Adam, this premise seems to be the key to the question in your OP. On what basis do you hold this premise?
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I think we are already a more advanced form of life. One that surpasses biological evolution to change at a much faster rate.
The idea that evolution = advancement or progress is quite popular, and easy to find in popular claims about evolution, including from scientists who ought to know better. But the reality is that evolution is simply change. Of course, change advances in some direction or another. Some organisms have evolved increased complexity in particular aspects; some have simplified in particular aspects. These changes may be advantageous or disadvantageous in different contexts. We can figure out lots of things with our complex brains that other creatures can’t, and can get in lots more trouble from the things we figure out than they can.
In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Lewis raises the question of distinguishing between Progress and Going Bad. Both are going somewhere, which is all that science alone can tell us.
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Incorrect. It is variation AND natural selection. (Of course when I read past that sentence, I see you are aware of this) To be sure there is no end goal and I definitely think variation is the driving force. But there is a filter which acts as a measure of approval or disapproval. Many changes are neither, of course. Thus you get a branching tree to millions of species. I agree with you (and thus disagree with T-aquaticus), I suppose, to the point that there is no inevitability.
But natural selection is very important part of this because populations of living organism significantly alter the environment – not only for a competition factor, but also to create new opportunities (new niches and making cooperation advantageous).
I would be interested in a reference to that, because I don’t recall this.
I think it’s part of what happens to/with Eustace.
In the Lone Islands (their first landing after Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace join the voyage), Governor Gumpas defends the slave trade. “Have you no idea of progress, of development?” Caspian replies “We call it Going bad in Narnia.” (Eustace was one of those to be freed by Caspian’s banning of the slave trade.)
Certainly both selection and variation are key parts of evolution. But it is evolution if there is change (cf. the common definition as change in gene frequency in a population over time) and stasis if the selection keeps things the same. Selection does create directionality, though random change produces an increase in total variation. That might be considered a direction. Also, if the random change starts at a point other than the center of the total possible range, there will be a directional shift in the average from merely random change. For example, programming a bunch of drones to fly randomly will increase their average elevation. Plenty will crash into the ground, but they can’t go any lower than that, so the average elevation once you let them start flying will be somewhere above ground level.
Selection is a major reason why error catastrophe is not true. If an organism’s DNA is too catastrophic, it dies without contributing to the gene pool. Individuals with advantageous alleles (under the particular selective regime they have encountered) tend to have more offspring, increasing the frequency of helpful alleles and decreasing the frequency of harmful ones. New mutations are no more likely to produce helpful than harmful mutations, but new mutations have a chance of being advantageous; clones obviously are no better (or worse) than what they were cloned from, genetically. The crossing-over and independent assortment in meiosis, along with the new combinations produced in fertilization, give a chance for different advantageous alleles to get combined in one individual, as well as different disadvantageous alleles. It depends on the environment, the level of competition, and other factors as to whether a change is likely to be as good or better than the existing genomes, or likely to be detrimental.
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It should be noted that there is generally existing variation in populations, and a shift in ecological or physical environment can then favor or select against a previously neutral characteristic within the present range. Thus evolution as a change in allele frequencies. Of course, while this is going on, mutation continues to contribute ongoing variation, which may have immediate or deferred effect. This is also one reason that smaller, homogeneous, and very specialized populations are less resilient to change.
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This also includes the closing off evolutionary paths which some lifeforms already there make unworkable.
The result of all these is a feedback loop or butterfly effect in chaotic dynamics, where the whole ecology chooses a path and gains a momentum in particular directions. We can definitely say that mankind has been such a huge environment altering factor making it difficult for species to survive unless they can find a niche in the human dominated/altered environment.
Of course many would say that the human effect on the environment is just bad. But the only real objective measure will be ultimate survival. Do we lead the whole earth into an evolutionary dead end, or do we find a path forward? At the moment the most directionless factor in the evolution of life on the planet is this human impact, as we fail to take responsibility and have no idea what we are doing and where we are going. But I think there are many optimistic possibilities as well as doomsday ones, and we tend to explore the many possibilities in our science fiction entertainments.
