Hey, Cole.

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
1)But all this is intellectual history, not science. Darwin might just have been wrong in not seeing human, intended activity as different in kind from naatural selection. As I said to Jayson, I just don't see the significance of he distinction except in terms of the human belief in being somehow special, a belief that Darwin always challenged and that various people have always tried to smuggle back in.
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While Darwin just might have been wrong in making the distinction, you too just might be wrong in not seeing its significance. Even if I concurred with your view, which in many respects I do, your initial claim that you and Darwin are on the same page about the inclusion of human design in natural selection has not been borne out, unless by that you mean that you and what he "should have thought" are on the same page.

So, independent of who is right or wrong, there is what you think natural selection means and what the consensus thinks natural selection means. The wiki entry is clear and comprehensive about what natural selection means "out there" in the world. You believe that to be wrong and hold a different view, fine. Your view that human design's unique ability to subvert selection processes is not a categorical difference v. other animals may very well make more sense, but this discussion started with what is meant by natural selection, and for that I go with the wiki view.

Btw, as far as your claim that Darwin emphatically rejected the expression "survival of the fittest," the wiki entry says otherwise: "after reading Darwin, Herbert Spencer introduced the phrase survival of the fittest, which became a popular summary of the theory. The fifth edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1869 included Spencer's phrase as an alternative to natural selection, with credit given: "But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient." Although the phrase is still often used by non-biologists, modern biologists avoid it because it is tautological if "fittest" is read to mean "functionally superior" and is applied to individuals rather than considered as an averaged quantity over populations."
 
So you haven't read Darwin, you've read Wiki? And on that basis, you've decided you know what Darwin meant? If you read later editions, you'll find Darwin considering Lamarckian theories of passing on acquired characteristics. Darwin hated Lamarck but he had to consider mechanisms that sped up evolution because of Jenkins and Kelvin. No one has ever thought that he wanted to include Lamarck. In later editions of Origin and particularly in the famous last paragraph he suggested that evolution was run by a divine force. His letters and his Autobiography make clear that he was an atheist. His notebooks made clear that he thought that his view of evolution made was a material one that eliminated the divine from the picture. Reading the book would have made your case stronger since actually retitles the 4th chapter from Natural Selection to Natural Selection or Survival of the Fittest. If you read the chapter though, you will see that he continues to describe the process he always described and had not in any sense adapted Spencer's ideas. He introduced the term at the suggestion of Alfred Wallace because Wallace thought that the phrase natural selection and its illustration in terms of human selection created a mistaken sense that natural selection always implied design. Your own last sentence shows the consensus on the connection between the two ideas. I should say that there are critics who do think Darwin accepted Spencer more fully and even if you only read the 4th chapter, I'm sure with selective quotation you can make a better case for your view (none of them thought that it wasn't a mistake for him to do so since the theories were irrevocably different). But without reading Spencer and reading Darwin, you really aren't going to get very far.

This is really deep in the weeds, though, since whether he accepted Spencer or not has little to do with the question of whether he thought human activity to be something other than natural selection.

Look, I use Wiki too to find out things I know nothing about. But you can't do intellectual history using it. Next I'll be hearing the old story that Darwin was reading the Bible on his deathbed and admitted to being a believing Christian.
 
Ok. I’ll start small.

What does it mean that “chance doesn't count”?

How are you all defining and/or using “chance” in this context?

I don’t think chance / probability and natural selectivity are orthogonal terms as Jonathan seems to suggest. I’m not sure given how classical or quantum science works, that makes any sense.

From a first principles perspective Science starts with an initial condition, a state. Events may occur to change that state to get you to a different state at a certain time. Those events happen with a certain probability or chance. It all gets complex very fast. And one can focus on the micro or the macro. But that is what is happening. Darwin may or may not have understood the world this way, but it’s not really debatable any more.

So from this perspective, Jonathan, what is natural selection? What in your view distinguishes natural from non-natural selection to get us from one state of the world or a system we are looking at to the next?
 
Oswaldo began by asking whether any form of evolution was not natural selection or was the term a tautology. My answer was that any consistent change in the genetic make-up of a population that was not caused by a survival benefit (or in some views a reproductive benefit, thus including sexual selection, though, as I said, Darwin separated the two)would be not be natural selection as Darwin argued for it, though it would still be "natural" of course. One example would be changes driven merely by probabilistic outcomes. As I explained, if there are three pathways transmutation can change, it's possible that the pathway chosen has nothing to do with survival benefit but occurs because of the kind of multiplicitous causation to which we perhaps errantly, apply the term chance. If there's some other term you prefer, go right ahead. It will still be the case that a form of genetic change across a population not caused by a survival and/or reproductive benefit will be not natural selection. And that is the answer to your final question.

