Re: genetic variation is purely random, right?

<Snipped, only for the sake of space saving, your (John Edser's)
excellent interpretation and exemplification!!



2. [This comment contains a to me even more important call to be careful
about what we mean with these concepts.] Too much distress, is as you
describe it, too much of a bad thing.
However, "too much distress" is also a description of a maladaptive
reaction - by definition!

JE:-
Ok (refer to the example above).

And, as we all 'ought to' know, many adverse environmental challenges
that
stimulate a sensory or motivational *overload* are handled
*automatically*
[here i.e. independently of whatever the patterns of brain activity are
that generate, and that in principle can be used to define, our levels
and
contents of "conscious awareness" - or, EPTly put, how we "pay and
transiently focus actention"] by highly specific synaptic hibernation
(i.e. the neural "gating" of signals on their way to generate
self-defeating
distress reactions).

JE:-
I think I agree but I AM NOT SURE :-(

Could you restate the above so it is simple to understand?

How about if I this time let your potential for an EPT-aligned recognition
'ripen on its branch within your brain' rather than me having another
(potentially decEPTively blathered) bash at another reiteration (rehashing)
of my rationales? :-)

(Answered with a question but without any arrogant equivocation attached.)

You know I can't do that! If I try the result will always be something like
what follows:

"I thought that was a both compact and comprehensive way of expressing
that SHITS [=how I label and implicitly define a broad range of lifetime
events and conditions that causes: psychological trauma and our inbuilt
neurophysiological "defences" to effect repression rather than a mere
habituation-type self-regulatory neuronal inhibition] selectively as if
trigger a "freeze" (in the form of CURSES type memory states or imprints)
that most directly affect "brain-structional streams" (or IOW, that blocks
or drastically down-regulates, or mutes the metabolism) within the specific
neuronal channels inside which corresponding feelings and figurings could
and would otherwise flow in a primarily futile and self-defeating
'functional direction')."

<snip>

Here is a short sample from Studdert's book that might (as I see it!)
provide a peek at one past source of your (John Edser's) ideological
inspiration:

From The Stress Theory of Evolution, by Richard de C Studdert:
SELECTION
It never ceases to amaze people what small margins of survival value
are sufficient to select the fittest. But for anyone conversant with
the exponential growth curve and the amount of
evolutionary time available, it should not amaze.
For instance, if one better adapted offspring born every 1,000 years
can be attributed to trait A over trait B, then trait B will disappear in
an evolutionary flash. Because of this elimination of
the ever-so-slightly less-fit species and the impossibility of two
species being and remaining exactly equal in survival value,
for any significant period we get the principle of
"one species only per niche." This is a basic rule of ecology
that we must always respect.

JE:-
I agree with Studdert that just tiny differences in "survival value" are
sufficient to produce evolutionary changes. Of course, I have always
maintained that individual genes can only have a non additive empirical
(epistatic) Darwinian fitness. I define fitness in an entirely refutable
way: the total number of just fertile forms reproduced into only one
population by each parent. Because evolution occurs per population, it
follows logically that each Darwinian selectee (each fertile form) can
have
a different fitness per population.

The thing being selected is the trait, determined not usually
by a gene but more often by a combination of genes. Individuals
who possess adaptive traits are selected in, while individuals who
possess maladaptive traits are selected out -- that is, culled.
Except for preselection, selection occurs at the individual
level always, but selection is often much more severe in certain
groups within a species, thus constituting apparent group selection.

JE:-
I had discussions with De C Studdert about this when he was well.
Initially
Studdert remained in two minds concerning group selection. Later on he
came
to believe that group selection existed and it could override individual
selection. I believe that this was mostly because of his left leaning
politics (Balmain, where he lived most of his life was the working class
suburb of Sydney in which the Australian Labor Party was founded). I have
always maintained that political (or any) belief pollutes the sciences.
One
of the most important _functional_ aspects of our unique adaptive group
response: trade, which is mutualised exchange, is almost 100% politicized.
It remains almost impossible to have a scientific discussion of trade,
i.e.
mutualised exchange as an entirely _non_ politicized process.

With regards to group selection: It is easy to prove that if the fitness
of
one group is just the simple addition of the fitness of each group member
then no group selection can possibly exist, no matter how you define
fitness.

This provokes me to say something again about "levels of selection":

Atoms don't reproduced themselves and their *non-existent* clones
"constitutions"
don't have a chance to both be preserved and vary with every new never to
eventuate
atomic generation. ;-)
Hence, to propose a level of selection as deep as the above (whether it
spans our the astroevolutionary past or the 'bio-local' present) makes no
sense at all.

Self-replicating single super large molecules (DNA of course especially)
is a possibility but their capacity for inter-generational modification is
only of interest as far as they code for proteins and cellular super
structures
and their functions such as living creatures - such as (of course
especially) us.

However, there is no better candidate than genes, or individuals' DNA,
for appointment as "the basic unit of reproductive inheritance".


Entities ranging from single self-sufficiently self-replicating and
life-cycling single cells to single asexually and/or sexually reproducing
multicellular organisms are perfectly suited to be seen as what is being
positively and negatively "pressured" (or naturally pruned in or out
according to recognizable-or-not universal laws/fundamental
probabilities/patterns of regularity, of evolutionary patterning) by their
interactions with their environment.

(That was a crude - not quite EPT - approximation of how I imagine how the
principle of Natural Selection has been busy 'genophenotyping' populations
in the phylogeny of fauna and flora. ;>)

Hence, the individual is the central unit of Darwinian (or natural)
*selection*.

Since I have yet to be able to imagine how a group of individuals undergo
Darwinian
selection other than by help of its individuals reproducing, "group
selection" is to me a concept of
individuals' reproductive successes because of their inherited propensities
for "coping by cooperation" - or, IOW, coping by means of "mutalistic
(Edserian) altruism".

P


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