Natural Selection VS Random Walks

[Meleagar]

I suggest that you did nothing more than Google "evolutionary pathway," and cherry-pick 4 papers which do not support your position at all. One, in fact, directly refutes the concept of intelligent design or other (non-Darwinian) evolutionary mechanisms not based on natural selection (Lynch, Protein Science, 2005, 14).

Your argument would be of interest were I making a case for intelligent design in this thread. I am not. Nor am I making a case for any non-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism.

Would you care to explain - beyond the fact that they happened to use the term pathway how, if at all, these papers relate to your position?

Because they use it to describe evolutionary sequences and locations, just as I am using the terms, and not as if evolution was "trying" to find certain pathways or "trying" to find certain locations. IOW, they use the terms to describe, or refer to , evolutionary sequences that have occurred, or might occur, and features that actually exist, or have been acquired; and not in terms of evolution advancing down a prescribed path towards a prescribed target.

[Meleagar]

Something interesting I found in post #7:

When I said:

I find this claim about natural selection to be faulty. Given that from any starting point with an original cellular ancestor, there are X numbers of pathways towards acquiring any functioning macro-evolutionary feature - like winged flight. Since natural selection doesn't have any idea what pathways lead there and which ones do not, and isn't trying to accomplish the construction of any particular macro-evolutionary feature, then all that Natural Selection does, in terms of acquiring such targets, is remove potential pathways to that target from the evolutionary field. It doesn't create any pathways, it only removes the potential pathways that chance* mutation might go down.

Note my use of the terms "targets" and "pathways". Notthecheatr responded:

Congratulations. You're stating something that is both obvious and meaningless.

Notthecheatr agrees with me and has no problems with my use of those terms, or in my statement that natural selection only removes pathways in terms of acquiring such targets.

Later, in the same post, still responding to my O.P. where I say:

For example, there may be many pathways to acquiring winged flight that include generating semi-wing-like structures that would otherwise be detrimental to the survival and procreation of the organism, and then through a long process of development (which might include further variations that would hinder procreation and survival) move those structures towards full winged-flight, which would be a survival and procreative advantage. But many, if not most, of those pathways are prevented by natural selection.

Notthecheatr responds, again in agreement, and using the same terminology I used in the same way:

The vast majority of the beneficial and harmful pathways are indeed prevented. So?

Only when I reach the conclusion mandated by the logic:

If we lived in a world of unlimited resources and capacity, it would certainly be true that without natural selection, under the idea that mutations are chance*, that fully functioning winged flight might develop even faster, because wing-like proto-structures that would otherwise make survival and procreation difficult would be allowed. One might argue that natural* selection aids in the development of such features in a limited world by channeling resources to those variations that have a better chance of surviving, but that is not necessarily in the best interest of developing the target feature. In fact, it is likely to the detriment of developing such target features, because natural* selection might be channeling resources away from those proto-features that would have the best chance at acquiring the macro-evolutionary target.

.... only then does nothecheatr suddenly have a problem with my terminology, recharacterizing my use of those terms because he/she doesn't like the conclusion, when in the prior two quotes he/she understood exactly how I used them, and used them the same way to respond and agree with me and my use of them. Note his/her response to my conclusion:

Your assumption here is that there's a target feature. That's begging the question. When you realize that evolution has no "goal" or "target" then you realize that this whole argument is meaningless. Evolution is not trying to produce anything in particular; it's merely trying to help the creature survive. Wings just happen to be one natural outcome of that process.

IOW, in making my case, notthecheatr not only agreed with my premises and descriptions about evolution, pathways, targets, and what natural selection contributed (and did not contribute), he/she considered my observations trivial and obvious.

Only when I reached the conclusion warranted by the logic - using the same terms, in the same way that I had before - did notthecheatr suddenly have an issue with the tems I was using.

[notthecheatr]

There's nothing at all interesting about the fact that as usual, you do not respond to any of the points I made, instead choosing to claim that I have somehow contradicted myself, and that this renders the claim that your argument is meaningless and nonsensical invalid.

Notthecheatr agrees with me and has no problems with my use of those terms, or in my statement that natural selection only removes pathways in terms of acquiring such targets.