I don't know that bringing quantum mechanics in here helps much, I will readily admit that ultimately the forms of causation Physics describes will also be the forms of biological causation.But it still tends to confuse the issue, which is not the final, accurate description of causation, but the distinction between separate kinds of causes, even if they both will follow the rules of quantum mechanics. Thus, once again,if there is a kind of genetic change not caused by survival or reproductive benefit, that would not be natural selection. Human selection is caused by those things.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Oswaldo began by asking whether any form of evolution was not natural selection or was the term a tautology. My answer was that any consistent change in the genetic make-up of a population that was not caused by a survival benefit (or in some views a reproductive benefit, thus including sexual selection, though, as I said, Darwin separated the two)would be not be natural selection as Darwin argued for it, though it would still be "natural" of course. One example would be changes driven merely by probabilistic outcomes. As I explained, if there are three pathways transmutation can change, it's possible that the pathway chosen has nothing to do with survival benefit but occurs because of the kind of multiplicitous causation to which we perhaps errantly, apply the term chance. If there's some other term you prefer, go right ahead. It will still be the case that a form of genetic change across a population not caused by a survival and/or reproductive benefit will be not natural selection. And that is the answer to your final question.

I don't know that bringing quantum mechanics in here helps much, I will readily admit that ultimately the forms of causation Physics describes will also be the forms of biological causation.But it still tends to confuse the issue, which is not the final, accurate description of causation, but the distinction between separate kinds of causes, even if they both will follow the rules of quantum mechanics. Thus, once again,if there is a kind of genetic change not caused by survival or reproductive benefit, that would not be natural selection. Human selection is caused by those things.
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I wasn’t suggesting quantum mechanics is relevant. Just that the way science works is the same there too.

But I’m not sure I understand your distinctions of different causes. I’m leaning toward Darwin making causal distinctions that don’t stand up to modern scrutiny and maybe that’s confusing me.

Maybe an example will help me. A mutation occurs in a plant gene, by what you might call random chance (which we know now isn’t really just a spontaneous random event) or by some reproductive stress. That new plant has a reproductive or survival benefit with respect to its unmutated parent. Over time the mutated plant population flourishes while its parent dies out. What is natural or non-natural about either the initial mutation or the subsequent evolution? What possible causes could be at play potentially other than reproductive or survival pressures after the initial mutation if we include stresses that are both endogenous and exogenous to the plant’s evolution? (If we are spinning because you already discussed this, just tell me what post to go back and reread. I’m not trying to be difficult. Just to understand what is an interesting WD-type discussion.)
 
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Oswaldo began by asking whether any form of evolution was not natural selection or was the term a tautology. My answer was that any consistent change in the genetic make-up of a population that was not caused by a survival benefit (or in some views a reproductive benefit, thus including sexual selection, though, as I said, Darwin separated the two)would be not be natural selection as Darwin argued for it, though it would still be "natural" of course. One example would be changes driven merely by probabilistic outcomes. As I explained, if there are three pathways transmutation can change, it's possible that the pathway chosen has nothing to do with survival benefit but occurs because of the kind of multiplicitous causation to which we perhaps errantly, apply the term chance. If there's some other term you prefer, go right ahead. It will still be the case that a form of genetic change across a population not caused by a survival and/or reproductive benefit will be not natural selection. And that is the answer to your final question.

I don't know that bringing quantum mechanics in here helps much, I will readily admit that ultimately the forms of causation Physics describes will also be the forms of biological causation.But it still tends to confuse the issue, which is not the final, accurate description of causation, but the distinction between separate kinds of causes, even if they both will follow the rules of quantum mechanics. Thus, once again,if there is a kind of genetic change not caused by survival or reproductive benefit, that would not be natural selection. Human selection is caused by those things.
Click to expand...

I wasn’t suggesting quantum mechanics is relevant. Just that the way science works is the same there too.

But I’m not sure I understand your distinctions of different causes. I’m leaning toward Darwin making causal distinctions that don’t stand up to modern scrutiny and maybe that’s confusing me.

