I would like to begin by congratulating Kantian Naturalist on his recent post, Solving Wallace’s Problem and Resolving Darwin’s Doubt, which squarely faces the epistemological issues raised by Darwin and Wallace, regarding the reliability of human knowledge. In this post, I’d like to explain why I don’t think Kantian Naturalist’s statement of the problem quite gets it right, and why I believe the solution he puts forward is a flawed one.
Wallace’s problem
Let’s begin with Wallace’s difficulty, which he discussed towards the end of his review of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Elements of Geology, which was published in the April 1869 issue of the Quarterly Review. On page 392 of the review, Wallace expresses his astonishment at the fact that people in all ethnic groups have brains with virtually identical capacities, regardless of their level of intellectual development: “Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.” Wallace rhetorically asked: “How, then, was an organ developed so far beyond the needs of its possessor?” Wallace applied the same argument to the organs of speech, remarking that “among the lowest savages with the least copious vocabularies, the capacity of uttering a variety of distinct articulate sounds, and of applying to them an almost infinite amount of modulation and inflection, is not in any way inferior to that of the higher races.” Once again, the level of development struck Wallace as biologically superfluous: “An instrument has been developed in advance of the needs of its possessor.” Wallace proposed that just as man has “directed the action of the laws of variation, multiplication, and survival, for his own purposes” when artificially breeding crops and domestic animals, so too, a Higher Intelligence has “guided the same laws for nobler ends… in the development of the human race.”
It is worth noting that the foregoing argument of Wallace’s is a purely biological argument: natural selection lacks foresight, and is therefore unable to account for the development of an organ which will be biologically advantageous in the future, but which (he believed) confers no advantage at present, in many human societies. This argument is quite distinct from Wallace’s philosophical argument, made in the same review: “Neither natural selection nor the more general theory of evolution can give any account whatever of the origin of sensational or conscious life.” The laws of Nature could generate complex bodies through the process of natural selection, but these laws “cannot even be conceived as endowing the newly-arranged atoms with consciousness.” (I am reminded here of Thomas Nagel’s claim, in his now-famous paper, What is it like to be a bat?, that “Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem really intractable.”) Nor can any law of evolution account for “the moral and higher intellectual nature of man,” in Wallace’s view.
If we examine Wallace’s biological argument, we find that it was answered fairly comprehensively by Thomas Henry Huxley in his 1871 essay, Mr. Darwin’s Critics. First, Huxley pointed out that the so-called “savage” races faced cognitive challenges far more formidable than those faced by people living in “advanced” societies:
…[C]onsider that even an Australian [Aborigine] can make excellent baskets and nets, and neatly fitted and beautifully balanced spears, that he learns to use these so as to be able to transfix a quartern loaf at sixty yards; and that very often, as in the case of the American Indians, the language of a savage exhibits complexities which a well-trained European finds it difficult to master: consider that every time a savage tracks [176] his game he employs a minuteness of observation, and an accuracy of inductive and deductive reasoning which, applied to other matters, would assure some reputation to a man of science, and I think we need ask no further why he possesses such a fair supply of brains. In complexity and difficulty, I should say that the intellectual labour of a “good hunter or warrior” considerably exceeds that of an ordinary Englishman.
Additionally, Huxley contended that there was a strong selective effect favoring individuals possessing “intellectual or aesthetic excellence,” even in the most technologically backward societies:
The savage who can amuse his fellows by telling a good story over the nightly fire, is held by them in esteem and rewarded, in one way or another, for so doing–in other words, it is an advantage to him to possess this power. He who can carve a paddle, or the figure-head of a canoe better, similarly profits beyond his duller neighbour. He who counts a little better than others, gets most yams when barter is going on, and forms the shrewdest estimate of the numbers of an opposing tribe… If we admit, as Mr. Wallace does, that the lowest savages are not raised “many grades above the elephant and the ape;” and if we further admit, as I contend must be admitted, that the conditions of social life tend, powerfully, to [179] give an advantage to those individuals who vary in the direction of intellectual or aesthetic excellence, what is there to interfere with the belief that these higher faculties, like the rest, owe their development to natural selection?