I DO have a problem with your use of those terms, because the conclusion based on your use of those terms is wrong.

.... only then does nothecheatr suddenly have a problem with my terminology, recharacterizing my use of those terms because he/she doesn't like the conclusion, when in the prior two quotes he/she understood exactly how I used them, and used them the same way to respond and agree with me and my use of them. Note his/her response to my conclusion:

IOW, in making my case, notthecheatr not only agreed with my premises and descriptions about evolution, pathways, targets, and what natural selection contributed (and did not contribute), he/she considered my observations trivial and obvious.

Again, the fact that your use of the terms "paths" and "targets" is meaningless and leads to a meaningless conclusion means that I do indeed have a problem with your terminology. You didn't get that from my post?

You focus on the fact that you think I have contradicted myself, in agreeing with your premises but not your conclusion, yet you do not even begin to address the fact that your argument is meaningless and absurd and based on a complete misunderstanding of evolution and natural selection. The actual content of my posts is completely ignored, and the points I make, which are valid whether or not I contradict myself or make logical errors, are neither acknowledged nor responded to.

[notthecheatr]

If we assume that ancestral life forms were like bacteria, then they could reproduce every fifteen minutes, generating about a million descendant offspring in about 7 hours. Many bacteria are known to be extremely hardy life forms, being able to live in areas virtually no other life-forms can survive - extreme cold, extreme heat, and miles below the surface of the earth in rock. Bacteria can reproduce pretty much immediately after reproducing.

Elephants, on the other hand, produce about 4 offspring in a lifetime of about 60 years. It is obvious that if elephants are the descendants of bacteria-like single-celled organisms, quite a few mutations that were detrimental to procreation must have occurred, because bacteria are far, far better at procreating than elephants.

Wrong. Bacteria are smaller than elephants, and therefore are able to reproduce greater numbers than elephants. Quantity and quality are two different things. The reason elephants cannot reproduce like bacteria is because if they did, they would suffer massive food shortages and die out. Reproduction isn't just about numbers, it's about not dying out. If the multicellular organisms which are the ancestors to elephants needed to grow larger and consume more resources in order to compete to survive, then there was nothing detrimental about sacrificing quantity in order to grow.

Besides, it seems inappropriate to compare single celled organisms with multicelled organisms in this sense, firstly because they reproduce very differently and secondly because multicelled organisms are composed of single-celled organisms. Perhaps single-celled organisms found they were better able to reproduce and survive in certain environments if they formed multicellular organisms?

Also, obviously, the transition from simple self-duplication to sexual reproduction was detrimental to procreation, since requiring a member of the opposite sex to reproduce can only make it far, far harder to reproduce.

Not if doing so allows greater genetic diversity, and thus, better chances of acquiring positive variations over the generations.

They have failed to reach the destination only because they have been ejected from the field. If they were allowed to continue wandering (by removing natural selection), they might have eventually reached one of the target zones. It's really basic logic. If blind man is allowed to wander anywhere on the field without ever being ejected, there would by definition be no "harmful" or "beneficial" mutations, because "harmful" and "beneficial" are terms that are only relative to the action of natural selection.

That's like saying a chess grandmaster might have eventually won the tournament if he hadn't lost the game. The idea is absurd. He lost the tournament because he lost the game; there are no "what ifs" and "could have beens." There is only what is, and if you lose the game, you cannot possibly win later on. Life without natural selection is inconceivable.

Your argument isn't in terms of a natural selection system vs a system without natural selection; you are arguing a natural selection system vs a natural selection system. If a blind wanderer wanders into an ejection zone in the natural selection system, it is removed from the field. In the non-natural selection system, he is still wandering, and can meander around, find one of the necessary starting points for winged flight, and eventually find functioning winged flight.

There's no such thing as a "non-natural selection system." You are positing something that does not and could not exist.

It's really just basic logic.

Based on absurd and practically impossible scenarios which could not even exist in theory let alone in practice.

