[lit-ideas] Re: Natural Selection
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 31 May 2014 12:33:07 -0400 (EDT)
How natural can selection be?
Is natural selection Nature's selection?
When discussing "Meaning", Grice thought that '... means...' is a more
English construction than '... is a sign of...'. As to the distinction between
signs being natural and non-natural, he found it confusing, "I prefer
'natural' as opposed to 'non-natural'". His example:
"Those spots meant measles to the doctor, but they meant nothing to me."
Naturally, he lacked a medical education.
In a message dated 5/31/2014 8:42:13 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx writes in "Group selection and natural selection":
Of course, we can try to bring everything under a Darwinian approach by,
for example, classing any kind of "selection pressure" as part of "natural
selection", but then we risk (1) rendering the term "natural selection"
vacuous...
We have discussed that already, I realise, especially re: 'the fittest
survives' -- Wikipedia references on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest
below.
One problem with 'natural selection' is 'natural'. I was reading a Loeb
volume recently, which may relate.
It's actually Aristotle's Rhetoric -- a minor example:
Aristotle writes:
"That is why the style of Alicidamas appears frigid. For he uses not
'museum' but 'having taken up the museum of nature'".
There is a big footnote here:
"The meaning of 'paralabon' is quite obscure: various renderings are
'having taken to himself', 'received', 'grasped', 'inherited'. The word
'museion', originally a haunt of the Muses, came to mean a school of art or
literature. The fault [in Alicidamas's locution] appears to consist in the
addition 'tes phuseos', but it is difficult to see why. Cope confesses his
inability to understand the passage. Jebb translates: "he does not say, 'having
taken to himself a school of the Muses,' but 'to NATURE's school of the
Muses'".
Anyway, mutatis mutandis, I propose:
natural selection --
versus
Nature's selection
selection of Nature.
---- Surely for a reductionist of (say), W2 and W3 items to W1 items (and
cfr. Grice on 'reductive' versus 'reductionist'), it's ALL a matter of the
selection of Nature. Whether this is tautologous I wonder if Darwin cared.
E.g. I would not be surprised if a Father of the Church, say, would take
'that's tautologous!' as COMPLIMENTARY -- but, admittedly, Witters changed all
that!
On top of that, 'naturally' has become abused. The first Google hit is (as
per today), for 'naturally' is, naturally, Selena Gomez's song, entitled,
"Naturally" -- the lyrics don't have an explicit reference to Darwin's
appeal to "Nature" but they should.
Cheers,
Speranza
---
""Survival of the fittest" is sometimes claimed to be a tautology."
"The reasoning is that if one takes the term "fit" to mean "endowed with
phenotypic characteristics which improve chances of survival and
reproduction" (which is roughly how Spencer understood it), then "survival of
the
fittest" can simply be rewritten as "survival of those who are better equipped
for surviving". Furthermore, the expression does become a tautology if one
uses the most widely accepted definition of "fitness" in modern biology,
namely reproductive success itself (rather than any set of characters
conducive to this reproductive success). This reasoning is sometimes used to
claim
that Darwin's entire theory of evolution by natural selection is
fundamentally tautological, and therefore devoid of any explanatory power."
"However, the expression "survival of the fittest" (taken on its own and
out of context) gives a very incomplete account of the mechanism of natural
selection. The reason is that it does not mention a key requirement for
natural selection, namely the requirement of heritability. It is true that the
phrase "survival of the fittest", in and by itself, is a tautology if
fitness is defined by survival and reproduction. Natural selection is the
portion of variation in reproductive success that is caused by heritable
characters (see the article on natural selection)."
"If certain heritable characters increase or decrease the chances of
survival and reproduction of their bearers, then it follows mechanically (by
definition of "heritable") that those characters that improve survival and
reproduction will increase in frequency over generations. This is precisely
what is called "evolution by natural selection." On the other hand, if the
characters which lead to differential reproductive success are not heritable,
then no meaningful evolution will occur, "survival of the fittest" or not:
if improvement in reproductive success is caused by traits that are not
heritable, then there is no reason why these traits should increase in
frequency over generations. In other words, natural selection does not simply
state that "survivors survive" or "reproducers reproduce"; rather, it states
that "survivors survive, reproduce and therefore propagate any heritable
characters which have affected their survival and reproductive success". This
statement is not tautological: it hinges on the testable hypothesis that
such fitness-impacting heritable variations actually exist (a hypothesis that
has been amply confirmed.)"
"Momme von Sydow suggested further definitions of 'survival of the fittest'
that may yield a testable meaning in biology and also in other areas where
Darwinian processes have been influential. However, much care would be
needed to disentangle tautological from testable aspects. Moreover, an
"implicit shifting between a testable and an untestable interpretation can be
an
illicit tactic to immunize natural selection [...] while conveying the
impression that one is concerned with testable hypotheses.""
"Skeptic Society founder and Skeptic magazine publisher Dr. Michael Shermer
addresses the tautology problem in his book, Why People Believe Weird
Things, in which he points out that although tautologies are sometimes the
beginning of science, they are never the end, and that scientific principles
like natural selection are testable and falsifiable by virtue of their
predictive power. Shermer points out, as an example, that population genetics
accurately demonstrate when natural selection will and will not effect change
on a population. Shermer hypothesizes that if hominid fossils were found in
the same geological strata as trilobites, it would be evidence against
natural selection."
(B)
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When you know it's meant to be
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When you're with me, baby
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