natural selection is wrong

It is not an unsupported assertion because it comes from your quote of talk.origins. It demonstrates the talk.origins interpretation of natural selection as teleological, because there they separate natural selection from genetic drift etc. In the paper natural selection is equated to evolution, and this empties natural selection of teleology. In talk.origins evolution consists of natural selection and neutral drift, so natural selection is separate from neutral drift. Therefore it is teleological in the way explained before.As before the solution to getting rid of teleology is to view in terms of sampling, and understand selection to be a subset of sampling.Where the teleology comes from in natural selection, apparent or actual, is in the description of the relation of reproduction to competition, and from describing the one variant encroaching on the other variant. The teleology would disappear IMO, once these things are described from the point of view of individual organisms, and as incidental in the relationship of the organism to the environment in terms of reproduction, rather then described as continuous and from the point of view of population, or groups of variants.What is also very confusing is that Darwinists are in effect making a 3 step sampling program. First survival, then reproduction, then retention in the population. These are simply 3 different theories of sampling stacked on top of one another, rather then that they are 1 theory. Retention is the way in which populations are sampled, reproduction and survival, are ways in which individuals can be said to be sampled. As in the other post, this also leads to teleology as if the goal is the next sampling step.The only force should be understood to be reproduction, the environment is essentially passive. Changes in the environment, change the populationsize, change the limits to be filled up by reproduction. etc.A framework of understanding like that, would stop teleology, rather then talking teleologically and then making explicit denials that it is meant telological. These denials of teleology, denials of purpose tend to translate to atheism, or partial atheism that God is not acting someplace. In stead of saying the theory of natural selection is not teleological, they are saying that there is no teleology affecting nature, which is simply atheism in another disguise.Below John Wilkins talking about sampling as you can find on google groups with keywords wilkins sampling.
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It seems to me there are increasingly inclusive kinds of processes here.In the most general terms possible, I think of them this way.Sampling is the broadest class. It can be biased or stochastic (the
latter being random drift). Selection is a sampling process (over traits in a population). Sampling requires a population of individuals, but not that they vary or have any differential bias.Sorting is the next most restrictive class. Selection is a sorting
process, but so are non-selective biological processes (like species
sorting, which Gould, inappropriately IMO, calls species selection).
Sorting requires a differential bias, in which some items are ranked in ways that affect their persistence. Selection is a sorting process.But selection itself requires two further conditions - variation in
hereditable traits, and that those traits have some differential bias
that correlates with hereditability. This differential bias we call
fitness.Another way to think of it is that you have a variable for alleles that can take any value from one to zero for variability. Selection occurs when it is greater than zero but less than one for a locus in a
population. You cannot non-arbitrarily draw the line anywhere in
particular, but if the variability is extreme enough we just do not call it selection any more.My amateur opinion.
---------regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Dear Syamsu,Thank you for finally something actually resembling a reference, why not just link the URL though and save everybody some time?I can appreciate the view Wilkin's puts forward of selection as a subset of sampling this doesnt however make any actual difference. You still have exactly the same factors natural selection and genetic drift (GD), the only difference between Wilkins statistical approach and that in the original paper you referenced is what level they decide to put the label Natural selection at. Wilkins decides to leave it seperate from GD and make a higher level called sampling, the original paper just says that since we can't dissect out the specific causes of the exact outcomes we see in the populations genetics we will just stick natural selection as the label at the top for the coming together of all the factors to produce specific trends in the population. The paper concludes that This clearly states the importance of variation in evolutionary studies. As to the question of whether NS and GD should be seperated or both lumped together as NS, it makes absoloutely no difference, not one iota. Genetic drift is as much an example of heritable variation and differential retention as NS is, it is just not directed or biased if you prefer, the paper's authors say NS as they have decided to designate this as the top level term.This still doesn't remove the importance of variation from the discussion of natural selection. Neither Genetic Drift nor Natural selection can operate on a homogenous population. It does not demonstrate that talk.origins interpretation is teleological, it demonstrates that naive theories of evolution in which NS unopposed would produce optimal solutions are teleological. Unless you can show that the generally accepted theory of evolution at TO is one where NS unopposed gives rise to optimal solutions then you are still just making statements with absoloutely no support.'Darwinists' do not have a three step sampling program, you just sample the population and derive a picture of its genetics. You have to do this over several generations because NS/evolution is a trend over time. Nature does all the rest, the exact cause of the retention of the specific genetic traits in particular instances, such as increased longevity or fecundity, is irrelevant to the detection of trends within a population.Any probabilistic formulation of evolution highlights how useless your individual organism focus is. You can't do stats on 1 organism anymore than you can have selection operating on a population with no variation.You have yet to actually show the teleological thinking in anything other than an adaptationist formulation of evolution, I would appreciate an explicit and simplistic explanation of your line of reasoning. Please don't rely on reference to the papers we have been discussing as our interpretations of what they say seem to be at such odds with each other that it would do nothing but further confuse the issue.I'm also not quite sure what your point is supposed to be with regards to teleology and atheism. Certainly the removal of teleological thinking is consistent with a strictly materialist point of view, but since that is the only point of view which has facillitated successful science it seems reasonable within the boundaries of science. Outwith the science people are free to believe whatever they like.You seem to be both castigating evolutionary theory for being teleological and castigating science for trying to exclude teleological thinking as a way of sneaking atheism through by the back door. Either you think that teleology is an acceptable concept in science or you don't, which is it?TTFN,WKThis message has been edited by Wounded King, 06-03-2004 12:29 PM

