Re: Natural selection and favorable traits how were they measured ?

On Jan 22, 9:26 am, backspace <sawireless2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Friar Broccoli wrote:
If it is, I won't argue the point. I believe in NS and believe
the evidence points strongly in favour of NS, but I know I
cannot prove that God does not sometimes intervene in the
process.
Do you think that you and I disagree on some substantive
point?

Let me ask you the following which is my answer to you:

What is the true meaning of the following:
1) Survival of the fittest. (Note that I never said SoF is a
tautology.)

Taken literally, not much. Better would be "survival of the
fitter" (reproductive success is relative to the success of others,
not absolute -- there is no 'fittest' in an absolute sense, only
fitter in a conditional and relative sense). Better yet would be
"greater differential reproductive success due to better phenotypic
adaption to local conditions than organisms with a different
phenotype" (only that portion of the phenotype that is due to genotype
has evolutionary consequences). This, of course, assumes that the
words 'success' and 'better' are used, as is standard usage, for the
survival and/or reproductive success of an organism rather than for
its early death or sterility. So we are really looking at a
correlation: between differential reproductive success and adaptive
success (on some feature important to an organism's relative ability
to live/reproduce in a particular local environment). Sometimes
relative adaption can be measured independently by engineering
standards. That is, certain phenotypes can be empirically
demonstrated to be be better at helping an organism eat, survive, and/
or reproduce than alternative phenotypes. In organisms, the only
consistent measure of "success" is differential reproductive success.
In a number of cases, death of the organism itself is evolutionarily
favored *because* it leads to increased reproductive success.

2) You Friar Broccoli have a green light.

Think a bit about this.....

.

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