TheoMorphic responds to me:
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No, not really because we have no idea how that mutation will connect with the morphology already present...
er, well i didn't explicitly state this, but i thought i implied it. basically pretend we know everything EXCEPT how the organism will actually perform in an environment
That's just it. We can't really know that except in the most mundane of circumstances.
You may know everything about the personalities of two people, but you can't know how they're going to like each other when they meet. There are so many variables involved that you cannot control for everything.
There's this thing called "emergent behaviour." It is the way in which a system reacts as a whole that cannot be predicted from the parts. The only way to find out is to actually run the system and see what happens.
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if the answer is no then we need to find some other reason as to why allele frequencies change.
Not at all. We know why the allele frequencies change (and no, it doesn't always happen through being "fitter"...genetic drift fixates neutral mutations, for example.)
Do you remember the scene from
Jurassic Park where Goldblum's character puts the bead of water on Dern's hand? He asks her to predict which side of her hand it's going to roll off. The thing is, you can't. Oh, we know that the water is going to fall off given the effects of gravity and the unstable nature of the surface upon which the water sits, but we cannot predict which way it's going to go.
And we don't need to. Our inability to determine which direction it is going to fall does not deter us from knowing that it is going to fall.
Here, let me give an example from biology.
Suppose we have a community of organisms that have a system of reproduction where there is an alpha breeder who is ostensibly the parent of all the members of the group. Suppose two new children are born. Each has a mutation that we could reasonably consider "better" than the other members of the community. Which one is going to get propagated into the rest of the community?
Well, that depends...the rock slide the kills one but not the other is going to have a say in that. Even though the mutation might be considered "better," we cannot say that it is going to get passed onto the next generation because there are always things that we cannot predict about the system.
Your argument essentially boils down to the claim that because we don't know
everything, then we don't know
anything.
You're playing games, TheoMorphic. Just come right out and say it. What is your point?
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Rrhain
WWJD? JWRTFM!