In my humble opinion, Huxley got the better of Wallace in this exchange, leaving Wallace’s argument from the alleged surplus capacity of the human brain in tatters. I am therefore utterly mystified at Kantian Naturalist’s assertion, in his post, that the answer to “Wallace’s problem,” as he calls it, required not only a philosophical revolution (viz. the notion that language is logically prior to thought, and not merely the vehicle by which thoughts are communicated), but additionally, scientific developments in the fields of “niche construction theory, embodied-embedded cognitive science, comparative primatology, and paleoanthropology (none of which were available to Wallace or Darwin).”
As we saw above, Wallace’s philosophical argument against the mind being a product of natural selection rested on the claim that there was a sharp discontinuity between conscious and unconscious creatures, and between humans, with their moral and intellectual capacities, and other animals, which lacked these capacities. Once again, we find that replies were forthcoming from the scientific community, even back in Wallace’s day. In his work, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1st edition, 1871), Charles Darwin argued that the difference between man and the apes was one of degree rather than kind, and that it was dwarfed by the far greater differences in mental capacities between apes and the “lower” animals:
If no organic being excepting man had possessed any mental power, or if his powers had been of a wholly different nature from those of the lower animals, then we should never have been able to convince ourselves that our high faculties had been gradually developed. But it can be clearly shewn that there is no fundamental difference of this kind. We must also admit that there is a much wider interval in mental power between one of the lowest fishes, as a lamprey or lancelet, and one of the higher apes, than between an ape and man; yet this immense interval is filled up by numberless gradations. (Chapter II, p. 35)
Nevertheless the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind. (Chapter III, p. 105)
…[T]he mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom, as will perhaps be best illustrated by comparing the mental powers of two insects, namely, a coccus or scale-insect and an ant, which undoubtedly belong to the same class. The difference is here greater than, though of a somewhat different kind from, that between man and the highest mammal. (Chapter VI, p. 186)
On the whole, the difference in mental power between an ant and a coccus is immense; yet no one has ever dreamed of placing them in distinct classes, much less in distinct kingdoms. No doubt this interval is bridged over by the intermediate mental powers of many other insects; and this is not the case with man and the higher apes. (Chapter VI, p. 187)
I therefore cannot concur with Kantian Naturalist’s assessment that “[w]hereas Darwin thought there was continuity between humans and non-human animals, his evidence is primarily about emotional displays, rather than the genuinely cognitive discontinuity.” Indeed, chapters II and III of Darwin’s Descent of Man can be described as a systematic attempt to prove that the moral and intellectual difference in capacity between man and the other animals is merely one of degree, rather than kind. As a dualist, I am not at all persuaded that the attempt works. But if I were asked who got the better of the exchange between Darwin and Wallace on this point, I would have to say: Darwin.
Notwithstanding this admission on my part, I would like to point out that oft-repeated claims of a cognitive continuum between man and the other animals rest on faulty science. Unfortunately, in Darwin and Wallace’s day, the scientific experiments lending support to the hypothesis of human uniqueness had not yet been performed. Three years ago, I presented the evidence for human uniqueness in a series of essays on Uncommon Descent, which readers are welcome to peruse at their own leisure:
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part One)
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part Two)
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part 3(a))
The Myth of the Continuum of Creatures: A Reply to John Jeremiah Sullivan (Part 3(b))
As Kantian Naturalist correctly points out, Wallace wasn’t the only one with doubts. It turns out that Darwin had doubts of his own about the reliability of human cognition, and it is to these that I now turn.
Darwin’s Doubt
Here’s how Kantian Naturalist summarizes Darwin’s “horrid doubt”:
A closely related problem, however, was squarely faced by Darwin: the question, nicely phrased in his famous letter to Asa Gray, as to whether it is plausible to think that natural selection can have equipped a creature with a capacity for arriving at any objective truths about the world. (It is not often noted that in that letter, Darwin says that he believes in an intelligent creator — what is in doubt is whether natural selection gives him reasons to trust in his cognitive abilities.)
These two questions, Wallace’s Problem and Darwin’s Doubt, are two sides of the same coin: if natural selection (along with other biological processes) cannot account for the uniquely human ability to grasp objective truths about reality, then we must either reject naturalism (as Wallace did) or question our ability to grasp objective truths about reality (as Darwin did).
Call this the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism. Can it be solved? If so, how?
