This is what I call “:ecological natural selection.” This is what I have been advocating ever since I have been on BioLogos, and have met with derision most of the time. Thank you for your agreement.
However, please do not think that what you describe as evolution is what Darwin and Dawkins say is evolution. It is evolution based on ecological natural selection.
Yes. John 1:1-3 (NIV2011)
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
2 He was with God in the beginning.
3 Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made.
Evolution works the same way that gravity, chemistry, weather, etc. work, and that is through the Logos. I trust you know that the Logos refers to Jesus Christ and also Reason. God created every thing through Reason/Logos, so humans could understand the universe though our reason/science. Also the Logos holds all things together, so that the universe is not a chaos, but a cosmos. All of these systems work with each other , not against each other, even as I mentioned above ice is lighter than water going against the basic law that solids are heavier than liquids.
Humans live in one rational universe with one rational natural law, with one rational moral law, and with one God, not many random systems each doing their own thing independently of each other.
If we violate the laws of ecology, the Logos, we and the rest of nature will suffer the difficult consequences…
Seems a bit redundant since ecology is already part of the term “natural selection”.
You seem to be confused with the push back you get when you say Dawkins rejects ecology. I have yet to see one person here who rejects ecology as a part of natural selection. Can you cite a post?
I have yet to see one person here who rejects ecology as a part of natural selection.
Ecology is not an add on. It is the core of natural selection. as your model of evolution demonstrates. Also your example of evolution was the only one that I saw that used natural selection of any sort. People take natural selection for granted, which means they do not take it seriously, which is the same thing as denying it.
The fact that certain people do not want the truth known about Dawkins and ecology speaks volumes about him and his views. He does have some issues, so why not admit it?
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I think you have constructed a 3 story Dawkins strawman that you enjoy hitting with sticks and burning in effigy. What you describe is nothing like the Dawkins I know. The Dawkins Prize is awarded to researchers in the field of ecology, for crying out loud. The Dawkins Foundation has articles on ecology:
if i understand you properly, the answer is yes. many (though certainly not all) of my programs, when i would use one as the basis for the next, and then the one after that, etc., would certainly exhibit this continual change. shared features could be simply the result of mixing and matching. one program being largely the same as the previous, but showing “descent with modification”, and the same with its “descendent”, and so on, is something that would have been exhibited in at least many of my programs (the ones i formed by continuing modifications of the former).
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
87
What is your qualification in ecology? What degree? Postgraduate?
[And where is Dawkins against science in the form of ecology? He rightfully dismisses Gaia of course. It’s lovely science fiction, like Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children. I’d love Jonathan Haidt to be right in his one unscientific premiss in The Righteous Mind, but he’s not either; group selection. Believe it or not it hurt.]
I have trouble responding to both of these at once… You’re saying by analogy that the process of evolution, essentially, will be able to shuffle through the cards, selecting improvements, and each time without exception hit the “bulls-eye” of a 4-of-a-kind or a royal flush… But also that evolution doesn’t hit bulls-eyes, and any claim to recognize such a bulls-eye is painting the target around the arrow…
It might help to take that good analogy and refine it yet more. So try thinking of it this way.
Evolution does not (could not) foresee the “royal flush” (i.e. - your ‘bulls eye’) as the best of all possible hands. And so as the cards are drawn off the deck, we don’t have the immediate advantage of thinking ahead and planning to only keep the cards that will eventually give us the Royal Flush. But what we do have is the much more modest notion of slight improvements in the strength of our hand (courtesy of some natural selection or other mechanisms - but mixed with plenty of other randomness too.) So initially we may collect other sorts of odds and ends, sometimes thinking that at least having a set of similar colors makes for a prettier collection, or maybe having all the same number has certain appeal of uniformity. Only through many reshufflings of the remaining deck and this continued collection might the player end up with something like a Royal Flush. And here is where we fall afoul the sharpshooter (bulls eye painted around arrow) fallacy. If at that point we fixate on the improbability of a player landing on the Royal Flush as the only possible winning outcome all along. It is indeed a very improbable outcome, but perhaps (in fact quite likely) not the only winning one. But it is the one our player eventually settled on. But the player didn’t get there all at once (which would indeed have been vanishingly improbable). The player got to this particular winning outcome through many fits and starts and backtracking along the way - but with enough modest improvements over prior hands to drive what would later be viewed as ‘progress’ toward a present and realized ‘bulls eye’.