This reminds me of a special I watched last year about how the world is running out of (accessible) sand. One of the effects of mining sand for concrete has been the devastation of estuaries and beaches, which alters the coastline sufficiently that it is driving a number of species to extinction. The shortage is starting to threaten rivers as well where dams have captured massive amounts of sand that would have reached the coast otherwise, and proposals have been made to mine it right from the rivers – totally ignoring the fact that a multitude of species that live in estuaries are already threatened because the sand isn’t getting there any more, besides the fact that mining by dredging will radically alter the river ecosystem (one proposal to mine by dredging in the upper stretches of reservoirs was halted when the government involved gave permission but with the requirement that water quality downstream from the dredging site had to be indistinguishable from the water quality a quarter mile upstream of where the river reaches the reservoir).
But it isn’t just big projects; people make bonfires on beaches or river banks using freight pallets without recognizing that they will be leaving heaps of nails behind, drive nails into trees without investigating whether that species can deal with such wounds, and burn plastic trash in fireplaces without considering that they may have neighbors with lung issues to whom the smoke is toxic.
Maybe all middle schools should have classes in thinking ahead, with a more advanced version in high schools (call the class “What Could Possibly Go Wrong?”).
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Even a shift in environment is unnecessary, since there is variation in environment across a population’s geographical area.
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You don’t understand error catastrophe, don’t know what biodiversity is, misunderstand Kimura’s neutral theory, don’t know what the Lenski experiment is trying to do, don’t know how additional chromosomes can be detrimental, can’t work out how Lamarckism differs from Darwin’s ideas, and think Piltdown is still being touted as evidence… and I’m the one that clearly hasn’t studied?
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@adamjedgar, I’m still wondering about this.
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You reply was beautifully straight forward and got at the reason I asked about this:
In pre-school, entirely non-technical terms (appropriate for me):
Living things are constantly changing.
Environments are constantly changing.
The current living things either propagate in their current environment, move to a suitable one, or die out.
An “advanced form of life” can be wiped out in a moment if the environment suddenly becomes unsuitable.
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So if a doctor recommends using Molnupiravir to deal with a virus, you will just tell the doctor you don’t believe in that.
A fact that is often not fully appreciated. One of my favorite examples is fur color adaptations in pocket mice and their relationship with lava fields.
Pinacate lava field:
Black fur is actually a strongly deleterious dominant mutation outside of those islands of black lava. Light fur is equally deleterious for mice living on those black lava islands. There is free interbreeding between the dark mice in the lava fields and the light colored mice in the surrounding region, but natural selection works to limit the spread of the dominant dark allele out into the larger population.
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[creationist mode]
Fraud!
Those photos are staged! Those mice have been glued to the rocks!!! They don’t stand on the ground in real life!!!
[/creationist mode]
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“Where the mutations fall” is the wrong way to think about this. There is genetic variability in any population (unless they are all clones), and variability in fitness as a result. If the entire population is within a “narrow band” of fitness, then natural selection cannot “select” based on fitness.
New mutations tend to add variability in the fitness of a population, increasing the spread. Even if the population starts in a narrow band, the new mutations will increase the difference between those with the lowest and highest fitness to the point where selection can occur.
So while it possible for the “catastrophic” scenario where “selection cannot act” to occur, its usually a self-solving problem. So long as the population is reproducing fast enough to replace losses, the variability in fitness will grow until natural selection is unavoidable.
This is why Kimura’s graph tails off on the left; that is the part of the population that is actively being “selected out”.
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If you want to critique evolution, you should leave off reading YEC apologists and start reading actual science. I know it’s hard for you to believe, but the Christians you trust to tell the truth regularly lie and twist facts to make the evidence fit their predetermined conclusions.
Otherwise known as the “fallacy of the beard” – how many hairs does it take to make a beard? Abraham tried to use this tactic on God to save Sodom in Genesis 18. Didn’t work.
If you want an actual answer, scientists have studied something called “minimum viable population,” which is how many individual adults are needed for a population in the wild to have a 90% survival rate after 40 generations. The best answer is around 7000.
I would absolutely not agree with that proposition. We have zero examples in history of that happening. New species arise from a population. Genetics 101.
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It is not…Kimura made that observarion himself. Have you actually bothered to read Kimuras work? From your response there in blaming Sanford its obviously a no.
Would you mind citing some proven examples there because even google AI stupidly cites darwins finches and mice as being the two well known examples.
Another example is found in a certain fish that can change its form to look like a predator within a very short generwtional cycle if its environment requires that…it can then revert back again in equally few generational cycles.
The trouble is, these are neither new animals nor irreversible…so they are not examples of darwinian evolution. They remain the same kind of animal they have always been.
I have no lroblem with evolutionary mutation…that is well explained by the old earth proponents in the intelligent design community.