John Wilkins use of sampling is actually different then mine, because he uses it as one or the other reproduces, requiring a population, where I use it as the one reproduces or not.Evolution is descent with modification, or reproduction with modification. The change is a mutation, or a recombination, which then get's sampled by the environment in terms of it's fitness for reproduction.These are straightforward observations. Now where natural selection would fit in this structure of knowledge is really largely inconsequential. It can never be that natural selection, differential reproductive success of variants, would be more fundamental then the observations above, which already describe evolution.You are essentially arguing that things like comparison of same, should be in a different theory altogether, then comparison of variants, which is absurd, and leads to the erronuous conclusion of natural selection as a separate force, and all kinds of errors and deceptions. They should obviously all be part of the one theory.What people who assert the lack of purpose in nature tend to do, is to make purpose natural. They are the ones who tend to produce the pseudoscience, it is of no benefit to science as far as I can tell. Anyway the assertion of lack of purpose violates the ideal of objectivity obviously. If you say the planets going round the sun is without purpose, then that's just your subjective opinion. Of course these people would try to have a scientific definition of purpose, love, selfishness, God, soul, free will etc. so that they can scientifically say that there is no purpose there, but there is purpose elsewhere. Obviously this kind of practice leads to the ideal of objectivity becoming undermined in a confusion about the meaning of words.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

You can't meaningfully sample a population of 1 anymore than you can select from a population of 1, you don't have to be just meaning something different to Wilkins you have to be using 'sample' as a word meaning deomthing totally different to what everyone in the world considers sample to mean, here is the dictionary.com entry for sample to help understanding. No that isn't what I'm arguing, you can study the population genetics of a heterogeneous population if you wish, but it won't show you anything relating to natural selection, genetic drift or evolution until there is some heritable variation going on. Things which stay exactly the same from generation to generation are not evolving.You have never shown to anyones satisfaction, other than perhaps your own, that comparisons are absurd this seems to be the baseless basis of your entire argument. Your stable populations are part of evolutionary theory in as much as they are periods of stasis between periods of evolution. However since I have never heard of any totally homogeneous populations of anything, certainly nothing with a population suitable for the species to continue, with the possible idealised exception of clonal populations of bacteria in the laboratory, it seems highly unlikely that a situation ever occurs, certainly not in nature, where populations with no variation continue to have no variation over several generations, even in the absence of any selective pressure random mutation and genetic drift would make a population deviate from homogeneity over several generations. In fact I would imagine the only situation in which it would be possible would be if the animal was under very high selective pressures to maintain its genome in exactly the same state in its entirety. Ah, gibberish. That absoloutely fails to make anything clear, although I would agree that you seem to be suffering some confusion as to the meaning of words. It certainly doesn't explain your claims about teleology being fundamental to modern evolutionary theory, nor does it answer my question as to whether you believe teleology has a place in science, a question for which a one word answer should be sufficient.Why are you incapable of providing a simple explanation for any of your positions. I have asked you to break down a number of points for me and all I have had in reply has been obfustication and repetition.TTFN,WKP.S. Are you prepared to concede that Newton's laws of mechanics are not universally applicable to all areas of science Yet? Or that teleology is not a concept whose appearance in science is unique to biology?