That seems a good refinement of @T_aquaticus’s model. So that no pre-decision to collect cards toward a straight flush or 4K is required. Instead, imagine a game played online in which you are dealt 7 cards as are the other players l. The online system identifies the best 5 card pokerhand and discards the two unused cards. Each round, the system randomly deals each player 2 more cards, identifies and retain the five which form the best hands down then discards the not used. I suppose we should imagine that unlike a game played with a single eco, each player can potentially draw any card not already in his hand including those he hasalready drawn and those also In Use in the current hands of active players. I think that would pretty well mirror natural selection in that every organism can potentially draw the same gene/card. Sorry a out typing area I suck at typing on my phone.
Here the computers program plays the roof the environment. Dispassionately boozing the best fit each time.
A simpler game that perhaps better illustrates evolution is Yahtzee. In it you roll 5 dice, keeping some and roll again to fill a “hand” that gives you points on a card. You often get imperfect results, but it best fills a “niche” on the scorecard. The difference between it and the card illustration is that there is less direction, hands may start out one way and going another with less direction and preconceived ends (though there is some, so still has its limits as do all analogies.)
I’d fix it but trying to seems only to scramble things worse. It’ll be several hours before I have access to my computer so please enjoy the laughs until then. You picked out one that cracked me up.
I think you have got it backwards. My argument is not with Dawkins, but with his ideas. I think that if you would read my book you would see that I am arguing against the ideas and science behind the Selfish Gene and related books by Prof. Dawkins. To day that he has a foundation which promotes ecology is impressive, but if hid life work is the Selfish Gene, which is counter ecology and his criticism of Wilson’s new book is counter ecology, I am going to belief the words and ideas from his own mouth.
The Selfish Gene is Prof. Dawkins primary book of science, none of which is original with hum, and on the first page he makes a bold ideological statement. I see it as based on ideology of the Selfish Gene which he tries to back with science.
THe essence of his ideology is best summed up by a statement found in River out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, p. 133. [ Note Bene: Dawkins is comfortable calling his ideas Darwinian.] He outlines his view of the meaning of life in chapt5er 4 and it comes down to DNA. “DNA neither knows nor cares (about humans.) DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
Are genes selfish? Yes, DNA does not know or care about others. Are we by nature selfish, like Cheaters? Yes, if we “dance to their tune.” Ecology is not based on the Selfish Gene, but based on symbiosis.
However thank you for the link to the foundation. It does look good from an ecological perspective and my mind is open to change basw3d on ideas. “How Warp-Speed Evolution Is Transforming Ecology” is the name of the article featured by the foundation. I have not been able to access the articles as of yet, but the titles indicates the Evolution moves as “warp-speed” which would be very different for Prof. Dawkins and evolution changes ecology, when it seems very clear that the ecology influences evolution.
Each drawn card is random. You don’t have to look through the deck and find the ones you want because you will eventually get a card that improves your hand through a random draw.
The fallacy occurs when you paint the bulls eye after the event. Human evolution has already happened, and you are saying that humans were the target after they already evolved. I strongly doubt you could have predicted every twist and turn in human evolution if you looked at the ancestral population 5 million years ago.
Using cards as our analogy again, you can shuffle a deck and then lay down one card at a time until you have all of them face up. The probability of getting that specific order of cards is 1 in 52!, or 1 in 8x10^67. How is it possible that I got such an improbable event on my first try?
There is no reason why your programs would fall into a nested hierarchy. You could borrow units from many different programs and combine them into one which would not produce a nested hierarchy.
A nested hierarchy is more than just shared features. It is a PATTERN of shared features. Using an example from biology, if you found a species that shared derived features from birds and mammals this would actually be evidence against evolution. For example, a species with feathers, three middle ear bones, flow through lungs, and teats would be a serious challenge to the theory of evolution.
You have misrepresented what Christy said by truncating her statement and taking it out of context.
Let’s take a look at the full context and the full quote:
Christy was stating that many forum participants have explained, at great length and numerous times, that the theory of evolution as taught in universities today incorporates ecological dynamics.
You should have paid more attention to the context of Christy’s statement and its complete text, @Relates.
Hi @Chris_Falter, great to connect with you again, and thanks for engaging in the “back-of-the-napkin” math!
FWIW my 10^-36 response was to point out that although 10^93 looks huge, there was no attempt at a denominator, and so in isolation 10^93 is not meaningful. So let’s try to do one that might be meaningful.
Brief context comment: this looks like primordial soup type of discussion, which we know from the science is not how it happened. But we can start there cuz we gotta start somewhere and refine!
So given some disclaimers, sure, starting with my 10^-36 probability of Cytochrome C, let’s assume that any useful for life protein would have that same “chance”, and if there were 10^26 useful proteins in a 100AA random ordering, then 10^-10 would fall out. Let’s see where this goes!