For people’s interest, Berkeley University has an “Evolution 101” misconceptions page: I pasted some of the topics from the page below. Note that “natural selection acts for the good of the species” is listed as a common misconception…
Misconceptions about natural selection and adaptation
Which is what the survival of the variation consists of.
Then I have shown those textbooks are wrong with the examples of bees and mating rituals. Some traits survive because they enhance the survival of the species.
And I would add one more.
Traits evolve because they benefit individuals.
Why so stubborn?
Because on this hinges the possibility of the evolution of altruistic behavior. klw would like to say this is impossible and I think this is wrong. It is possible because some traits survive because they enhance the survival of the species rather than individuals.
No, you have not shown that kin selection (which is what bees are doing) or sexual selection (which is what mating rituals are involved in) is for “the survival of the species”… If you don’t want to believe me, did you read the common misconceptions of evolution that I posted from the Berkeley University site? What is it there that you don’t understand?
Oh wait! So now you want to set yourself up as an authority over Berkeley Professors in the field?
OK, I’m smiling and nodding and slowly backing away… But for those following this thread who are really interested in the facts, I’ll post the list again here, and note bullet point 4:
Misconceptions about natural selection and adaptation
klw likes to call it “Kin selection.” But I think that concedes the argument because “Kin selection” includes the evolution of altruistic behavior and traits which enhance the survival of the species.
Science is not about authority. You seem to be confusing science with some kind of religion.
Wrong again! This is not an example of kin selection. Male praying mantis allow themselves to be eaten by their mate, because they have fertilized the eggs of that female. And so, they are enhancing the survival of their own offspring by donating their bodies as nutrients for the eggs that their mate will lay. This is simple natural selection.
Nice try at deflection?..are you now claiming that the information on the Berkeley University site is not true, and being promoted only on the basis of “authority”?
Let’s go to the source of what klw is claiming to preclude the survival of traits which enhance the survival of the species.
Natural selection has no foresight or intentions. In general, natural selection simply selects among individuals in a population, favoring traits that enable individuals to survive and reproduce, yielding more copies of those individuals’ genes in the next generation. Theoretically, in fact, a trait that is advantageous to the individual (e.g., being an efficient predator) could become more and more frequent and wind up driving the whole population to extinction (e.g., if the efficient predation actually wiped out the entire prey population, leaving the predators without a food source).
Natural selection has no foresight or intentions.
Strawman (in the way klw has used it). There is nothing about any foresight or intentions in anything I said. The same tactic can be used to say that individuals have no foresight or intentions with regards to the survival of their genes.
In general, natural selection simply selects among individuals in a population, favoring traits that enable individuals to survive and reproduce
Incorrect. It selects among variations in the population not individuals in the population – favoring variations which enable those variations to survive better than other variations. Thus the survival of the male individual praying mantis is irrelevant, because the variation survives better when the male provides his body as nutrients for the eggs.
a trait that is advantageous to the individual (e.g., being an efficient predator) could become more and more frequent and wind up driving the whole population to extinction (e.g., if the efficient predation actually wiped out the entire prey population
Excellent example of how the survival of the species trumps survival of the individual. Now that variation is gone and elsewhere the variation without that advantage to the individual is the one which survives. Some call this ecological evolution.
No… only that YOU are touting the authority of it. I am willing to bet those who made the list are perfectly willing to consider that the list can be added to. Why do I think that? Because I have been a part of such a process myself.
But I never said you were making a point about “intentionality”, so your objection here is a red herring. Getting back on topic to the question of “for the good of the species”, the quote above says “favoring traits that enable individuals to survive and reproduce, yielding more copies of those individuals’ genes in the next generation” . Note individuals and their reproductive capacity are the units of selection, not species.
But the variation is among individuals. It is individual phenotypes that vary and which natural selection acts on. So, your phrase “it selects among variations in the population” makes no sense without individuals being involved. The male praying mantis is an individual. And his behaviour is selected based on his (i.e., an individual’s) ability to reproduce relative to other hypothetical individual mantises not displaying that trait. The male’s behaviour benefits his own (individual) reproductive success, and that is what Natural Selection operates on. There is no need to invoke an idea that the male does this “for the sake of the species”…
huhhhh?..you seem to have misinterpreted this entirely. "Driving the population to extinction"means the species goes extinct.
I’m touting the truth of the list primarily and only posted an authoritative citation because you didn’t believe me. But yes, when it comes to a lay person in the field such as yourself who wants to claim alternative facts to such a list, I’ll take the word of the “authorities”, thank you very much
Incorrect. Populations and species are not same thing at all. This is another big factor in evolution because separated populations often evolve differently.
But even if you correct what you said to say species rather than population, this changes nothing. Because it is still an example of how natural selection went against a variation because it did not enhance the survival of the species.
Well it is true that I am not a biologist. I am physicist. But it means I do know how science works. And evolution? It is no where near as difficult as quantum field theory.
Ok but that excuse doesn’t work with other examples. So you use another excuse of “kin selection” for the bee example. But then there is that final example in which neither excuse works – mating behaviors which select the strongest and most healthy ones to reproduce. And now you have added a fourth example of how the population which survives is the one with the variation where the species survives rather than the variation giving only an individual advantage.
No, read the example again, you’re misunderstanding it. It shows how a trait that benefits an individual is the driving force, because it can cause the population to go extinct. And species are simply collections of populations, so if populations can theoretically be driven extinct by individual selection, by default it implies species could go extinct. i.e., the driving force of selection is not necessarily for the good of the species
Good for you! You’re a lay biologist then! I will certainly trust you when it comes to physics, and do enjoy your posts on physics topics in this forum. You have much interesting to say, and much that I agree with.
I hold a professorship in evolutionary ecology and animal behaviour and very much enjoy the practice of science.
Well I think I prefer to leave this on that positive note. I still don’t agree but I am not convincing you either. You can put it down to my lay biology status, but I think it can be attributed to semantics. So we will leave it at our respective stubborn opinions. And I will not be so surprised or offended if there is physics issue where we do not agree also.
BTW what is your most recent work in evolutionary ecology? Perhaps I will find it interesting. No guarantee I know… sometimes the work of science isn’t terribly exciting.
Positive notes are always nice. I prefer some degree of anonymity on public media platforms, but if you want to private message me, I’ll point you in the direction of my profile on google scholar. Yes, agreed there, work in the trenches of science is often not that thrilling…
cheers.
So the universe seems to be a place which has been conceived in the way that it is, because it facilitates relationships, because love is at the heart of it.
Reads like a conclusion, something not expected as the start of something.
My first response, based on trying to get behind that beginning, was that to me the universe seemed to be a place that had order at the heart of it.
. . . there is a frankly, religious fundamentalism in modern biology, which says that there are lots of questions that cannot be asked, because they’re questions that can’t be posed in the language of the orthodoxy.
Can’t argue with that!
. . . you might be able to understand to a tiny degree, some parts of what it’s like to be a nonhuman.
My immediate thought was “science fiction writers!” Not all, of course, but there are some who have looked at species in nature as models and come up with some very alien – and very internally consistent – ways of thinking.
I’ve been wondering lately if we will realize our kinship with elephants and dolphins soon enough to keep from killing them off.
I think you guys are talking two different things. On one side is the fact that species don’t reproduce, individuals do, so natural selection actually operates at the level of the individuals; on the other is that what benefits individuals so they have more offspring is thus shared with the species due in part to the increased offspring but eventually if the bearers of the advantageous gene don’t die out.