Maybe an example will help me. A mutation occurs in a plant gene, by what you might call random chance (which we know now isn’t really just a spontaneous random event) or by some reproductive stress. That new plant has a reproductive or survival benefit with respect to its unmutated parent. Over time the mutated plant population flourishes while its parent dies out. What is natural or non-natural about either the initial mutation or the subsequent evolution? What possible causes could be at play potentially other than reproductive or survival pressures after the initial mutation if we include stresses that are both endogenous and exogenous to the plant’s evolution? (If we are spinning because you already discussed this, just tell me what post to go back and reread. I’m not trying to be difficult. Just to understand what is an interesting WD-type discussion.)
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You are assuming that every mutation will have either a reproductive advantage or disadvantage and that no other cause could overcome that advantage of disadvantage in terms of the gene being passed on. This is just the issue in question. For some theorists, if the advantage isn't massive and if the number of possibilities are sufficiently small (the individual could get large, smaller or stay the same),then the direction of change will be determined by whatever you want to call what determines the outcome of a coin toss. This theory is highly controversial and you should feel free to reject it. My claim was simply that one can imagine causes of change other than reproductive advantage (one could add fixism or the claim that species do not change or that we pass on acquired characteristics)and thus that natural selection was not a tauto!ogy.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Oswaldo began by asking whether any form of evolution was not natural selection or was the term a tautology. My answer was that any consistent change in the genetic make-up of a population that was not caused by a survival benefit (or in some views a reproductive benefit, thus including sexual selection, though, as I said, Darwin separated the two)would be not be natural selection as Darwin argued for it, though it would still be "natural" of course. One example would be changes driven merely by probabilistic outcomes. As I explained, if there are three pathways transmutation can change, it's possible that the pathway chosen has nothing to do with survival benefit but occurs because of the kind of multiplicitous causation to which we perhaps errantly, apply the term chance. If there's some other term you prefer, go right ahead. It will still be the case that a form of genetic change across a population not caused by a survival and/or reproductive benefit will be not natural selection. And that is the answer to your final question.

I don't know that bringing quantum mechanics in here helps much, I will readily admit that ultimately the forms of causation Physics describes will also be the forms of biological causation.But it still tends to confuse the issue, which is not the final, accurate description of causation, but the distinction between separate kinds of causes, even if they both will follow the rules of quantum mechanics. Thus, once again,if there is a kind of genetic change not caused by survival or reproductive benefit, that would not be natural selection. Human selection is caused by those things.
Click to expand...

I wasn’t suggesting quantum mechanics is relevant. Just that the way science works is the same there too.

But I’m not sure I understand your distinctions of different causes. I’m leaning toward Darwin making causal distinctions that don’t stand up to modern scrutiny and maybe that’s confusing me.

Maybe an example will help me. A mutation occurs in a plant gene, by what you might call random chance (which we know now isn’t really just a spontaneous random event) or by some reproductive stress. That new plant has a reproductive or survival benefit with respect to its unmutated parent. Over time the mutated plant population flourishes while its parent dies out. What is natural or non-natural about either the initial mutation or the subsequent evolution? What possible causes could be at play potentially other than reproductive or survival pressures after the initial mutation if we include stresses that are both endogenous and exogenous to the plant’s evolution? (If we are spinning because you already discussed this, just tell me what post to go back and reread. I’m not trying to be difficult. Just to understand what is an interesting WD-type discussion.)
Click to expand...

You are assuming that every mutation will have either a reproductive advantage or disadvantage and that no other cause could overcome that advantage of disadvantage in terms of the gene being passed on. This is just the issue in question. For some theorists, if the advantage isn't massive and if the number of possibilities are sufficiently small (the individual could get large, smaller or stay the same),then the direction of change will be determined by whatever you want to call what determines the outcome of a coin toss. This theory is highly controversial and you should feel free to reject it. My claim was simply that one can imagine causes of change other than reproductive advantage (one could add fixism or the claim that species do not change or that we pass on acquired characteristics)and thus that natural selection was not a tauto!ogy.
Click to expand...

I didn’t think I was assuming that but let me think about it. I hear your point that what you are calling chance is all the shit that happens that doesn’t lead to what we identify as a naturally selective evolution. But then I need to think about whether that makes all this sort of trivial. Because then it may be that everything we observe as identifiable evolution ex-post is natural selection and everything that didn’t is the background bath tub of other events and stresses we are calling chance. And we only distinguish one from the other after the fact. But then we are just cataloging. Maybe. Or was that the point? Anyway I’ll think some more about what you wrote.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
So you haven't read Darwin, you've read Wiki? And on that basis, you've decided you know what Darwin meant? If you read later editions, you'll find Darwin considering Lamarckian theories of passing on acquired characteristics. Darwin hated Lamarck but he had to consider mechanisms that sped up evolution because of Jenkins and Kelvin. No one has ever thought that he wanted to include Lamarck. In later editions of Origin and particularly in the famous last paragraph he suggested that evolution was run by a divine force. His letters and his Autobiography make clear that he was an atheist. His notebooks made clear that he thought that his view of evolution made was a material one that eliminated the divine from the picture. Reading the book would have made your case stronger since actually retitles the 4th chapter from Natural Selection to Natural Selection or Survival of the Fittest. If you read the chapter though, you will see that he continues to describe the process he always described and had not in any sense adapted Spencer's ideas. He introduced the term at the suggestion of Alfred Wallace because Wallace thought that the phrase natural selection and its illustration in terms of human selection created a mistaken sense that natural selection always implied design. Your own last sentence shows the consensus on the connection between the two ideas. I should say that there are critics who do think Darwin accepted Spencer more fully and even if you only read the 4th chapter, I'm sure with selective quotation you can make a better case for your view (none of them thought that it wasn't a mistake for him to do so since the theories were irrevocably different). But without reading Spencer and reading Darwin, you really aren't going to get very far.

