Hi again;
Only enough time for nibble. You say-
quote:
"For some reason people just stood by and watched this corruption of the language take place, and so now, here we are with it imbedded in the language like a virus that cannot be gotten rid of."
Except that it is not corruption, it is using modifiers to differentiate between different processes that actually happen.
Protest away, but the undeniable fact of the matter is that Darwin personified nature by attributing a human quality/property/trait, (the abilty to select from among alternative choices), to an abstraction, "Nature" , and then the neo-darwinsts took it a step further, and changed the meaning of the word, 'selection' altogether.
You can assert that you are talking about "different processes that actually happen", but the fact is, I can show you live organisms making individual choices, aka, acts of 'selection', but you cannot show me an abstraction that does that, nor any inanimate, naturally occuring object or system, that does that. So please stop saying that your mystical "Natural Selection", and/or your mystical, "Nature", does that.
As for the neo-darwinist corruption of the word 'selection' meaning, wherebye 'to make a choice' is turned into, 'to become one of the chosen', creating total equivocation as neo-darwinists used this as sophists, perpetually sliding from the active, causal verb form [mechanism] to the passive, noun/effect form [observation of fact], often in the same breath, in order to evangelise their metaphysic.
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Natural Selection occurred before Darwin put the terms together (and he was likely not the first to recognize it), so what we are doing is ADDING to the power of language to describe reality, not corrupting it.
**
Something was happening long before Darwin, and human ideas about what was happening were in existence for as long as there were human beings around to think about what was happening, and there were people around thinking about evolution since the ancient greeks, and there were europeans speculating about the causes for evolution for some time before Darwin said a word, and some of those thinkers seemed to have been thinking thoughts very similar to Charles Darwin's [see Erasmus Darwin, et al], but the notion, "Natural Selection", did not actually come into full existence until Chuck put those words together and wrote a book about it.
Your problem here is that you cannot see that there is a vast difference between the country and a map of it. Evolution has been going on since the first day of life, and something has been driving it for all that time, and that is 'the country' we are exploring. But Darwin didn't draw his map of it until "OotS", and so "Natural Selection" did not exist before... whatever it was--1859?
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This is the way language develops over time, regardless of the topic.
Language evolves, and so long as it evolves naturally, nobody complains. However, when language evolves naturally, word meanings do not become their exact opposites and retain both their original meaning and its opposite, setting up ambivalence, confusion, and communication breakdowm. It takes some "Humpty Dumpty" deliberate tampering to do that, and that tampering, that self-serving corruption, is exactly what the neo-darwinists did, and still do, to the word, 'selection'. The least darwinists could do is to alert their listeners to when it is that they are using 'selection' in the active sense, as a 'cause', and when it is that they are using it in their passive sense, as an 'effect'. But they very carefully letting anyone know that.
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You can only talk about corruption if you claim that language can never change, a philosophically ridiculous position (it implies that all knowledge is known).
Good thing thing then that I have never even come close to suggesting that language can never change, isn't it? What I have said is that language can change, and does change, and changes in two very different ways. Legitimately, language changes unintentionally from one sense to another as time marches on, or brand new words [neologisms] are introduced to signify novel things or original concepts. But language can also be changed illegitimately, Humpty Dumpty style, by people who want the word to take on a new sense that is qualitatively different from the sense in common usage. Either way the language ends up changed. Our problem in the present debate is not really about the fact that 'selection' can now mean both a cause and an effect, but the deliberate equivocation of using the 'effect' sense as if it were the 'cause' sense. Make up your minds, is "NS" a causal force, a 'mechanism' that explains observed effects, or is it those effects, the results/effects of some other causal mechanism. (It cannot cause itself, since logically, a cause cannot be its own effect, and vice versa, in one and the same case.)
Anyhoo, we've clobbered this one to death, and I cannot think of anything else to add to it, so if you want to believe that it is perfectly legitimate to use the same word, 'selection', in two different senses, interchangeably, that's your prerogative, but, for reasons given and amply explained, I disagree.
