I'd illustrate the issue with some sort of genetic landscape plot, where all the little details such as "fitness" and likelihood to survive during current conditions is based on a height in the landscape. Now, imagine that you have peaks in this landscape, where breeding and survival rates are higher than everywhere else. Then it follows that the closer individuals of a species is to the peaks in their particular fitness landscape, the more likely they are to pass their genes onwards. This part of the theory is fairly simple; but the problem is the landscape. It will be constantly changing due to billions of factors entering into survival rates/ general fitness - some factors can be rather large, like availability of nutrients and presence of predators (in polar bear form or viruses, it doesn't matter much) and certain other environmental conditions, but a lot of the things are factors you can't really consider unless you are omniscient (red feathers, hard beak )... So, in short, it is extremely complex to find the fitness landscape for a species at any given time, and as such, it is all but impossible to design an experiment or observation that could falsify the initial assumption. Suffice to say that there has not yet been any conclusive evidence to say that it doesn't work...
Now, to take a Popperesque view of science in this case might be somewhat flawed... complex biological systems simply have too many factors to consider; Poppers views are more properly applied to science where you can churn the numbers for everything involved instead of doing large scale simulations based on approximations.
Now, to take a Popperesque view of science in this case might be somewhat flawed... complex biological systems simply have too many factors to consider; Poppers views are more properly applied to science where you can churn the numbers for everything involved instead of doing large scale simulations based on approximations.
Lets grant you have infinite knowledge of genes in all individuals in a population and all there relative and interdependent probability to contribute to the genepool. How would you reconstruct the fitness landscape, given that it is stable?
Or the other way around, what if you would know the landscape perfectly, given that it is stable, how would you evaluate the difference in survival rate of different individuals?
My question is: arn't the two actually the same? Hence, arn't they a tautology?
As for Popper, my problem is not that NS is too complicated to be tested or falsified, my problem is that, even with perfect knowledge it could not be falsified.
If anything NS is too simple to be falsified: it is always true.
Natural selection
06/08/2011 03:51:26 PM
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selection for suitability
06/08/2011 04:18:51 PM
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Thanks for your responce
06/08/2011 04:41:20 PM
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I can't speak for LadyLorraine and won't try, but here's how I see it:
06/08/2011 06:49:49 PM
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Just a question
06/08/2011 07:18:09 PM
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Yes it can
06/08/2011 07:41:59 PM
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But how?
06/08/2011 07:52:10 PM
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Re: Just a question
06/08/2011 07:49:21 PM
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I'm not sure I understand you
06/08/2011 08:20:44 PM
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All tautologies are truisms, but not all truisms are tautologies.
06/08/2011 09:38:12 PM
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Then it is still a tautology
06/08/2011 09:45:33 PM
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You can know it's beneifical to a particular individual, but it's harder to say for populations.
06/08/2011 10:18:16 PM
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Maybe...
07/08/2011 01:55:54 PM
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I'm more inclined toward his logic, but possibly toward your conclusions.
09/08/2011 12:45:46 AM
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we can't really know ahead of time what makes a specific trait benefical in that environment
09/08/2011 06:16:02 PM
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As I understand it
06/08/2011 06:04:44 PM
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Better...
06/08/2011 06:36:38 PM
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Did you perhaps mean "beneficial in the environment" rather than "beneficial to the environment"?
06/08/2011 06:34:44 PM
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yes. I did not really phrase that very clearly. *NM*
09/08/2011 06:14:11 PM
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No biggy; from what Bram said, I underestimated how well you were understood anyway.
09/08/2011 06:45:16 PM
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Hmmm... there's some truth to that
06/08/2011 06:36:35 PM
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The complexity of the problem makes it all but impossible to falsify...
06/08/2011 08:26:06 PM
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The questions go deeper
06/08/2011 08:38:31 PM
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Re: The questions go deeper
06/08/2011 09:10:32 PM
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I think I know why you don't understand my question.
06/08/2011 09:38:41 PM
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How many equation's has Moraine screwed up? *NM*
06/08/2011 09:45:36 PM
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100% I think Moriaine is a very beneficial trait that contributes a lot to the RAFO pool *NM*
06/08/2011 09:46:54 PM
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Re: Natural selection
07/08/2011 03:00:30 AM
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Thanks a lot
07/08/2011 01:38:39 PM
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2 things
07/08/2011 04:00:35 PM
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Re: 2 things
07/08/2011 04:33:00 PM
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Re: 2 things
07/08/2011 05:48:26 PM
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My best guess
07/08/2011 06:00:28 PM
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Re: My best guess
07/08/2011 06:37:58 PM
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Re: My best guess
07/08/2011 06:47:26 PM
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