Sampling is just a word, I told you quite specifically what I meant with it numerous times. How on earth can you now still not understand it? It refers to the relationship of the organisms to the environmenet in terms of fitness for reproduction. As before biologists describe individual organisms all the time in terms of their chance of reproduction or survival, it is the mainstay of biology already regardless if it has been given a name or not.I have already told you numerous times that biologists already describe individual organisms this way, yet you continuously ridicule the practice of describing this way (referring to homogenous populations not existing etc.). That is why this argument is repetitive / useless because time and again you forget those things that go to prove that your position is quite absurd. I would like to ask a moderator to reject your post on account of avoidance of argumentation offered several times before. I think that is the only way this discussion can progress to a conclusion, with an impartial moderator arbritating points like that.It's not my problem where comparison, natural selection, or genetic drift, or any of the perhaps dozens of "factors" that are subsets to "sampling" fit in. The theory I posit is right and meaningful as a fundamental theory, and that's as far as I need to go as far as I can tell. You have no chance in this argument unless you can find some fault in my basic observations, and criticizing wordchoice of sampling is not really very strong criticism.In regards to your strawman about variation, I could then equally posit the strawman that natural selection is only applicable if every organism is varying in every respect.It's unfortunate that you apparently don't understand why saying something like "the planets going round the sun is purposeless" is not a scientific statement. I don't think there is much wrong with my explanation, the issues are quite complex and paradoxical of themselves. Dawkins and Haeckel can assert blind purposelessness of evolution, and then Dawkins can turn around and say that the purpose of organisms is reproduction.....regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

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I would like to ask a moderator to reject your post on account of avoidance of argumentation offered several times before. I think that is the only way this discussion can progress to a conclusion, with an impartial moderator arbritating points like that.

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Why not ask Percy/Admin to allow you and Wounded King to start a thread in the "Great Debate" Forum? This would provide you with exactly what you are asking for. And even better for you, nobody but Wounded King and yourself would be allowed to post.

If you think that that is quite specific then there is no way we are ever going to have a meaningful discussion. In what way does it refer to the relationship of the organism to its environment in these terms? Give us your idiosyncatic defintion of sampling. A specific defintion, not a vague wibble. Biologists very rarely describe singel organisms this way and conclude that that is meaningful in and of itself. What biologists do is look at a small sample of a population hardly ever a single individual, I defy you to show that the majority of research is focused on the study of specific individuals. They may then make general observations about an entire species based on these few observations, the point is that these are generalisations. In general all humans are born with two legs, but there are a number of specific cases where they aren't. For someone who is bemoaning the lack of precision in natural selection you seem all to happy to embrace a generalisation about an organism as the be all and end all of knowledge about all members of the population that individual belongs to.One of the reason why this has been the case is because until very recently we didn't have the technology neccessary to detect a lot of the variations in populations. Even if an organism is morphologically identical to another it may have a significantly different set of physiological parameters, it may have many proteins with differing and significant amino acid sequences effecting metabolic rates. It is reasonable to make generalisations about classes from a sample of a population, it is mistaken to make them from one instance, this is one of the reasons that science relies on replication to such a great extent.Please offer an example of 'those things that go to prove that your position is quite absurd'. And then show where I ever stipulate that all biology must bow down to variation, we are talking about evolution and natural selection, end of story, both of these things have an absoloute requirement for variation, if you can show me even a hypothetical situation in which either evolution or NS can occur in the absence of any variation I will be astounded. Please by my guest, bring a moderator in if you feel you must. I sincerely doubt that you will find one impartial enough to review this thread and agree with your conclusion that I am the one avoiding making substantive responses to points. Please let me know when you have got a Mod on the case, I've always wanted to be a controversial figure of mystery. Fair enough, unfortunately all you have provided is a fundamental theory of population dynamics which involves looking at animals as and noting if they breed or not. You can use it to keep an accurate record of a popultions numbers if you look at all the animals in the population, individually of course, and then collate but not compare the data. Unfotunately your theory is useless in the context of evolutionary theory, but please fell free to try and show any way there can be evolution, rather than stasis, in a population with no variation and how your theory could explain or detect it. Except that you haven't shown my argument to be a strawman, simply stated that it is so. Your strawman is patently false as you can obviously select between variants on 1 single area of variation, you have yet to show how you can meaningfully select on the basis of no variation. I never said that that statement was scientific, but thank you for putting words in my mouth. You have yet to provide a one word answer (Hint: the word should be yes or no) as to whether teleology has a place in science, in your opinion. I have no problems with Richard Dawkins being wrong, I'm not married to the chap. Richard Dawkins is as fallible as the next person, unless perhaps the next person is you, in which case I would give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt.TTFN,WKP.S. Any response to the P.S. in my last post?