Conclusion: It is absurd to claim that without natural selection, organisms are more likely to achieve a particular "goal." The reason it's absurd is because we have no idea what a system would actually resemble, because such a system is inconceivable. Natural selection is part of life. There is no such thing as life without natural selection. We have no examples, no models, no theories, no theoretical sample space from which to calculate such probabilities. In fact, we don't even have a way of calculating the probability of something developing with natural selection. You are comparing probabilities that cannot be calculated based on analogies which have been shown to be wrong.

[gallo]

Only if one is deliberately trying to misinterpret what I said and ignoring every instance where I have corrected them; I've said - repeatedly - that I use those terms in the descriptive sense, not the prescriptive, which is the same way mainstream evolutionary scientists use such terms, which I showed by providing links and quotes to published work

Doesn't matter how many times you say you are using the terms in the descriptive sense, your discussion proves that it isn't true. How on earth can you look at a trait that is present today and then tell us that your version of evolution would randomly eliminate the pathways that have this trait as a target. Your discussion is nonsense, mainly because you are trying to introduce the concept of targets into evolution and natural selection.

Secondly, natural selection is not what you claim it to be.

then all that Natural Selection does, in terms of acquiring such targets, is remove potential pathways to that target from the evolutionary field. It doesn't create any pathways, it only removes the potential pathways that chance* mutation might go down.

Hogwash, pure and simple. If you don't mean that natural selection has a target, then why do you say it does? Moreover, mutations don't go down paths. Evolution has no concept of mutations somehow following prescribed paths.

Your understanding of natural selection is dead wrong. Natural selection does no function to remove "pathways." It doesn't function to remove anything. Of course natural selection doesn't act to create pathways to targets, just like it doesn't act to remove them. If you understood what natural selection really is, you would recognize the ignorance of your own argument.

Natural selection is the differential reproductive success of organisms with beneficial traits. Natural selection does not randomly eject mutations or pathways from some ridiculous football field. Such metaphors make it clear that you are talking about targets as targets and pathways as paths to those targets.

Learn what you are talking about before you speak. Would you like for me to suggest some reading for you? I mean some that doesn't come from creationist web sites.

[Dan74]

Hogwash, pure and simple. If you don't mean that natural selection has a target, then why do you say it does? Moreover, mutations don't go down paths. Evolution has no concept of mutations somehow following prescribed paths.

This is all you need to know. Stop making pointless threads about nonsense.

Thank you.

[Meleagar]

Hogwash, pure and simple. If you don't mean that natural selection has a target, then why do you say it does? .

Not only did I not say that, I stated exactly the opposite several times in order to correct that (apparently deliberate) mischaracterization, including the O.P., where I said:

Since natural selection doesn't have any idea what pathways lead there and which ones do not, and isn't trying to accomplish the construction of any particular macro-evolutionary feature,...

Since I have pointed this out repeatedly, and you and others simiply refuse to correct your erroneous characterizations but instead keep repeating them, I can only conclude you are unable or unwilling to be corrected even when your error is obvious and contradicted in the O.P.

[gallo]

Not only did I not say that, I stated exactly the opposite several times in order to correct that (apparently deliberate) mischaracterization, including the O.P., where I said:

Since natural selection doesn't have any idea what pathways lead there and which ones do not, and isn't trying to accomplish the construction of any particular macro-evolutionary feature,...

Since I have pointed this out repeatedly, and you and others simiply refuse to correct your erroneous characterizations but instead keep repeating them, I can only conclude you are unable or unwilling to be corrected even when your error is obvious and contradicted in the O.P.

You keep saying that you don't mean pathways to targets and then you discuss pathways as if they were aimed at targets. You keep talking about removing pathways by random and, as a result, the target can't be attained. How is that not path to target?

You can (and probably will) deny that you mean what you are saying as often as you wish. The fact remains that your discussion is based on pure imagination. Your discussion is dead wrong.

You see, (I've pointed this out to you before but you don't seem to understand) natural selection is not the random removal of a pathway to a designated target. In fact, natural selection isn't random and it doesn't remove anything.

[Meleagar]

You see, (I've pointed this out to you before but you don't seem to understand) natural selection is not the random removal of a pathway to a designated target. In fact, natural selection isn't random and it doesn't remove anything.

I never said natural selection was random; and I'll leave you with your statement that natural selection "doesn't remove anything".

