tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3759353.post879110559860699180..comments2023-08-29T02:42:23.063-05:00Comments on ¡Bemsha SWING!: Evolutionary ChangeJonathanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09371893596402673898noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3759353.post-49711344507941082822011-06-03T09:37:16.259-05:002011-06-03T09:37:16.259-05:00"This seems fanciful, because there is no int..."This seems fanciful, because there is no intuitive reason to believe in a large reproductive edge for a slightly favorable trait, ..."<br /><br />It doesn't have to be large, and having a slightly favorable trait doesn't mean that that organism will reproduce. It's playing the odds, over deep time.Barry DeCiccohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04735814736387033844noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3759353.post-89885567568309699072011-05-24T14:06:28.616-05:002011-05-24T14:06:28.616-05:00Dawkins makes the interesting point (in his "...Dawkins makes the interesting point (in his "Greatest Show on Earth", though surely elsewhere as well) that every organism has always been in the same species as its father/mother (or other type of parent, for other types of reproduction), but that as you go back far enough from a particular living organism today, eventually there is an ancestor with whom that given organism would not be able to reproduce.Andrew Shieldshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02804655739574694901noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3759353.post-70864253927396043182011-05-24T09:54:57.830-05:002011-05-24T09:54:57.830-05:00The point at which this story becomes hard to beli...The point at which this story becomes hard to believe is that these modifications actually lead to each species being adapted to its environment. The story is something like: individuals with favorable mutations (favorable as in better-adapted) produce more surviving offspring; therefore over time an initially rare mutation becomes increasingly common, etc. This seems fanciful, because there is no intuitive reason to believe in a large reproductive edge for a slightly favorable trait, and is different from the idea that if you deliberately only let individuals with the desired traits have offspring they will eventually take over. A lot of good scientific ideas seem absurd, but this is precisely why they're hard for lay readers to believe.<br /><br />(It is sometimes claimed that the fittest are precisely those who survive; this dodge has the unsatisfactory consequence of making the "theory" a tautology: if "fitness" is not a predictable trait the theory has no explanatory power, it would be just as consistent with an entirely different set of traits having evolved. But of course the naive version of the theory -- the fittest, in some easily predetermined sense, survive -- is incorrect. The truth is somewhere in between...)Zedhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10623092831367861959noreply@blogger.com