Re: A question of timing


"Perplexed in Peoria" <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:df51cs$2a6l$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> "Michael Nuwer" <StopSpam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:df0ouq$q48$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Perplexed in Peoria wrote:
>> >
>> > Interesting question. I will attempt two different answers, each of
>> > which interprets your question slightly differently.
>>
>> Thanks for providing hooks to hang these ideas onto. These are
>> particularly helpful for an outsider like me.
>>
>> >
>> > First, neo-Darwinian evolution (based on genes) is inherently slower
>> > than cultural evolution (based on memes). Genes can only be passed to
>> > offspring and there is a limit to the number of offspring one organism
>> > can have. It takes time for a gene to spread in a population - a
>> > time proportional to the logarithm of the population size. The time
>> > is also proportional to the selection coefficient - the number which
>> > measures just how advantageous this innovation is. So neo-Darwinian
>> > evolution takes place on a minimal time scale of hundreds or thousands
>> > of organism generations.
>> >
>> > However, this is still pretty fast - potentially much faster than is
>> > suggested by the fossil record, though slower than cultural evolution.
>> > So, apparently, evolution moves slower than it theoretically could,
>> > based
>> > solely on population genetics arguments. Why so slow? Well, it could
>> > be that most evolutionary change is the result of mutations with very
>> > small selection coefficients. Or it could be that the mechanism of
>> > mutation simply takes a long time to generate new advantageous
>> > variations
>> > upon which selection can work.
>>
>> Thanks for the answer. It sounds like Darwinian evolution is not, in
>> principle, dependent on a time factor.
>
> I would put it differently. First, I would distinguish 'Darwinian
> evolution'
> from 'natural selection'. I would say that 'Darwinian evolution' results
> from the interaction of two processes - mutation (or, more generally, a
> source of variation) and selection. (Actually, there is a third process
> involved, inheritance, but that doesn't impart a direction).
>
> Now there are time factors involved in both mutation and in selection,
> but the logic of the process doesn't depend on the *size* of those
> factors.
> It turns out that in biological evolution, those factors make the process
> moderately slow. But it is conceivable that some other non-biological
> 'Darwinian evolution' process might work with speedier time factors.
>

Let us be honest about the evidence. It is not all in yet.

If we are truly scientifically literate, and totally honest with ourselves
and others about what scientific evidence HAS been attained so far, then we
do not need to get too adamant about one or another speculation about just
how long something took, where that entails little more than creative
imagination to connect dots that still are separated by many thousands or
millions of years. Pixel by pixel, more dots are being attained every day,
across multiple scientific disciplines.

Scientists need never play a dogma game, or run a bluff. Good science
recognizes and acknowledges what it knows already, and does not yet know,
and places hard evidence on one side of the scale, and guesstimation clearly
and precisely on the other. Dogma cannot hold its own against hard
evidence. So let the dogmatists play from their strength, which relies upon
what has not been empirically established yet, and let the scoreboard of
truth show that the dogmatists do not tend to put anything on the board
other than claims of knowing -- though they dispute among themselves as to
which has got it right -- and bravado based upon gaps in human knowledge.
And each time a gap is filled, the dogmatists simply back up and point to
another and another...

Regardless of what or who made all this phenomenon some call by the name
"nature," others, "reality," and still others by other names, here is the
situation in which science, on the one hand, and dogma, on the other, must
cope:

If humans are born into an examinable cosmos, and have powers with which
they may actually make an examination of that cosmos, then it does not seem
to the scientific thinker that man does better to seek answers to what he
and the universe are about by focusing on the unexaminable, by means of
powers man does not have to examine.

And, let us look at the other end of this scenario, from the standpoint of
who or what produced the examinable and the examiner. If, after all, the
cosmos itself, and our human powers to examine it, are so designed as to
provide us nothing but LIES about how it came to be as it is, then what hope
remains for us that we might trust our examination of things that are NOT
examinable, in ways we are not empowered to pursue, and the answers we might
come up with by that approach.

If reality -- or creation, as the case may be -- is a lie, then what more
might be expected of the process -- or the spirit, as the case may be --
that would make that so.

g





.

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