[notthecheatr]

Your argument would be of interest were I making a case for intelligent design in this thread. I am not. Nor am I making a case for any non-Darwinian evolutionary mechanism.



Because they use it to describe evolutionary sequences and locations, just as I am using the terms, and not as if evolution was "trying" to find certain pathways or "trying" to find certain locations. IOW, they use the terms to describe, or refer to , evolutionary sequences that have occurred, or might occur, and features that actually exist, or have been acquired; and not in terms of evolution advancing down a prescribed path towards a prescribed target.

Irrelevant. The question is, do they use the term "pathway" the way you use the term "pathway?"

[gallo]

I never said natural selection was random; and I'll leave you with your statement that natural selection "doesn't remove anything".

You equated natural selection to places on a football field where a blind man that wandered into that place would be randomly ejected from the field. You also talked about natural selection as randomly removing pathways to targets.

You have to pick a horse and ride it. You can't keep flopping around and denying what you said every time you realize that you are wrong.

You also don't seem to understand that a reduction in the frequency in an allele in a population is not the removal of a pathway to a target. Nothing is removed. In fact, of the mechanisms of evolution that tend to reduce genetic variation, genetic drift is far more likely to remove an allele from a population. Natural selection actually increases the frequencies of beneficial alleles - for example, the alleles for feathers that allowed the development of flight in certain theropod (maniraptoran) dinosaurs.

As I recall, you also claimed that binocular vision was also impossible because of the random ejection of a wandering blind man from a football field, because that blind man somehow represented an evolutionary pathway to the target of binocular vision. One has to wonder what a football field has to do with the fact that binocular vision has evolved independently in many groups of animals, like dinosaurs (not all dinosaurs) and birds (not all birds) and mammals (not all mammals) and so forth. So please explain how this pathway was removed by a blind man being randomly ejected from a football field. I'm dying to know.

[gallo]

Funny that Meleagar cites binocular vision as a trait that impossible to have evolved because somehow a blind man wandering on a football field will be randomly ejected from the field at various points. This ill conceived metaphor is somehow supposed to represent natural selection.

Meleagar apparently learned somewhere that some mechanisms tend to reduce genetic variability (it could have been from me on this board). From this Meleagar concludes that natural selection functions to remove evolutionary pathways to targets. He picks a target and concludes that the wandering blind man that is aimed at that target would have been randomly ejected from the playing field by his distorted view of natural selection.

Natural selection does not "select" against. It selects "for." I know most of you are tired of seeing this, but I'll say it once more anyway. Natural selection is the differential reproductive success of individuals that possess beneficial traits. In other words, individuals with beneficial traits tend to produce more offspring than others. As a result, those traits become more common in a population. Natural selection does not function to remove pathways. Natural selection increases beneficial alleles in a population.

Of course, if we pick an evolutionary target (and claim that we aren't talking about targets) in a modern animal, and then declare that natural selection will randomly eliminate the pathway to that target (while again denying that we are talking about targets and pathways, and yet claiming knowledge of evolution and natural selection) because of a really, really nonsensical metaphor of a blind man wandering about a football field. Somehow the random (but I never said random) ejection of this metaphorical blind man from a metaphorical football field is supposed to represent natural selection. Wouldn't it be better to learn before speaking? The metaphor is based on dismal ignorance of the topic.

So let's consider binocular vision. What sort of animals have such vision. The first thing that comes to mind is predators. Binocular vision is very common in predator species of almost every taxonomic class. On the other hand, prey species more frequently have eyes that are on opposite sides of the head. Also, arboreal species frequently have binocular vision.

Here's an fact that I have always found interesting. Anole lizards have eyes that work independently. They are almost, but not quite, on opposite sides of their head. If you watch a hunting Anole, you will see that eyes constantly move independently while searching. When a target (I do mean target) is observed with one eye, that eye remains fixed on the target while the head is turned to point directly at the target. At that point, the other eye can also see the target, giving the anole binocular vision.

Birds aren't the only things that I watch. The hummingbird feeders that I hang every year attract lots of insects. Somehow, year after year, an anole figures out how to get on top of one of the feeders. It sits there for hours, lapping up bug after bug. And it doesn't seem to bother the hummingbirds.