It appears that Kantian Naturalist is referring to Darwin’s letter of May 22, 1860 to the American botanist Asa Gray (1810-1888), in which Darwin affirms that, although he does not believe in the necessity of a design in nature, he finds it difficult to believe that everything is the result of “brute force.” After tentatively suggesting that everything results from “designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance,” Darwin concludes by saying that the whole subject of God’s existence and nature is “too profound for the human intellect.”
However, the phrase “Darwin’s horrid doubt” comes from Darwin’s 1881 letter to William Graham, in which he wrote:
…I have had no practice in abstract reasoning, and I may be all astray. Nevertheless you have expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the Universe is not the result of chance. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?
As the Australian philosopher John S. Wilkins points out in a 2010 essay titled, You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals on his blog, Evolving Thoughts, Darwin’s doubt had nothing to do with how we are able to grasp objective truths about the world:
First, let’s dispose of one point: Darwin’s Monkey Mind Puzzle was not aimed at debunking our knowledge of the natural world. He did not admit a fatal flaw in his own metaphysics or epistemology…
Darwin’s “horrid doubt” is whether we can know anything about God, not the world…
The same remarks apply to Darwin’s 1860 letter to Asa Gray: here, once again, Darwin suggests that the human mind is liable to err when it engages in abstruse theological reasoning. Nowhere, however, does he express doubts about the reliability of our reasoning processes, when applied to the natural world.
Our knowledge of the external world: problem solved?
In his 2010 essay, You and me, baby, ain’t nothing but mammals, philosopher John S. Wilkins addresses the question of whether Darwin’s theory supplies sufficient warrant for our belief that our scientific theories (including the theory of evolution) truly describe the world. He concludes that it does, because our theories are carefully constructed on the basis of our observations of not only near objects, but also increasingly distant ones, enabling us to gradually extend the scope of our generalizations:
So to the main point: if evolutionary theory is true, then are we blocked from thinking that it is true? Clearly not. If it is true then there is no contradiction with our beliefs being formed on the basis of evolutionary processes also being true…
When true beliefs are causally relevant to fitness, then we might expect organisms, including those endowed with monkey minds, to be able to track truth. Species that have nervous systems respond to environmental cues that are highly relevant to their fitness: von Uexküll called this the Umwelt. The world of primate common sense is our Umwelt.
Scientific theories bootstrap on this Umwelt; we begin by testing distal claims by ordinary observation, and then extend our theoretical reach by increasingly theoretical, but tested and grounded in our Umwelt, observations, as Ian Hacking argued in Representing and Intervening. Science tracks truth because it is able to rely on some degree of truthlikeness for the observational reports that we can generate in our protoscience.
However, I don’t think this answer will do. The problem with this view is that it assumes that as we refine our observations, we will eventually be left with a single theory which leaps out at us, as it were. In reality, this never happens. Scientists have no way of showing that a given theory is the only way of explaining our observational data. There are always choices to be made between rival theories that can account for the same data, and quite often they are made on aesthetic grounds: we tend to prefer simple, elegant theories. But as Oscar Wilde wittily observed, “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” Our preference for simplicity, elegance and ease of comprehension is a human projection on Nature – one which would make no sense unless we assumed that Nature was designed to be comprehensible, as many theists do. If an atheist wishes to refrain from making this assumption, then it seems to me that an anti-realist view of scientific truth is the only logical alternative. On this view, we should not say that unobservable or theoretical entities actually exist, but merely that they are useful constructs for helping us to make predictions about future observations. But if that’s correct, then is macroevolution real? Hmmm.
To sum up: it seems to me that Darwin’s theory of evolution gives us good reason to believe in the predictions made by our scientific theories, but little reason to believe that those theories are objectively true, insofar as they postulate theoretical entities which go beyond the limit of our observations. All we can say is that science works.
So, what about Kantian Naturalist’s solution to the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism?
Kantian Naturalist thinks he can solve what he refers to as the Cognitive Dilemma for Naturalism, by a two-step process, which he helpfully explains in a comment on his post:
There are two distinct moves here.
The first is a philosophical move, in which we see language as underpinning and making possible, both in evolution and in development, abstract thought, symbolic communication, self-consciousness, and objectivity. (That’s what I’m calling ’embodied discursive pragmatism’.)
The second is a scientific move, in which we understand how language is a result of evolution (more precisely: the co-evolution of language and human cognition).
