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Member (Idle past 180 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
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Author | Topic: PZ Myers vs. Adaptationism | |||||||||||||||||||||
MrHambre Member (Idle past 180 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
I'm not trying to make any hypothetical scenarios whatsoever. Over and over I've said that this matter didn't spring fully-formed from MrHambre's overheated imagination. Myers, and Gould and Lewontin, and John O. Reiss are describing the flaws in the way people conceptualize the relationship between adaptation and evolution. Unfortunately, the way we conceptualize such things has consequences in terms of the way we define well-being in individuals and society.
And the problems with adaptationist thinking are easy to see in the matter of evolutionary medicine or EN. Michael Cournoyea at the University of Toronto describes the way an adaptationist approach to medicine has been of limited use to the discipline. quote: So according to the adaptationists, the evolutionary heritage of traits or processes is the most important thing to understand about them, and the key to clinical practice. However, it turns out that even when EM isn't completely speculative, it's of very little relevance in practice: quote: Again, no one is disputing that humans are the products of evolutionary processes or that certain traits are adaptive. What's being disputed is whether we should define well-being in terms of adaptive importance, or whether the evolutionary legacy of a biological function is more relevant to clinical practice than the sociocultural or personal context of the patient's condition and treatment.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 3 days) Posts: 16112 Joined: |
That would explain why I called it "his proposed hypothetical situation", rather than yours. Now, what do you think would happen in a situation such as he describes?
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bluegenes Member (Idle past 1264 days) Posts: 3119 From: U.K. Joined: |
You seem to have missed the main point I picked you up on, which was that there is nothing in the two sentences you quote from Dawkins that isn't compatible with what Myers is saying in the video. Dawkins (and Darwin, were he alive) would readily agree with your last sentence. Variation is essential to Darwin's theory, and three of the four processes which Myers identifies early in the video (mutation, recombination and drift) are the main identified processes that create variation in populations. Dawkins is merely pointing to natural selection (the fourth process) as being the creator and sustainer of what might be called "functional complexity". Variation is assumed. If you want a realistic example, Dawkins is saying that you won't get the "functional beauty and apparently designed complexity" of eyes in the absence of the selective environmental factor of light, and selection is the only known process that drives the production of and sustains such elaborate systems in variating self-replicators. Myers would certainly agree. In cave systems completely without light, organisms will not evolve eyes via mutation, recombination and drift, and those species that arrive from lighted environments with eyes will lose them over time due to those processes. Incidentally, can you think of any characteristics which are at fixation in the phenotype of our own species that could have become so and remained so without the help of selection at some point? Surely, with all this neutral evolution going on, as P.Z. informs us, in small population groups like ours, there must be a long list?
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MrHambre Member (Idle past 180 days) Posts: 1495 From: Framingham, MA, USA Joined: |
No need to be snide. I've said a few times that non-selective processes aren't mutually exclusive of selection in evolution. The problem comes in when we automatically start speculating about an adaptive history for a trait, and in the process focus so closely on selective scenarios that we lose sight of the context of the organism and population as a whole. In Message 46 I described the way Evolutionary Medicine's exclusively adaptationist thinking creates problems in clinical practice: the speculative adaptive history of a condition becomes more important than the treatment of the patient. In a more general sense, adaptationist thinking becomes a method through which to define well-being and normalcy in ways that aren't strictly scientific but can have consequences for the way we view racial and gender differences; the sociocultural context of things like health and diversity gets de-emphasized in favor of more "objective" bases.
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