Cornelius Hunter seems very confused.
…This brings us back to the UC Berkeley “Understanding Evolution” website. It abuses science in its utterly unfounded claim that “natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.”
In fact natural selection, even at its best, does not “produce” anything. Natural selection does not and cannot influence the construction of any adaptations, amazing or not. If a mutation occurs which improves differential reproduction, then it propagates into future generations. Natural selection is simply the name given to that process. It selects for survival that which already exists. Natural selection has no role in the mutation event. It does not induce mutations, helpful or otherwise, to occur. According to evolutionary theory every single mutation, leading to every single species, is a random event with respect to need.
He has forgotten what “adaptation” means. Of course he is correct that “Natural selection is simply the name given to [differential reproduction]”. And that (as far as we know), “every single mutation …is a random event with respect to need”.
And “adaptation” is the name we give to variants that are preferentially reproduced. So while he would be correct to say that “natural selection” is NOT the name we give to “mutation” (duh); it IS the name we give to the very process that SELECTS those mutations that promote reproduction. i.e. the process that produces adaptation.
Cornelius should spend more time at the Understanding Evolution website.
ETA: CharlieM points out below that…
When CH says that natural selection does not produce adaptations he is talking about individual organisms. He is discussing mutations in individuals and adaptations in individuals. Natural selection has nothing to do with the first appearance of an adaptation in an individual.
And that of course is the confusion – I hadn’t seen just where Cornelius’s confusion lay. Because, of course, the term “adaptation” is a population-level concept. At the level of the individual, the equivalent would be “advantageous mutation”. And that makes the Understanding Evolution website absolutely correct.
If even freedom ‘evolves’, folks, then what doesn’t evolve?
Properties of things that don’t reproduce.
I understand CH to be saying exactly what you are saying. However, I’ve noticed this about anti-IDist patterns of interpretation; it seems they go out of their way (subconsciouly, of course) to interpret anything an IDist says as being in some way erroneous wrt “actually understanding” basic evolutionary terms and meanings.
When IDists stop “saying things” and start “doing things” then perhaps the outlook for ID will change.
Wjm:
it seems they go out of their way (subconsciouly, of course) to interpret anything an IDist says as being in some way erroneous wrt “actually understanding” basic evolutionary terms and meanings.
Dr.Hunter claims not to be an IDist, only an impartial voice who has no personal opinion whether evolution is true.
It used to be that when IDists would say things like this they would at least try to back it up with evidence or reasoned argument, but it seems to me that more and more ID has been reduced to a series of mantras. The more they’re repeated the more IDists take them as self-evident truths that don’t need to be backed up.
No, he is not saying what I am saying, William. That was the point of my post. Check again.
That’s a hoary old reductionist “argument” from creationists/IDists, used as if it were some kind of revelation. It’s like saying that artificial selection didn’t produce dogs, because artificial selection only keeps what already exists. Somehow, though, repeated selection manages to “produce” a yorkie from a wolf, if not in isolation from other processes.
However, IDists/creationists continue to convey opinions of evolution that are erroneous wrt to actually understanding basic evolutionary terms and meanings. The need for these terms and meanings to be “wrong” appears to be a strong driver to do what is necessary to try to make them appear wrong, meaningless, or even religious.
Glen Davidson
Cornelius says that the claim that:
is unfounded. He then proceeds to explain that selection is that name that we give to the process whereby:
which is exactly what adaptation is – the propagation into future generations of variants that improve reproduction.
So his argument is self-contradictory.
Maybe he thinks Natural Selection can’t produce the ‘amazing’ ones …
Well, his argument in that piece seems to be that it isn’t even in theory. But as usual, he’s got the theory wrong.
William may claim that:
but it’s not “subconscious” at all – the fact is that most ID arguments against evolution turn out to be “erroneous wrt “actually understanding” basic evolutionary terms and meanings”.
And this is a case in point.
Another one is “selection can only eliminate bad mutations, it can’t select good ones”.
Another is “selection can’t create anything”, which is true but only inasmuch as “selection” is the name we give to the process by which novelties are selected (duh), not the process by which the novelties are generated.
The misunderstanding of course arises from the fact that there aren’t two separate processes at all – referring to them as separate processes (variation creation and selection) is just a manner of speaking. There is one process, which is the generation of novel variants of self-replicating organisms within an environment. If those variants have heritable variance in reproductive success in that environment, then we call that adaptive evolution “by natural selection”. If they don’t, then we just get the usual dripfeed of neutral variants into the population, potentially enhancing its capacity to undergo adaptive evolution if the environment changes.