[quote]
Well, I don't think we should introduce 'sexual selection', which a/only applies to sexully reproducing organisms and
b/ is, in those rare instances in which it is truly present, is a dynamic, intentional activity, as opposed to the passive, accidental experience intrinsic to natural selection,
until after we have thoroughly determined the nature of 'natural selection'. So I'm going to skip down a bit."
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What you think is irrelevant, nature and the universe are totally unimpressed and unaffected.
No kidding! Good thing I'm not trying to impress and affect "nature and the universe", isn't it? Merely trying trying to express my opinions to you. Not to them. What made you bring up "nature and the universe", anyway?
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Sexual selection exists.
Yes, it does, although not in nearly so many cases as darwinists think that it does. But when true 'sexual selection' does take place, it totatally conforms to the pre-darwinian sense of 'selection', i.e., sentient beings make intentional choices between alternatives, based upon their ability to discriminate according to criteria based uipon values, with those values derived from their goals. Picking a sexual partner is 'selection' in exactly the same active sense as is picking out what tie you'll wear to work. It is the act of a sentient being, not an abstraction, such as Darwin's "nature".
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The nature of 'natural selection' is determined, whether you think so or not, and it includes sexual selection in it.
Well, that's your opinion, and I'm sure you'll stick to it, and if you are only speaking of it as a particular ideational position, yours, then in that notional sense, you must be right. However, if you are trying to tell me that your notion and empirical reality map to each other in such perfection that you can say 'natural selection' as if it were some real and actual, physical and a tangible part of this universe, then you are equivocating. Like the song says, "It ain't necessarily so."
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"What do you mean by "aspects of natural selection"? Defining characteristics? Natural properties?"
The phrase was "other aspects of natural selection" and then there was a list of other aspects, different processes by which natural selection occurs and can be viewed to occur..
Sorry, I didn't see that list. I googled 'aspects of natural selection', but couldn't find any.
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"If 'natural selection' means the experiences that might befall a passive entity, then everything and anything can be an 'aspect' of 'natural selection', including both dying [being killed] right now, and not dying [being killed] right now."
Why limit it to passive entities? Natural selection involves experiences that might befall all organisms. Surviving a flood is not necessarily passive, for example.
I did not "limit [natural selection] to passive entities. I expanded the term to include passive entities, as should have been perfectly plain in context. I think that you may may be deliberately throwing up 'non sequitur' objections, just for the sake of having something to say. I hope that that is not the case, since I would like to continue our debate. The point is, does your 'natural selection' apply as appropriately to inanimate objects and immaterial concepts as it does to living organisms, or does it not? Please respond to the point I'm making, and not to some point that I very clearly am not making.
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"Kind of makes the term, "NS", both nebulous and vacuous. I think that scientific terms should be a lot more specific, definite, and meaningful than that. "
Only when you keep applying your straw man version of it instead of the processes that occur to life in general, passive and active.
Well, you can call it a "strawman version" if you like. But it is not a 'strawman version', and you cannot demonstrate that it is, so your name-calling gets you nowhere.
[quote]
"Well, aside from absurd truisms, such as,-- the sick are not as healthy as the hale and hearty, the stupid are not as bright as the intelligent, the old are older than the young, the slow are not as fast as the swift, the blind do not see as well as the sighted, the weak are not so powerful as the strong,-- and on and on, just exactly what is it that you are trying to say?"
And yet in spite of these truisms you haven't made the connection that this shows that natural selection happens, that it is fact, because that is what these truisms tell us."
No, these truisms only tell us that death is a fact of life, something that doesn't require a 'scientific theory' in order to be observed and accepted into our bank of knowledge. You are trying to advance the notion that a fact of life is a scientific theory about a fact of life, and that is absurd.
