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Evolution by natural selection: Difference between revisions
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This seems to be just as analytic as the mathematical statement: the hidden tricksiness is in the notion of fitness. That’s where the hard work is done; that is where all the synthetic work sits. ''What'' counts as “fitter”? How do we predict ''that''? On this, evolutionary theory has nothing to say. It doesn’t predict where organisms are going next; it merely gives an account of how they got to where they are now. Its only prediction is “it is highly unlikely that organisms won’t continue to evolve ''somehow''”. | This seems to be just as analytic as the mathematical statement: the hidden tricksiness is in the notion of fitness. That’s where the hard work is done; that is where all the synthetic work sits. ''What'' counts as “fitter”? How do we predict ''that''? On this, evolutionary theory has nothing to say. It doesn’t predict where organisms are going next; it merely gives an account of how they got to where they are now. Its only prediction is “it is highly unlikely that organisms won’t continue to evolve ''somehow''”. | ||
==Sexual selection== | |||
The yang to [[natural selection]]’s yin, and the thing that perhaps more than anything else leads to muted cries that the theory of [[Evolution]] may be not so much universal acid as universal ''arse''. | |||
For natural selection says that all variations are selected for environmental fitness. This, you would think, stands to reason (is ''[[a priori]]'' true); for if it were not, and a variation that ''prejudiced'' one’s environmental fitness could sometimes win out in the genetic lottery, then the reliable [[algorithm]] of incremental, and inevitable, ''improvement'' of a species’ capacity to cope with prevailing conditions would be, in a word, buggered. | For natural selection says that all variations are selected for environmental fitness. This, you would think, stands to reason (is ''[[a priori]]'' true); for if it were not, and a variation that ''prejudiced'' one’s environmental fitness could sometimes win out in the genetic lottery, then the reliable [[algorithm]] of incremental, and inevitable, ''improvement'' of a species’ capacity to cope with prevailing conditions would be, in a word, buggered. | ||