Ever considered the reason that many ID supporters support ID is because they don’t understand much about biology? Look at how Sal is being shown up here for an example: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/?p=28360&cpage=1#comment-73750
The way I see it is that you are both right in your own way but CH is being more consistent.
When you talk of ” those mutations that promote reproduction” you are talking of a mutation to an individual organism, but when you say that natural selection produces adaptations you have jumped to the species level or above. For example penguin’s flippers are adapted for swimming, it is a feature of the group.
When CH says that natural selection does not produce adaptations he is talking about individual organisms. He is discussing mutations in individuals and adaptations in individuals. Natural selection has nothing to do with the first appearance of an adaptation in an individual.
No, indeed. Is somebody suggesting otherwise?
No, you have jumped to the population level. Which is the level at which adaptive evolution takes place.
This is what Cornelius has missed.
He has confused “adaptation” with “variant”.
Though I congratulate you, Charlie, on pinpointing the problem. You are right that Cornelius has interpreted the word “adaptation” to mean a novel genetic variant that turns out to be reproductively advantageous*.
But that’s not how the word in used in biology, and therefore his claim that the Understanding Evolution website is wrong, is, well, wrong.
The website is using the word as it is used in evolutionary biology, and, as such, it is correct: natural selection is what produces adaptations – populations of organisms adapted to their environment, such as the chameleon, most of which of course have involved the accumulation (through natural selection) of many many genetic variants.
*ETA: this would normally be called an “advantageous mutation”, not an “adaptation”.
CharlieM,
It was still an adaptation in an original single species, because it caused differential reproductive success within that population (on the evolutionary paradigm, that is). It probably went through a few rounds of tuning too. Since then, the original species has split into several, with deeper branching, but they retain the ancestral feature.
Of course you would think that.
However, as I said, I read what CH wrote, and it means exactly the same thing to me as your “correction”, and it seems to me that if another anti-IDist had said something similar, because you subconsciously assume they know what they’re talking about, you would interpret them differently.
It’s what I refer to as what one assumes exists “between the lines” or “behind the words”; or blank-space assumptions. I think this is probably behind a lot of claims about “quote-mining” – people with one perspective interpret sequences of words one way because of the blank-space assumptions; others interpret the same sequence entirely differently.
That’s happened to me many times here when I first started posting here and continues to this day. Certain members here still insist that their blank space assumptions about me are the truth no matter how often I try to correct them.
In the beginning, I would get responses from people that simply made no sense wrt what I had actually written, and back then the problem was primarily that everyone assumed I was a Christian. It took a lot of time and repetition to disabuse them of that notion. Even after I repeated it several times, the same people would still respond to something I wrote in a way that only made sense if I matched their boxed version of a Christian.
I think this is a pretty common cognitive bias issue.
No, I would not. It is simply wrong to say that “natural selection” cannot produce “adaptation”. It’s key to the entire concept of “natural selection” that it does. If “natural selection” didn’t produce “adaptation” then it wouldn’t be “natural selection” as Darwin proposed it.
He has, as Charlie points out, taken “adaptation” to be the equivalent of “beneficial mutation”. But that isn’t what the word means in evolutionary theory and it’s not what the word means on the Berkeley website.
Cornelius is NOT saying what I’m saying, and it wouldn’t matter who said it – it still wouldn’t be what I’m saying and it would still be wrong.
Now your own reading may differ from mine, but, with respect, William, that’s because you don’t know much about evolutionary theory.
Which is the point. People like Cornelius (and you) think they’ve seen a problem with evolutionary theory, but what has in fact happened is that they’ve misunderstood either the theory or the terminology.
Individuals may have novel mutations, which may or may not be advantageous. Populations have adaptations, and they have them because that’s what natural selection does. It’s why often “natural selection” is called “adaptive evolution” as opposed to, for instance, “drift” which is also evolution, but not adaptive.
There is also “conservative evolution” which is not actively adaptive, but maintains the population at a local optimum (counteracts drift).
Yes, I recall that happening, William. However, it is not what is happening here. What is happening here is that Cornelius made a mistake.
Perhaps it would help William if you explained to us precisely what you think Elizabeth’s “blank space assumptions” are.
Tamara Knight,
Hi Tamara and welcome to TSZ.
It’s not “of course”, it’s something we have learned from experience. In other words, the insinuation that we would just be somehow automatically thinking you are misunderstanding the concepts because we are in opposition in this debate, is in fact wrong.