[quote]
"The race is to the swift, the struggle to the strong--usually. We get that. "
Not really, the "race" goes to those that survive and reproduce more, to those who contribute most to following generations - by surviving from year to year and breeding more than others -- they "win" the "race" to provide the genetic material for following generations.[quote]
You are still just listing facts, i.e., effects, and acting as if the existence of these facts explains the existence of these facts. Like I said, that's absurd. Until you give a causal explanation for the fact that some "win" and some "lose", you are not saying anything, you are just talking.
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"We get that. It's not rocket science. In fact, it's not science at all. It's just a meaningless fact of life that is probably just as apparent to cheetahs chasing gazelles, and gazelles being chased by cheetahs, as it is to you and me."
That's what happens when you talk about facts ... or should be.
Very true, but the we are not talking about facts, but about your hypothesis, "Natural Selection". You cannot debate facts, by definition--they are what they are, no more, no less. Notions about those facts are a whole other matter, but you repeatedly insist upon conflating the facts and your explanation for them, as if they were one and the same thing. They are not. You'll just have to accept that.
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"In short, anything can affect mortality, and anything that affects mortality can affect reproduction, and anything that affects reproduction affects 'evolution', and since, basically, everything that affects mortality, from birth defects to broken legs to catching a virus to being bitten by a shark is, in the vast majority of cases, a matter of pure chance, I guess we can reduce this to 'chance=evolution', right? Or is it, "chance=natural selection"? Or is it both, in which case "Chance = natural selection = evolution"?"
Again, some is chance and results in genetic drift (and the evolution - the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation) and some is not chance but related to the ability of the organism due to the hereditary traits.
If 'genetic drift' is something that results from 'natural selection', as you say here, then my reading on 'genetic drift'[i.e, Random fluctuations in the frequency of the appearance of a gene in a small isolated population, presumably owing to chance rather than natural selection."], must have been entirely wrong.
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Some organisms have genetic birth defects compared to others, and these will more likely be less able to live and reproduce than others and thus be subject to natural selection due to their differential ability to survive and reproduce.
Birth defects, like broken legs and meteors dropping from the sky, are facts of life. They are not a theoretical postulate called 'natural selction'. Longevity, mortality, fecundity, and chance are all facts of life. None of them are 'natural selection'. You keep on making the same mistake, i.e., mistaking the actual country for your ideational map of it. It would appear that you would happily point to every aspect of life itself, and call it 'natural selection'. Life = NS? I do not think so.
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Likewise, some organisms are genetically endowed with weak bones compared to others, and these will more likely be affected by broken bones than others and thus be subject to natural selection due to their differential ability to survive and reproduce.
Whether or not you can empirically demonstrate that this assertion is true, let alone demonstrate that it is a common, non-anomalous circumstance, (sufficiently common as to constitute a scientific, universal, causal mechanism for evolution), remains to be seen. But what you have admitted is that your "NS" is a negative, subtractive, non-addditive phenomenon that, as Darwin's peers pointed out to him, cannot account for the addition of novel traits to the variations already existing. Which is why Fisher and co. invented the notion of 'adaptation by genetic accident', usually referred to as "RM+NS".
Which reduces everything that your "NS" gets to 'pick'/'eliminate', into a matter of pure chance. Which, logically, reduces your "NS" to an aspect of pure chance, which is what it was to begin with, anyway.
"Chance" is not a scientific mechanism. Being, by definition, irregular and unpredictable. So there goes both "RM" and "NS" as scientific mechqanisms. Into the bin of bad ideas. Sorry.
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Thus it is not pure chance rather it is affected by the differential variations in traits between the individuals within the population as a whole.
Since, according to you, these 'differential varitions' are the end product of pure chance, i.e., "random genetic mutations", then it is logically undeniable that they are chance as much a matter of pure chance as are the randomly mutated genes that produced them. Like it or not, you have reduced evolution, and life itself, to a matter of chance accident. But that's where materialism has its primary postulate, so I do not think that this conclusion is accidental, but is 'pre-determined'.
Later.
™ Version 4.2