Kantian Naturalist’s philosophical claim that language is logically prior to abstract thought has attracted a lot of criticism, most of which I think this is unjustifiably harsh. Having studied Wittgenstein’s thinking in some depth at university, I can appreciate Kantian Naturalist’s insistence that language and thought are inter-twined. While I would not say that the former precedes the latter, I would wholeheartedly agree with Kantian Naturalist’s rejection of the naive view that language is merely a vehicle or tool for expressing our thoughts.
Instead, my criticisms will be directed at Kantian Naturalist’s scientific claim that the origin of language can be understood in evolutionary terms: in particular, that niche construction theory may have driven the evolution of language and shared intentionality.
…[T]he construction of a uniquely hominid niche involved obligate cooperative extractive foraging. While extractive foraging is common in primates, and many great apes use tools to extract foods from their environments, humans are cooperative in extractive foraging (and must be so). Adequate provisioning requires that everyone in the group who is able to contribute will in fact contribute to the provisioning of everyone else, through division of labor that involves hunting and scavenging; setting traps for small animals; gathering nuts, seeds, berries and herbs for foods and medicines; cleaning and cooking food, making clothing, weapons; transmitting to future generations the knowledge of how to do all these things through active teaching.
Obligate cooperative foraging involves two important cognitive transformations: displaced reference and joint intentionality. Displaced reference, which put hominids on the road to language, is the capacity to communicate about objects and events that are not perceptually present to (at least) the hearer. Joint intentionality is the ability for two creatures to take an object as their shared object of attention, to know of the other creature that it is also attending to that object and to want them to do so, so that the two creatures can coordinate their actions in order to succeed at a task that neither of them could accomplish alone (or which would take much more time or energy to do so).
Frankly, I don’t buy this story, for several reasons.
First, arguing that language would have been beneficial to human survival, if it arose, fails to explain how it arose. “Why” is not the same thing as “how.” I was shocked to see so many commenters fall into this teleological mode of explanation. Here’s a case in point:
Social groups need to communicate. In a forest niche, vocal communication has advantages over visual communication and signalling.
I could just as well argue that telepathy has great advantages over vocal communication, but that wouldn’t explain how it evolved. In fact, it wouldn’t even tell us whether telepathy could have evolved. We need a mechanism.
Second, there are plenty of animals which engage in niche construction (e.g. beavers), co-operative hunting (e.g. lions) and extractive foraging (e.g. chimps), without the benefit of language. I’m not at all convinced that a lifestyle combining these various behaviors (such as that of our hominin ancestors) would have necessitated the use of language, either. I don’t see why we need language for “gathering nuts, seeds, berries and herbs for foods and medicines,” or for “cleaning and cooking food.” As for cultural transmission of skills to future generations, this is something we observe in non-human animals as well. Making clothing is unlikely to be what necessitated the use of language, as clothing is a relatively recent invention, probably coinciding with the appearance of anatomically modern humans in Africa, around 200,000 years ago. Language, on the other hand, probably goes back at least to the common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal man, as Dan Dediu and Steven Levinson have argued at length in their article, On the antiquity of language: the reinterpretation of Neandertal linguistic capacities and its consequences (in Frontiers in Psychology, 4:397. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00397):
The Neandertals had a complex stone tool technology (the Mousterian) that required considerable skill and training, with many variants and elaborations (see Klein, 2009: 485ff). They sometimes mined the raw materials at up to 2 meters depth (Verri et al., 2004). Their stone tools show wear indicating usage on wood, suggesting the existence of a wooden material culture with poor preservation, such as the carefully shaped javelins made ~400 kya [about 400,000 years ago – VJT] from Germany (Thieme, 1997). Tools were hafted with pitch extracted by fire (Roebroeks and Villa, 2011). Complex tool making of the Mousterian kind involves hierarchical planning with recursive sub-stages (Stout, 2011) which activates Broca’s area just as in analogous linguistic tasks (Stout and Chaminade, 2012). The chain of fifty or so actions and the motor control required to master it are not dissimilar to the complex cognition and motor control involved in language (and similarly takes months of learning to replicate by modern students).