From the paper:
"Consider, then, a case like this: two organisms, O1 and O2, otherwise very similar, differ in (vernacular) fitness because O1 has better eyesight than O2. Now, contrast the following possible events.C1. O2’s bad eyesight leads to its falling off a cliff. It dies and O1 survives.C2. O1 is killed by a lightning strikeCthe difference of visual acuity was irrelevant to this event."The white moth on the black tree was quite visible on the tree to predatory bird, and it was killed.The black moth was camouflaged on the black tree, escaping the predatory bird.The moths in this area died to chemical pollution caused by insecticides.The moths flourished in the timeframe between the birds migrating south and the onset of winter.The black moth took away the the insect the white moth was after.etc. etc. etc.These observations are all of one sort, or at least I mean them to be interpreted as such. They are meant to be interpreted as the relationship of the organism to the environment in terms of reproduction, either reproduction, or no reproduction.Are you denying that at the basis of natural selection, genetic drift etc. are individual observations like these?As before, a mutation occurs and it get's "tested" (sampling is not the right word yes) in terms of it's fitness to reproduce. Or the environment changes and the variations already present get retested. (but having the variation already present is not really the correct approach when the subject of interest is changes in structure of organisms). The change in envrionment results in changes in the relationship of the organism to the environment, changes in the rate of reproduction (of any particular variant if you wish). The reproduction rate will, with a stable relationship to the environment after the change, tend to go towards 1 or 0.1 or 0, illustrating that fundamentally the relationship of the organism to the environment in terms of reproduction, it's fitness, is a matter of reproduction or no reproduction of an organism.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

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The white moth on the black tree was quite visible on the tree to predatory bird, and it was killed.

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In this case, specific camoflage is selected for. However, some white moths will reproduce, but many more black moths will reproduce. Camoflage is not directly related to the ability to reproduce, just the chances of reproducing and the chances of the offspring reproducing.

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The moths in this area died to chemical pollution caused by insecticides.

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. . . because none of the moths were resistant to the insecticides. They lacked the variation to resist poisoning resulting in local extinction. In this case, black or white camoflage had nothing to do with the selection process. I'm not sure if you are trying to say that natural selection is not applicable in this case, but it plainly is. The non-resistant moths were selected against. It just so happens that there were no organisms to select for.

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The moths flourished in the timeframe between the birds migrating south and the onset of winter.

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And those moth variants that are able to consume limited food supplies in a more effecient manner will out compete less effecient variants. Effecient food gathering will be selected for.

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The black moth took away the the insect the white moth was after.

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White or black doesn't matter. What is selected for is food gathering effeciency and food gathering technique.

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As before, a mutation occurs and it get's "tested" (sampling is not the right word yes) in terms of it's fitness to reproduce. Or the environment changes and the variations already present get retested. (but having the variation already present is not really the correct approach when the subject of interest is changes in structure of organisms).

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Umm, I think you might have slipped up here. For something to be "tested" it must already be present. Evolution is changes in allele frequency, that is the percentage of organisms with a specific trait. Yes, at some point in the past the specific characteristic or trait may not have been present, but to be tested it must already be present. And yes, under certain circumstances traits that were once selected against may become advantageous in a different environment. Just off the top of my head, predatory cats often go through cycles of long canine teeth followed by periods of short canine teeth. According to the most popular theories, this is due to a feedback loop between predator and prey size (both progressively get bigger over time until it is selected against due to environmental changes).

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1 or 0, illustrating that fundamentally the relationship of the organism to the environment in terms of reproduction, it's fitness, is a matter of reproduction or no reproduction of an organism.

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WRONG. It is the percentage of individuals with certain traits in subsequent generations. Using black and white moths, white moths will still reproduce and may make up a small percentage of the population even under strong selection. It is not a stringent "yes or no" type of deal. Black or white does not effect the actual ability to reproduce, but the ability to live long enough to out reproduce other organisms within the species. Also, fitness is not measured by how many "children" you have, but how many grandchildren you have.

