Well let’s look at what natural selection is-
“Natural selection is the result of differences in survival and reproduction among individuals of a population that vary in one or more heritable traits.” Page 11 “Biology: Concepts and Applications” Starr fifth edition
“Natural selection is the simple result of variation, differential reproduction, and heredity—it is mindless and mechanistic.” UBerkley
“Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view.” Dawkins in “The Blind Watchmaker”?
“Natural selection is therefore a result of three processes, as first described by Darwin:
Variation
Inheritance
Fecunditywhich together result in non-random, unequal survival and reproduction of individuals, which results in changes in the phenotypes present in populations of organisms over time.”- Allen McNeill prof. introductory biology and evolution at Cornell University
OK so it is a result of three processes- ie an output. But is it really non-random as Allen said? Nope, whatever survives to reproduce survives to reproduce. And that can be any number of variations taht exist in a population.
What drives the output? The inputs.
The variation is said to be random, ie genetic accidents/ mistakes.
With sexually reproducing organisms it is still a crap-shoot as to what gets inherited. For example if a male gets a beneficial variation to his Y chromosome but sires all daughters, that beneficial variation gets lost no matter how many offspring he has.
Fecundity/ differential reproduction- Don’t know until it happens.
Can’t tell what variation will occur. Can’t tell if any of the offspring will inherit even the most beneficial variation and the only way to determine differential reproduction is follow the individuals for their entire reproducing age.
Then there can be competing “beneficial” variations.
In the end it all boils down to whatever survives to reproduce, survives to reproduce.
Evolutionists love to pretend that natural selection is some magical ratchet.
So what does it do?
The Origin of Theoretical Population Genetics (University of Chicago Press, 1971), reissued in 2001 by William Provine:
Natural selection does not act on anything, nor does it select (for or against), force, maximize, create, modify, shape, operate, drive, favor, maintain, push, or adjust. Natural selection does nothing….Having natural selection select is nifty because it excuses the necessity of talking about the actual causation of natural selection. Such talk was excusable for Charles Darwin, but inexcusable for evolutionists now. Creationists have discovered our empty “natural selection” language, and the “actions” of natural selection make huge, vulnerable targets. (pp. 199-200)
Thanks for the honesty Will.
Chapter IV of prominent geneticist Giuseppe Sermonti’s book Why is a Fly Not a Horse? is titled “Wobbling Stability”. In that chapter he discusses what I have been talking about in other threads- that populations oscillate. The following is what he has to say which is based on thorough scientific investigation:
Sexuality has brought joy to the world, to the world of the wild beasts, and to the world of flowers, but it has brought an end to evolution. In the lineages of living beings, whenever absent-minded Venus has taken the upper hand, forms have forgotten to make progress. It is only the husbandman that has improved strains, and he has done so by bullying, enslaving, and segregating. All these methods, of course, have made for sad, alienated animals, but they have not resulted in new species. Left to themselves, domesticated breeds would either die out or revert to the wild state—scarcely a commendable model for nature’s progress.
(snip a few paragraphs on peppered moths)
Natural Selection, which indeed occurs in nature (as Bishop Wilberforce, too, was perfectly aware), mainly has the effect of maintaining equilibrium and stability. It eliminates all those that dare depart from the type—the eccentrics and the adventurers and the marginal sort. It is ever adjusting populations, but it does so in each case by bringing them back to the norm. We read in the textbooks that, when environmental conditions change, the selection process may produce a shift in a population’s mean values, by a process known as adaptation. If the climate turns very cold, the cold-adapted beings are favored relative to others.; if it becomes windy, the wind blows away those that are most exposed; if an illness breaks out, those in questionable health will be lost. But all these artful guiles serve their purpose only until the clouds blow away. The species, in fact, is an organic entity, a typical form, which may deviate only to return to the furrow of its destiny; it may wander from the band only to find its proper place by returning to the gang.
Everything that disassembles, upsets proportions or becomes distorted in any way is sooner or later brought back to the type. There has been a tendency to confuse fleeting adjustments with grand destinies, minor shrewdness with signs of the times.
It is true that species may lose something on the way—the mole its eyes, say, and the succulent plant its leaves, never to recover them again. But here we are dealing with unhappy, mutilated species, at the margins of their area of distribution—the extreme and the specialized. These are species with no future; they are not pioneers, but prisoners in nature’s penitentiary.
Not such a powerful designer mimic after all.
But there is one thing it can do– it can undo what artificial selection has done.
As I said, it is an artefact in the same way that the result of just about any medical trial, or meta-analysis of multiple trials, is an artefact – that is to say, not an artefact at all. You don’t do irony, do you?
It is an ‘artefact’ that causes populations to adapt to their circumstances, which is a pretty powerful designer mimic, if adaptation were the goal. .
NS is a result and whatever is good enough is the result. And ns needs to do more than what you are saying before it could be considered a designer mimic.
Nope, it is also a process. The result does not occur without something happening on the way – specifically, organisms living, dying and reproducing, datum points in the bigger picture. The result of a football match does not occur other than through playing the game!
Well, you certainly need a source of variation (mutation). And recombination, for a much more souped-up version of the Mk1 process. Beyond that … nope, I think that’s everything…
what in hell is a ‘designer mimic’ anyway? A natural process that copies what we humans do? Good one. Not only does the universe supposedly THINK like we do, it has to share our love of making stuff. These arrogant apes – the universe is like a very big version of US! LOL.
Natural selection is the result of three processes. If you don’t like that then take it up with the experts who defined it as such.
And a designer mimic is something that can design structures that would normally require a designer. IOW ns is said to have designed things like flagella…
The inconsistency leads to the wobbling stability mentioned in the OP.