Additionally, a 2011 essay by Dietrich Stout and Thierry Chaminade, titled, Stone tools, language and the brain in human evolution (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 12 January 2012, vol. 367, no. 1585, pp. 75-87) lends support to the view that the Late Acheulean tools made by Heidelberg man required a high level of cognitive sophistication to produce, in addition to long hours of training for novices. This training would have included the use of intentional communication, which the authors characterize as “purposeful communication through demonstrations intended to impart generalizable (i.e. semantic) knowledge about technological means and goals, without necessarily involving pantomime.”
Third, I should point out that the evidence for the extractive foraging hypothesis is not terribly strong. Another popular theory is the social brain hypothesis, but that seems to have problems, too, as does the recent theory that cooking helped big brains evolve.
Finally, I’d like to draw readers’ attention to a quote from writer and columnist A. N. Wilson, a convert from atheism, who argued that materialist accounts of the origin of language are inherently inadequate, in a hard-hitting article titled, Why I believe again (New Statesman, 2 April 2009):
Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat.
It seems to me that Wilson’s remarks contain a lot of good sense. Language really is a miracle, which cannot be explained from the bottom up, naturally.
What do readers think?
So telling bad stories is an advantage too!
And being lazy, and being a hard worker. . Both evolutionarily advantageous.
And telling lies, and speaking the truth.. Both evolutionarily advantageous.
Mung,
Well, of course. If the fittest survive, then everyone is fit! Why do people tell lies? Its an evolution advantage. Why do they tell the truth? If more people trust you, of course that is an evolution advantage.
Morality? Evolutionary advantage. Immorality? Advantage! Childish features? Advantage! Large breasts? Advantage! Hairy? Advantage! Hairless? Advantage!
So you see how easy it is to make an eye? Just make everything an advantage. Yes, but you still need pupils and corneas you say? So? If it is an advantage to have them, of course you will get them! What’s the problem?
Adorable observations about the world? Well, of course that is an evolutionary advantage, are you kidding me?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kids-supernatural-thinking_us_580a5dcde4b0cdea3d873f9b?section=
phoodoo,
I’m not sure why you think it follows from the fact that not every conceivable property is fitness-enhancing or diminishing that no property is. Say brown hair, a deep voice, or a capacity to imitate bird calls is neither among humans, does that mean a long neck wasn’t among giraffes? Take away sight from some family of tigers–how do you think they’ll fare?
walto,
I don’t think it follows that just because all animals have useful functioning features, that it is natural selection that got it there. In fact, I have made the case before that there are small insignificant features, that are useful, but which would never be useful enough to elicit a survival advantage (Like eyebrows) which just goes to show that organisms get useful qualities in other ways.
Of course there are people like DNA Jock who think that eyebrows could make the difference between life and death, but that’s just what evolutionists need to keep thinking to claw onto their theory.
I think Darwin came up with a very simplistic idea about survival, and people have taken it and run with it for decades. I think it is a childish theory that lacks sophisticated analysis.
walto,
In fact Walto, I don’t think most evolutionary biologists really believe in this power of natural selection anymore, but what else are they going to do? They have no work without it, and most are devout atheists, so they really have no where to turn.
phoodoo,
But, just to be clear, you’re not claiming that if the ability to carry a tune is not a survival-enhancing trait, it follows that there are NO survival-enhancing traits. And, if you agree with me that that doesn’t follow, I take it you have some other argument or arguments for claiming that, with respect to every ACTUAL survival-enhancing trait, it’s false that
Is that right? I mean, a lot of what you’ve written about, you know, good story-telling, seems to me to be irrelevant to the standard Darwinian claims about stuff like speed and strength and acute vision and sharp teeth.
Best story tellers
It depends on the environment and the niche one occupies.Being born rich seems to be an advantage ,
Why is it irrelevant?
The Darwinian account is that if a lucky mutation made one slightly faster, they will have more babies, and the next generation of babies will get more mutations that make them even faster, or have better vision etc….
So indeed I am saying that doesn’t happen. You don’t have more babies just because you have slightly better vision or run slightly faster, and the mutations that cause those (which probably don’t exist) don’t get passed on better because of this fairytale advantage. Its an advantage being fast, but all cheetahs are fast. Not some are faster than others and then have sex more.
Its an advantage for giraffes to have long necks, but there were not some with long necks and some with short ones and the short ones lost. Its an advantage for seals to hold their breath long, but I don’t believe there used to be a bunch of seals that couldn’t hold their breathe, and none of them had sex, so they are all gone now.