You can have evolution mean changes in frequencies, but you can't then use the theory of evolution to explain changes in structure of organisms, or sequences of changes in structure of organisms. To do that, you have to start with mutation.I think it's signficant to note that you are disconnecting yourself from the realities of reproduction and mutation, by explaining in terms of populationshare. The population as a whole is reconstrued as one continuous organic body, which changes in response to the environment. The basic observations of mutations and reproduction are abstracted away from. This seems highly dubious of course.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Syamsu, Nonsense. NS explains what happens to extant variation. That's all it's supposed to do. How it got there is neither here nor there. That is the domain of genetics, & the job of evolutionary theory in general to synthesise the two into a larger whole. Yet it still remains possible to explain frequency change in population despite not knowing how that variation occurred in the first place.MarkThis message has been edited by mark24, 06-05-2004 06:55 AM

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There are 10 kinds of people in this world; those that understand binary, & those that don't

I know there is no reason why you must need to have been following my own course here on EVC but if the spatial differences in geological terrance indicate via macrothermodyanmics an actual value of brithplaces apriori on Earth by mechanism of dominance and recessiveness due to rotation casued thermal contanct then where natural selection FITS in DOES matter. For this particular suggestion of mine of Georgi Gladyshev's law and principle would THEN limit the amount of artifical selection due to the metric of the geology that domestic breeding would be unable to mimic with say what I will later write down (I have some of the stuff at home already and sparcely on the net) as ecosystem engineering displacing Eldgridge's anti-creationist criticism with some more sholarship on agrigulture and the reflective mind whether by God or Man and God or just Man etc etc etc.I would guess that becuase Provine tried to use the unbounded nature of artifical selection against Johnson there is likely some literature that specifies what WK was suggesting???

Arguably the entire point of population genetics is to obviate the need for individual observations such as these, they may consitute the basis of trends in the population but knowledge of these specific instnace is not neccessary to observe those trends. All of these events are automatically factored in when we look at the genetic constitution of the population over several generations. The specific cause of death/ reproduction for 1 individual is irrelevant. Handily nature itself has taken care of integrating all the relationships between individual organisms and all aspects of their environment including all other organisms in that environment.If you think for a second that it is feasible to account for every single environmental factor, or even just those contributing to a specific instance of death, affecting 1 individual let alone a population, then you are sadly mistaken, would that we had such omniscience.Of course fitness is to do with reproduction, its all about reproductive success!! But in a homogeneous population differences in reproduction will have no evolutionary significance. You can argue that by looking at an individuals reproductive success, but only in comparison to other members of the population, you can rank its 'fitness' if you define fitness solely as being the number of offspring. You can't measure an individuals fitness in an evolutionary sense however without looking at the ability of a certain trait to spread through the population.Perhaps you would be interested in the work of Lloyd Demetrius on producing a analogous framework for evolution to thermodynamics. He has a theory he terms directionality theory, which is nothing to do with teleology, it is directional in as much as it proposes that evolution is under certain specific parameters a uni-directional process leading to an increase in what he terms 'evolutionary entropy' which is a measure of the indeterminacy of the age of the mother of a randomly chosen individual.A review of this idea published in PNAS is freely available online here.Let me know what you think of this theory.TTFN,WK

As argued before.... it is shown that describing in terms of real fitness is prefferable as a fundmantal conception, over describing fitness in relative terms, when describing extinction of species for instance. The logic of relative conceptions of fitness would lead us to say that some particular variant in a species going extinct is increasing it's fitness, because it's populationshare is increasing, even while the actual numbers and rate of reproduction may be going down.So talking in terms of fitness as relative would obviously tend to exclude extinction from the set of possibilities, and as seen before, this kind of prejudicial exclusion of possibilities is what can lead to teleology. "One variant reproduces, the other variant doesn't reproduce", is included, but "one variant reproduces, and the other variant also doesn't reproduce", is excluded. The resulting theory is a "postivist" optimistic kind of theory, where one variant always reproduces. That is a total misconception of the relationship of the organism to the environment in terms of reproduction.It's not a great accomplishment to have abstracted away from the individual, because the interest of biologists is centered on the individual. Populationshares of variants can be said to be populationtraits, and these populationtraits generally have no interest except in cases of balancing selection. So then you have some variant A, that has a great share of the population, but you don't know how any individual A functions in regards to reproduction. How is that helping anything much? Trait A was photosynthesis for instance, only identified as variants with green coloring by those seeking to abstract in terms of populationshare. So how have you helped anything by ignoring how photosynthesis works in individuals?Why if a population density level can be considered a "testing" factor in terms of reproduction, why then can't the existence of another variant influencing reproduction not also be considered as simply yet another "testing" factor in the environment among the many? Why must this "testing" factor be prejudicially lifted out from the rest?It is already evolutinary significant when saying a mutation occurs, it get's tested by the environment in terms of reproduction, and it passes it reproduces. No matter what happens to all the other variants in the population, this organism evolved from it's ancestor, and another mutation may occur, and get tested again, and so on. So I don't agree that you have to look at how it spreads through a population to see anything evolutionary significant, unless you define evolution as changes in populationfrequencies.The only thing I can say about the article is that it seems to be very far away from anything that would be in a basic textbook about either evolution or natural selection. I doesn't seem to me the authors are positing some fundamental theory of natural selection or evolution.regards,
Mohammad Nor Syamsu