This is really deep in the weeds, though, since whether he accepted Spencer or not has little to do with the question of whether he thought human activity to be something other than natural selection.

Look, I use Wiki too to find out things I know nothing about. But you can't do intellectual history using it. Next I'll be hearing the old story that Darwin was reading the Bible on his deathbed and admitted to being a believing Christian.
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I read the On The Origin of Species in my late teens and absorbed the concept of natural selection as in the wiki entry. That is what the world at large understands by natural selection. I am not going to read the book again just to refute your definition, not only because I have better things to do, but also because it won't help me with that, since you seem not so vested in Darwin's definition because you have a "better" one that includes human design, one for which you do make a decent case. Except that you cannot change the meaning of a commonly-used term and require that others accept the change.

What I called tautological was an earlier understanding of what you were calling natural selection, one in which all animal action, by chance or design, was fodder for natural selection. Hence my question about what would constitute not natural. In reply you introduced exceptions (or meant them all along and I didn't understand), separating chance from design, thus removing the tautology.

In any case, the commonly-accepted-definition-of-natural-selection ship has already sailed, and human design was left waving from the shore.
 
I"n any case, the commonly-accepted-definition-of-natural-selection ship has already sailed, and human design was left waving from the shore. "

Your certainty for a relativist is charming. Your rhetoric, by which you become judge of the dispute, reminds me of Bill Klapp over at WineBerserker.

I will hereby imitate that rhetoric. The notion that Darwin did not think human beings were animals whose actions were both conditioned by and condition evolution is absurd. Like you, I won't bother supporting that assertion with any reference to The Descent of Man or the Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Your notion that no one else thinks that human intention somehow separates human action from evoloutionary causation so flies in the fact of contemporary evolutionary neuropsychology as to be eqaully breathtaking. It is true, of course, that both the Darwin books and evolutionary neuropsychology tries to outline how the human thought and emotion was shaped by natural selection rather than how its actions constitute it, but if the human thought processes are as evolutionarily determined as those of other animals, then their participation in the system is obviously of the same order. Only anthrocentrists think that human beings are somehow different, either especially angelic or especially evil.

As I will say for the last time, the one thing this thread does prove is that when I originally objectived to the term cultivar not for any taxonomic reasons but because it tends to support the unfounded belief that human action is somehow magically different from all other natural action was at least empirically accurate with regard the the widespread holding of that belief.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I"n any case, the commonly-accepted-definition-of-natural-selection ship has already sailed, and human design was left waving from the shore. "

Your certainty for a relativist is charming. Your rhetoric, by which you become judge of the dispute, reminds me of Bill Klapp over at WineBerserker.

I will hereby imitate that rhetoric. The notion that Darwin did not think human beings were animals whose actions were both conditioned by and condition evolution is absurd. Like you, I won't bother supporting that assertion with any reference to The Descent of Man or the Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Your notion that no one else thinks that human intention somehow separates human action from evoloutionary causation so flies in the fact of contemporary evolutionary neuropsychology as to be eqaully breathtaking. It is true, of course, that both the Darwin books and evolutionary neuropsychology tries to outline how the human thought and emotion was shaped by natural selection rather than how its actions constitute it, but if the human thought processes are as evolutionarily determined as those of other animals, then their participation in the system is obviously of the same order. Only anthrocentrists think that human beings are somehow different, either especially angelic or especially evil.

As I will say for the last time, the one thing this thread does prove is that when I originally objectived to the term cultivar not for any taxonomic reasons but because it tends to support the unfounded belief that human action is somehow magically different from all other natural action was at least empirically accurate with regard the the widespread holding of that belief.
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Truly, if nature selected for stubbornness, you would have an insurmountable advantage. Glad that works for you.
 
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