Right. And that’s about all there needs to be to it to get the natural selection ball rolling, no? You’re focusing too much on the single aspect of sexual attractiveness, I think. Forget about that for a minute and consider: if you die young, you aren’t gonna have too many babies.
I’ve had guinea pigs. They can’t run or dig warrens like rabbits, they can’t climb trees, and they can’t fight for beans. They’re incredibly stupid: will get lost in a paper bag. So how the hell have they survived? Well, they do have at least two things going for them. They’re great at making babies (can have one litter after another) and they can eat and survive on almost anything that is (or was) green. Without either of those two abilities, I think they’d be done in a generation or two. Don’t you? I mean, it’s obvious. Well, that’s natural selection: it’s not terribly mysterious. If you and your gang have bad survival skills–it’s “So long, suckas.”
For me, it’s hard to imagine how that could even be doubted. You characterize this as luck. Fine, call it luck. Fortunately, it’s the kind of luck that can be transmitted to offspring. We find that it is. Voila!–evolution.
walto,
I think you sound totally in denial honestly.
If natural selection was really real, we should still seeing it in action everyday. there should be packs of seals with some that are good at what they do and others poorly adapted. There should be lions that can catch food and that that appear almost hopeless at it. There should be zebras that just don’t trot as well as the rest, who obviously are not going to pass on their genes to too many more generations, because their babies will also be bad trotters, and well, they probably just won’t reproduce at quite the rate as the better trotters.
But we see none of this Walto. We don’t see some hamsters that are good at life and some that are bad at it. They are all pretty much the same in ability. Same for chimps. There aren’t bad climbers who look like they have no chance of making well competing babies. So the entire premise of evolution begs that we ignore what we see, and just assume it used to be different. And why? Why was it different before but not now?
Every animal alive, unless it is unusually sick or deformed, can pretty much do all the tasks it needs. There is no great hierarchy of abilities for reproduction in any animal groups. They all have what it takes to get by.
We have to ignore that to believe in natural selection.
Well, if it’s a life or death struggle you’re after:
Evolution Visualized
Or does this not count as Natural Selection?
So, in order to survive, i.e. to eat and reproduce, the necessary abilities are – drumroll – to eat and reproduce!
Now, why do organisms have any of those other pesky irrelevant and unnecessary abilities? Such as reason?
One thing at a time. Phoodoo has been denying there’s such a thing as natural selection at all.
It does to me.
Or cuteness. 🙂
Sure we do. I don’t think you’re looking very hard. But the really poorly adaped babies will die, which is why we don’t see as many of the poor trotting zebras or poor swimming seals. This is just as one would expect, no. There are only a few of them for a reason. They are outliers.
Let me ask you this, if there were no hospitals and other modern care available, how long do you think those human beings with severe birth defects would live? Would kids with spina bifida just be sitting in the back of 7th grade class rooms, or would they have died as infants?
I really am having trouble following you here.
Looks to me like selective breeding or artificial selection.
Of particular note on your point, Walto, is that it illustrates that natural selection is not a static force, but rather a function of the environment surrounding organisms that can change quite drastically. Hospitals and modern care happen to be part of our environment, so people like me (born without functioning kidneys) are quite “fit” all other characteristics being equal. A hundred years ago (heck…55 years ago) and I and others with similar conditions are dead as door nails and automatically selected against. But now such characteristics have very little impact on overall fitness because we – collectively – have modified our environment to be considerably more accommodating to variations in our species and thus members with a whole slew of varying characteristics have little trouble mating and leaving offspring. No homogenizing for us.
Now, of course all other characteristics are never equal – that’s another point. Every member of a species has a variety of characteristics that make up its relative fitness, and these characteristics come in strengths/aptitudes that fall along some spectrum for each member. So there’s no one characteristic that anyone can look at in a group (like seals) from day to day and go, “oh look…those seals are better adapted today given X than those other seals and are getting even better day-to-day!” Nope…too many characteristics and too many environmental fluctuations on a daily basis to really make much of an assessment. This isn’t to say – as you note – that some seals are not weaker at swimming than other seals and thus those seals tend to get “selected” against more often, it’s just that it’s hard to assess that on a daily basis. Over the course of years though, that’s pretty easy to assess.
“Eating” and “reproducing” are not abilities. Digesting citric acid is an ability. Moving is an ability. So moving that allows one to eat more or avoid being eaten is an ability.
