Aren’t you the “Friendly” atheist? “Unlike you.” Think bigger, Mr. T.
I’m still allowed my outbursts on scientific topics.
If you think a species is an ecosystem, then you don’t understand biology, nor should you be comparing yourself to Wallace.
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DNA does randomly mutate, and DNA is heritable. If a child encounters malaria they can’t just change their DNA so they are immune to it. However, they can inherit certain hemoglobin alleles that do confer malarial resistance, and those alleles were produced by random mutations. They don’t have anything to do with memories, cognitive structures, or the rest of your word salad.
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Then why are the bird wing and bat wing so different?
If we compared the DNA of bats to both birds and humans, which do you think it would most closely match?
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You’re right that group symbiosis (lichens, corals, mitochondria) represents fusion, not group selection. These are integrated units, not cooperating individuals. But that’s how all individuals came to be.
I’m proposing that evolution operates at many levels, and that unit can be an organism, a tribe, a community, or a biome. The “threading equations” apply to whatever the coherent unit is:
Cell with mitochondria: one unit
Lichen (fungus + algae + …): one unit
Coral reef (coral + zooxanthellae + fish + ..): one unit
Old-growth forest (trees + fungi + wildlife + microclimate): one unit
Earth itself.
Not group selection: systems evolution. The Amazon doesn’t evolve through tree competition; it evolves as an integrated climate-regulating system. Selection acts on the coherence of the whole.
On “Selfish Gene” Sufficiency: Fabric proposes why those paths and not others, why convergence, why geometric optimization, why constrained possibility space. Selfish is a philosophy.
On “Anamnesis isn’t even wrong”:
Here’s a list of explicit falsification criteria:
- Convergent traits should consistently re-use homologous developmental or regulatory pathways, suggesting reactivation of latent architecture rather than independent innovation.
- “Impossible morphologies” (e.g., six-legged tetrapods) should remain unrealized even under strong selection.
- Post-disturbance ecosystems with preserved biotic or microbial networks should recover exponentially faster than those with erased ecological memory (Mt. St. Helens example above.)
- Traits or morphologies lost in a lineage should reappear preferentially when similar environmental conditions reoccur.
Testable = potentially wrong = science.
Evolution threads coherence through fused systems at multiple scales, not just through individual replicators.
Evolution doesn’t even produce the same result on every island[1] on this planet, where much of the environment is shared. Expecting evolution to converge on different planets that don’t have the same environmental conditions -atmosphere, gravity, temperature range, crustal composition, amount of water - is naive.
Biogeographical islands in general, not just physical lumps of rock surrounded by water, though those are of course included. ↩︎
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Because bats emerged out of the mammal line and probably emerged due to webbed fingers. Just found a poor little bat the other day all dried out. Helped to study bats too with researchers. Really fascinating.
Am I saying convergence produces the same creature? No, clearly not. Giraffes are nothing like giraffatitan. Dolphins do not equal shark.
Biological evolution and systems evolution are very different processes. They just happen to have been given similar names in English. That didn’t have to be the case.
Biological evolution doesn’t apply to planets, because planets don’t reproduce.
Systems evolution doesn’t apply to genes, because they don’t change over their individual lifetimes.
Claiming that evolution operates at many levels because both species and stars evolve is like claiming that tectonics operates at many levels because both volcanoes and acne erupt.
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“Convergent traits should consistently re-use homologous developmental or regulatory pathways, suggesting reactivation of latent architecture rather than independent innovation.”
Is this falsified now?
“Of course, not the exact same result, but very similar. Convergent evolution to the max.”
Bat wings and bird wings are not very similar. The pectoral fins of dolphins and sharks are not very similar. The pectoral fins of dolphins are much more similar to human arms than they are the pectoral fins of sharks.
There is absolutely no reason why we would expect the same result if life evolved independently on another planet. We don’t even get the same results for life on Earth.
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Since Wallace has been invoked in this thread, the Wallace line is a perfect example of this.
The Wallace Line or Wallace’s Line is a faunal boundary line drawn in 1859 by the British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace and named by the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley.
It separates the biogeographic realms of Asia and ‘Wallacea’, a transitional zone between Asia and Australia formerly also called the Malay Archipelago and the Indo-Australian Archipelago (present day Indonesia). To the west of the line are found organisms related to Asiatic species; to the east, a mixture of species of Asian and Australian origins is present. Wallace noticed this clear division in both land mammals and birds during his travels through the East Indies in the 19th century.
