Re: OT: Evolution (was: Archive search no longer working?)

On Jan 23, 12:38 pm, taylor.kings...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

  Again, this is nothing new.

This reminds me of arguing with my kid sister--nothing new under the
sun she claims, and concepts tend to morph a lot during the course of
the conversation...but I digress.

Human society, technology and medicine
already make it possible for individuals to survive and propagate who
would not do well on their own, e.g. hemophiliacs, paraplegics etc.
Natural selection in the traditional sense doesn't really apply in
such cases.

But extend this thought to the animal kingdom Taylor--that is new, and
radical.

  I suppose if some female birds came to prefer scraggly, unhealthy-
looking males exclusively, that breeding population might eventually
become a separate species. However, as the saying goes, "the organism
proposes and the environment disposes." Usually unhealthy appearance
goes along with poor health, at least to some extent, and so such a
line might well be selected against by good old-fashioned Darwinian
factors, such as lessened fertility or being out-competed by the
healthier birds.
  If, however, the sexual selection factor was otherwise neutral, say
some females preferring blue feathers and others preferring red, then
the two populations could continue to diverge without a disadvantage
to either.

Now you're switching to animals from humans. But even with animals,
you can posit that the evolutionary disadvantage is not so strong as
to warrant extinction. And you're introducing the concept of the
Tangled Bank versus the Red Queen (like Alice in Wonderland's chess
queen).


But what about useless organs for one purpose becoming useless in
another?  That is the theory.  In short, Darwin assumed a sort of
logic to evolution. But if you read David Raup's book,

  Would that be "Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck?" (W.W. Norton,
1991)? I have it here right now.


Yes, that's it.

pointing out
(updated) that all five of the Big Five extinctions were caused by
extraterrestrial events (he posited 4 of 5, but since his book was
published in 1991, recently the other mass extinction--the Late
Devonian extinction-- has been found to possibly be from an Antarctic
meteor strike,

  The extraterrestrial impact hypothesis has been accepted much less
by the scientific community than by the general public. The public
likes simple, dramatic explanations, but quite often the truth is much
more complex, and commonplace. The impact hypothesis' originator, Luis
Alvarez, was a physicist, not a paleontologist or geologist, and he
could not answer many objections that paleontologists and geologists
made.
  A couple of relevant books I'd suggest are "Gorgon" by Peter D. Ward
(Viking, 2004), on the Permian-Triassic extinction, and especially
"The Great Dinosaur Extinction Controversy" by Charles Officer and
Jake Page (Helix Books, 1996). After reading those you may be much
less inclined to the impact hypothesis.

No, these books were written before the latest data came out. And no
doubt you saw the speculative study from a month ago about the
microdiamonds as evidence of the Clovis dieoff in North America around
10k bc.

  I would say that at our current state of knowledge, we cannot even
infer any direction, let alone any purpose, not just that "some of
evolution is completely purposeless." If there is some divine force
behind it then by definition it's beyond scientific investigation,
while if it's something tangible like the mysterious sentinels of
Arthur C. Clarke's "2001," we have yet to discover it.

No, I did not posit a Divine Being. But you don't have to believe in
a divine being to believe in purpose, btw, as per Nietsche, Hegel,
Schopehauer (sic) and some other philosophers. And I think mainstream
Darwinism would say there is a purpose, along the lines of "organism
proposes and environment disposes". The radical part of this thread
would be (I posit): organism proposes and environment is disposed of,
meaning the environment is not as big a factor as you might think.
The bird determines its destiny, similar to how a beaver dams a stream
in order to create an environment suitable to it.

Let's just say that we're looking at the glass from two different
points of view.

RL
.

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