Such increases relative survival and thus increases relative offspring and thus increases the perpetuation those beneficial characteristics.
Reasoning is an ability that both increases the odds of differentiating foods (or possible foods), adding the ability to categorize foods by the risk (or cost) to attain it, relative nutritional value, distribution priority, use for a group vs individual needs, and a slew of other such assessments. Bottom line, “reason” is an ability that greatly increases overall survival.
I would not deny natural selection, but I deny that it *does* anything, such as select for fitness. When there’s selection, there’s someone/something that selects. Selection is the word for the process or event, not for the one doing it.
Right. All this stuff just seems so obvious that it ought to hardly be worth mentioning. And yet there’s this weird resistance.
Depends on what you mean by “advantage”. If you mean in terms of evolutionary fitness, then I would disagree. There are numerous studies that show that wealthy people, particularly those above to the 1%, tend to leave far fewer offspring compared to other human subgroups. In fact, by far the subgroup with the most offspring (relatively speaking) are poor. Now, they also tend to have higher rates of infant and child mortality, but still. Even if the wealthy pretty much guarantee that any offspring they have will make it to reproductive age, there’s still a greater advantage – beneficial heredity-wise – to have more offspring.
Oh goody. That means they didn’t evolve.
What else is on your list of “abilities” that did not evolve? Urinating and defecating, obviously. Breathing? Sensing? Thinking? Most people might call these abilities. What do you say?
Reference: the first five minutes of “Idiocracy.” 🙂
Or take the history of European royalty, for a more serious example.
I would bet people in the middle of the bell curve on any important attribute produce the most children and, over time, leave the most descendents.
You can call it luck too. Call it whatever you want. ‘Jadeveon Clowney’ is a nice name IMHO.
Qubbles, quibbles everywhere–nor any drop to drink.
…and…?
I’d say you didn’t actually read what I wrote, but that’s not all that surprising…
But I’ll toss you this bone:
“Urinating”, in a generic sense, didn’t evolve any more than “air” or “warm” evolved. Bladders evolved and muscles to control bladder use (and more importantly, control when to use) evolved. The ability to control when and where to urinate and defecate has some real clear advantages not just for survival, but also reproduction, in a number of environments. That you either don’t know the difference or don’t care that there is such a distinction is likely part of the reason you have difficulty grasping evolution as a biological process.
Yep. Nicely put.
When Darwin invents the phrase “natural selection” — which I think he understood to be oxymoronic — what he means is that intra-specific competition over limited resources, combined with heritable variation, tends to result in phenotypic changes over time that are analogous to the effects of selective breeding or “artificial selection”.
As long as one understands the point of the analogy and doesn’t get too hung up on the literal meaning of the phrase, there’s no problem.
Notice that analogies play a generally important role in generating new scientific concepts. The atom is not literally a tiny solar system, but it was helpful to think of it as being like one. DNA is not literally a code (in the same sense that Morse code is) but it’s helpful to think of it as being like one. The brain is not literally a computer but it’s helpful to think of it as being like one.
In all those cases, as long as one is aware of the limits of the analogy and doesn’t take it too far, there’s no problem. Same with the phrase “natural selection.”
This helps clarify where I’ve been coming from all this time. What you say here I would accept as being generally true of intelligence. It’s rather that I think of reasoning and intelligence as being somewhat different capacities. More on that point later on.
I think too that Darwin understood the term to be oxymoronic, but this didn’t stop him. He used it as a term and not as an analogy. Which is a problem.
In another thread we had somebody saying something like “mutation innovates” and this was supposed to provide the mechanism for evolution. Either it’s really meant to be a working mechanism or it’s an oxymoron that does not work.
Atomists literally thought of atoms as tiny hard balls arranged as a solar system and distinct from waves, until it turned out to be that matter easily swaps these characteristics at quantum level. It should have been obvious for them based on the analogy of macro-scale: Water can be solid ice, liquid, or steam, but it’s still water. Same with matter in microscale.
Scientific terms are terms, not analogies. An analogy may be taken too far, but a scientific term may only become better specified as the data accrues. If this is not happening to “natural selection”, the obvious conclusion is that it was not a scientific term to begin with. It was an oxymoron.
Terms confused with what they refer to several times in this post. I leave the exact count to industrious readers.