Dear Syamsu,The interest of doctors might be on the individual but I would deny that the focus of biologists is, most emphatically. As I pointed out, you may need to study a number of individuals to draw general conclusion but the study of any specific instance is not the purpose of biology, except in as much as it increases our knowledge of variation within the general population. Medicine which hstarted out as a great discipline of generalisation from basic anatomy on down/up and is only now really focussing on the benefits of understanding the variations between people in crafting individual treatments, having previously only seen the variation in things such as hereditary syndromes and congenital defects.You are merely being obtuse with your comments on a case where the population as a whole is decreasing. The fact that the population as a whole is decreasing does not mean that there is not still differential fitness amongst varying sub populations, it does not exclude the possibility of extinction at all. In the most extreme case where a sampler blithely ignored the numbers of the population and only measured the proportions of the variants then there could be a scenario where the frequencies of all the traits suddenly go to zero since the entire population has vanished, but it is absurd to propose this is how pop. gen. studies are intended to work. If you are trying to sample organisms for a pop. gen. study then the total population is obviously going to be an important factor to ensure you have a large enough sample to be representative of the population. Evolutionary biology is not carried out in a vacuum, it is intinsically linked to all the other many and varied branches of biology. Scientists studying the pop. gen. of a population are also likely to be studying its population dynamics. This is sheer nonsense. You seem to believe that NS/ population genetics must be able to explain everything in glorious isolation with no reference to any other field of biology. You need not understand how photosynthesis works to see that organisms with the 'green' trait are outcompeting non-green organisms, you might need to work out what was going on in photosynthesis to begin to explain exactly why that trait was leading to an increase in fitness, and if you saw that the trait only conferred a benefit in populations with access to sunlight that might set you on the right track. If you were truly looking at the genetics, in terms of the actual DNA sequence, then you might be able to isolate the specific locus/ loci of the trait and begin to dissect out the photosynthetic process genetically. It is facile to do this sort of thing with our current knowledge, the benefit of NS/ pop. Gen. is that it can help you identify interesting traits (either beneficial or detrimental) in the first place and you can then go on to find out exactly what those traits are and how they confer that benefit, ideally at least.This isn't how photosynthesis was discovered historically but it wouldn't be theoretically impossible. If you had the neccessary molecular biology and genetics knowledge, but lacked the microscope as a tool, you could probably determine much of the genetics and biochemistry of photosynthesis but you probably couldn't deduce the structure of the chloroplast although you might be able to deduce its existence if you knowledge of other areas was advanced enough. Of course whether you could ever reach that sort of depth of knowledge without having ever discovered the microscope is another question entirely.What is 'real' fitness? I can understand you wanting to see arguments at a basic textbook level, in fact I highly reccommend that you start reading some textbooks dealing with evolution at some point, it really would help.If you don't see the relevance of this paper to the one you reference in the OP then I don't see what you saw in that first paper. The first paper proposed that statistical methods such as those used in thermodynamics were the appropriate analogies for the volutionary process. The paper I referenced show a specific appraoch where a statistical method analogous to that used to model uni-directional phenomenon in thermodynamics was used to model a uni-directional phenomenon in evolution, strenghtening the proposal that probabilistic thermodynamics, and not deterministic newtonian mechanics, is the right way to go to look for classical physical phenomena analogous to those we see in evolution.TTFN,WKP.S. Do you still intend to contact the MODs?P.P.S. Any feelings on the questions in my previous P.S.s?