmental change scenarios into a book of rules for what will happen to species in each case. The world isn't that simple.
--Percy
[This message has been edited by Percipient, 06-06-2002]

This message is a reply to:
 Message 9 by Syamsu, posted 06-05-2002 11:12 PM Syamsu has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 11 by Syamsu, posted 06-06-2002 11:40 AM Percy has not replied

  
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