My ability to eat and reproduce was made enhanced by the salary I have been paid for my ability at mathematical reasoning.
But mine wasn’t harmed by my lack of it. (Thankfully.)
I don’t have a problem with evolution as a biological process. I don’t have a problem with evolution as a non-biological process. And I rather enjoy the story-telling that accompanies both, along with the process of storytelling.
Tell us the story of which came first, the bladder, or the ability for bladder control.
You see, I think the bladder started out as something to hold air to help creatures swim better, and only later became co-opted for use in urinating.
As for control over urination and defecation, do you know of any creatures that do not have control over those abilities? Because now you’ll need a story about that.
The question is if well-paid and smart people really reproduce more (and better) than poor people. Doesn’t look like the native population of Europe can keep up with the reproduction rate of Africa, Asia, or South America. It’s always the lower classes that outbreed upper classes.
But I get it. Facts like this don’t matter.
The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor
Yes, that’s what I talked about. People confuse terms easily with what the terms refer to. Darwin is also guilty of it. In another thread I was bashed because I dared to make a principled distinction. And KN thinks it’s safe to call scientific terms analogies, and when it doesn’t work, then everybody else is guilty of taking the analogy too far.
What do you say? Is natural selection a term or analogy? No opinion, I guess.
ETA: I see that it was you who said the following,
walto: You can call [natural selection] luck too. Call it whatever you want.
And you affirmed this funny thing from Robin,
Robin: “Eating” and “reproducing” are not abilities. … Moving is an ability…. Reasoning is an ability…
walto: Right. All this stuff just seems so obvious that it ought to hardly be worth mentioning. And yet there’s this weird resistance.
My resistance is to category errors like these. Are they obvious enough or do I need to get more specific?
I should have indicated that what I was agreeing with in Robin’s post was this:
I don’t care about whether it’s an ability or some other thingy. That’s a smokescreen.
If you are careful to make the distinction between words and things, I commend you. I’m relatively careful with quotation marks only when I’m not posting via my blackberry. Of course, strictly speaking, natural selection is neither an analogy nor a term.
I see. Precision with copy-paste is tough on handheld devices.
Strictly speaking? As in when it occurs in nature? Okay. But how about when Darwin referred to that which occurs in nature?
It is on mine. You should try it sometime.
I have no idea what you’re asking there. What Darwin referred to was neither an analogy nor a term. That should be obvious.
I mean the term he used to refer to whatever he was referring to. Was it a term or an analogy? Or will the answer be that Darwin, since he was referring to natural selection in nature, was using neither a term or an analogy?
I know very well that the process of natural selection is neither a term or an analogy. But when we refer to it using the words “natural selection”, what are these words? A term or an analogy?
How are they supposed to matter?
Have you read any of the posts on this thread?
How is this supposed to contribute to the discussion? And you’re the one who admits to skipping posts and only reading the responses, not Erik.
All my life, I have been hearing that smart people reproduce less. If this were a problem, then the intelligence of the population should be declining. I don’t see any evidence of that.
Does that matter? There’s lots of mixing up of the gene pool. So what would be lost?
If there’s lots of it, and it has been happening for a long time with no bad consequences, then where’s the problem?
keiths:
Vincent:
That makes no difference. If someone can retain the ability to reason despite losing the ability to communicate their reasoning, then the capabilities are necessarily distinct.
I see no reason why we shouldn’t. Reasoning and communication are distinct abilities.
That’s because normal humans possess both capabilities. In a species that lacks our communicative abilitites, such as the New Caledonian crows, the failure to explain one’s reasoning is not indicative of a lack of reasoning.
The nature of the impairment depends on where the brain damage occurs.
Was the term Darwin used a term? I’m going to go out on a limb and say yes.
What are you trying to say, exactly?
Well, if walto is going to choose term, I am going to go with analogy.
The problem is that riches or intelligence or beauty or whatever have no connection to reproductive success. So, given evolution, those things have no reason to exist. They are meaningless fluff in terms of evolution. Yet they exist and are highly valued even by evolutionists themselves.
For example the theory of evolution is said to be true. But if truth has absolutely no bearing on reproductive success, then it’s a meaningless fluff to insist that the theory of evolution is true. And this is so with everything, except with reproductive success itself. If you sincerely think evolution is true, then stop convincing people that it’s true. Go on and reproduce.