Wednesday, May 25, 2011

The F-words of Evolution





So let’s think about how we throw around those
f-words. Especially in the presence of children!

Let my people evolve


No, I don’t think it’s intentional.




neeeeeed that.

If you cling to this belief that only the


Nature can’t

Any which way but lose

Darwin incorporated Spencer’s phrase “survival of the

"Survival of the

Most organisms are not the _____-est!

Are you the _______-est in anything or at anything?

I'm not.



So hear me as the latter when I say…

Evolution isn’t about the winner.

The winner? The
fittest? Nope. Think “survival of the fitter.”





“Survival of the




But since he can't, why don’t we?


[1] Have you seen

Read more here.

by Ken and Anne (of this very blog!)


[5] No text should be treated as holy.



James Goetz said...

Natural selection is probabilistic survival of the fittest. For example, frequently recurring advantageous mutation such as a point substitution would likely fix. But a rare advantageous mutation would unlikely fix.

Holly Dunsworth said...

something that I was covertly addressing in the post is the incorrect assumption that all evolution occurs by natural selection.

Ken Weiss said...

Actually, Jim, Darwin said repeatedly that natural selection detected the tiniest of differences in 'fitness'. That itself is rather a mystical concept and there are people who would argue that we have not yet got a good theory of natural selection.

More to the point, is that the concept of 'fitness' is not easy to justify when viewed probabilistically, especially if--as seems mainly to be true--the purported fitness difference is very small. Whether fitness is different from zero (neutral) is almost a mystic premise in itself.

In addition to the points Holly made in her very nice discussion today, we spend a lot of time in our book on these issues about the nature of selection.

The idea that good enough is good enough and all that Nature 'cares' about is right, but we still have the problem of explaining the supposed precise, exotic, or fine-tuned 'adaptations'. How do they come about if good enough is good enough?

There are still some under-appreciated challenges to understanding how evolution works---and how we can infer it empirically.

Holly Dunsworth said...

I could have added to my post that there is no one size fits all rule or explanation for evolution.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Doesn't anyone know people who aren't Creationists, but are averse to evolution, nontheless, because of how people have used it to justify racism?

I do. Very well, actually. They're smart people too. They just don't know much about biology.

Anyway, evolution's got a serious PR problem and not just with closed minds... with open ones too.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Gazelles aren't very much faster than cheetahs (or the other way around)... is that fine-tuned or just good enough? And from what perspective?

That bat with the long tongue to feed from that deep flower: Its tongue isn't any longer than need be. It seems perfectly fit for that task, for eating nector from that flower. Maybe too long a tongue is bad, but maybe that length tongue is just good enough (not "fine tuned").

We see perfection all around us but maybe we see through perfection-colored glasses. These perfect adaptations could just be good enough.

Ken Weiss said...

There have been many philosophies and social movements beyond (a minor side of) Christianity that objected to evolution because it was so manifestly used to justify inequity and racism.

One of the nominal, at least, reasons that Soviet Communism rejected western science was that it used evolution--and they, anti-Darwinians but pro-'Lamarckians', believed all humans could be improved by improved conditions and this could then be inherited. That was one reason Lysenkoism was accepted.

The hard-core Darwinians simply say "tough luck, the world is cruel" and stick to their Darwinian guns. Rarely is the issue hinged on a serious examination of evolutionary theory and the nature of its strengths and weaknesses.

Most people want simple answers, in this sense I think.

Ken Weiss said...

As to selection, there is what we have referred to in our book and elsewhere what we have called 'organismal selection' by which organisms choose where and how to live among available alternatives. This is related to 'niche construction' by which organisms modify their environments. There can be genetic bases, in some generic sense, for these behaviors, but there need be no Malthusian (over-crowding) based, nor differential reproduction involved.

Do humans farm because we adapted to do that? Or is it that given our nature, we choose to do it, or are able to do it? One can say we were 'pre-adapted' for farming by prior selection but one can push both sides of that back as well.

There is now a movement, led by several people but recently by positive reviews of a book by Nowak, that stresses the central importance of cooperation. That is mainly in the social sense of the term, and of course is a major objective of our own book. But there is a danger that a 'cooperation' school of thought will now grow that will be as strident, say, or polarized as the competition fervor of our present time.

It is difficult for people to look for what one might call a 'balance' among various things that, clearly, are part of the fabric of nature.

Most people want simple, and convenient answers, it seems.

Holly Dunsworth said...

Maybe we should stop talking about "evolution" and, instead, just refer to all of it as "nature." Nature, as a label, doesn't seem to limit and circumscribe things the way that the label "evolution" does.

Nate Davis said...

Something of a tangent: conversations are often a minefield for this sort of thing. The other day, I was having lunch with some fellow nonbelievers, and we were talking about movies. In a partial quotation of Roger Ebert, I commented that it was a "miracle" that something like a movie would be produced at all. One of the fellows took offense to it, where really all I meant was that something like a movie involves dozens to hundreds (to thousands) of actors, artisans, arists, moneymen, and other workers putting in millions of hours to create a cultural document; that a cogent anything that has power and meaning can emerge from this is quite remarkable. A miracle, even!

Of course, it's a mistake to use the word, though how else could we describe such an improbable document? There's an additional worry here in that language can devalue something that comes from human agency and expertise. I'm reminded of the time John Paul II was shot, and a team of doctors worked for days to save him, and afterward, everybody said "Thank God!"

One last point: ideas are most powerful at their simplest. A lot of these words and imaginings have deep roots in our minds, as well as the rich soil of shared culture. I agree that a "better language" is something that's needed. Do we have any good ideas?

Ken Weiss said...

'Marvelous' is perhaps a suitable word, with unclear origins but capturing the idea.

That the one survivor of a tornado that levels a church and its worshipers inside thanks God for his survival is certainly an interesting skewing of the usual ideas about God.

James Goetz said...

I thought that my comment about the loss of most advantageous mutations went along with this critique of hyper-Darwinism, but perhaps I needed to develop and introduction to make that clear.

Anyway, in regards to the statistical analysis of evolution based on population genetics, the concept of "survival of the good enough" is expected, while in some but not all cases the "good enough" evolves into the "fine-tuned," but never necessarily.

By the way, my perspective of evolutionary science could be described as a conflation of the views of Masatoshi Nei and Stephen Jay Gould, while I see their views are harmonious.

Anonymous said...

If calling an organism "fitter" for having a trait that benefits it regarding the general populous is "racist". Isn't calling an organism "Weaker" for having less beneficial traits equally as "racist"?

Holly Dunsworth said...

To Anonymous with the "racist" question: I'm not sure what you're asking, or how to answer, since your premise is not one I agree with (and it reads like that's how you've interpreted my or a commenter's P.O.V.). And, further, "racist" only applies to one organism: humans. There are humans who are "fitter" than others. They have more offspring who have more offspring than others and they can be identified regardless of how difficult it would be, in many circumstances, especially within the bounds of normal variation, to pin down exactly which selective pressure(s) is elevating their reproductive success relative to others. There is nothing inherently racist about that whatsoever. Nature is not racist, humans are.