So you have two sets of islands close to one another, but on one set of islands the species are more similar to species farther away in Asia, and on the other side the species on those nearby islands are more similar to species much farther away in Australia.
Wallace is also famous for independently discovering natural selection of heritable traits within species, and also work on potential mechanisms for speciation.
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Hi,
Benefits to the individual (or to individual kin as in the social insect scenario) can select for the trait of sociality and cooperation but this is not “group selection” as defined by biologists. Because the selection here can still be explained most parsimoniously at the level of the individual, biologists find the assertion of higher-levels of selection (i.e. among competing groups for group survival) superfluous.
There was a big debate in the last decade or so where a handful of biologists were claiming evidence for “multi-level” (group) selection in social insects, but a closer look at their mathematical population models revealed that these just collapsed back to classic kin selection models (and hence could be explained most parsimoniously by individual selection). For those interested in the population models see the scientific paper here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2013596117
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Epigenetic memory
Cellular network memory (cell differentiation, prion-based inheritance)
Behavioral and cultural memory (bird song dialects, primate tool use)
Microbiome-associated memory: (symbiotic microbial communities)
Ecological and niche memory: (Bias: soil chemistry, reef architecture)
Though that’s a result of parasite-induced abnormal development.
How about five-legged tetrapods? Spider monkeys and kangaroos would qualify. Two-legged and zero-legged tetrapods are common, and should be just as impossible under your scenario.
Though I doubt six-legged tetrapods are actually "impossible morphologies” under anamnesis, since the most likely precursors of tetrapods had more than four limbs (six or seven), so finding them would be a confirmation, not a falsification.
I noticed back when growing up that kids from forest and farm were less likely to get sick than those who lived in town.
Even Dawkins doesn’t claim that any more – he regrets coining the term.
Locke would love to discuss this with you!
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But it does. Trees most certainly compete; any working forester knows this.
BTW, I’m taking a forestry class at the local community college, and competition was noted as how a forest develops, including when humans decide what trees to plant. Yes, there is “cooperation”, but it is because different species use other species, e.g. the western hemlock uses the Sitka spruce for storm protection, while the spruce gets nothing out of it.
That’s not an “impossible morphology”, it’s a contradiction in terms.
One geology professor referred to volcanoes as “zits on an adolescent planet”.
And in Central America there are “sky islands” where some species resemble nothing except themselves.
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That’s still DNA. Besides that, there is very little evidence of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance in vertebrates. Epigenetic inheritance would also not last for thousands of generations.
That’s all DNA driven.
Has no impact on morphological traits.
Again, has no impact on heritable morphological traits.
What you have listed are factors that affect natural selection. Given a specific environment certain DNA based traits will be selected for or against. In the very same way, the rest of the species in the environment/ecosystem will also evolve through natural selection of DNA based heritable traits. Changing the names of all these well understood mechanisms is nothing more than semantics, and it only creates confusion when discussing biology. Just use the descriptions that everyone else is using.
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Fair. I agree that many apparent cases of “group selection” can indeed be re-expressed as kin or individual-level selection when modeled mathematically.
Where my framework differs slightly is in framing cooperation and stability not as selection levels, but as emergent memory effects within systems. In that view, what persists isn’t just the success of individual genes or kin networks, but the recurrent reactivation of cooperative architectures that have previously stabilized under similar conditions. So it’s more about how multi-agent systems can retain and re-express previously successful configurations; and how constraints develop as well (forgetting).
“Selection” is one of those terms that may need to be replaced for precision and accuracy.
But given that the morphology and behaviour of the multiple agents (individuals) that form ecosystems is encoded in their DNA, the structure and function of any ecosystem will depend ultimately on the DNA of the individuals involved (and selection at the individual level of the organisms that comprise an ecosystem). As a professional biologist myself (and a Christian), postulating a vague, metaphysical “memory” that is responsible for the attributes of ecosystems just seems superfluous and unnecessary. A boreal forest that regenerates after a fire will once again assume the attributes of the previous boreal forest not because of a “memory” but because the same species(more or less) will recolonize the area and the way a species will function with others in the ecosystem will be encoded in its DNA, which is inherited from previous generations.
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@SkyReflections Mr Zelenka, I am afraid I also agree; it sounds a bit anthropomorphic.
Thanks.
I do think you would enjoy an Evolutionary Biology course. @klw and other scientists here, including Kai and T, are far above me in that. (@klw teaches this, I believe).
I am saving that article on the evolution of altruism!
Thanks.
What, evolution isn’t selective of genes by means of individual - self - survival to reproduction?
I’d like to see where he doesn’t know that any more.