You have people sitting here in this very thread doing that very thing, arguing on the basis of their own wrong understanding. So we don’t have to assume anything about you guys, we can sit here and directly read how you fail to comprehend the subject.
It is a curious phenomenon that you are so intensely biased against anything that has to do with evolution you apparently feel the need to protest even the simplest and most obvious things.
It’s like the creationists who pay lip-service to their acceptance of “microevolution”, then when a case of microevolution is showed to them, they say it’s actually not evolution at all but just “adaptation” and shouldn’t even be called evolution.
You know that when your opposition feels the need to even rename the concepts out of a fear of association with certain ideas, they have lost their minds and are no longer thinking clearly or rationally about the subject.
William J. Murray,
Nah, what’s behind claims about quote mining is … quote mining. If you – for example – copy-paste some excerpts from climate scientists’ emails from a denialist website, that’s precisely what’s happening – quote mining.
It is certainly possible that, in wider context, the simple reading of the text is not changed. But this is so rarely the case, it has become a knee-jerk reaction for some of us to research the wider context immediately. Because so often, the omitted context changes everything. We don’t just interpret the bare pasted words differently. We restore context. The quote miner isn’t interested in context, but is only interested in the bare words.
One is reminded of the classic creationist quotemine of Darwin’s section on the gradual evolution of the eye.
In any case, I didn’t assume anything. I simply read Cornelius’s claim. Which is wrong.
I didn’t assume he was wrong. Indeed he got some parts right. This is right, for instance:
So is this:
I mean, it is true that this is the postulate of current evolutionary theory. It may or may not turn out to be true.
What is not true is this part:
Adaptation is precisely what natural selection, according to evolutionary theory, produces. It’s virtually the definition of what natural selection produces, and in Darwin’s formulation it is.
So no, I did not “assume” Cornelius was wrong, or had misunderstood evolutionary theory. I read what he wrote, and saw that he had.
I have a different reading of where Hunter went wrong. He took the Berkeley website to be saying that natrual selection is the cause of the process. And it’s not; it is the name of the causal process. Perhaps the writers of the Berkeley site were simply not being careful enough?
But it certainly doesn’t follow that we don’t understand the causal processes that generate adaptive traits in populations, and that the term “natural selection” refers to some of those causal processes.
No, they were being careful enough, because the only people I have ever met who consistently get these misunderstandings are creationists and ID proponents.
I have never labored under any of these silly misconceptions they constantly bring up.
I think he went wrong there too.
But I do think Charlie nailed it – he applied the concept to the wrong unit.
You believe it is correct to say that natural selection produces adaptations. How can you be so sure?
That guanine nanocrystals in individual chameleons are the result of mutations and that colour changes in poulations of chameleons are, to borrow a phrase from climate skeptic Michael Crichton, postulated but not demonstrated.
From whyfiles.org :
If that is what you believe happened then apparently it did happen.
My point is not whether it can or can’t (although clearly it can, as has been observed in lab, field and in silico), but that Hunter is simply wrong to say that natural selection can’t produce it.
He has, as you pointed out, interpreted “adaptation” to mean “advantageous variant” i.e. an individual mutation that subsequently proves advantageous.
Natural selection can’t produce “advantageous variants”. What it does produce is adapted populations – which is what the Berkeley page is saying.
Now, you can disagree about whether the theory is correct or not (there’s very good evidence that it is). But what is a simple matter of fact is that under evolutionary theory, adaptation is precisely what natural selection produces.
Naturally selected changes would be advantageous.
Changes that fix by drift would be adventitious.
What a bizarre and confused OP.
I can’t even find any support for it’s claims on the web site in question which does in fact have articles on adaptations.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/0_0_0/evo_31
Not only that but please see also:
http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/ridley/a-z/Adaptation.asp
More like The Twilight Zone.
This might be better . .
“natural selection” is the process whereby non-satisficing (“not even good enough”) traits are removed from populations because not enough of the individual organisms with those traits live long enough to transmit the hereditable basis of those traits to the next generation, but there can many different causal factors as to why that turns out to be the case, when it does.
We should be careful of assuming that all traits are adaptive. Some of them could be “spandrels”, and some of them are adventitious.
There’s also the very interesting phenomenon of ‘niche construction’, in which an organism’s behavior constructs the ecological niche that it occupies. Sterelny (in The Evolved Apprentice) argues that much of what is unique to human culture and cognition is due to niche construction — namely, the ecological niche of cooperative foraging first begun by australopithecines, or perhaps by early Homo.