Who says that natural selection “designs” anything? Design requires an agent (and one with intention, at that) , and there are those, I believe, who say (repeatedly, and ad nauseam) the natural selection is not an agent, but a result.
The whole purpose of natural selection is explain design without without a designer. Perhaps you shoud read “On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection”
Maybe this will help:
Darwin’s greatest discovery: Design without designer
I refer you (and possibly them) to Mr Darwin, who coined the term – indeed it is in the original name of his book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
“by means of” would certainly suggest a process, or mechanism, and that is how it is routinely characterised, throughout the literature. Of course, it does not matter greatly either way. It is what it is, and I guess we could redefine Darwin’s term. But Darwin was making the explicit comparison with Artificial Selection – that is a process whereby a breeder selects those organisms best suited to his plan, not the result of that process. The signal that NS (as opposed to pure Drift) has been in operation can only determined after the fact – in that sense, it is a result. But it is not solely a result, So I disagree with your authorities. It’s allowed, isn’t it? Do you agree with them on everything about evolutionary biology?
What makes you think flagella normally require a designer?
Yes darwin tried to make the comparison to artificial selection but even then he knew that nature did not select. And yes you can disagree, however there is the evidence factor.
1- No evidence that necessity and chance can produce one and
2- “Our ability to be confident of the design of the cilium or intracellular transport rests on the same principles to be confident of the design of anything: the ordering of separate components to achieve an identifiable function that depends sharply on the components.”– Behe
Joe G,
“Yes darwin tried to make the comparison to artificial selection but even then he knew that nature did not select”
How do you know this? Surprise us, and provide a citation.
You appear to have broken the “assume good faith” rule on this blog.
Why would natural selection not apply to any population of imperfect replicators, regardless of how that population originally came about?
Why exactly would none of those things apply to my robot example?
The whole purpose of ID is to explain design.
Go on then.
From that abstract;
“This was Darwin’s fundamental discovery, that there is a process that is creative, although not conscious.”
Do you agree that what Ayala referred to as “design” – and yes, he used inverted commas to indicate a loose use of the word – in nature is an unconscious process? If so, what need for a “Designer”?
Personally, I don’t see Design in Nature. Never have. So I don’t really need to view NS in those terms. People who do see Design in Nature are unlikely to be persuaded that some poxy incremental process of mutation, recombination and selective fixation is up to the job.
But for my part, I am totally unpersuaded that the complexity of some life-forms requires invocation of additional entities. And, further, why an answer on that simple intellectual question has bearing upon some kind of ‘purpose’ for us. We build tools and machines for a direct purpose, and then throw ’em away – we certainly don’t build them so we can give them a happy eternity. Complex life-forms have no apparent ‘purpose’ other than to survive in the niche to which they are ‘tuned’, just like simple ones. Then they too get thrown away.
Allan,
That is all fine and dandy but the bottom-line is you don’t have any scientific explanation for our existence.
Designers design- then, as with archaeology and forensics, we study the design so we can understand it.
Because there still isn’t any evidence that natural selection can design anything.
I know it because I have read it. He did like “survival of the fittest”.
Look it up…
Fuck you 😛
And what conclusions have you come to so far? What have you “understood”?
Off topic. Please try and stay on topic!
Of course I do – evolutionary amendment! There’s a lot of literature on the subject, you know. Before that, nucleosynthesis. Before that, the Big Bang. Before that .. well, I dunno, and neither do you. There are gaps in our understanding, but that’s why science is an ongoing pursuit.
If designers were involved anywhere in that process, all fine and dandy. But I would require some evidence that they can exist outside of biology before I would accept even the possibility that they are involved in the design OF biology, let alone the materials from which biology is formed – that seems a completely ridiculous notion, on the face of it.
Strawman.
Next?
joe, you’re obviously sadly mistaken about pretty much everything.
No evidence for your claim.
Strawman.
No evidence for your claim.
Next?
Off topic.
Strawman.
Next?
Appeal to authority.
Next?
Everything you say is moot.
Appeal to authority, and an appeal to a crackpot (behe).
Next?
Bzzt. Wrong.
Perhaps you should join the 21st century.
Next?
False.
Not even wrong.
No evidence for your claim.
Next?
I thought you said that natural selection can’t do anything?
Make up your ….., nevermind.
Off topic.
And I don’t think the climate has ever claimed that it can account for any organisms in the first place or any other place.
Next?
Creodont, I moved a bunch of your posts to guano.
Please use some other venue for your slanging match with Joe G. Geez, it’s like the back of the school bus in here, sometimes.
Comments on moderation moved to Moderation
No, Allan, I have read the literature and there isn’t any evidence for your position and no way to even test it.
lol.
Yes, you are a little obtuse loser.
Enjoy it while it lasts Joe.
You are going to be a little obtuse loser for a long, long time.
I don’t know if I can enjoy anything for that long… 😛
I bet your kids are real proud of their dad. Do they read what you write on the internet Joe?
Yes they are and yes they do.
They also know that evoTARDs are cowards who couldn’t support their position if their lives depended on it.
You don’t seem to have a position to support. ID for you is whatever the other guy says but the opposite.
Prove you are not a coward. Support your own position! Here and now!
Natural selection can’t do it, as evidenced by the OP and all your “evidence”.
You claimed you had a replacement waiting in the wings.
Now would be the time to explain what that replacement is.
If not now, when? What are you waiting for?
Good. Just checking.
I question if that replacement exists.
So Joe, as I’m assuming you are posting in good faith I assume that you have a replacement for the failed evolutionism, just like you say you do.
So what is it? When will you say if not now?
I have said it all on my blog. And I know you do not post in good faith.
I have said it all already. As I said, you seem to have issues that go beyond normal tard