Re: Survival of the Fittest: What was Darwin's pragmatics?

In article <1183449752.671345.236430@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
backspace <sawireless2000@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 3, 3:45 am, Greg Guarino <gdguar...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Darwin's realized that since our ONLY control of the process was
selecting which animals would breed, ANYTHING that had the same
effect would be able to produce similar results. Why are gazelles so
fast? Because their slower ancestors were more vulnerable to predators
and thus less likely to breed. Why are cheetahs so fast? Because their
slower ancestors were more likely to starve (and not breed), having
failed to catch the speedy gazelles.

And if something other than gazelles were fast wouldn't you tell me
the same story? You have framed the whole thing in terms of one
organism competing against another with whatever you discover then
declared to be the survivor. This makes the whole thing unfalisifiable
because you will tell me the same story nomatter what you find in
nature.

A cheetah's legs are controlled by a complex feedback control loop
that must under the bandwidth constraints of the nervous system
propell the cheetah to a high speed. Telling me that the Cheeta
survived by outwitting his previous competitors for the same food
doesn't explain to me where the feedback control mechanism comes from.
Darwin couldn't even do math and knew not of genes, why is his stories
still be told as though it has any relevance?

What you're missing is that the complex system of the Cheetah didn't
have to be completely reinvented for the case of making a fast animal
that can sometimes catch some prey, or for making an animal that eats
grass and runs away from cheetahs. Evolution is not just "survival of
the fittest"; there are several principles at work. One that affects the
"design" of all living things is that because of inheritance of traits
with modification, completely new features rarely appear. The usual
pattern is to adapt existing features to new functions. Thus evolution
explains very well why and how both the gazelle and the cheetah are
four-footed mammals with skeletons on the inside, with a tail at one end
and a head containing brains, eyes, ears, teeth, tongue, and so forth at
the other?animals very similar in design at one level of abstraction,
sharing a long list of common features, yet those features are quite
different from each other in detail.


Your complaint that "you will tell me the same story nomatter what you
find in nature" is flawed. The same logic could be applied to gravity:
Telling me that the hammer fell to the ground doesn't really tell me
where the attractive control mechanism comes from: whenever you see two
masses accelerating towards one another, you declare gravity to be the
reason. This makes the whole thing unfalisifiable because you will tell
me the same story nomatter what you find in nature.

Falsifiability doesn't work that way. The theory of gravity is *in
principle* falsifiable because if one showed an example of two masses
not attracted to one another according to Newton's theory, that would
falsify the theory. (Note that the test is not whether the masses would
accelerate toward each other. They could be held apart by a structure or
something.)


You made two important complaints: where the feedback control mechanism
came from and whether Darwin, who could not do math and did not know
genetics, could legitimately come up with evolutionary theory.

The Cheetah's nervous system did not develop independently of those of
other tetrapods. Nervous systems have been around for a long time, and
have continually been adapted and expanded to fill new roles. So the
answer to where the cheetahs' feedback control mechanism comes from is
more complicated than you imagine. It came, of course, from its
ancestors, and was adapted to this role.

Your last complaint, about why Darwin's "stories" are still told, also
has a kind of evolutionary answer. Have you ever wondered why people
complain about the term "Darwinist"? It's because Darwin's theory isn't
the be-all and end-all of evolutionary theory. Many other people added
to it and changed things and adapted it to fit new data. It's not purely
"Darwinism" any more. It's not just Darwin's "stories" but many others'
as well. Specifically, Darwin's stories are still told because they are
still valid observations. In fact, since he was able to make them
without specific knowledge of genetics makes them all the more valid: he
had no preconceived notions of how things ought to work, and once
genetics was more fully explained, that validated Darwin's theories.

--
Timberwoof <me at timberwoof dot com> http://www.timberwoof.com

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