I myself consider it likely that we see here a version of the Baldwin effect: the success of cooperative foraging in australopithecines acted as a selective pressure for the cognitive and morphological changes across the Australopithecus–Homo transition, so that hominids got increasingly better at cooperative foraging. If the behavioral changes drove the subsequent anatomical changes, that would explain why we see stone tools older than any Homo remains.
4.2 Adaptation and Fortuitous Benefit
The answer is that increased running speed evolved because it benefited the organisms. Speed is an individual adaptation; the fact that the group is better off just shows that increased running speed provides a fortuitous group benefit. Running fast is not a group adaptation.
– Elliott Sober. Philosophy of Biology
The real answer is much simpler. Cornelius Hunter is deliberately misrepresenting what the Understanding Evolution site is saying. The UE site specifically defines “natural selection” as the combined process of mutation+differential reproduction+heredity. They provide a whole page to explain the concept here and repeat that definition on the page Hunter is grousing about here.
Hunter’s is deliberately ignoring UE’s definition in favor of the much narrower “natural selection” as only the differential reproduction part, then hammering away at his cartoon strawman.
Such childish rhetorical games are about all this particular Creationist can muster.
That is false.
Here is the actual text:
IOW, natural selection is THE RESULT. That’s not a definition of natural selection.
“Arrival of the Fittest” deals with how variations occur. It’s the side of the process that Cornilius is puzzled by.
It is all about nature pushing selection on a population. Including where a mutation gives a adavantage for some reason. Doesn’t have to be mutations but simply, like island creatures that shrink, like deer/mammoths, it just leaves the smaller ones as the most healthy and so breed more.
Then drift mutations etc etc are invoked as needed.
yet the devil is in the mutations. They need heaps of them for selection to build the complexity and diversity of nature.
Very unlikely this could take place. Very very unlikely it did take place.
They took a minor detail in nature and made a unreasonable hypothesis.
Moved a post to Guano. Please check the rules for these threads.
The confusion is because “natural selection” is a metaphor for a process. The metaphor isn’t all that good, because there is no selecting agent that is the analog of the human breeder. But the RESULT is as though there were an active breeder.
So you can either call “natural selection” the “result” of heritable differential reproduction, or you can also call “natural selection” the process of heritable differential reproduction as a kind of anthropomorophisation of that process.
It doesn’t matter. It’s just the term Darwin used to explain his theory.
The point is that heritable variation in reproductive success gives rise to adaptation. And we call that process – or, alternatively, that result, “natural selection”.
Either way, adaptation is not the variance-generation aspect, it’s the aspect by which reproductively successful variants build up in the population, thus causing the population to adapt to the current environment.
That is poorly put. Can you give context? Page number? Source?
ETA: it may not be poorly put. By “group adaptations” he may be referring to natural selection at the level of the population, whereby populations with a particular adaptation survive and those without go extinct, e.g. adaptations like queen/worker/drone systems, and distinguishing that from adaptations like long legs, which are are a property of the group, but promote individual reproductive success, not the group’s survival at the expense the reproductive success of some individuals (as with worker ants).
That’s why it would be good to see context.
This is not brilliantly put (in your link):
Normally one would describe as an adaptation a feature that is universal in a population, and they are indeed, produced by natural selection i.e. by differential reproductive success.
Typical examples are those they give – adaptations to a desert environment for instance – water retaining features in plants; cooling features in animals.
None of these are the results of single genetic variants that are “common in” the population. They are the results of many genetic variants that are common TO the population.
But the point is, as again Charlie pointed out, the difference between using the term “adaptation” to refer to a novel genetic variant (which is the sense in which Cornelius is using the term, and is indeed NOT “produced by natural selection”) and using the term to refer to a feature of a population (big ears; water-retaining capacity; habit of burrowing under the sand during the day) that IS produced by natural selection.
And it is that latter sense that is the way the term is used in biology. And in that sense, it is not simply produced BY “natural selection” – it is another way of describing the same thing.
The page is not actually wrong – a feature that was merely “common” but not “universal” in a population, and was so because it was advantageous, would still be an “adaptation” and still be produced by “natural selection” , but it is the prevalence that is the “adaptation” that is produced by “natural selection” not the genetic variant itself, which is produced by mutation, not natural selection.
I would rewrite it something like:
“An adaptation is a feature of a population that provides some improved function in that environment. Adaptations are produced by natural selection, the name we give to the process whereby genetic variants that improve function in that environment become more prevalent in the population”.
Yes. But when referring to an individual variant, not produced by natural selection but by mutation, we call it an “advantageous mutation” i.e. one with a positive selection coefficient.
