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Actually Praziquantel Send a noteboard - 06/08/2011 10:13:51 PM
Animals with traits that are beneficial to the environment can live longer and potentially contribute more to the gene pool.

The latter is all that matters (biological fitness, or how many viable offspring are produced) in natural selection. Lifespan and any greater purpose (benefit to the environment) are not applicable.

As I see your revision it seems you are more careful in describing NS, but does your view on NS escape being a tautology?

Since contributing to the gene pool is the only definition you give, it either has no result (the author calls that a 'lame' definition, since it isolates the proces of NS so that it no longer tries to explain evolution), or the result is a difference in the gene pool (that is: a difference in the frequencies of genes) after one or several generations, and then we have a tautology again.

'Contributing to the gene pool' is a very vague phrase to use. I clarified what I meant to make the definition more specific. Under natural selection the 'purpose' (if you will) of living is to reproduce as much as you can and leave behind as many offspring as possible. Now, you can get into genetic theories and rationalize that, every offspring will have slightly different genomes due to genetic recombination and spontaneous mutations, which can have good, bad, or neutral consequences in terms of future biological fitness (the ability to produce offspring). But it seems reasonable to me that given a diverse gene pool (which is facilitated by increased biological fitness), the population as a whole would be more likely to survive some calamity or other.

I don't understand where the tautology is in that.
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