We only call it an “adaptation” when we are referring to its resulting prevalence in a population – in other words “adaptation” is the population-level term, not the individual-level term.
Of course genetic variants can also become prevalent by drift, and we can only tell statistically that some are drift and some are adaptations, at least unless we do a Lenski-type experiment.
But by the time we have an actual discernable polygeneic feature, like big ears or spines, or webbed feet, it’s not an “advantageous mutation” but a fully fledged adaptation that is exactly what Darwin proposed “natural selection” as the explanation for.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again:
– Graham Bell, The Masterpiece of Nature
So, mutations occur which give their bearers better or worse chances of survival / reproduction. Better ones could be lost, and worse increase (because of chance). But such is the the nature of probabilistic processes, populations will still tend to become enriched in those mutations that give better chances, and impoverished in those that give worse. They thereby adapt to their environment, in a way analogous to the way an individual may adapt to altitude or a hot climate. The process is adaptation, the result an adaptation.
‘But it’s only a result’. ‘It’s tautologous’. ‘Selection doesn’t do anything’. Yeah, whatevs.
Elizabeth, you say that Cornelius has confused “adaptation” with “variant”. but from NCSE we have this
It seems that there is disagreement among biologists about the precise definition of “adaptation”. The first definition equates “adaptation” with a type of “variant”. I take it you disagree with this definition?
I realise, because we need to understand what is being communicated, we should use precise language, but I sometimes think that over-analysing leads to a failure of communication. From my simple point of view I thought that an adaptation was a trait belonging to an organism and a varient was the organism itself.
I have understood “adaptation” and “adaptive trait” to mean the same thing. Are they different, and if so, can you explain the difference to me?
I believe that an “adaptation” (adaptive trait) is an integral part of a being which itself is an individual expression of archetypal form. You cannot understand the adaptation without understanding the whole organism to which it belongs.
And you cannot understand an organism or a population of organisms in isolation, they are part of the unity of life. Life is not a collection of separate entities, it is a unified being which grows and differentiates but always remains a unity. In the same way an individual animal grows and differentiates from a single egg but throughout its existence it always remains a unity. External forces have an effect on these unified entities but their essence is maintained by internal forces. Life is not the haphazard spread of forms vying for their own niche, it is the unfolding of an entity which was there in potential from the beginning. In other words there is a direction to evolution.
CharlieM,
How does an entire collection of such entities come to be amended in the same way, if not by, ultimately, descending from the same original ‘trait-bearing’ ancestor? (By ‘trait’, I merely mean a specific genetic amendment – a mutation).
IMO, the problem CH had was with the term “produced” (which is why he isolated it in scare quotes) and that is primarily where EL’s interpretation went off the rails – not with the term “adaptation”. If we assume CH meant the same thing as EL – an adaptation as a feature that benefits a population, and not as a single advantageous mutation in one organism – the disagreement becomes about what “produced” means, and what “produced” is referring to; the feature, or its distribution through the population.
What did NS “produce”? It did not produce the feature; it “produced” that feature’s distribution through the population. In his post, CH is making it clear that he’s talking about the construction of the feature, not its distribution through the population.
The glossary at the website CH refers to says this about adaptation:
Note: it doesn’t say anything about a “population” or the feature’s distribution in a population. It also seems to impute teleology via the word “for”. It would seem that whomever wrote the glossary at that site is at least as “confused” as EL thinks CH is.
On the Adaptation page, it says:
Note: it doesn’t say that an adaptation is the commonality or the distributed nature of the feature; it says that an adaptation is (1) a feature (2) that is common in a population. It is at best grossly misleading to claim that NS produced a feature that is common in a population because it did not produce the feature in question at all; it produced its commonality in the population.
Now we come to phrase CH quoted: “..natural selection can produce amazing adaptations.” Using EL’s and the Adaption page definitions, the site is saying this where CH quoted: “natural selection can produce amazing features that are common in a population”.
Since the site is aimed, one assumes, at those relatively new to biology and evolutionary theory, we can see how this is a completely misleading statement. NS produces no features; it produces distributions of a feature that was generated by mutation. This is exactly the point that CH rightly makes.
Each of us is an example of such a unified entity. All of your body cells have descended from one ancestral cell. That cell did not have the traits of a liver cell or a neuron, but they were within it in potential. Life as one unified entity developed from an original organism. That organism did not have traits such as consciousness or the ability to see the stars, but these abilities were within it in potential.
A mutation is not a trait. It might have an input in producing a trait, but by itself it is not a trait.